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ELECT A LEADER WHO CAN DO THE SUBSTANCE AND THEATRE OF POLITICS

It is election night. Enough of the vote has been counted for you, the leader, to know your party has lost. You are devastated. You are accountable. You go on stage at a function room your party has decked out for victory, not defeat, and take responsibility, staff weeping in the wings, a sea of shattered supporters before you. Then you withdraw to your cave. Despair hits like a tsunami. Eventually the anguish subsides from visceral to something vaguely bearable. Questions begin to cohere and emerge from the morass of pain, and you ask why. Why did you lose? To get to the whole truth, whatever other factors are involved, you must ask yourself and answer two questions. Did I do the substance of politics well enough? Did I do the theatre of politics well enough?

Leaders are incredibly important. They are more thought about, talked about, written about, analysed, and advised than anyone else or any other thing in politics. Their spouse has been giving them free advice for decades. Their chief of staff and political advisor assume the coach role, as does the party secretary and the party pollster who measures the leader’s and the party’s ups and downs. Then there’s the rest of the leadership team: the leader’s deputy in the House of Representatives, and the leader and deputy-leader in the Senate, who sometimes act like coaches too. Add every member of parliament, all of their staffers, the party president, and the party’s rank-and-file branch members who all have opinions on how the leader could do better. Former leaders sometimes volunteer ideas on what their successors should do differently. Then you’ve got scores of journalists and commentators who make their living reporting politics; and the voters who read, listen to and watch them, all readily offering free advice of their own through letters to the editor, talkback radio and social media. The leader can feel besieged by this onslaught. The kindest thing can be just for everyone to shut up and give them a break from a cacophony that boils down to these two points. When a leader wins an election, they’re a genius. When they lose, they’re a dunce.

Labor’s shock 2019 election loss was put down by many to its leader, Bill Shorten. Labor won or drew every Newspoll between the 2016 and 2019 elections, but over the same time Shorten was less popular than the Liberal leader, even when that leader was under siege.¹ You are unlikely to have heard anyone say, ‘Bill Shorten is great. Can’t wait to vote for him!’ Rather reactions were variations on the pervasive theme of Shorten as wooden and shifty, meshed to the hope that he would be a better prime minister in government than he was a leader of the opposition. Despite this, Labor stayed just far enough ahead in the polls to suggest Shorten was likely to be elected prime minister anyway, though this was more hope than deeply held conviction.

Opposition leader is a terrible job. It is the ‘other’ of the political hierarchy, and draws all the unfair opprobrium that attaches to otherness. Power confers golden raiments on prime ministers, at least initially and during the prime of their time in office. It confers ashes and sackcloth on opposition leaders who are never seen as smart enough, buff enough or popular enough unless they face a tottering prime minister (think Gough Whitlam versus Billy McMahon in 1972 – see page 28). Every season is open season on opposition leaders.

Prime ministers possess vast policy, information, and resource largesse to dispense in ways reinforcing their power and, done in an ethical and legally sound way, is a profoundly helpful fact of office.² Compare this to opposition leaders who are unconsciously despised for their powerlessness, offering their supporters merely the hope of eventual victory.

The shift from opposition leader to prime minister can work magical transformations: think John Howard who winning the 1996 election went from washed up has-been to all-knowing conservative magus. Interestingly, the qualitative polling on Shorten shared something with Gough Whitlam’s as opposition leader. The derring-do public Whitlam persona we remember emerged with his 1972 election win. Labor’s own qualitative polling in the run-up to that election showed voters saw Whitlam, like Shorten, as evasive and untrustworthy.³

Action is character, they say in the theatre. We form judgements about people by observing their actions over time. Shorten began his career as an energetic, engaging union official – blond, playful, charming, policy smart, media savvy, a labour movement star destined for big things in Labor politics. He was golden. Later, as parliamentary secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services in the early Rudd Government, Shorten deservedly won kudos for championing the rights of people with disability, and pressing for the reform of Australia’s disability services systems to better support equal rights and opportunities. His senior minister at the time, Minister for Disability Reform Jenny Macklin, harnessed the momentum created by Shorten’s advocacy to create the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), one of the Gillard Government’s signal achievements.

Inside Labor, though, Shorten was known less admirably to have squibbed on deals, and been prone to power-plays. He was prominent in the advance guard of MPs, for example, which brought down Kevin Rudd as prime minister in favour of Julia Gillard in 2010.⁴ When Rudd’s relentless destabilisation of Gillard depressed Labor’s chance of winning the 2013 election, Shorten then publicly urged a return to Rudd.⁵ A mixed picture of Shorten as policy idealist and sharp political operator formed inside the minds of the media and the public generally.

The Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison governments spent a lot of time and money in Shorten’s six years as Labor leader cementing nascent doubts about his integrity into a hardened perception of him as untrustworthy. Partly because of his own choices and actions, and partly because of sustained Liberal attacks on him, Shorten morphed from the open and engaging character of his earlier career into the hypervigilant, ‘prudently paranoid’ politician of his later one.⁶

Shorten was protected by a Federal Parliamentary Labor Party rule change making it extremely difficult to dump a leader between elections. Ironically, it was introduced by Rudd after Rudd’s relentless destabilisation and eventual toppling of Julia Gillard as prime minister in 2013. It was designed to stem the leadership bloodshed which Rudd’s hunting of Gillard showed cost Labor votes – and would, of course, have reinforced Rudd’s hold on the leadership had he not flubbed the 2013 election.

In a Darwinian display of infighting, the Liberals had three leaders in the six years after winning government in 2013. Nevertheless (and in contrast to the Labor experience) Liberal prime minister Scott Morrison went on to win the 2019 election.⁷

This appeared to overturn a widely held ‘truism’ of Australian politics, that if you can’t govern yourselves you can’t govern the nation – or win an election, anyway. The historical record shows, however, that this ‘truism’ had been revealed as flawed decades earlier. In the lead up to the 1996 election there were three different Liberal leaders in one term of opposition: John Hewson, Alexander Downer, and Howard. Howard won the 1996 election in a landslide.

Did Labor overlearn the lesson of the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd years? It appears so. Labor prioritised stability over performance. The Rudd rule saved Labor from lost support over leadership infighting, but sticking with a leader who failed to lift after narrowly losing the previous election may have cost more votes than stability saved. In contrast, the Liberals prioritised performance over stability. The craftiest among them, Scott Morrison, rose to the top in August 2018, replacing Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister and beating Shorten at the election eight months later. After Morrison’s ascension the Liberals at his behest adopted a Rudd-style rule making it difficult to change leaders between elections – a self-serving initiative from Morrison which, in light of his appalling performance during the Great Conflagration of 2020, may prove critical to his survival as Liberal leader.⁸

Feeling grows in Labor ranks, meanwhile, that gains from stability may not be worth the price of keeping on an underperforming leader. The Rudd rule may not be enough to save struggling Labor leaders in future since a simple vote by Labor MPs could overturn it anytime, making leadership changes between elections easier once again.⁹

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Leadership challenges make terrific political theatre, of course – the kind which leaders themselves want to avoid. To do so they have to do the substance and theatre of politics well enough to keep their job and win elections.

Not doing the theatre of politics well enough means no one will ever know how well they do the substance of politics because no one will listen or watch to find out. The public sphere, as sociologist Ari Adut puts it, is ‘simply a space of appearances’ that is sensory, largely visual, involves distance, and of which spectatorship is the essence – in short, it is spectacle.¹⁰

Further, theatre is about emotion. The prime error made by contemporary social democratic politicians is to rely on reasoned argument to sway voters. Emotion trumps reason in politics every time. Labor relies overwhelmingly on reason and facts to carry the day, making it easy pickings for right-wingers who understand the primacy of emotion and exploit it to the hilt.

Earnest political players may scoff at the importance of politics’ thespian dimension, but even cursory consideration of a few prominent examples makes the point. As with Ronald Reagan, many of Bill Clinton’s speeches were banal on the page but tremendously effective, and sometimes electrifying, in the delivery. In contrast, Hillary Clinton’s speeches read well on the page but tended to fall flat in the delivery. The two outstanding examples of politicians whose speeches read brilliantly and were delivered brilliantly – Winston Churchill and John F Kennedy – put tremendous time and effort into getting both the texts of their speeches and the performance of those texts absolutely right. Who was the last Labor leader to pull off this double?

The Shorten–Morrison contest, on the Labor side, was bad theatre. Had Shorten won rather than narrowly lost the 2013 election against Turnbull, perceptions of him may have undergone the kind of transformation Gough Whitlam’s did upon winning office in 1972. As opposition leader, though, Shorten’s presentational problems symbolised his situation and caged him in them. Ill-fitting suits with overly large coats made him look like a boy in a grown up’s clothes. He spoke at voters rather than with them. They appeared as passive listeners to a politician rather than feeling a fellow human being was communicating with them, seeking their trust and favour. Compare and contrast with Bob Hawke whose enviable ability to be only and obviously himself, in public and in private, flaws and all, made him a national phenomenon and helped Labor win four consecutive elections in 1983, 1984, 1987 and 1990.

