• “Is Tony Abbott not launching this policy because he doesn’t understand it?” Andrew Robb was asked yesterday at a hostile press conference to launch the Coalition’s broadband proposal. “Definitely not,” Robb insisted, saying it was a matter of logistics because Tony Smith had to attend a debate in Canberra. Then Abbott went on the 7.30 Report and indeed appeared not to understand it. That Abbott’s staff wouldn’t or couldn’t school their leader in the basics of broadband sufficient to launch his own policy was poor work.
  • While broadband speeds are, rather like the internet filter, primarily an issue of preoccupation to a small number of voters and the relevant industry, the issue comes freighted with symbolism. One of the many ways in which Kevin Rudd painted himself as more relevant and modern than John Howard in 2007 was via Labor’s broadband policy, which created an effective contrast between a party willing to embrace a key new technology and one that looked like it wished broadband would go away and stop bothering it. In a campaign in which Labor is emphasising similar themes, the Coalition has handed them a chance to repeat the dose. Robb and Abbott can talk about the animal spirits of the private sector all they like but that rhetoric doesn’t work when you talk about nation-building.
  • Abbott again took it easy yesterday, with a press conference to detail just how ready the “boarding school” on Nauru is to take our asylum seekers (prior to them inevitably coming here, if past experience is anything to go by), and then a school speech. Julia Gillard appears to be picking up the pace and rolled out another education policy, a water policy and an appearance on The 7pm Project. The momentum that was going the Liberals’ way appears to have stalled after Sunday’s lightweight campaign launch.
  • The game over policy costings continues, probably to the Coalition’s disadvantage after it released a table with basic errors in it. Robb defended the Coalition yesterday by saying Labor does not make clear what policies involve new spending and what policies are simply announcements of money allocated in the Budget. Labor may not do that on its website but it says exactly that, clearly and simply, at the bottom of every policy press release. Labor and Liberal are simply doing what their opponents did in previous elections: Labor keeps pointing to the clock and demanding the Liberals submit their policies to Treasury and Finance for costing, and the Liberals are holding out for as long as possible. The press releases Nick Minchin routinely released in 2007 attacking Labor for failing to submit their policies could, word for word, be the ones Wayne Swan has been issuing this time around. It reflects the fact that the entire election commitment costing process is a game tilted in favour of governments and should be scrapped.
  • Labor is insistent that costing errors show the Coalition is incompetent and can’t be trusted. They show nothing of the sort. That opposition advisers, without access to internal government data, make relatively small errors is understandable. They have no impact on policy when it is ultimately delivered, since policy commitments go through the same Budget process as any other spending proposal.
  • A Morgan poll last night has the Greens on a Senate vote of 15.5%, suggesting they would secure quotas in their own right in virtually all states. Morgan even suggests the Greens might pick up the ACT non-Labor senator with a 27% vote, giving them 10 seats. But at over 15% nationally, that would be a two-thirds increase on the Greens’ 2007 result — an unprecedented outcome.