Scott Morrison (Image: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Polling suggests that Scott Morrison, rather than making up ground on Anthony Albanese and Labor, is starting to drift further behind. He has less than a fortnight to reverse that trend, lift the Coalition’s vote, and hope preferences from long-time Coalition supporter Clive Palmer can offset a stronger Labor vote.

But as Cam Wilson noted yesterday, Morrison’s reputation as a formidable campaigner (partly the result of defeating a big-target Labor in 2019, part media manufacture) is taking a battering as he struggles to shift voter sentiment. Morrison himself is a big part of the problem: he’s now a known quantity with voters, and voters, especially women, don’t like what they see.

But the Coalition’s campaign tactics have also been dramatically less successful. The Morrison campaign, carefully prepared in advance with help from right-wing strategist and Lynton Crosby protégé Isaac Levido, has incorporated successful elements from other right-wing campaigns, drawing from the Republicans in the US and from Boris Johnson in the UK (Levido was a key Tory strategist in 2019), as well as from Morrison’s own “miracle” 2019 win.

The campaign’s key elements are:

  1. Micro-targeted pork-barrelling for marginal seats
  2. Culture war campaigns to distract and provoke outrage from the left
  3. Coordination with the right-wing media and News Corp to deliver attack lines
  4. Demonisation of opponents and their policies.

But:

Demonisation of opponents has been dramatically less successful, mainly because Labor has learnt its lesson — or re-learnt John Hewson’s lesson — and given Morrison far less material to work with. Labor has instead taken a lesson from Kevin Rudd’s 2007 campaign and narrowed its differences to a few key areas — climate change, integrity, cost of living, housing.

Morrison has tried to drum up scare campaigns there — accusing Labor of a stealth carbon tax, saying a federal ICAC would be a “kangaroo court”, warning Help to Buy would see the government own your home — but each has failed to resonate or, in the case of a federal ICAC, merely highlighted Morrison’s own failure.

Attempts to demonise Albanese himself have fallen flat. The original attempt to paint him as a left-wing ogre (as one eminent Liberal said, “They’re trying to make people scared of Albo when he’s about as scary as the family golden retriever”) was replaced with an attempt to portray him as weak. His personal approval numbers have only improved since.

Coordination with the Murdoch political party and select journalists in media outlets is crucial to the Morrison campaign, as it is to the UK Tories and the Republicans. In 2019, a Sky News journalist was specifically tasked with disrupting Bill Shorten’s media conferences by yelling questions at him about the cost of his climate policies. It was the Prime Minister’s Office this time that began feeding journalists “gotcha” questions for Albanese, either directly or via compliant editors (the reason so many journalists read these questions from their phones isn’t always poor memory).

News Corp’s campaigning for Morrison and the beleaguered Josh Frydenberg has been even more blatant in 2022 than during previous elections. But the “gotcha” moments were overdone and themselves became the story, as has the extent of media bias against Labor and independents, especially at the ABC. The old line that political staffers should never become the story also applies to journalists, but they’ve brought into plain sight the role of the media in distorting election narratives.

Culture warring has been by far the most successful part of Morrison’s campaign, and particularly his use of the transphobic comments of his handpicked Warringah candidate Katherine Deves. It’s a bold strategy — essentially to gift Warringah to Zali Steggall, but with the aim of signalling to more socially conservative voters in outer suburbs and regional communities that he supports her transphobia.

The status of trans people is not a vote shifter on a large scale, but is designed to convey that Morrison is aligned with the mores of particular communities. Strategists on both sides say Morrison’s support of Deves has played well. There are two problems, however — one is that the kind of people likely to nod along when Morrison backs Deves may well already vote for him, and Deves may help inflict a grisly toll on moderate Liberals — Trent Zimmerman in North Sydney, Jason Falinski in Mackellar and Dave Sharma in Wentworth.

Morrison’s other culture war front — on religious discrimination legislation, which he tried to ramp up over the weekend — has been less successful. This is because Liberal MPs and senators have readily emerged to say they will again cross the floor to vote against it, and because — unusually — Morrison has been given a rough time by journalists demanding to know when he would legislate to protect children from being expelled from schools for their sexuality.

Micro-targeted pork-barrelling, despite being of dubious political benefit, has become a crucial part of the conservative campaign arsenal. In the UK, for example, the Johnson government is using multibillion-pound slush funds to relentlessly pork-barrel targeted electorates (though it didn’t help Johnson in the most recent council elections). But greater awareness of the cynical tactic thanks to Bridget McKenzie’s rorting and Alan Tudge’s bungled car parks, and a growing belief that this represents corruption, appear to have mitigated its effectiveness. In NSW, Premier Dominic Perrottet is now making a virtue of reforming NSW’s grant processes — much abused by his predecessor — to curb the practice.

The last week and a half of the Morrison campaign will be a fascinating test of the agility of his team. Can they refine and sharpen their four key tactics to start delivering better results? Or do they shift gear and try something different, reaching outside the Murdoch-Johnson-Trump-Morrison playbook for another tactic? Victory isn’t out of reach yet, but people are already voting in their tens of thousands. Change can’t come soon enough.