Anthony Albanese skirts disaster to take chocolates in first federal election debate

You may have scored it decisively one way or the other, but ask 10 people and you'll get a spread of answers, with some saying Scott Morrison looked the more assured and others preferring Anthony Albanese's obvious intent.

Measured against the degree of risk associated with failure, which is how the two sides tend to size up these dangerous but unavoidable encounters, it was a moral (and thus morale boosting) victory for Albanese.

The Labor leader re-energised his claim on the prime ministership, matching his opponent, who he referred to only as "Scott" and thus dealing himself back into this race.

Why? Because he is the challenger. Because he went in with more to prove. Because recent lapses gave him a narrower margin of error. And because in the binary logic of two-party politics, this was not an obvious loss, when it so easily could have been.

Especially when Albanese stumbled at one point regarding boat turn-backs.

Scott Morrison pounced, asking the Labor man why, if he now believes so fiercely in the turn-backs policy, he hadn't introduced it when last in office.

An untidy quarrel ensued as to which side had championed the heartless measure first. Morrison pressed, asserting copyright as opposition spokesperson on border policy in 2013. Albanese demurred.

But Morrison erred at times also, most glaringly in his all-too-familiar 'not my fault' explanation of what went wrong with Australia's diplomacy and intelligence in the Solomon Islands.

The tone for the rest of the forum was noticeably polite. The advantage of the people's format is that it gets real rather quickly, minimising the wooden speech-making, the finger-pointing and the dry-mouthed debating tension common in more structured formats.

Facing undecided voters, leaders cannot afford to waffle as they do in press conferences nor smart-arse their way around voters' questions as they routinely do in interviews.

Deftly moderated by Kieran Gilbert, the affair got down to brass tacks pretty fast with questions on housing unaffordability, nurses' pay and workforce shortages, scare campaigns in politics (a timely moderator's question from Gilbert) and electric vehicles, to name a few. A couple of these questions exhibited unfortunate racial undertones but both leaders ignored false assertions of foreigners (read Chinese) driving house prices beyond the reach of young Australians, and claiming not enough was being done for "Australian" nurses.

From their mercifully short opening statements, it was clear both men had come prepared - Morrison, perhaps too prepared as he paraded his Rain Man-style compendium of remembered figures no doubt hoping to contrast with Albanese's problem recalling the jobless number.

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For his part, Albanese presented a sharpened and more purposeful communications style - one truer to his natural persona than was obvious in week one.

His pitch for a better fairer, cleaner, more self-reliant Australia was more forward looking than the PM's dire framing of the election as a choice between a sound economy under the Coalition and uncertainty under Labor.

In the end, Albanese lived to fight on, even if for one perilous moment he had surfed the edge of confusion when recalling the traumatic chronology of Kevin Rudd's second premiership - the one in which Albanese himself was ever-so-briefly deputy prime minister.

After his tremulous start on day one of the campaign, the weight of risk was with him. Another slip up in another policy area seen as the favoured ground of the Coalition would have sent serious frighteners through Labor ranks - possibly terminal frighteners.