Election Campaigns

The best weapon Labor has at its disposal to prevent the election of a Tony Abbott-led Coalition Government is Tony Abbott. The polls have consistently shown that while Labor is seriously on the nose and Julia Gillard deeply unpopular, the voters have very limited affection for Abbott. Worse for the Opposition Leader, the trend has become even more pronounced, with Gillard pulling in front of Abbott as preferred prime minister in Newspoll earlier this month.

Abbott has a number of problems – he’s seen as far too negative, he’s seen as too aggressive, and he’s seen (even by some of his own MPs) as economically inconsistent, on the one hand arguing for small government and low taxation, yet still pursuing extravagant policies such as the $3 billion maternity leave scheme which has been denounced by the conservative writer Andrew Bolt as an indefensible tax on business. Indeed the mere fact that this policy has won plaudits from the Greens should firmly establish its credentials as a form of budgetary vandalism.

Given these facts, it is more than likely that when the election rolls around next year that Labor, its strategists and its advertising agency will be like attack dogs on a leash as they get ready to mount the mother of all negative advertising campaigns against the Opposition Leader. Abbott will be painted as a bovver boy, an economic lightweight, an enemy of working people.

Continue reading "Elections: If you’ve got nothing nice to say…" »

Back in that happy 17-day period last year when Australia was chugging along nicely without a government, we ran a piece on The Punch speculating that whichever party ended up winning the federal election would probably lose the next one.

The thinking went that the victorious party and prime minister would end up so co-opted and compromised by the various deals required to form government that they would not look like much of a government at all, with their authority diminished as they pandered to disparate MPs within their fragile alliance.

Part of the problem comes from the timidity of modern politics. The saying goes that politics was the art of the possible. These days it often looks like the art of the impossible.

Continue reading "With friends like Greens Julia needs no enemies" »