Labor’s challenge is to build confidence in the future while the far simpler task for the opposition is to turn any bad vibes into a fully fledged vibe-lectionFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAs Aussie summers go, it hasn’t been a bad one. No major disasters. The weather’s been mostly good, notwithstanding those storms. The cricket was epic. The Demon is still alive in the tennis. Bad things may well be happening, but they are happening somewhere else.The national mood has shifted marginally but perceptibly, lending weight to my long-held theory that summer is the season for incumbents, when the punters switch off and appreciate life without the aggravations. Continue reading…Labor’s challenge is to build confidence in the future while the far simpler task for the opposition is to turn any bad vibes into a fully fledged vibe-lectionFollow our Australia news live blog for latest updatesGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastAs Aussie summers go, it hasn’t been a bad one. No major disasters. The weather’s been mostly good, notwithstanding those storms. The cricket was epic. The Demon is still alive in the tennis. Bad things may well be happening, but they are happening somewhere else.The national mood has shifted marginally but perceptibly, lending weight to my long-held theory that summer is the season for incumbents, when the punters switch off and appreciate life without the aggravations. Continue reading…
As Aussie summers go, it hasn’t been a bad one. No major disasters. The weather’s been mostly good, notwithstanding those storms. The cricket was epic. The Demon is still alive in the tennis. Bad things may well be happening, but they are happening somewhere else.
The national mood has shifted marginally but perceptibly, lending weight to my long-held theory that summer is the season for incumbents, when the punters switch off and appreciate life without the aggravations.
You can see it via a number of data points in the first Guardian Essential Report of 2025: approval for the PM has gone from 11 points negative to net zero; our right track/wrong track rating, while still in deficit, has improved by 10 points; and, as the below table shows, we are looking on 2025 far more positively than we looked back on 2024.
If you had to wrap these findings into a single proposition, it is that the vibe has improved over the break. “Vibe” may seem a woolly indicator, but it has a material impact on the way national politics plays out.
The so-called “vibe-cession” was seen as one of the key barriers to the Democrats failure to secure a second term: despite the US economy improving through 2024, the people didn’t feel it and now Donald Trump is dancing with the Village People.
Kyla Scanlon, a Gen Z economist, coined the phrase, defining it as “a period of temporary vibe decline where economic data such as trade and industrial activity are relatively OK-ish”. These bad vibes manifest their own economic reality, undermining confidence, limiting consumer spending, retarding business investment.
A vibe-cession takes hold for a number of reasons: some indicators mean more to people than others (price rises are innately unfair, but you feel like you earned your wage rise); progress is relative (if you are doing OK but other people are doing better, does it mean you’re actually going backwards?); and there are overt versus hidden impacts (moderating government spending may be good for inflation, but if your service or job is cut, it is materially bad for you).
Is Australia currently in a vibe-cession? The economic figures – as the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, is quick to point out – are more than OK-ish.
Inflation has gone from 6% when Labor took power three years ago back to the Reserve Bank’s target 2% to 3% range; wages are up in real terms after declining under the Coalition, unemployment remains low, the government has been delivering budget surpluses, the economy is growing.
Interest rates remain an issue that inordinately punishes one group (mortgagees) – nowhere near the 18% of Hawke-Keating times, but also not near where it was during the pandemic when money was basically free.
And then there is the all-consuming cost of living, which voters tell us they currently see as the primary indicator of a strong economy – particularly energy bills, supermarket costs and housing, each a consequence of broader market failures.
In this context it’s hardly surprising that, notwithstanding the summer vibes, people have a neutral or negative view of the state of the Australian economy for the year ahead.
The risk for government in making its case in a time of negative vibes is (a) it is seen as being out of touch and lacking empathy if it invalidates the prevailing wisdom, and (b) if it is actually honest about the limits of its powers in a global economy, this can be seen as ducking responsibility.
The far simpler challenge for the opposition is to reassure people their negative feels are real and expand the vibe-cession into a fully fledged vibe-lection.
A basic trick to fuel the grievance is to convince them that others are enjoying privileges they are not. This was skilfully deployed during the voice referendum to invalidate Indigenous disadvantage and repackage consultation as special treatment.
Short odds Peter Dutton will make a song and dance about flags and welcomes to country on Australia Day. He will no doubt leverage this to cleave off other minorities, with the DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) agenda in the crosshairs.
Second challenge: create a rose-coloured view of the past that you promise people you will return to; a world when interest rates were lower, the pandemic and Ukraine war had not created a global inflation surge and governments were rewarded for pump-priming the economy with handouts.
Third: build a false perception of what government can actually do and then nail the incumbents for its failure to do so. The most obvious trick here is the amorphous “cut spending” mantra the opposition is pushing, without identifying which jobs and services it wants the government to cut.
For Labor, the response is not to rest its case on raw economic data; but to bring its first term to life in a way that builds confidence in the future and highlights the risk of disruption from changing course now.
Here it has rich fodder: not just the Liberals’ traditional allegiance to big business, but Dutton’s actual record of voting against improvements to workers’ rights and his pledge to wind them back further if he is successful.
Labor has a swathe of good policy to add to the vibe. Renewables powering through 40% on their way to net zero; material changes in aged care and childcare to improve quality and reduce costs; a big bold plan for manufacturing; rebuilding the trade relationship with China.
The big challenge is sharing these good vibes in the fragmented, polluted information environment in which the election will be played out – one that rewards anger and negativity and pays little credence to truth.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s cynical offering to Trump that he will dispense with factcheckers on his platform while reinstating political content will only make any rational discussion harder. A final question in this week’s report shows that Australians do not want this level of factual liberation.
It’s worth noting here that if the opposition had not poleaxed Labor’s important misinformation laws late last year, this would be something Zuck and Musk and the other tech overlords would now be compelled to take responsibility for in Australia.
Instead, we risk making Australia a colony of their libertarian wonderland, where truth is relative and everything – including the economy and the outcome of the upcoming election – is at the mercy of their algorithms of division and anger. That’s the real vibe-killer.
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Peter Lewis is an executive director of Essential, a progressive strategic communications and research company
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