With three polls this week from Newspoll, Morgan and Essential all showing Labor on track for a narrow win, the Coalition looks to have run out of time to close the gap, especially with around 3.5 million people having already voted.
However, there remain the undecideds, people so utterly indifferent to politics that they will likely go to vote on Saturday not knowing whom they’ll support until the pencil is in their hand. A JWS Research poll from the 2016 election found 23% of voters didn’t make up their mind until polling day, with older voters less likely and younger voters more likely to do that. That means an important chunk of the electorate can still be moved even at the very death of the campaign. And the Coalition is pinning its hopes on scaring undecideds away from voting Labor.
On this, it has learnt from Labor’s successful Mediscare campaign in 2016. Labor unleashed a scare campaign around the privatisation of Medicare in the last week of that campaign. It was based on a complete lie about Coalition intentions to somehow sell off Medicare, and was utterly shameless in its mendacity.
It was also highly effective, and a key reason a mid-campaign swing back to Malcolm Turnbull failed to deliver him a decent majority. The Liberals were furious — having forgotten the extraordinary lies they told about Labor’s carbon pricing scheme when they were in opposition.
Given Labor’s “big target” strategy, the Coalition has plenty of material to work with. The focus on Labor’s taxation levels — a staple of the Coalition campaign — has dropped away, in favour of what was intended to be a final week scare campaign about Labor’s negative gearing policy, off the back of the announcement of ScoMoBank on Sunday.
That has misfired a little: Labor promptly endorsed ScoMoBank, and no one else did. Indeed, the Financial Review, which is supporting the Coalition — and which stands to benefit from increased housing demand via the ownership of Domain by its parent company Nine — has gone feral on ScoMoBank, running a series of articles detailing what a disaster it will be.
That hasn’t stopped Morrison going full bore on negative gearing, lying that Labor’s policies would cause house prices to fall and rents to rise. A variety of campaign material has been designed to back that up: Liberal candidates like Peter Dutton have been sending out fake rent increase notices to voters; other Liberals have sent out fictitious “Mortgage Revaluation Notices”; the Dave Sharma campaign in Wentworth has tried to link Kerryn Phelps — who opposes Labor’s policy — to “homeowners” being hit by negative gearing changes, regardless of the fact that homeowners definitionally don’t negatively gear.
Head of the loss-making mortgage firm Yellow Brick Road, Liberal donor Mark Bouris, has been doing robocalls attacking Labor (apparently unauthorised, and thus in breach of electoral laws). This has been backed up by an extraordinary display of partisanship from real estate firm Raine and Horne, which has been sending propaganda material to tenants warning them about Labor’s policies.
It’s not the only scare campaign, of course. There’s still the campaign around the ending of the franking credit rort. Angus Taylor has decided to create his own scare campaign around electric car charging stations, which he and Liberal candidates like Warren Mundine insist Labor will force every household to install (one of the interesting footnotes of this election, no matter the result, is the disappearance of whatever credibility Mundine had on public policy).
But the focus will be on property prices and rents all the way to Saturday evening, with social media not covered by the laughable analog-era election blackout.
Labor and progressives can rail at these scare campaigns and denounce the lies they’re based on, but they’re no worse than Mediscare. Both sides routinely treat voters as mugs and lie to their faces. What Labor may rue is that it has chosen not to run with its own big scare campaign in the dying days of the campaign to shift undecideds in its direction.
Twenty three per cent of the electorate is a lot of people yet to make up their minds.
Even if 23 per cent “haven’t made up their mind” (doubtful claim), it doesn’t necessarily mean undecided between the government and opposition. More likely to mostly be conservatives deciding which conservatives to vote for and progressives deciding which progressives to vote for.
This “house prices falling/rent increasing” scare campaign is absolutely NOT like the mediscare campaign. The former is a deliberate misinterpretation and misinformation of existing policy. There are plenty of studies and analyses that make it clear that this is nothing but a scare campaign and outright lie.
“Mediscare” was very different. Sure, Labor went all in on something that they knew would resonate and for which there was no stated policy from the Liberals. But that said, I have no doubt that if it wasn’t for how effective the mediscare campaign was, the Liberals would have spent the last three years working towards privatising (likely by stealth) medicare.
Yes, Mediscare has a basis in the Coalition’s long term indifference, or even outright hostility, to the Medicare system.
They did plan to farm out some IT functions to private industry, rather than internally improving the system.
