I’m a bulldozer. I’ll change. You know who I am. I’m the devil you know. Who do you want me to be now? I’ll be someone else. Coz I am who I am. Please please vote for me.

Julian Hill, MP, paraphrasing Scott Morrison

With one week to go in the polls, it’s beginning to look more and more certain that there will be a Labor government elected on the evening of May 21st. If this week was good, but not great, for Albanese, it was an absolute shocker for the Prime Minister.

If we’ve learnt anything, it’s that the myth of Scott Morrison being an expert campaigner (after he was attributed the win in 2019, wrongly in my view – the Liberal campaign as a whole was very good and attacked Shorten effectively and that comes from the campaign HQ rather than the lead candidates) is slowly being eroded.

A lot can change in a final week of a campaign, although with already over 1 million votes cast via pre-polling and postal, anything other than a perfect week from Scott Morrison will surely see Anthony Albanese elected as the next PM.

Sunday night will see the Liberal Party ‘launch’ their campaign in Brisbane. These launches are a highly orchestrated affairs and will see Morrison be able to deliver his message to a captive audience on home turf. He couldn’t hope for a better start to the final week.

It will, however, be the next two days that set the tone and on the campaign trail, with a media that appears to be now looking for Morrison’s blood after starting the campaign hunting Albanese, anything can happen. With a hostile media and a developing flood situation in South-East Queensland (the launch is being held in Brisbane) there is a very real prospect of a stumbling start to the final five days. The PM cannot afford this.

Albanese, on the other hand, just needs to play a straight bat. The polls are consistently showing an ALP lead of the two party preferred vote somewhere around 54 to 55% to 45 to 46% for the LNP. In 2019, the polls significantly swung towards the LNP during the campaign, this has not happened at all in 2022 and in some polls have blown out to 57% to 43%. Such a result on election day would be a landslide for the ALP and likely set them up for a second term on the strength of numbers in the House alone. However, take that figure with a grain of salt, it was an outlier result.

What has become apparent during this campaign is that the concept of ‘gotcha’ journalism – whereby a journalist asks a question deliberately to catch the responder off-guard and appear out of their depth – has largely failed in the eyes of the electorate. Much has made of Albanese not recalling the current unemployment rate and cash rate in week one, but it barely registered in the polls. By the time a second ‘gotcha’ about the NDIS was attempted (and the ‘made-for-tv’ back and forth between Albanese and the press pack that resulted), the electorate appeared to have tuned out – the polls for the ALP were ultimately stronger that week.

In a similar vein, the public appears to have tuned out of Morrison’s messaging. At the start of the campaign, he was commenting on his strength and character saying ‘You know who I am’, and then bizarrely late into week five claiming ‘I can change’ despite the obvious irony of both not being able to be true. But it speaks to a campaign running out of steam and ideas.

And in fairness, if there is one thing this campaign has strongly lacked from the LNP is actual ideas. Their campaign has been built around attacking Albanese as an ‘unknown’ whilst simultaneously trying to link him to the 2019 campaign promises, and trying to play up Morrison’s ‘leadership’. But what has been lost in all there is any serious discussion around policy. There have been policy launches, but it doesn’t seem that the electorate has any idea what they are. The media has a part to play here, in focussing on the personal attacks on Albanese and the comments on Morrison about himself, but if the campaign from the LNP was focussed on policy from the start, the media would play along.

The risk in any lengthy campaign is that the electorate tires by the end of it and tunes out. Morrison better hope this is not the case as we enter week six. To paraphrase Murray Walker, anything can happen in the final week of a campaign, and it usually does.