Politics with Michelle Grattan: historian Frank Bongiorno on dramatic shifts in how elections are fought and won

This election has been lacklustre, without the touch of excitement of some past campaigns. Through the decades, campaigning has changed dramatically, adopting new techniques and technologies. This time, we’ve seen politicians try to jump onto viral podcasts.

To discuss old and new campaigning, we’re joined by professor of history at the Australian National University, Frank Bongiorno.

Many decades ago, campaigns were marked by lots of public meetings, and with them came hecklers. Bongiorno says politicians

needed to be able to command an audience and to deal with interjectors in a big public meeting. Radio was really coming into its own.

Very famously – not in a political campaign and not as prime minister – but Menzies made a number of broadcasts that are still remembered. [That was] back in the earlier part of the 1940s, when he was out of government. The most famous of which is the “Forgotten People” broadcast in 1942.

Over time, campaigns have focused more on the leaders, in the style of the United States.

[It’s] another aspect perhaps of the Americanisation and presidentialisation of our political system, that focus on party leaders in that kind of way. The 1984 debate was between Bob Hawke as prime minister and Andrew Peacock. I think many people thought that Peacock actually got the better of Hawke on that occasion and that was really, in some ways, the assessment of the whole campaign.

…That does speak to the American influence in particular. Very famously of course there was the 1960 presidential debate between Nixon and Kennedy, that is such an important part of the collective memory of Kennedy’s success in that election in 1960.

Do debates still have any impact on campaigns? Bongiorno says “they have become something that I think a lot of people shun.”

They do seem rather neutral affairs, in which the pundits’ ideas about who won don’t seem to probably matter very much to most voters.

On the move from traditional media sources to an online campaign, Bongiorno says,

A lot of the campaign now is fought online. And I guess that trend began really as long ago as the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the parties would maintain campaign websites. It seems so long ago and so primitive, compared to where we are now.

And social media took off from about the middle of the first decade of this century. Facebook and YouTube came into their own in 2007. Twitter, now called X, in 2010… The use of memes really took off about 2019. And I think TikTok, which is often particularly used by younger people, from about 2022.

He says scare campaigns have become harder to report on or rebut, due to more targeted online campaigns and advertising.

Everything depends on your algorithm. The election campaign that I’m seeing when I go into my feed for X or for Facebook will be quite different to my next door neighbour’s, for instance, who could have a totally different sense of what’s happening in the campaign, what are the issues that matter, where the sort of balance of public opinion is.

On this year’s record start to pre-poll voting, Bongiorno says it makes timing more important than ever.

It means that whatever the parties are saying now, whatever candidates are saying and doing in the media over the next little while, is going to have no impact on anyone who’s already voted. So it can only be those who are still to vote.

It probably makes leaving the release of policy – and perhaps even costings as well – to the last minute a riskier venture, because if you do have goodies on offer, they’re going to miss anyone who has already voted.

It does mean that the parties need to be pretty careful in how they’re timing the release of particular aspects of their policy offerings.