Anthony Albanese was at his lowest ebb in the heat of the 2022 election campaign after flunking gotcha trivia when he found strength in Taylor Swift, ponying up to a feral press gang and chirpily resolving to “shake it off”.
As this global icon descends on our shores, Swift’s dominance of the media, the economy and the culture will suck everything, including a PM who will no doubt have snaffled a seat and a photo op, into her vortex.
But beyond her celebrity, which this week’s Guardian Essential Report shows traverses generations, gender and political affiliation, Swift’s ubiquity in a fragmented world might carry some broader lessons for a man with a more modest megaphone at his disposal.
The first lesson is about collaboration. Taylor Swift’s career has been a journey from country starlet to mainstream popular success with forays into rock, synth-pop, hip-hop and, more recently, the edges of independent music.
A few years ago, I angered Billy Joel fans by likening his pastiche of musical styles to Scott Morrison’s pantheon of confected, contradictory personae (and who didn’t enjoy his “innocent bystander” shtick on the current ABC series Nemesis?).
Swift’s music is the polar opposite to Joel’s appropriation; at each step she creates something new. Her pandemic project with sad dad titan Aaron Dessner delivered fresh audiences for Swift and Dessner’s band, The National.
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The prime minister too has been characterised by his capacity to work with others – the Greens, the teals, other independents and a handful of principled Coalition members – to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.
The voice campaign failed, but in doing so galvanised this group around an agreed moral imperative; while legislative progress on climate, workers’ rights, nature protection and integrity have all been achieved because negotiations started from a point of shared values.
According to this week’s Guardian Essential Report, more people see the common ground between Labor and the Greens than the difference – especially those who vote for these parties.
As the on-ramp to the next election campaign approaches, the PM will have to make important choices about who he works with and with whom he chooses to have a fight.
While Peter Dutton will be deploying the infrastructure of the right to confuse, divide and outrage, battle lines will be drawn on Labor’s left flank around its ambition on climate, the need to raise jobseeker payments and, most pointedly, housing.
Housing is the area where the Greens and Labor have been most fractious; Labor too quick to dismiss the Greens as economic vandals, the Greens too willing to throw up somewhat simplistic solutions.
Which brings me to Swift’s second lesson for the PM. More than any other figure of her era – with the possible exception of Donald Trump – she has used her fame to build a network of grassroots support that has its own power, energy and agency.
That grassroots infrastructure has protected Swift through the recent AI-generated deep fake porn outrage, when Swifties organised themselves to flood X, formerly Twitter, with #protectTaylor messages to beat the algorithm and deprioritise the horrible digital manipulations.
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Likewise for Albanese, the goodwill of the progressive base – not just Labor voters but those who preference them over the LNP – was instrumental in withstanding the Murdoch hits to win power. Indeed, it was the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, who best defused the fractious coverage of that campaign with his immortal “Google it, mate” riposte.
But after coalescing around their mutual disdain for Morrison, there has been less to keep these believers true.
One obvious point of progressive alignment is around fixing a broken housing system that is seeing more money each year bleeding into the pockets of investors, a taxpayer-funded get rich scheme for those who are already in the market.
The Greens have set this up as a re-election showdown, demanding a wind back of negative gearing in return for support for a new shared equity program designed to give young people a leg into the market.
What will follow is predictable: Greens will accuse Labor of selling out renters, while Labor will accuse the Greens of holding good policy to ransom. But our polling shows this is a political contest over shared values; indeed, Labor voters are actually stronger in their support for tax change.
The problem for both parties is with high levels of uncommitted voters, none of these proposals to address the abject unfairness of the tax system are, as yet, politically compelling. The hard work in bringing more voters on side for change still needs to be done.
It would be disheartening for everyone outside the power bubble if housing policy were to descend into an angry and divisive slanging match between people who fundamentally agree with each other.
Which leads me to a final lesson from what shapes as a fortnight of Tay-mania as massive arenas around the nation fill with thousands of people simply there to experience the solidarity of loving something together.
In a world where conflict is privileged by both our media and our digital platforms, our politics seems to have lost this sense of shared joy for all but the most ardent. Connections are more likely to be forged – if at all – in anger.
At best, we regard politics as a combat sport where we collectively cheer our side and boo the opposition and hate the referee in our pursuit of a sugar hit of ephemeral triumph.
A final question speaks to this conundrum:
I know the battleground of modern politics bears no comparison to either music or the rest of society, but maybe that’s at the root of the crisis that many democracies are grappling with.
Look around the stadium of national politics right now and no one without a pony in the race is trying to get a ticket in, there is little to give delight and it’s hard to find anything to write songs about, let alone sing along to.
As we admire this global collaborator and community organiser doing her thing, wouldn’t it be wonderful for all of us who yearn for a better politics to reflect on how we too can find ways to celebrate our points of connection?
Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
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