Anthony Albanese must do more than just not be Scott Morrison in this election battle

As he, and a depressed party, contemplate their position, almost the only glimmer of hope - a dim one - is the understanding that while the Coalition has forfeited the electorate's trust, voters have not yet transferred their hopes and expectations to Anthony Albanese and the Labor Party.

That might not necessarily be a reflection on Labor and its campaign. It is common that it is governments which usually lose elections. Only rarely do oppositions win despite a reasonable government record. The Coalition is losing because it is badly on the nose, in part because of effective attacks from the opposition. The electorate wants a change. That might be enough. The danger for Albanese is that this may not be because of enthusiasm for the character of the Labor leader, confidence in his ability, or excitement about his exciting and tempting package of policies, programs and goodies. There is just no one else.

Indeed, it may well be that on many of the policies that are mobilising voters - action on climate change, strong action against political corruption and a return to basic principles of transparency, accountability and good practice - it is the teal independents and the Greens doing the most to galvanise voters. That is not to say that they will win more votes on such issues than Labor, particularly out of the inner suburbs of capital cities. But they are the only ones campaigning with zeal and with zest. Most of the electorate looks rather sullen and unimpressed, whether with Morrison or with Albanese.

The teal independents are marketing themselves as right-of-centre moderate Liberals. They assert that the government has gone rogue on climate change, primarily because they are in thrall to the Nationals and the hydrocarbon industry. They want integrity in government. Given the way recent conservative governments, particularly Morrison, have deviated from the norms, they want a powerful anti-corruption body. These are hardly radical positions, nor part of a secret Greens agenda, least of all over managing the economy.

Labor wants them to win when they cannot themselves win particular seats. No doubt they will run dead to maximise the teal chances. But the goodwill extends only so far. Each seat they take will be at Liberal expense, but down the track, if a shattered and defeated Liberal Party is regathering after the election, its new leader may well be inviting the teals to join in. There's a narrow chance, if neither party has an absolute majority, that the teals could be bargaining over which party should govern. Even then deals over an integrity commission or climate change action are unlikely to make them other than casual allies of Labor. That is because they could not survive the following election if their votes had made Albanese prime minister.

The attractive, articulate and persuasive personalities of the teals have stood in marked contrast with the surly and entitled responses from coalition incumbents stuck with the job of showing solidarity with the Nationals and Morrison's policies. But just as importantly, they have mobilised hundreds of volunteers, and a big sense of popular and public participation in politics that matter.

For the teal independents, the campaign has seemed a joyous idealistic crusade. For Labor, it has seemed a grind for soiled and limited objectives.

The Labor campaign, by contrast, is dominated by suits and advertising people, and while trying to organise and use branch members, shows the same contemptuous approach to grassroots democracy and government by members as the prime minister has to the Liberal Party. The result is that the teals seem to "own" the issues, and seem "pure" on them. They seem unaffected by deals, compromises and base motives. By contrast Labor, which developed many of the policies, has come to seem soiled by the way that leadership and party processes have ground them down.

The teals, like the Greens, are idealistic and liberal on a number of other critical issues, not least refugee policies. Morrison and other Liberals - indeed the Nationals - make little of this positioning, even as it acts to their detriment, appealing as it does to definite constituencies of moderate Liberals.

If voters must choose Morrison or Albanese, it appears that Albanese is more than a nose ahead, because he is not the devil they have come to know all too well.

But they are not confident that they will be electing a typical Labor government as they understand it to be. Nor are they reassured that the party is infused with Labor "values" and aspirations, whether for the working class or for poorer and disadvantaged Australians, and for those who have been missing out while Morrison and Josh Frydenberg were splashing billions of dollars at well-heeled constituencies of cronies, donors and insiders.

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Albanese has an extremely limited agenda. He has deliberately dampened almost all hopes and expectations. He's not much into redistribution of income. He has no real plans to shift tax burdens on to those who can most afford to pay. In his efforts to distance himself from the Greens, he has become a great champion of coal miners and coal mining.

He talks action on climate change but has carefully positioned himself as being only slightly more active than the government. He pretends, and in government will no doubt continue to pretend that his arbitrary targets and limited action were settled on the science and advice about successful outcomes. That's not true. It was a juggle between party interests, including among operators, such as Joel Fitzgibbon and Kimberley Kitching seeking to undermine him.

True believers are hardly impressed by Labor's positioning on defence, foreign affairs, immigration and refugee policy. They may well understand the pragmatics but wonder why the party refuses to stand for and on principle. In the US, Britain and most of western Europe, centre-left parties can have different approaches to conservatives on such issues without being denounced as traitors. They can even have nuance, where, though there are large areas of agreement there are differences of emphasis. But there is no nuance in Australia. The Labor-Coalition "consensus" is not a true bipartisan policy. The Coalition has made policy unilaterally, consciously trying to push Labor to adopting positions that ought to be anathema to them. But Albanese stands side by side with the government, so fearful of being wedged or labelled as "soft" or a China-appeaser that he refuses to make the sort of intelligent criticisms of extreme government actions and their logical consequences.

