Putting interest in the race. This year politically is shaping up as one very long election campaign. There really is very little on the agenda of the Government to keep the Parliament active with anything other than talk. When I put my mind to it I am hard pressed to think of what Labor really wants to achieve on the legislative front.
Sure there will be a third attempt to get some kind of emissions trading scheme enacted but that is little more than show business. It is not going to happen unless the Greens, Family First and Nick Xenophon have a change of heart. There will be grand standing too on health matters with the Government trying to do enough to make it look like Kevin Rudd has not broken his promise to put an end to the blame game on public hospitals. His self imposed deadline from the last campaign of giving the states 18 months to fix things or risk a federal takeover is now past so he has to do something to spin his way out of it.
Of course we will have an annual budget full of forecasts and projections and opportunities for the Coalition to torment Treasurer Wayne Swan with negative votes in the Senate. But really, it will all be little more than show business as politicians prepare themselves for the main event of the election later in the year. Words, words and more words is what we will get from all sides with very little by way of action behind them. The final months before polling day are not the time to risk upsetting anybody by actually getting on with governing.
Which is why this morning’s Newspoll was so well timed. It enables politicians and pundits to start concentrating on the race right from the outset of the parliamentary year. And thankfully the numbers hold out the hope that it may not be as one sided an event as it has looked for the last two and a bit years. Labor remains the front runner but the distance has closed a little.
Clearly I was not alone towards the end of last month when I advised that it was time to expect the Liberal-National price to shorten. The bookmakers say this morning that people have started backing the Coalition and that for the first time since the last election they have been taking more bets on the Coalition than the Government. “In this session of parliament I think we’ll see the Government on the back foot for the first time in three years and that could well see the Coalition’s odds trim up further,” said Michael Sullivan of Sportingbet.
Not that there has yet been a dramatic movement in the Crikey Federal election indicator. Labor are still rated as a 79% chance of winning but that translates into meaning that one in every five elections starting from this position would be won by the outsider.
The one close election forecast for this year is in Tasmania where the Labor Government is given only a 55% chance of retaining office.
A variation on the cultural cringe. If I was still a South Australian wine producer I would be downright disgusted with the State Government for using a French musical theme as the background noise on its current advertising campaign designed to get visitors to visit “the wine capital of Australia.”
La Mer indeed! Long gone are the days when our industry needed to hide behind French nomenclature like Burgundy, Chablis and Champagne. These days on the world market it is the French who are struggling to copy the Australian industry’s honest varietal labelling.
Boardered with the Liberals. I know it is risky leading with your chin like this but I can’t resist passing on this wonderful example of the care with which the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott responds to correspondence:
My informant commented “I’m sooo boardered with the Liberals. Of course, with staffers like that we’ll soon get replies to emails and printed letters to Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey by SMS on our mobiles, so who cares about spelling then!”
I await with apprehension the message from the first reader to pick up a similar howler in one of my stories.
It is very important that we protect our boarders.
From the boarding masters? With a crowbar? etc.