Federal election 2022: Do political stunts ever work in an election campaign?

But either way, a lot of them are on the way. Babies will be 'oohed' and 'aahed'. Schooners of beer will be raised, coincidentally with a camera present. Supermarkets will be visited.

It's already started. The Prime Minister recently washed a woman's hair - in public, as though it's just what a prime minister in a time of war and pandemic might do.

Everyone's done it: Paul Keating was on the front of Rolling Stone magazine in gangster shades; Julia ("I am obviously a republican") Gillard posed in Australian Women's Weekly knitting a kangaroo for a royal baby.

There is a slight difference between a stunt and a photo-opportunity. Churchill's V-sign was done as a publicity device but it would be harsh to call it a stunt. A stunt is much more contrived. It involves a politician doing something he or she wouldn't usually do in a planned, controlled setting, with cameras and often without pesky reporters being allowed to ask probing questions. It's an arranged situation for an image and a sound-bite but not for a meaningful interrogation.

In 2020, Alistair Coe, the then Liberal leader in the ACT, went to a bakery and produced a pie to demonstrate how the Liberals in government would "grow the ACT's pie". He literally froze a rates bill. Those were stunts, and a common view is that they were far too contrived. Mr Coe, by the way, chose not to comment.

There are some basic rules, according to Darrin Barnett who was Julia Gillard's press secretary. Top of the list: don't let the politician be photographed near an exit sign or The Reject Shop. Eating food in front of a camera is risky.

In the upcoming election, there will be a a mountain of effort into checking out locations so that Mr Albanese and Mr Morrison will look like normal, relaxed people in the most abnormal, unrelaxed situations.

Cameras wait for every tick and burp. When Julia Gillard tripped on a visit to India, the fall was the story, certainly for the section of the media which was gunning for her. Had it not been for the slip, the location - Mahatma Gandhi's memorial - would have been perfect to project a stateswoman engaging with world leaders as the desired image on the evening news back home.

Sometimes a setting is there to illustrate a specific policy - a laboratory for extra spending on science, say - and sometimes it's to convey a broader image. A hospital setting emphasises "empathy", according to Mr Barnett. Uniformed personnel underline an impression of being strong on national security. Expect more of those - the first from Labor, the second from the Liberals.

For the spin doctors and their Sherpas scoping out locations for stunts, there is a trade-off: getting the politician out among ordinary people is good ("Look, he's one of us"), but ordinary people can be refreshingly unpredictable (it's one of the joys of democracy) - remember the delicious moment when a house-holder shouted at Scott Morrison to get off his grass?

Photo-opportunities (or stunts, if you prefer) work best when they illustrate policy, according to Simon Banks who has been chief of staff or deputy chief of staff to three federal Labor Leaders. "It's trying to find a visual representation of the issue, so if it's about school funding, for example, you go to a school and have kids around you."

Mr Morrison's hair-dressing stunt was not related to policy, and Mr Banks thinks it backfired: "If you had been turning up in a hairdresser studio, saying, 'I've got some relief for hairdressers. They've had a tough time during COVID, so here's something I've done to make their life better', you could probably understand that."

But that wasn't the context, and so, Mr Banks thinks, it fell flat. Even conservative critics like Andrew Bolt called it "sad" - and all this on top of Mr Morrison playing the ukulele on television.

The best advice seems to be that stunts work for a politician if they have a purpose beyond just getting said politician's mug on the telly.

So: no aimless dancing or singing - or hair-washing. The Labor MP Julian Hill who is widely admired for his use of social media, particularly TikTok, is proud of a stunt where he used a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Peter Dutton.

Mr Dutton was minister for immigration when his department closed a centre in Dandenong near Melbourne, a centre much used by immigrants.

According to Mr Hill, Mr Dutton refused to come to Dandenong to discuss the closure, so the local MP and his colleagues had the cut-out made. "He refused to come and meet the community so, in protest, we made the cardboard cut-out and took it into the centre of Dandenong. It was a visual way of illustrating a point."

The message behind the cut-out was: he's closing something important in Dandenong; we're trying to save it, and that narrative played strongly on local media.

There is a lesson for ambitious politicians, according to the MP: "If you are doing stuff just to attract attention, you will probably look like a loser and a try-hard, and that's not a good look."

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