THIS COULD HAVE BEEN AN EMAIL. IT WASN’t.
Last Wednesday, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced a rare national address.
A full, blanket coverage, every-channel, 7pm moment.
Which - if you’ve lived through the last few years (and, like me, tuned in at 8am daily to Gladys Berejiklian’s Covid pressers) - comes with some very specific emotional baggage.
Something is wrong. Brace.
And for the next eight hours, that’s exactly what we did.
Group chats lit up. Theories escalated. Travel bans? Troop deployments? Work from home mandates? Lockdowns?
The temperature rose - fast. And personally? Campaign plans and content shoots were paused because we didn’t know what tomorrow looked like.
Then at 7pm, we got precisely three minutes and twenty-seven seconds of:
“drive less”
“take public transport”
“think of others”
“we’ll be okay”
And….
“enjoy your Easter”
The internet’s verdict was immediate: this could have been an email.
But that read misses the point. Because Albo’s address was more about what he didn’t say than what he did.
The message felt thin.
But the moment felt heavy.
The address wasn’t about information - it was about conditioning - and that disconnect is the signal.
That's the red flag, guys 🚩
Governments don’t interrupt the nation for admin updates.
🚩 They do it to shift behaviour.
🚩 To set a tone.
🚩 To elevate the baseline of what feels “normal”.
So what we got was a soft launch of constraint.
Not mandates (yet)
Not policy (yet)
Just the introduction of an idea: things might get tighter, slower and harder - so start adjusting.
Which is also why so many people felt dissatisfied.
We were looking for reassurance, some leadership and direction. A sense that someone is driving the car and knows where we're going (not just asking you to use less fuel)
Instead, what we got was the political communication tightrope in action:
Say enough to prepare people (without saying enough to panic them)
Acknowledge the crisis (without fully defining it)
Avoid committing to anything (that you might not be able to control)
So yeah sure - it might have felt like a company-wide email, but it was actually something far more deliberate: it was a rehearsal.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
Subscribers get every edition first. The archive opens later.