Pressure, it's a curious thing

The art of playing politics and tennis is intrinsically linked to handling pressure. Yet, there is something especially public about the pressure that politicians and tennis players face. On this day of Chinese New Year, we are reminded of the Oriental adage, “the higher the monkey climbs the tree, the more visible its behind.” Be it in a House of Parliament or one of the world’s grand tennis stages, there is no place to hide for the elected representative or the sponsored player.  

Pressure can be multi-faceted or revolve around a singular moment or event. Similarly, the absence of pressure can radically alter events. Look at Australia’s Alex de Minaur, a forever frustrated fourth round and quarter-finalist at Grand Slam events. For the moment, he cannot manage the pressure of having to conquer the likes of Alcaraz, Sinner and Djokovic. Release that pressure and de Minaur impressively wins last week’s Rotterdam Open.

Victoria Mboko, defeated by Sabalenka in the Australian Open, and free from pressure, upset Australian champion Rybakina in last week’s WTA Doha event. Think of the Winter Olympics: Australia sends a team of 53 athletes with some hopes of success and has won three gold medals. Traditional Winter Olympics powerhouses Canada and China have teams comprising close to 500 athletes.  Canada has just won its third gold medal. China has won none.

Pressure can arise without notice for politicians. An ill-considered meme and the brutal conducting of duties by ICE officers suddenly have President Trump reeling. For many Western politicians the inexorable pressure of rising prices, ageing populations, shrinking tax bases, and controversy about immigration and energy policies is relentless. England’s Prime Minister had these matters to worry about, but then along came another tranche of Epstein files, this time implicating Keir Starmer’s hand-picked ambassador to the United States in treachery and association with the worst of sorts.  Suddenly the political and personal pressure Starmer faces are colossal and, many believe, insuperable.

In the decades since the end of World War 2, Australia’s major conservative political parties, the Liberal-National coalition has rarely faced the pressure it faces today. In government for 51 of the last 81 years, it now languishes in the opinion polls, barely registering more support than the further right One Nation Party- think Nigel Farage’s Reform party in England.

The major road connecting Australia’s largest cities of Sydney and Melbourne is the Hume Highway, named after colonial explorer Hamilton Hume.  People are turning off the Liberal-National coalition in the same way that drivers must turn off the Hume Highway to reach Australia’s purpose-built capital of Canberra. At last year’s Federal election, the Coalition suffered its worst electoral defeat ever. Never have the Coalition had so few members travelling along the Hume Highway to parliamentary offices.

Last week, the Liberal Party chose, after weeks of speculation, to change its Federal leadership. Its new leader is Angus Taylor.

He represents the Federal electorate of Hume, based around the august colonial town of Goulburn (see map above). Never in Australia’s parliamentary history has a Prime Minister or an Opposition Leader had a Deputy whose surname is that of the leader’s electorate, but there is a first for everything. Taylor’s newly elected Deputy is Senator Jane Hume.

The party faithful desperately hope that Taylor and Hume can chart a return to popularity. To join the Hume highway or not is the question. Will the switch to the double Hume team bring more voters back to the coalition or will voters continue to bypass the party, being turned off by the party’s offering and exiting it permanently?

They have their work before them. Last weekend I drove from central Melbourne to the South Australian capital of Adelaide, a distance of 725 kilometres. London to Edinburgh is only 650 kilometres. From central Melbourne, through its inner and outer Western suburbs, around large regional townships and across the border, I only drove through the top corner of one Victorian rural Liberal electorate and fully across one South Australian country Liberal electorate. Not one urban foothold! The first challenge for the party is the unlikely prospect of retaining the southern NSW seat of Farrer, recently vacated by defeated Liberal leader, Sussan Ley. Like so many leaders seeking to cross an abyss, Taylor faces the pressure of not losing the seat, or not losing it by too great a margin. Ah, the pressure of managing expectations!

Conversely, Australia’s Labor Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese might consider himself the least pressured Prime Minister in recent history. Personally and politically buffered by a thumping majority and relishing in the torment of a feuding Opposition, Albanese could be forgiven for thinking the political Gods have delivered him a benign, if not triumphant hand.

How quickly, however, the barometer can swing! A recent rise in interest rates and growing calls for tax reform and spending cuts indicates that the pressure of the economic headwinds is growing.

Australia’s national debt has surged past one trillion dollars and there still does not seem to be ever enough money for our hospitals, schools and universities. Cost of living pressures, especially energy costs, remain just that. Real wages have begun to fall for the first time in two years. Despite his wish that Australians “turn down the temperature” of social division, it seems far too many do not feel pressured to answer his call. The recent visit to Australia of Israel’s Prime Minister, Isaac Herzog, suggested that social divisions and antisemitic prejudices have not diminished since the Bondi shootings. Significant protests opposing Herzog’s visit took place, some in contravention of court orders. A former Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, used a Sydney city balcony to chant “globalise the Intifada”, in an unedifying sign of how fractured Australian society has become.

Physicists often observe that without pressure there is inertia. In a tennis match the pressure to have your opponent commit a greater number of errors is relentless. At least tennis players know what awaits them in a match, although the social media announcement of Australian Destanee Aiava’s retirement suggested an unnaturally pressured world lurks beneath the game’s surface.

In politics, the iron laws apply even more ruthlessly- the inescapable arithmetic of percentages of support and preferences and seats won, the calamitous effect of internal party divisions, the ephemeral nature of personal popularity and the corrosive effect of time in office upon broad appeal.

The Hume duo must remember that even when serving at 0-6, 0-6, 2-5 you are still in the game. Every point won from an impossible position has the effect of unsettling the seemingly unconquerable. In politics, the utterly unpredictable effect of unknown circumstances and events exerts an eerie pressure on even the most assured and comfortable. As it does for all of us.