Here's a question: according to Labor, what caused the housing crisis?
I made a critical error for my mental health yesterday. I watched the National Press Club debate between Max Chandler-Mather and Michael Sukkar. And it was fine. The press gallery asked a bunch of inane and unhelpful questions. Chandler-Mather repeated all the lines. Sukkar repeated his.
And for Sukkar, his lines were all about immigration. Redirecting the debate about housing towards a debate about immigration has clearly been the Coalition's strategy since Labor came into government. And they have been, along with their conservative media machine, relentless.
Just look at what happens to this graph in 2022:
Weak ideas make for weak messaging
One of the first things I learned about messaging strategy was that you always need to have an origin story for the problem you are talking about. Solutions logically follow from problems, so if you can convince people that your diagnosis of the problem is correct, you can generally convince them to support your solution.
The Greens and The Liberals both have an origin story for the housing crisis. Both of them are internally consistent and both of them point towards the solutions they would like to see implemented.
For the Greens, the housing crisis has been caused by big banks and property investors who have turned a necessary human right into a market commodity. Investors are using homes as a way to extract profit for themselves, crowding out first home buyers and pushing property prices through the roof.
For Sukkar the housing crisis is caused by "record immigration".
For Labor, the housing crisis is caused by... (the greens voting against the CPRS in 2009!!??)
Not having an origin story for your problem isn't just a problem because it makes your story weak. It's a problem because it creates a huge opportunity for your opposition to reframe your issue.
Labor never told a compelling origin story for the housing crisis, so the Liberals filled in the gaps. They told a story about record immigration causing housing prices to spiral which offers a tantalisingly easy solution.
So now housing, an issue that Labor really should have a clear advantage over the Liberals on, is now a conversation about immigration. And because Labor has no ideas of their own, they have played along:
“You can’t talk tough on immigration and then vote against putting a limit on the number of people that come to this country every year,” he [Education Minister Jason Clair] said on Monday.
“Over the course of the next few months, Peter Dutton is going to wander around the country pretending to be a tough guy on immigration. But the truth is he’s a fraud, and this is the week that Australians will come to know that they can’t trust anything that Peter Dutton says.”
They're playing on Dutton's court now. Strap yourselves in for one hell of a xenophobic election campaign.