A university visit Shorten made to address a student meeting a few years ago suggests he was able to change gears if he wanted. The vice-chancellor attended. A wooden performance from Shorten ensued until one student asked an especially challenging question. Shorten electrified the meeting with the brilliance and conviction of his response, then reverted to his previous mode. Afterwards the vice-chancellor raised the dramatic, impressive but temporary change in tenor for that one question and asked why he didn’t speak that way all the time. Shorten said his office forbade it as insufficiently ‘leaderlike’. So it did not have to be this way. Shorten could have been less wooden and more engaging, making him more credible and likable – that is, more electable.

Nor was it as though Morrison was strong on the ‘trust’ front himself. He had a documented record of sketchy performances in positions of responsibility, departing from two jobs under a cloud after serious governance failures – firstly, as director of the New Zealand Office of Tourism and Sport (1998–2000) and secondly in Australia under the Howard Government as managing director of Tourism Australia (2004–2006).¹¹ In 2018 colleagues noted the cynicism and cunning of Morrison and his supporters in their manipulation of Peter Dutton into a leadership tilt against Turnbull, and then of Turnbull out of the prime ministership while ostensibly remaining loyal to Turnbull, with Morrison himself magically emerging from the fray as prime minister. Post-election revelations about the $100 million ‘Sports Rorts’ affair, overseen by Morrison’s office in a way that bent the flow of cash to boost the government’s prospects in marginal seats, reinforced concerns about his trickiness.¹²

Nevertheless Morrison easily bettered Shorten in the theatre of politics for the duration of the 2019 election campaign, when it really counted. Political scientist Glyn Davis, paraphrasing research by American sociologist Frederic Milton Thrasher on Chicago gang leaders in the 1920s, noted the leader ‘must embody those attributes the gang most values … must be of the culture’.¹³ So it was that Morrison interacted enthusiastically with every ordinary voter in sight, left no sizzled sausage voraciously uneaten, and radiated palpable energy through the media coverage of those interactions to voters not there. Shorten and his wooden ways looked lower energy and less relatable by comparison. Relative to Shorten – and that is an important qualification – Morrison visibly connected with enough people in enough places, amplified through the media, to boost his chance of winning significantly. Bob Hawke did the same for Labor, informed by and advancing social democratic rather than conservative values, in his four consecutive election wins from 1983. Voters want to feel, vicariously if they cannot get it directly, energy and connection.

‘It is often said of democratic politics,’ historian David Runciman pointed out astutely, ‘that the question voters ask of any leader is: “Do I like this person?” But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: “Would this person like me?”’¹⁴ Morrison enthusiastically made encounters with voters appear to be all about them, conveying the impression he really liked the ordinary Australians he met on the election trail. Viewers of news reports carrying pictures of these interactions day in, day out, during the campaign were more likely to think he would like them too. With Shorten it too often seemed to be about him as he stayed controlled and within himself, smiling but slightly distant, looking ahead to the next person whose hand had to be shaken almost before he finished shaking the one in front of him.

Morrison’s mishandling of the national crisis over the summer of 2020 – going on holiday secretly to Hawaii while the east coast was ablaze, having his office deny he was there, reluctantly returning when he was found out, failing to show compassion to affected communities and then attempting to exploit the situation for political gain through ads designed to burnish his leadership standing – revealed his true self. But he managed to devise, create and perform the ‘daggy dad’ political persona for the five weeks of the 2019 election campaign sufficiently well to see off Shorten’s prime ministerial prospects for good.

Winning the theatre of politics does not always come down to good looks, likeability or the ability to scoff sausages like a local, but it does always come down to the better performance. In his successful 1993 election campaign Paul Keating was not the widely liked, knockabout character Bob Hawke had been among voters at Labor’s previous four election wins, and nor was his opponent, the academic economist-turned-politician John Hewson. Keating was respected and awesomely powerful, though, in his public arguments and interventions – so much so that his opponent cracked under the media pressure orchestrated by Keating’s relentless pursuit of him on policy grounds. The campaign yielded two of the most memorable images of modern Australian politics: Lorrie Graham’s photograph of Keating cheekily peering over a pair of dark sunglasses on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, and a perspiring Hewson facing Mike Willesee’s forensic examination on the Nine Network’s A Current Affair of the way his proposed goods and services tax would apply to the purchase of a birthday cake.¹⁵ Keating was cool; Hewson perspired under pressure. Keating won the substance and theatre of the campaign, the theatre powerfully coming, during the campaign, to symbolise its substance.

So successful leaders need to be able to do both, ideally in a way that enables voters to say yes when asking themselves the question: ‘Do I like this person and, more importantly, would they like me?’ A leader who can do the substance and theatre of politics will beat a competitor who can only do the substance or theatre of politics every time.