(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

World War I began early, accidentally, when a small German force invaded the north tip of Luxembourg on 1 August, 1914, three days before the Western war began in earnest. Having destroyed a railway station telegraph office and ripped up rail track — both of which would have to be rebuilt when Germany re-invaded — they sheepishly withdrew across the border.

Is that where we are now? With the publication of the latest Newspoll giving Labor the magical 56-44 2PP, The Australian came out all guns blazing, the anti-Labor stories tumbling over themselves hourly. By mid-afternoon, Albo was “defending” Labor’s position on China (which appeared to be identical to the Coalition’s position on China). 

By late afternoon, when one glanced back to check a fact or two, it was gone and Albo was now doing a backflip on the Kurri Kurri hybrid gas plant. Both stories were tendentious in the extreme. Labor’s “defence” of its China policy was simply restating it. Labor’s plan for the Kurri Kurri plant had always been that it should be hybrid, converting to full hydrogen use in a decade. 

Business as usual. Whether right-wing ideologues or mortgage-paying desperados, News Corp’s staff have been reformed into ideological flying columns, ready for the long slog on behalf of a blemished and discredited government. 

But have they gone a little early? Reporting on the Newspoll included a series of dodgy pie charts, which visually skewed the results of the “Better PM” poll — ScoMo leading by a slender 43% to 41% — to give the impression that the Coalition had a de facto near-majority. 

Those pie charts appear to have disappeared on the News website, after a storm of ridicule, and that sally might mark the right’s “Luxembourg telegraph station explosion” moment. With the right readying an onslaught behind their frontiers — a mixture of their powerful myths, appeals to self-interest, and big fear — but faced with an electorate whose trust they have lost, they wouldn’t want to go too early.

Is there four weeks’ traction in the mix of sawdust and bulldust they will try to sell us? Barely. There is certainly not six weeks. For the Coalition, assailed both by Labor and by independents of all stripes, the race will be against themselves — to get over the line with the whole campaign still patched together, without the sprockets flying off. 

But if they can do that, of course, then a reversal occurs. It is the Coalition, I presume, who for months now have had their wonks coming up with something like “the promise of Australia”, Scott Morrison’s 2019 quasi-religious appeal to a national spirit, which all could partake of, from their atomised lives, and which would allow the Coalition to acknowledge its own sins while owning a higher conception of life and possibility. 

“We all fall short of our ideals” I can imagine Morrison saying. “I personally have done that many times. So has Jenny. But all Australians are great and together we make up ‘the Australian greatness’ of a nation at peace, where you can work your way up … nothing but three bucks and an icy-pole stick…” etc, etc, and preacher boy that he is, he will sell the life out of that. Or something like it. And it may just work.

The problem for Labor is that ScoMo can make something like that sing, out of sheer desperation, and Labor is then once again left defenceless. It have advanced no general conceptions of how life should be, of what we should dream of, of making a society which honours and encourages our best selves. It is running on “kick this mob out”, and offering a few practical, region-focused solutions at the same time.

So they will either have to ignore that sort of big pitch or puncture it altogether. The latter strategy works if enough people are wholly convinced the Morrison government is full of it, but if that’s not the case, Labor — for some of them at least — takes on the role of the destructive cynic. (“What, you don’t want us to be great?” “Greatness? How about a fast train to Newcastle!”)

The truth is that conservative parties have always been better positioned to play this sort of game, for the simple reason that, since the advent of high capitalism and a full franchise, their success has depended on persuading a section of the working class to vote against their own specific interests. The convoking of imperial pride, of national loyalty, of abstract notions of duty was always campaigning with an offer of the imaginary — it’s just the imaginary was real. In the 1920s, the UK Tories slogan was simply “For King and Country”, and not much else was required. 

Labor parties learnt how to do this for a while, and then they lost it. As their ranks were taken over by university graduates (often of working-class origin), the very fact that they did want to do better for the less well-off — and had the figures to show what needed and had to be done — has diminished their capacity to talk in any language but that of technocratic command and remedy. We’ll see this time out if they managed to remedy that after the 2019 loss, but one doesn’t hear any great indication of such.

The concern with that asymmetry is also about from whence the passion will come to fuel progressives for the fight. Because without a political-economic narrative to attach to, progressives return to their comfort zone — culture wars that leave much of the nation cold or are flatly counterproductive.

The Grace Tame event of last week was a sign of that. Someone refusing a smile at an official event counts as a political act of sorts, but the outpouring of political passion attached to it by progressives, the tide of rah-rah op-eds, shows how utterly self-absorbed many progressives have become, and how their personal hatred of Scott Morrison and what he represents may well distort their political vision. 

That is what the right is hoping for, of course, and will be the traps that some will lay from now until May – or ha-ha, the House of Reps only election in September, after a half-Senate in May. As every progressive knows, the hacienda will not be rebuilt (Guy DeBord), but the Luxembourg telegraph office has been destroyed. The railway station the Germans took over was named Troisvierges. There’ll be none of those when this is all over.