‘Building Australia’s future’ or getting it ‘back on track’?

It also hints at how things could go wrong by changing course. “You don’t want to change a builder halfway through [a construction project],” Hughes said.

At the same time, Labor will capitalise on voters’ trepidation about Dutton by painting him as risky. Labor thinks the Coalition’s slogan offers an opportunity because it alludes to taking the country backwards. “We’re the builders in Australia, the Labor Party,” Albanese said on Thursday. “They’re the wreckers, which is why the first word of their slogan is ‘back’. They just want to go backwards and take Australia backwards.”

Morrison’s former principal private secretary, Yaron Finkelstein, said it was a classic strategy. “You do not want to be an incumbent government in 2025. Voters are very grumpy … Labor is in a situation where they know that voters aren’t rushing to re-elect them, so they have to heighten the cost of the transaction,” he said. “You might be attracted to the idea of change, and Labor’s job is to try and create a sense that the cost will be too high.”

Labor needed to make sure Australians didn’t just relate Labor’s slogan to heated political topics of construction or housing, Hughes said, and Albanese is aware. “When we talk about building Australia’s future, it’s not just bricks and mortar,” the prime minister said last week. “It’s Medicare, it’s aged care, it’s childcare, it’s education.”

The other risk was it sounded too long term. “People generally want more immediate delivery on government promises,” Hughes said. “The cost-of-living [issue] has dragged on and on, and they want something right now to make their lives better.”

That’s where the Coalition will sweep in. Its simple, positive slogan – “let’s get Australia back on track” – is paired with a negative message that the country “can’t afford three more years of Labor”. Campaign strategists point to polling, including this masthead’s Resolve poll, which showed 54 per cent of voters had a negative outlook about the nation’s future in December.

Former Labor staffer and campaign operative Megan Lane said the Coalition had captured a sense of nostalgia. “We know that voters always look back fondly to times gone by. It’s both a zeitgeist moment on the economy, and that encouragement to look back fondly on a place you wish you were, that brings that slogan together.”

Finkelstein said the trick would be giving voters just enough hope to make the risk of changing government worth it. “Coalition strategists know they now need to start showing what would make voters’ lives just a bit better,” he said.

Coalition frontbenchers are also promising to get “back to basics” on the economy, but also on things like education. “We need a country where we’re getting back on track, back in the right direction, and that means getting back to basics,” shadow treasurer Angus Taylor said last week, pledging to use old tools to bring down inflation and cut red tape for businesses.

Carswell said the phrase allowed the opposition to highlight its strengths while narrowing its message. “The risk for Coalition is allowing itself to go down the far-right path too often, and giving in to anti-woke tenancies,” he said. “The concentration on back to basic needs to be two things: getting the economy back in shape, and national security back in shape.”

The flipside, Hughes said, was that back to basics felt like a return to square one. “You’re losing something you already have. Labor can easily go after them on that, because who would vote for a party that wants to go backwards?”

RedBridge pollster Tony Barry said the framing would give voters a choice at the ballot box, between a better past or brighter future. “Albanese is asking people to make a choice between building a better Australia or going back. Normally, that would be a pretty compelling message. But at the moment, that’s fraught with danger because people will say: ‘Things were better then, I had more money in my pocket, my mortgage payments were lower’,” he said.

Lane said Labor could make it work by selling its record on economic achievement while empathising with people’s struggles. “That’s where the building Australia’s future piece comes in. It’s not just building things: it’s a prosperous country where people can get ahead, not just get by,” Lane said.

But voters might not make that leap. That’s why Lane thinks Labor will have more in its pocket as election day approaches. “It’s largely accepted that positive slogans in campaigns are window dressing for the real campaign. But you have to launch your positive campaign before the negative,” she said.

Loading

“The Coalition’s negative slogan – that voters can’t afford Labor – goes to the same cost-of-living zeitgeist piece, and the slogans speak to each other in a quite neat way,” she said.

“But I think we are yet to see what Labor’s trade-off proposition for a Dutton-led Liberal National Party looks like.”

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.