There are two leaders standing before the voters of Australia, seeking the position of Prime Minister.
(Almost) each day of the campaign they hold a press conference.
Journalists, whose news outlets have heavily invested in them being present, attempt to hold the leaders to account, and raise the issues they are covering for their audiences.
It is not an orderly process.
I can only speak to the experience of being on the Prime Minister’s election bus so far, where a long preamble and speeches from other politicians and candidates pave the run-up before the floor is opened to reporters.
On a number of occasions this week, those covering the campaign have been sandwiched into tiny spaces like the fruit and vegetable aisle of a local grocery story or a barrel-lined room in a vineyard.
Pressed together in these impossibly small areas surrounded by lettuces or oak barrels, reporters attempt to be heard and call out to get the leader’s attention.
The questions are varied, taking in economics, policy decisions, legislation, hung parliament negotiations and the public mood.
Everyone is under the live television spotlight, keen to get their question right, and try to craft an inquiry that elicits an actual answer.
Questioners are selected and the answer given may be directly relevant or stray vastly from what has been asked.
The Prime Minister, match fit from years of speaking over the opposition interventions in Question Time, barrels through most attempts by the media representatives to direct the leader back to the specific question asked.
At one point when pulled up on an answer that didn’t appear to address the question this week the Prime Minister laid it out.
“You get to ask the questions, you don’t get to say what the answer is.”
The Opposition Leader hasn’t got the same finely tuned approach to pushing through.
When he was pulled up on the six-point plan from his National Disability Insurance Scheme policy, and could not provide the detail, he too was put under pressure.
Later he lamented the “gotcha questions” harking back to the first day of the campaign when he was caught unable to provide the cash rate or unemployment rate.
If the election campaign is essentially one long unruly job interview, it’s hard going for the real interviewers, the Australian people.
Barely any of them would get close enough to the carefully managed and curated events, stacked with party members, to actually ask a question themselves.
There are not enough straight answers for voters, and the questions that have been partly or completely ignored during the campaign are piling up.
If you have a question you want to ask Anthony Albanese or Scott Morrison, drop me a line [email protected]
