Wong, then, was making an important intervention in the discussion. She was complicating the binary: effectively asking whether Dutton’s so-called strength really protects us from risk – or if it is, in fact, a risk itself.
Beneath the political question lie crucial questions for the Australian people about our country and its future. How much do we want to be a part of the world and how much do we want to wall ourselves off? Is the latter even possible? How much are we our own country, and how much are we simply following currents overseas?
The point that Albanese does often make about the previous government is that it left inflation high. You can understand this politically – voters have a one-track mind right now – but really this was a temporary problem, not unique to Australia. The problem with the last government was broader and more lasting. Across a range of areas – health, education, wages, productivity – the country either stood still or went backwards.
Another way to put this is to say that the things that perhaps make this place great – what separates it from other countries – were allowed to degrade. And this, too, is potentially an argument about Australia’s place in the world. Typically, Paul Keating put this best, in 2016, while criticising the “reverential, sacramental quality” the US alliance had taken on. We needed to recognise, instead, that Australia is “a better society than the United States”. Keating listed healthcare, increasing incomes, no guns in schools, school participation and superannuation.
The chaos Trump is currently causing in his own country would seem to offer a way to renew this argument. And there was a sense, with last week’s bulk-billing announcement, that Albanese grasped this, at least a little. “We don’t want our health system to be more American,” he said. “We don’t need to copy the ideologies of any other nation. We only want our health system to be more Australian.”
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Mostly, though, this case remains implied – as it was in Sunday’s announcements from the major parties. Albanese promised to build more urgent care clinics. Dutton promised to buy more fighter jets. Both, you might say, are promising us we can stay in our own comfortable, distant bubble: Albanese by promising to keep Australia different, and Dutton by promising to keep Australia safe.
In the shadow of this past week, Dutton’s emphasis looks smarter. But this points to another aspect of that febrile pre-election atmosphere: the tendency to give too much weight to whatever has just happened. Is Trump the most important person in this election, with Xi Jinping a close second? Or will the everyday dramas of Australian suburbia reassert themselves? The truth is that those caught inside the political bubble can only really guess what is going on outside it. They’ll find out on election night – along with the answer to the question of who is going to lose their job.
Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison. He is a regular columnist and a former adviser to prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
