ANDREW CARSWELL: Albanese’s great election hope — a fall guy in the form of Queensland Premier Steven Miles

Anthony Albanese thinks Queensland Premier Steven Miles is his fall guy.

He’s the burly, thick-necked Queenslander who Albanese believes will take an electoral beating on his behalf, shielding him from the full blast of anger from Queenslanders who are preparing to take to Labor with baseball bats.

Steven Miles, the somehow Premier, who through an unfortunate fate of electoral timing, will cast himself at the feet of the great unwashed on October 18 and beg for mercy, a full six months before Albanese similarly seeks such clemency from the masses.

Six months is an eon in the political sphere. Time for wounds to heal and for the anger to work its way through the sieve. For the bats to go back in the cupboard.

The nervous strategists within Camp Albanese are right to think that way, to hope like that. Because convention is on their side; protocol says he who ventures to the polls first — when the public is in one of its awful, irritable moods — cops the biggest whack.

The bloodlust would have been quenched. Those that follow can breathe easier.

But Queenslanders have never met a political convention they didn’t want to buck. Nor a second-rate political leader they didn’t want to send into early retirement.

Perspective is important. It stretches well beyond a run-of-the-mill State election that seems to have a natural end anyway. It sits outside the dull monotony of local issues and small town politics. There are far bigger gripes that annoy and frustrate Queenslanders.

Anthony Albanese. Rising costs of living. Crippling interest rates. A high cost, low reliability energy system. Anthony Albanese. The list could go on.

So when Queenslanders swing that baseball bat at Miles and his nervous smile — as the polls suggest they will — it will merely be the warm up act. Just to loosen up the shoulders a tad. Get the blood flowing.

The big target is still to come.

To assume Queenslanders will be satiated with mauling an already listless Premier is to misunderstand the depth of exasperation at Labor as a brand, the height of deception voters feel at a mishandled cost-of-living crisis, and the breadth of the rejection of Anthony Albanese as Prime Minister.

The latter isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, but it’s now set in stone.

Albanese has always been on the back foot in Queensland. While other States rejected the nine-year Coalition government in 2022, Queenslanders chose to give a fetid Labor opposition a sharp rebuke, cutting its seats from six to five. Neither conservative enough for the right nor progressive enough for left, Labor lost ground. Albanese pre-judged as not much chop.

Only 16 per cent of the State’s seats are coloured red.

That was before the Voice, before record inflation, before 10 interest rate rises, before annual electricity bill increases of 20 per cent, before families took calculators on their weekly grocery shop.

Before the economy plunged into a per capita recession. Before immigration bungles and the rise of migrant crime. Before the limp response to terrorism and the public shaming of a friend and ally. Before the disintegration of racial harmony.

Before they really saw who Albanese was. Or, more pertinently, who he wasn’t.

Once Queenslanders send Premier Miles to the slaughterhouse, will living costs suddenly decrease? Will energy prices track lower?

Will vulnerable Australians stop skipping meals to make ends meet? Will Australian homeowners no longer be in mortgage stress? Will the housing and rental crisis crushing young Australians instantly dissipate?

The answer isn’t just no.

It is more likely that these scenarios will be worse in six months time, not merely the same. The economic and budgetary pain that ordinary households are currently experiencing is not about to be cleansed any time soon. The pain continues to compound and relief is a distant star.

People care not about the wonders of a government budget surplus when their own household budget is in the red. In fact, it only aggravates.

Even if inflation stabilises within the Reserve Bank’s preferred band of 2-3 per cent. Prices are still rising, just at a slower rate, and off an ever-increasing base.

Even if interest rates ease in the new year, vulnerable households will still be sitting on the edge of a precipice, having been stretched too far for too long. The damage has been done. A little 0.25 percent of extra breathing room is hardly going to lead to mass solvency.

Voters are adept at apportioning blame and drawing a clear delineation of duty and responsibility. They know the score. Because they keep it.

Under a Miles Government, Queenslanders have been mugged by rampant youth crime and beset with health and public service failures.

Not Albanese’s fault.

Under an Albanese Government, living standards have been going backwards for two years, with Australia suffering the biggest income decline in the developed world.

Not Miles’ fault.

Batter up.

Andrew Carswell is a former strategist for the Morrison government