Albanese and Dutton are doing ‘soft’ interviews: that can only mean one thing

The worst part of his job, says Opposition leader Peter Dutton, “the absolute worst part”, is that “your family, your wife, your children, your friends, your cousins with the same name as you”, are all “sucked into that vortex that you’ve created”.

“And they haven’t sought it.”

Dutton made the comments during a 60 Minutes interview, aired last Sunday, which underlined the exquisite tension between private and public that every political leader must navigate. This tension becomes a central part of the party machine’s political strategy leading into an election. The leader’s family must be paraded, interviews must be done with them and details must be shared from one’s private life and personal history.

But how much gets disclosed and who gets to decide? And do such interviews even matter any more, or are they an anachronism?

We don’t yet have an election date, but there is no surer sign of a looming poll than the rash (perhaps there is a better collective noun for it) of personal, soft-touch interviews given by the prime minister and Dutton in recent weeks. Such interviews always involve the leader’s partner, and often their children too, and the conventional wisdom is that they “soften” the man’s image.

Voters, it is calculated, like to know their prospective prime minister is a person as well as a politician, to know he has foibles and is subject to the very ordinary vulnerability that comes with loving another person deeply.

The fact that it falls to women to serve as the symbol of a leader’s basic humanity continues to be depressing, even when the women concerned are as intelligent, articulate and self-possessed as both leaders’ partners appear to be.

These interviews also serve as marvellous distractions – something I am perhaps playing into with this column. Instead of talking about the questionable viability of the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy, or the questionable economic management of the Albanese government, we are given nice stories to consume – of romantic first meetings, stoic loyalty and the pressures of political life on a family.

As the Duttons were doing 60 Minutes, excerpts of an Australian Women’s Weekly interview with Albanese and his partner Jodie Haydon were dropped to the media. The engaged couple talked about their planned wedding, posed for lovely photographs and talked about the strong female role models in their lives (the feature is for the International Women’s Day issue of the Weekly). Haydon talked about her patronages and her work, emphasising that she works full-time and has her own career.

One Labor backbencher grumbled (anonymously) to the Australian Financial Review that the timing for the interview drop – just as the Reserve Bank delivered its interest rate reprieve – was lousy.

“It sends mixed messages. It’s frustrating when the prime minister’s office says, ‘Stay focused on cost of living’, and he’s out doing these pieces talking about yourself [sic],” the source was reported as saying. (It’s always heartening to know there is a Labor backbencher prepared to grumble anonymously to the press about others distracting attention from the government’s message, thereby distracting attention from the government’s message).

The soft family-oriented interview may be a perennial of election politics – designed to reach the majority of voters who barely tune into regular political news – but the content of such interviews has evolved.

It used to be that prospective leaders needed a nuclear family, and the iron-clad projection of “family values” that such a unit denoted. But as families have changed, in ways often lamented by more conservative politicians, so have the families of our leaders.

Tony Abbott had a “love child” from a university relationship, who turned out not to be his son after all. Voters were not fussed. His wife, Margie Abbott, kept pretty separate from her husband’s political role. Voters were not fussed.

Perhaps a complicated romantic past is forgiven only in male leaders – Julia Gillard’s personal life became a nasty, misogynistic political weapon, and the ABC even commissioned a poor-taste “comedy” about the PM and her then-partner living at The Lodge, complete with a post-coital scene. It was just one of the countless gendered indignities thrown Gillard’s way during her prime ministership.

The blokes tend to be granted more slack – neither Dutton and Albanese has a cookie-cutter situation. Dutton has a decades-long marriage and three lovely children, but his eldest is from a previous relationship, and before that, he had a short first marriage which ended abruptly.

He explained this to Sky’s Peta Credlin in another personal interview in early February. “I’d been married when I was about 23 for about six months and picked up my then-wife from a night shift and she said, ‘I don’t love you any more’.”

That must have been awful, and yet nothing will soften Dutton’s image as a hard-man more than voters knowing he once got his heart horribly smashed.

Albanese is a divorced dad who also had his heart broken when his marriage ended. Now, he is in the unique position of building a relatively new relationship as prime minister. He became engaged to Haydon last Valentine’s Day, and this Valentine’s Day, the pair did a social media video marking the anniversary. They answered questions from cue cards about each other’s foibles.

It’s impossible to know what, if any, effect these “soft” interviews have on the electorate. This is especially true at this particular geopolitical moment, when voters are rewarding disruption and a projection of strength over politics-as-usual.

Does it matter whether voters like you, sympathise with you or know that you are human? Or does it only matter if they respect you?

Perhaps the family involvement that Dutton says is the “worst” part of his job will soon be an anachronism.

Jacqueline Maley is a senior writer and columnist.

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