“If you make a mistake or you’re ambushed by the other person,things can go very badly wrong,” Hawker says. “The general advice is if you’ve got to have a debate when you’re leading the polls,have them as far out as you can from the election day.”
Meanwhile,Perrottet,who claimed underdog status at his campaign launch on Sunday,“hasn’t done a bad job of getting back into the game ... he’s got everything to gain in the last couple of weeks”,Hawker says.
The Herald and Nine debate will be moderated by Nine News’ Peter Overton,and the leaders will be grilled by Nine reporter Liz Daniels,the Herald’s Alexandra Smith,and Chris O’Keefe from 2GB.Credit:James Brickwood
The Labor campaigner has seen a few hairy debates in his time. He was in that (very hot) room in Penrith for Daley’s debacle in 2019,and immediately knew they were in damage-control mode.
“That debate did leave a bad impression on the public.[It] became a huge issue as far as the media were concerned ... the momentum that had been building up around various issues just faded into the background,” Hawker says.
Given all the dirt thrown at Daley,it’s difficult to say how much the debate itself factored into the election result. Berejiklian also faltered,and needed to correct the record on an answer shortly after the debate. But for undecided voters,Daley’s stumbles may have played into the perception that he wasn’t quite ready for the job.
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It wouldn’t have mattered so much if it happened at the start of the campaign,Hawker says. “It was the timing that was the issue.”
In 1997,Hawker was on the other side of the equation,having orchestrated a debate masterstroke for South Australian opposition leader Mike Rann. Labor dropped a leaked South Australian Treasury document canvassing a state-based GST to Nine,which was hosting the debate in the campaign’s final week.
According to Rann,the leak destabilised the debate and the Liberal campaign. The John Olsen-led Liberals,having come to power in a landslide just four years earlier,lost their majority and were forced into minority government.
While debates always centre on policy – with occasional questions of character thrown in – leaders don’t use them to make announcements,and they tend to shy away from complicated detail. The subsequent coverage of debates tends to focus on their manner,style and tactics – or mistakes.
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“You hear about how they missed the mark or they had a gaffe,” says Scott Morrison’s former media director Andrew Carswell,who now runs Canberra-based lobby shop Headline Advisory. “Not many people watch debates,but they read about it for the next couple of days.”
Morrison put in an impressive performance against Anthony Albanese during their first televised debate last year,a Sky News people’s forum,but it was his clumsy response to the mother of an autistic child that generated the headlines.
By contrast,Carswell says winning a debate doesn’t necessarily move the dial. But it peps up the leader and the team amid a tough,relentless campaign. “It makes you hit the ground running the next morning,” he says. “It fuels the tank.”
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