The most one can get are criticisms of "being asleep at the wheel" (over the Solomons) or attacks on waste and poor outcomes (over the submarines, even though Albanese has at all stages mirrored government policy). Labor is at best a millimetre to the left of the Coalition on the drift to authoritarianism, the national security and national surveillance state and the massive extension of police powers, without circumstances or results justifying the crack-down.

Once Morrison was in an advantageous position to exploit Australia's apparently successful management of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic shutdown it involved. He lost much of his advantage by his conflicts with the states over pandemic management, local responses and his determination to restart the economy before the pandemic was under control, as well as by a host of failures over vaccine ordering and distribution.

Even his economic measures, including JobKeeper and the taking on of debt and deficit - an amazing turn-around from among economic ideologues - seem to have ceased to work for him as pluses. It ceased to work because debates have resumed over accumulating debt and deficit. And rising interest rates have dampened confidence in the recovery.

Morrison's problem is in reinventing and remarketing his achievements, but he has left it too late. From his point of view, however, it could be a more positive tale than a recitation of his achievements over reducing emissions, promoting electric cars, building girls' lavatories and changing rooms at sporting ovals, and changing the equations over violence against women and sexual harassment at Parliament House.

Morrison's celebrated marketing nous is not working for him. He has a major credibility gap. The key to the Morrison style lies in his capacity to thoroughly believe anything he is saying now, even as it is plainly, the opposite of what he said yesterday - a fact he will indignantly deny. In time, however, his prevarication, and what Barnaby Joyce has called his capacity to reconstruct facts, has become obvious. Even as he faces a mainstream media far less critical of him than I have ever observed of any prime minister in recent history, his capacity to bluster, to make it up, or to deny the truth is declining. At this stage most of his well-rehearsed lines are failing, and his awful run of luck continues to dog him. Attempts to artificially ramp up some issues - conflict with China for example - also threaten to revive memories of his great capacity to crisis management, as manifest with bushfires and floods.

Shadow treasurer Jim Chalmers has had the measure of both Frydenberg and Morrison on economic issues. He has more than made up for the poor impressions caused by Albanese's alleged "gaffes" of failing to remember statistics. I doubt that such "gotcha" moments have long-term effect, even as they underline the combativeness of most of the mainstream press, including some ABC and Nine (Fairfax) journalists. Yet Albanese needs a better way of responding then looking like a deer in the headlights.

For Morrison, it shows Albanese as skimpy on detail, and not experienced enough in economic management. But if by contrast he is a master of detail, it underlines his tendency to micro-manage his ministers. And it also draws attention to the key Morrison problem: not his command of the facts, but his judgment in applying them to the problem at hand. And his failures to follow through after making announcements.

Albanese had shadow ministers whose job is to be masters, or mistresses, of the detail within their portfolio areas. As ringmaster, he is supposed to know what is going on, but not necessarily to the point of understanding each bit of arithmetic or every dot-point. His team is able - on the face of it more competent than the Morrison team, which is overfull of factional, religious and personal mates, and complete liabilities Morrison refuses to dump for fear of giving a win to the opposition. Some of these should be terrified about the prospect of a national integrity commission. Albanese's team has rehearsed what would happen if the leader caught COVID (as Malcolm Fraser did, with measles, in 1977).

By contrast, some of Morrison's more useful ministers - such as Frydenberg and Peter Dutton - are focused on their own survival, and others, apparently recognised as the liabilities they have always been, are being kept well out of the spotlight. Morrison has extraordinarily little to sell, and he himself is not regarded as an electoral asset in many electorates, particularly, as it turns out, in the inner-city ones where the teal independents have put incumbents under such pressure.

The last thing that Albanese should be doing is cruising confidently to victory. If the polls suggest that he is comfortably ahead, he should be redoubling his efforts to confirm the good impressions and to deal with the perception of limited and narrow vision, a meanness of perspective and a refusal to take chances. He should also be alert for a ruthless enemy attempting to regroup, who will throw everything at him before the contest is over. And not necessarily by Marquess of Queensberry rules.

Leaving aside the caretaker rules, Morrison may have as little as 16 days of power left. While there is mud on the floor, arrows in his quiver, public dollars in his purse, he will fight on. He may even win, or so handicap, or booby-trap, his successor, that the change of power changes nothing very much. It could be Morrison's greatest legacy that his defeat produced a government so timid and unadventurous, so committed by self-denying promises, so contaminated by the new traditions of government by discretion, that it was hardly worth the effort.