A lot needs to go right for Morrison to struggle to 75 seats — plus Katter, or 76 seats, and a lot of polling has to be wrong, but we’ve been here before in 2019.
Bernard Keane, Crikey.com
As Albo dusts himself off after a stirring National Press Club address, I thought it might be a good time to look at the first half of the last week of this seemingly endless campaign.
I wrote on Saturday that Morrison would need an almost flawless start to this week for him to be in with a shot – and hasn’t he delivered! His address to the party faithful in Brisbane on Sunday was virtually leaked ahead of time with the major metro papers leading with the Coalition’s downsizing policy for homeowners over the age of 55.
In essence, this was hardly a new policy rather than an extension of an existing policy already available to those over 65, but one detail was missing from the leaks: the new policy of opening up superannuation for first home buyers to access to use as a deposit.
The media, having not had this detail before hand, was transfixed and Morrison’s aim of winning the week began to play out perfectly. Despite almost universal condemnation from the superannuation industry, Labor, social housing lobbyists, and even old tweets from members of his own cabinet, Morrison rode the wave of positive news for a good two days.
Let’s be frank, this policy is less about winning over the 20- & 30-somethings who might access this – but more the 55 year old plus parents, as demonstrated by his visiting of retirement (not aged care) villages in the immediate days following.
The irony was probably best illustrated by Morrison only managing to get a real estate agent (seriously!?!) to stand beside him and applaud the policy at a Monday morning presser. No guesses needed why this guy was delighted with the policy…
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Final week polls are coming thick and fast with the inevitable drag towards the Coalition and away from Labor. Resolve was first out of the block with a 2PP firming towards the Government of 51%-49% to the ALP, in from 53.5% a fortnight ago.
This now puts the result within the MOE (margin of error) which is precisely where they were at this point in 2019.
The danger here for Labor is obvious. If they are unable to swing momentum back towards itself in the final three days, Morrison is in with a real chance, albeit with a hung parliament the most likely result.
The media blackout that comes into effect tonight may help Labor. As terribly annoying as the Liberal budget bucket ads are, they are incredibly effective and as their rotation has increased on the nightly primetime slots, so has the Coalition’s poll forturnes. Far be it for me to draw a conclusion from such correlation, but the trend will be certainly worrying Labor strategists at this late stage of the campaign.
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Which brings us to the NPC and Albanese’s address. As far as election NPC addresses go, this was fairly strong. He landed some good visuals for the nightly news when talking about public service cuts, linking them to the robodebt scandal and the deaths of ‘people’, as he reminded the audience they were.
Frankly, Albanese needs to be untouchable from here. Tomorrow’s costings release need to show no screamers for the Government to latch onto to reiterate their mantra of economic management, and Albanese needs to deal with questions about these better than he did in Perth yesterday.
There is a new avenue to attack Morrison, however. At a press conference earlier today, when questioned about his new ‘change’ mantra, he was asked if he would do anything different in regards to the pandemic. His response was a firm ‘no’.
This opens himself up to attack for ‘learning nothing’ and that his ability to change has now just been shown up to be another lie.
It’ll be interesting to see if Labor pick up on it.
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Final thoughts on this election to come before the polls close on Saturday afternoon and then a wrap up on the election next week. Then hopefully I can not think about politics for a while and write about something else for a change.