Tony Nutt, Federal Director of the Liberal Party and the man responsible for running this year’s election campaign for the government, went into the National Press Club today with a job that nobody in their right minds would have envied.

Speaking to some of the most senior journalists in the country, he had 30 minutes (plus 30 minutes of questions) to defend the fact that the Coalition came perilously close to losing an election everyone had assumed it would win, or to put it in reverse, that Labor had come far too close to winning given it had been only one term since the hung parliament and the leadership chaos of the Rudd-Gillard period.

Expectations, therefore, were low. And still Nutt failed to meet them. He didn’t so much attempt to kick an own goal – with all the attendant risk that he might miss and therefore still come out on top – as very slowly and deliberately pick the ball up, carry it back down the field, and place it, obligingly, in the net, before standing next to it, pointing and shouting and waving, just in case the referee hadn’t spotted him yet. He is a cautious man, Tony Nutt, and he was leaving nothing to chance.

The trouble began with his attempted defence of the government’s election strategy. Astutely, he noted that “what Australians wanted was a plan”.

Well, precisely. Which is what pretty much every man and his dog has pointed out was one of the major problems with Malcolm Turnbull’s campaign: there was no economic plan. Nothing substantive to talk about. No effective signature policies, other than a tax cut for big companies, which the government then proceeded to slowly back away from over the course of eight weeks.

But he got more brazen: “In the absence of a credible plan they would have punished the government.”

In other words, exactly what they did do.

It was impossible not to wonder at this point if Nutt was playing his own complex joke on all of us, parading a set of ironies as though he were serious while inwardly giggling at our gullibility. This suspicion was ratcheted up when he began talking about Turnbull’s removal of Abbott as the “re-formation” of the government.

As the speech went on, it seemed Nutt was, in fact, sincere. Which is a pity, because things got worse.

Peak denial was reached somewhere towards the final third of Nutt’s speech, when he got onto Mediscare. Now, this is obviously fair ground. Labor was not being honest. Its campaign was murky at times, and strayed into questionable areas. It would have been simple for Nutt to refer to it, to represent it as despicable behaviour, to talk in particular about the text messages that were sent to voters as though they were from Medicare itself, and to segue out again.

Instead, in what you might, were you being unkind, interpret as a sign that he was not quite as convinced of the impregnability of his case as he pretended, Nutt spent some time justifying why this scare campaign of all scare campaigns was different.

This was no “garden-variety lie”, he said. This was a “cold-blooded lie”, slowing his speech so that even the deafest among us could make out every monstrous syllable.

Yup, that was his opening gambit on Mediscare – that lies were alright, just not this particular type of lie.

Could anyone come up with a distinction more likely to cement the cynicism of voters than the man running the government’s campaign for re-election arguing that some lies are better than others?

There is, to be fair, a case that Nutt, in implicitly confessing the ubiquity of “garden-variety lies” in campaigns, was being admirably honest. And he did have a good line about party secretaries not being the best people to deliver moral sermons. But that “admirable honesty” argument only holds if it is delivered without the lashings of moral self-righteousness that Nutt followed up with.

Labor’s lie, he said, was a “complete lie”, and therefore, presumably, not as bad as – what? Carefully calibrated blends of fact and fiction?

Labor’s scare campaign had, he said, targeted vulnerable people. As was swiftly pointed out to him, the Coalition’s campaign on asylum seekers had also targeted vulnerable people. So what, exactly, was the difference?

A little later, getting emotional, Nutt said that he knew a few 80-year-olds, and therefore knew the impact of Labor’s campaign on some of those people personally. Which perhaps explained some of his passion on the issue. Of course, it may also have explained why he failed to grasp just how damaging some of the things said about asylum seekers can be.

Yes, politicians were “consenting adults” in the political process, Nutt said, but “you had to draw a line somewhere”. Impressively, he remained straight-faced. Not long after, Nutt was asked about Coalition attempts to smear Labor’s candidate in Cowan as pro-terrorist, despite the fact she is an expert in counter-radicalisation and had previously been praised by the government MP campaigning against her.

By this stage it was clear that Nutt’s attempt to avoid talking about what the government and its campaign team could have done better by shifting focus onto Labor had backfired, with question after question focusing on his taxonomy of fair and unfair lies. Nobody could make head nor tails of it and neither, to his mounting frustration, could Nutt.

And this was the greatest irony: that the man charged with keeping the government’s campaign on-message, in a forum provided to him to defend that job, allowed himself to be dragged completely off-message through his own handiwork.

To give him his due, the most substantive point in all of this was in fact made by Nutt, earlier in his speech, when he said that negative attacks are always more effective when accompanied by facts.

Yes, exactly! That’s because voters are not the innocent dupes they are sometimes presented as. They will not buy a scare campaign unless there is at least a speck of truth to it. The Coalition’s argument that Labor was divided on asylum seekers got some traction because – guess what? There is genuine division in the ALP about the best approach to asylum seekers. The Coalition pushed its arguments far beyond what anyone reasonable might call “the truth”, but they had a foundation to build on.

Which was also the problem for the Coalition on Medicare, as even the prime minister himself conceded a few days after the poll. The government’s actions on health over the previous few years had made them vulnerable on the topic.

Complaining about negative campaigns run by the other side will never get you very far. It’s as pointless as a politician complaining about the press, and not just because things will ever be thus. Every time, you can bet everything you have that the problem began in your own backyard.

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