You could tell they were pleased with it. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the start of the election campaign this morning, the line that Opposition Leader Peter Dutton “cuts everything but your taxes” rolled out of his mouth, sculpted and ready to be deployed ad nauseam over the next five weeks and a day.
Headline slogans are rarely brilliant and have become particularly dull lately (consider Labor’s 2022 “A better future” morphing thrillingly in “building Australia’s Future” by January this year). But during elections, there are certain lines that, for good or ill, find their way into the pubic consciousness.
They can define how a campaign, and even a prime minister, is remembered.
Scotty’s attempts at marketing
We always thought former prime minister Scott Morrison was the exemplar of the old Mark Twain aphorism that if you get the reputation as an early riser, you can sleep till noon. Policy-wise, the press were happy to meet him more than halfway.
The happy embrace of the (seemingly contrived) “ScoMo” sobriquet was part of the reputation he’d accrued as a master communicator and salesman on behalf of his brand, largely thanks to his achievement in dragging his party to a shock win in 2019. And yet, no prime minister has had more of his own phrases — “It’s not a race”, “I don’t hold a hose” — used as ammunition against him.
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In 2022, he threw all manner of (largely three-word) phrases at the wall: “can-do capitalism”, “choice not mandates” and, of course, “technology not taxes”. He had a go and got a go. Sorry, we meant he had a go and had to go — 2022 ended with a wipeout for his party.
Malcolm Turnbull’s Agility
Perhaps the problems Malcolm Turnbull faced in the top office are best summed up by his airy slogans. The silver fox orator seemed like a statesman from TV, a persona that got a bit uncanny and insubstantial when it butted up against reality.
Promising “continuity with change” in 2016 sounded like a parody of meaningless sloganeering because… it was. It was almost identical to the slogan of fictional US president Selina Meyer, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus in the scathing political satire Veep.
Then was his insistence, soon after taking over from Tony Abbott in September 2015, that “There has never been a more exciting time to be alive than today, and there has never been a more exciting time to be an Australian.” It was emulated and modified by his colleagues: “There really has never been a more exciting time to establish and grow a business in Australia,” beamed LNP MP Bert van Manen in February 2016.
It was also relentlessly parodied by his opponents. Turnbull was described by Labor’s Terri Butler as “a man who is doing his best to make sure that it is the most important and exciting time in the history of the world to be a tax dodger in Australia!”
Stop the Boats
That’s the thing about a slogan — even the most successful lends itself to parody. The point where the general consensus that Tony Abbott’s wild ride as Australia’s prime minister was soon to come crashing down was when he reintroduced knights and dames. Labor’s then chief joke merchant Senator Sam Dastyari gave a speech pledging to help him “stop the moats“, regurgitating a three-word slogan that cast its shadow over policymaking in Australia (and now elsewhere) for more than a decade.
Its potency as an attack line was immediately apparent from February 2010. At a doorstop alongside Abbott attacking then PM Kevin Rudd on recent asylum seeker arrivals, then immigration spokesman Scott Morrison and then shadow minister for justice and customs Michael Keenan both promised to “stop the boats”.
For years to come, there was no question the Coalition couldn’t answer simply by insisting they would stop the boats (including, in one case, the question “how do you plan to stop the boats?“). And by the time he took up the top job in 2018, Morrison had a boat-shaped trophy on his desk, apparently sent to him by a constituent, engraved with the phrase “I stopped these“.
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Detailed programmatic specificity for all
Sometimes the decision is taken out of your hands, and a damn good thing too. Take Kevin Rudd, a man who, left to his own devices, says things like:
There has to be a greater synergy between, let’s call it our policy leadership in this, which has been focused so much, legitimately, on targets and global architecture, almost reverse-engineered back to the means by which you can quickly deliver outcomes, and on the demand side in our economy we’re looking at potential advances in terms of 20 to 25% range if you do this across the board…
Rudd should thank his lucky stars that his first name rhymed with the last digit of the year in which he was trying to become prime minister. And, this’ll shock you, the brevity of Kevin07 slogan wasn’t to his taste: “I was seriously horrified one morning when I saw on television all these young people marching past Parliament House wearing Kevin07 t-shirts,” Rudd told The New Daily a decade later. “And I brought key staff together and said ‘whose idea was this?’”
“They all sheepishly looked at each other, but of course they were right and I was wrong, and it turned out to be a very successful campaign.”
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