Comment

What a tragedy that the campaign is now ‘my scare is bigger than your scare’. We all have to fear that the more frustrated and desperate the major players get, the more they will resort to dirtier tactics and less substance in terms of what they would propose as a future for our nation.

At the end of week two of the campaign we are confronting the prospect of neither major party being able to govern in their own right, which says everything about how underwhelming voters see the choice on offer.

Australian politics should not be bogged in a time warp of short-term political advantage. We cannot afford a second decade of inertia … Leadership should be about connecting the dots in such a way as to provide guidance for a safe and better future.

Despite the efforts of the media to discredit the independents’ movement, attempting to tag them as ‘fake independents’ and otherwise minimising their coverage, there should be little doubt that many conservative members sitting in what they had thought were ‘safe’ seats are already recognising the strength of the contest.

A shock, a self-inflicted wound on day one of the six-week formal election campaign has put Anthony Albanese on the back foot. That has to be the biggest takeout of week one, making the next five even more fraught for the Labor leader as he tries to persuade voters to give him a go in the top job.

For state and religious authorities, art has often been the enemy. It’s easy to see why. Art tends to be anti-authoritarian. It argues against the simplistic. It opens possibilities. It values freedom. It imagines. Worst of all, it destabilises the idea of authority itself.

The clear message of the 1990 election was that disunity is death in politics. Bob Hawke easily capitalised on this truism to win a fourth term in office. The Liberal Party, meanwhile, had been torn apart by the leadership contest between John Howard and Andrew Peacock and this rancour followed them all the way to their loss on polling day. We arrive some 30 years later with no lessons learnt.

The election campaign is off to an early and intense start. There was no need to wait for the governor-general to dissolve the house – Morrison stopped governing months ago and has been swamping the media with taxpayer-funded ‘government’ ads that are blatantly about returning the Liberals to power.

A triumvirate of longstanding party operatives, apparently representative of the left, the right and the soft-right, has been legally empowered to bypass democratic preselections, anoint a few favoured sitting members, and appoint candidates in a plethora of outstanding seats. Two of these people happen to be the prime minister, Scott Morrison, and the premier of NSW, Dominic Perrottet.

The priority is simply winning. And it is not even about winning to lead, it is about getting the position and power but with little or no commitment to creating a meaningful future for our nation and its people.