Federal Election

I’ve never been one for obsessing about The Australian. They have an editorial slant to the right, but they also have some very high quality journos who I like to read. As a result I buy and read their paper every day and filter out their leanings. I’m sure plenty of others do the same.

Yesterday, their front page (“Rudd loses ground in his homeland state and the bush”) blew up the filter.  It’s one thing to take a news angle on one part of a poll at the expense of a more complex message.  It’s another to ignore what should be, for one side of politics, an enormous, wailing emergency siren with big flashing red lights on top in order to substantiate a headline like that.

In their article, Matthew Franklin and Samantha Maiden claim “public support for Labor has plunged in regional Australia and fallen in Kevin Rudd’s home state of Queensland” as well as “a big jump in support for the Coalition among voters living outside the capital cities.” While no questions on the ETS were in the poll, the ETS was inserted as a possible cause.

Continue reading "The one conclusion from Newspoll: Turnbull is cactus" »

The battle lines in national politics have now been drawn along a fault line summed up by two four-letter words: debt and jobs.

In the one corner we have the Rudd Government, justifying an audacious program of pump-priming in order to protect jobs; in the other we have the Opposition, telling us it’s all about debt.

The key to understanding the jobs versus debt debate is that this is not an argument about economics – it is a battle to manage the national agenda.

Continue reading "Debt versus jobs: battle lines drawn for next election" »