If you walk into a business that retails new cars, find a salesperson and have a discussion on what your specific wants and needs they will always be able to recommend something from the range of vehicles in the dealership. If you’re talking to a Toyota salesperson, they are most unlikely to suggest that a Hyundai or a Subaru would provide a closer fit with the requirements that you set out. Of course, the Toyota wouldn’t have everything you described as needing or wanting, to which the salesperson would go into great detail on why you didn’t need the missing feature or lead you towards a similar ‘better’ feature in the range of vehicles they sold. 

It’s the process of making a sale. You can also observe similar practices if you were to wander into an Apple or Samsung store or one of the stores run by the big telcos. The Telcos are even more reliant on making a sale as the products they offer are almost identical. They all offer NBN services, mobile phones and fixed wireless internet. In the case of the NBN, they all resell the same service but claim a point of difference with the price, the quality of their call centre or the inclusion of ‘added extras’.

Everyone does it, Woolworths and Coles have access to the manufacturers of packaged goods, commercial arrangements with primary producers and contracts with logistics companies to get the goods from the paddock or warehouse to the plate as fast as possible with only minimal damage to the quality at worst. Woolworths prices are kept ‘down’ using similar practices to Coles who in turn sell equally ‘fresh’ food as Woolworths. The proof is Aldi who are in the same business, but rarely advertise the freshness or cost of items bought from their shops – but promote their ‘difference’.

It’s not hard to sell something. As we’ve seen business does it relentlessly and well. Bank staff ‘sell’ home loans, electronics manufacturers convince people to throw out perfectly good equipment because it doesn’t have the latest gadget with a multi-letter acronym that ‘guarantees’ a better experience. There are people employed to convince you to change your brand of shampoo as your current one doesn’t leave enough shine or bounce in your hair! So what is Prime Minister Albanese’s excuse for not selling his governments achievements? 

In the chaotic last week of Parliament for the year, Albanese’s government managed to cement a deal with the states to ensure the NDIS is used for supporting those that need the support, which meant the states have to tip some additional money into the pot. A report on the NDIS was released that identified where considerable waste (hint: a lot of it is to do with the process the previous Government put in to manage the scheme). Albanese steered the original NDIS legislation through the Parliament when a minister in Gillard’s minority government. He should be shouting from the rooftops that they have fixed the problems with the system imposed by the government where the current Opposition Leader was a key Minister.

In the same week, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek landed a deal to increase the flows in the Murray-Darling river system that landowners, the Greens and the government could agree to. No, the deal isn’t perfect and each party to the agreement would be able to suggest ‘improvements’ but some improvement is better than the status quo. There was also movement on the long overdue ‘same work, same pay’ legislation.

So, a bit of competence all round eh? Maybe in an alternative universe there was some acknowledgement of a job well done that actually supports those who need some assistance to live in our society or comment on how the additional flows will assist in returning the environment in and around the Murray-Darling basin to something remotely resembling health. It certainly didn’t happen in this universe. Most of the media were reporting Coalition concerns that some refugees that the government had been forced to released from detention after they had completed sentences for criminal offences had been re-arrested, using the Coalitions talking point that it was all a government foul up. Katherine Murphy in The Guardian was one of the few exceptions.

The ‘refugee crisis’ always was a beat up by the Coalition. Apart from the tradition suggesting that once you have done the time associated with the crime, you are rehabilitated and free to go, the policy around permanent detention was written and implemented predominately by the Coalition when in government. In short, the Coalition was arguing that its own lawmaking process was incompetent or badly managed. Albanese folded and brought in rushed and ill-considered legislation before he even tried to make the argument. Maybe the Home Affairs and Immigration Ministers should have been out prior to the Court’s decision suggesting there was a chance that the refugees would have to be released and if that occurred, it was the Coalition’s poor legislation drafting that would cause it. Alternately having the discussion around the ethics and morals of keeping one group of people in detention indefinitely while others who had behaved in a similar way were free of restrictions would have made Australia a slightly fairer and more equal society could have been worth it. 

The problem with generally competent governments is the media loses influence if it’s not seen to be driving the agenda and hammering home what you should believe. While some will have a genuine concern with some of the actions of a government, a lot of the output is aligned to the media owner’s individual political preferences. Nature abhors a vacuum and tries to fill it, so if you don’t get your positive message out to fill the available space, others will have no hesitation in filling the space with negativity.

In the 1970s, both the Queensland Government and Brisbane City Council had regular five-minute TV broadcasts that gave their version on the benefits of the programs they were implementing. Rightly or wrongly, both the Premier (Joh Bjelke-Petersen) and Lord Mayor (Clem Jones) stayed in their roles through multiple elections. They both knew that if they drove the agenda it was harder for opposition to catch up, regardless of the issue of the day.

For the Government to succeed, they have to suck the venom out of the Opposition’s opposition to everything. A comprehensive demolition across the Dispatch Box won’t do it as most of us might see the 30 second version on the TV and decide it’s just politicians being politicians again. The media won’t help the government as there is a commercial imperative to sell the conflict. The government telling us to wait a little while until the release something clearly doesn’t work as it allows the vacuum to be filled by others to set the agendas in a competition where coming from behind is always difficult.

If the government doesn’t change how it markets itself – Dutton will be Prime Minister in 2025 and a textbook case of how to win government in one term.