One of the first things Tony Abbott did soon after becoming Prime Minister of Australia in 2013 was to abandon the fibre-to-the-premises model that had been the hallmark of the previous Rudd Government’s National Broadband Network rollout. Shortage of labour and supplies had bedevilled the rollout under Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, but it promised a world-class high-speed broadband network that would greatly improve workplace productivity and make Australian businesses internationally competitive.
In the name of being a superior economic manager, Abbott replaced the FTTP model with multi-technology mixes that included a fibre-to-the-node model which involved using existing Telstra copper from the node to businesses and households. In the short term it was cheaper but the outcomes were predictably problematic as it became apparent that the FTTN model was significantly slower for users and was subject to constant breakdowns.
Abbott happily handed to Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull the poisoned chalice of implementing the new policy. In what became his serial political Achilles Heel, Turnbull did not push back against Abbott and so Australia got saddled with a seriously inferior NBN that within the decade needed to be fixed.
Abbott wore the label of cyber dinosaur as a badge of honour, declaring tongue-in-cheek that Turnbull was the virtual inventor of the Internet. Abbott’s motivation for the change of policy was his trademark hyper-adversarial prevention of a Rudd Government program reaching fruition and being seen by voters as a success story. Like Julia Gillard’s Emissions Trading Scheme (characterised as a carbon tax) and the Mineral Resources Rental Tax (demeaned as a mining tax), a high-quality Labor NBN had to be scotched at all costs. And it was.
Abbott could be open to the criticism of putting party ahead of country, and he did, but he understood the simple Machiavellian idea of getting credit for what you do as a politician while preventing your political opponent from getting easy credits for whatever it does.
Donald Trump understands this simple idea well and so pressured his allies in Congress to prevent the passing of a workable southern border solution, even thought it was supported by Trump allies such as Senator Lindsey Graham. That has left Trump free to campaign on the hordes of rapists, murderers and paedophiles crossing willy-nilly into the US.
Peter Dutton understands the idea also, but has had to do little on his own behalf to gain political points from it. He must have wondered in the second half of 2022 why Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles were spruiking the merits of AUKUS, having costed it at $368 billion. AUKUS was an uncosted Scott Morrison policy frolic secretly announced in September 2021 eight months before the May 2022 election. It was received with almost universal enthusiasm by the NewsCorp-dominated Australian media as a masterstroke that would lock Australia into a “forever partnership” with the US and Britain by supplying Australia with eight nuclear-powered submarine to defend us against China, our major trading partner.
Former Prime Ministers Paul Keating and Malcolm Turnbull stridently opposed the deal as misguided, expensive and incompatible with Australia’s defence interests. The New York Times uncharitably characterised the deal as one amounting to Morrison ‘betting the house’ on a gamble that entailed ‘throwing our lot in with the United States for generations to come’, implying that it involved a substantial loss of Australian sovereignty.
That being the case, there were ample exit lanes the new Albanese Government could have taken to void the agreement had it wanted to escape the crippling cost of the deal as well its indelible connection with the Morrison Government brand. But that did not happen.
If there were any political credits to be gained down the line from entering into the agreement, voters would be more likely to remember AUKUS as a Morrison policy initiative than an Albanese one, yet it has now been quietly embraced by the Albanese Government, and as a bipartisan policy is not open for discussion despite numerous defence and security experts damning it. One of those is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University, Hugh White, who argues that it’s wrong-headed as a defence strategy, and it won’t deliver what it promises anyway.
In addition to AUKUS, hot button issues have arisen over the past two years that have given the Albanese Government opportunities to show that it is living up to its election promises and is a safe pair of hands to continue governing the country when it goes to an election by May 2025. They include:
- how to respond to a High Court decision which made illegal the indefinite detention of refugees
- how to respond when the government’s anti-corruption commission refuses to investigate five people referred to it in a sealed recommendation by the Robodebt Royal Commissioner in relation to one of the most flagrantly unlawful episodes in Australia’s domestic history
- where should Australia stand on the increasingly vexed question of Israel’s continued occupation of Gaza and the slaughter of thousands of defenceless Palestinian civilians
- how to respond to evidence about corrupt conduct within the CFMEU, a major construction union
- what to do with the recommendations of a government inquiry that called for a blanket ban of gambling advertising.
On each of these hot-button issues, the leader of the Opposition Peter Dutton took a firm stand. On the release of refugees following the High Court decision on the illegality of indefinite detention, for example, Dutton demanded that only the one refugee who brought the case should be released and that the others should be rounded up and the random rapists, murders and paedophiles among them imprisoned for the duration. Dutton knows that is not how the law works in Australia. Yet, in response, Albanese introduced draconian laws to monitor the refugees it had released in accordance with the High Court decision, thereby validating Dutton’s high dudgeon.
On reports of construction union thuggery, Albanese blustered that his government would deregister the CFMEU, which Dutton called the “weakest of all responses”. On gambling advertising, the Albanese government is visibly caving into the bleating of gambling and News Corporation lobbyists, leaving its indecisiveness open to LNP calls that it’s spineless and woke.
On Robodebt, Dutton has warned the government that unsealing Commissioner Catherine Holmes’ sealed recommendation would amount to “trial by media or trial by Shorten”. So, while Albanese’s NACC is left looking impotent, Dutton’s demand that respect be paid to proper legal process makes him look strong.
On the Gaza issue, the feeble indecisiveness of Albanese and Penny Wong has been on full display, with calls in vain for Israel to exercise “restraint” while falling short of calling for a total ceasefire or withdrawing support for Israel. By striking contrast, Dutton sees the conflict as an existential contest between the forces of good and evil, with Benjamin Netanyahu representing all that is good, and Hamas representing such depths of evil that nothing on earth can be regarded as an obstacle to its complete destruction, which includes the wholesale slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian citizens who get in the way of Israeli bombs.
Doubling down, Dutton makes a public visit to Israel and returns with calls for the government to invoke national security concerns to deny visas to Palestinians who apply to escape to Australia as refugees. He makes the call at a time when the only way out of Gaza is the Rafah Crossing into Egypt, which is closed, so no Palestinians are presently coming to Australia. Because most Australians are not aware of that, Dutton looks firm and prime ministerial. He is the safe pair of hands once again looking after national security concerns while Albanese struggles to communicate the fact that Dutton’s calls are bogus.
With ten months before an election, Peter Dutton is getting maximum unchallenged coverage on every call he makes within the News Corp dominated legacy media, while Albanese continues to be ignored or misrepresented. Dutton’s falsehoods are exposed on social media and within independent media outlets, where Albanese’s neglected positions get some degree of representation. Yet Albanese joins the coalition, against its own interests, in blaming social media for the country’s ills.
If the government looked to Britain’s recent riots being blamed on social media, it might see that the megaphone given to the likes of Nigel Farage in the mainstream media was their real cause. By looking at how that unfolded, Albanese’s advisers might be able to see a mirror image of the way social cohesion is being systematically undermined in Australia by the legacy media.
Albanese’s central timidity has now come full circle with little he can do about it other than to rely on Australian voters largely ignoring what they see and hear in the mainstream media. By stubbornly refusing to do anything about media ownership for two years, Albanese has played into a predictable scenario in which whatever ridiculous thing Peter Dutton says wins him credit as a strongman, whereas everything his government does is either ignored or characterised as a weakness or a failure.
Paul Begley
Paul Begley has worked in public affairs for three decades, most recently as General Manager of Government and Media Relations at the Australian HR Institute. He is a current member of the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance (MEAA). Twitter: @yelgeb
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