Similar to what happened with the national cancer registry, the contract going to Telstra Health. And that didn’t go well.
Yes, and as Medicare is essentially a payment system the management and operation of their IT systems is a very large part of their function. Medicare doesn’t employ doctors and nurses, or hospital administrators, or deliver any other form of medical service, it simply pays for them. So coalition privatised Medibank after it was introduced in the 1970s, with it finally being sold off when Cormann was Minister. The coalition ‘fightback’ was going to kill Medicare in 1993, and was a major cause of the LNP loss. The record of de-funding/privatising medicare/medibank is there.
In spite of majority support for universal health insurance, the LNP have tried to destroy it since Fraser attacked the original Whitlam scheme. They have managed to set up a two tier system by subsidising private health insurance at an unsustainable level. It’s going to take a while to unscramble the mess but it can be done. Consistent government policy over a at least a decade is needed.
I was one of the victims of the Coalition’s abolition of universal Medibank, the first version of today’s Medicare. Just after I started a job after being unemployed for a while a member of our family was hospitalised for several days. We got a big bill even though it was a government hospital. The way the Fraser government worked the switch, with Howard as Treasurer at the time, anyone who was employed had to get private health insurance and the government would then subsidise any hospital bills. If you didn’t have private cover, bad luck: No subsidy. I had just started work on a low income so we couldn’t afford hospital cover. Therefore we were punished with the full, unsubsidised bill. Anyone who thinks they wouldn’t do this again is deluding themselves. It’s the only reason we’ve kept private hospital cover ever since we could afford it.
Total agreement Rais, I had a similar nightmare at the time with a cancer scare thanks to Fraser and Howard.
Yes, the Fraser/Howard destruction of universal health insurance when they changed the original Whitlam Medibank scheme had diabolical consequences. The rules about who was covered and not-covered by Medibank were so complex that even health care staff didn’t know. I worked in a public hospital at the time. People were (mistakenly) treated as free Medibank patients in out-patients, leading them (reasonably) to believe they were covered by Medibank. When they were admitted to hospital, the hospital would do further checks and find the patient was not covered by Medibank.
I saw many people sued by the hospital of their life-savings – particularly tragic in the case of European migrants who had uprooted themselves from their close-knit communities only to better themselves financially – and then lost it all because a clueless LNP government was incapable of understanding that universal health insurance is better than a US-style health insurance lottery.
I think the ‘Children Overboard’ was the nastiest and most successful last-minute scare campaign ever launched. Everything else pales into comparison.
d’oh! I meant ‘in comparison’ not ‘into’.
I don’t believe that Labor did a Medicare scare. The Liberals are chipping away slowly at it. No longer can one see a bulk billing doctor and costs of scripts are increasing.
You are so right Ebony. It showed the Liberals just what they are – heartless, spiteful and with hearts made of stone.
Also Agree
You’re dead right Ebony. Putting out photos saying they were willing to drown their kids to get asylum, and leaning on Navy brass not to say it was untrue. Lowest. Political. Act. Ever.
Authorised by John Howard.
I work in private health and I can say that this proliferation of junk policies have left people very vulnerable as a result.
Medicare has been attacked by stealth, a bit like ring barking a tree.
Specialist rebates have barely moved since Howard was elected, 20 years ago.
Yada yada yada….The Liberals, just as they have more recently with the NDIS, NBN, Gonski, have a policy of defunding Labor’s projected spending on Health…..the have that policy now and they had that policy then. Mediscare was a factual warning about the peril that the reduction in funding would have.
Why does this author not understand that the Liberals have form in keeping popular ALP policies in name only and then destroying it by ensuring it cant work effectively?
Stopped reading at the
“Labor unleashed a scare campaign around the privatisation of Medicare in the last week of that campaign. It was based on a complete lie about Coalition intentions to somehow sell off Medicare, and was utterly shameless in its mendacity.”
Bernard refers to this in the exact same terms at every opportunity, the lie is his, There was plenty of evidence to support the intention to gut, make unusable and eventually sell of Medicare by the Libs.
I do like the weasel words ‘somehow sell off’
Stupid me thought it might be the same way they sold off Medibank, the CES or so much of the public sector. But then I don’t have the advantage of a sandstone university education or having worked with the cream of the Public Service in Treasury.
In any case there is always Gladys and Cormann (rock stars both) who are here to help.