At the federal election, Scott Morrison will face at least four opposition leaders — and only one sits in Canberra.
Although Anthony Albanese will lead Labor’s national fight, it is more likely the premiers of Queensland, Victoria and Western Australia will carry a bigger sway with voters.
And that could make the prime minister’s plan to stay in power a touch tricky.
Take Queensland, where the working relationship between Annastacia Palaszczuk and Morrison is testy, where the state’s vaccination levels are lower than most other states, and where the borders remain shut. None of those issues were in play at the last election, but this time they will be crucial.
Will Queensland even open its borders when the rest of the nation does? Or would it be a clever political tactic for the Palaszczuk Labor government to keep them shut, stopping Morrison from calling a pre-Christmas election? Even how the Australian Electoral Commission deals with a pandemic poll means this election will be different.
Morrison may even be forced into hotel quarantine in Brisbane for the 14 required days before being allowed to roam the state. Campaigning by Zoom in Queensland? And WA too?
COVID-19 will also play a big role in Victoria. Will Premier Dan Andrews give Morrison kudos for the extra vaccines sent his way recently or lambast him for being tardy in ordering doses last year? And are voters directing their blame for civil unrest, the fact that many are still waiting to get a vaccine, and continued restrictions on Andrews and Labor or the federal Liberals?
Who knows how the changing of the guard in the New South Wales premier’s office will play out federally? While Dominic Perrottet is closer than his predecessor to Morrison in terms of faith (and gender), that will mean nothing during an election campaign.
More prominent — particularly if the poll is held this year — is how families fare as NSW opens up again after 106 days. What will that mean for schools? Public transport? Transmission? The impact on our hospitals will certainly be front and centre of the campaign, whether it’s held soon, or next year.
That will create a problem for Morrison, and almost definitely secure a boost for the states after Victoria and NSW joined forces to demand more funding. And what the states ask for — in this climate and wielding this much electoral power — they might just get.
This pandemic has showed us the power of the states. In many respects, it’s shown the premiers are more powerful than the prime minister. Combined, they could be overpowering. And that gives them enormous weight to influence the campaign.
Debt used to be a dirty word. Now it’s not. And issues that might have driven people to change votes will have muted influence this time. Of course, employment and climate change will remain vital, but voters’ safety, the mental health of the nation (particularly its children), how our schools and universities bounce back, and the ongoing transmission numbers will trump most traditional issues.
How will Morrison and the Liberals navigate that, with limited movement? How do they navigate the states’ responses to COVID? In Queensland, where except in the south-east corner the Liberals dominated in 2019, what impact will that have? Will voters credit state Labor with keeping COVID south of the border? Or will the votes come from the queue of coastal towns desperate to have southern tourists visit again?
Time will tell. But the premiers — Labor and Liberal — wouldn’t be doing their job unless they were writing a note to Santa and sending a copy to Morrison. At this point, we shouldn’t rule out that it might be delivered even before Christmas.
Those who wrote our Constitution got it right.
When we have a weak or non existent Commonwealth Government, its up to the States to step up.
We have and they did.
Until Covid, I was a firm believer that the States were redundant and an unnecessary layer of Government. I have completely changed my mind. Our current Commonwealth/States system is working as it should.
Now you can change the situation by giving some power to the new party, which is far more liberal than the neo fascists currently using the liberal name.
That Morrison is considered to have a chance in the coming federal election beggars belief. He deserves the most humiliating defeat in federal history.
So true!
Objectively this is true but the LNP/Murdoch party no doubt has strategies to hold on the power- that is all they want!!
I know that, but I am still not cynical enough to abandon hope.
Dear Been Around, tell me about it. I felt exactly the same as you prior to the 2019 Federal election. I eagerly followed the polls that were predicting a moderate ALP victory. Can you imagine the depths of despair I was plunged into when the intellectual giants in Queensland returned this bunch of thugs and criminals to power. Why I swear I was like Stalin when his buddy Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June of 1941, in a state of complete shock and depression and totally in seclusion for days afterwards.
So in a preventive bid to help you avoid a similar state of affairs allow me to draw your attention to a quote you may find helpful. “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here”. ‘Here’ being a place of hope for a successful outcome to something – probably in this case the election day result.
As far as I can ascertain it is attributed to Dante’s ‘Divine ‘Comedy’ written in 1320. It literally means to abandon all your hope and It is said to have been inscribed at the entrance of hell. If this is true it really is most relevant to you on two levels. First a Morrison victory would be one of the greatest jokes (Comedy) in the history of Australian federal elections and second a Morrison victory would be very akin to following the path to hell for this nation.
good luck buddy
I had, and have sustained, the same dreadful shock as you in 2019. And that dread has been proven justified. If Morrison wins, the only solution may be emigration to NZ, along with many friends who have similar dread.
Don’t go, stay and continue to fight for the country you want! I was heartsick for days after 2019, a grey pall over life but here we are still tapping away while not allowing the tiny light of hope to be fully extinguished!! If Labor could please jettison Albo and put Tanya or Richard or Jim or SOMEONE with some substance in charge we might have half a chance! WHY WON”T THEY LISTEN!
Good luck, MATE! Speak Australian , not Yank.
Buddy is pretty common these days, Malcolm, as much as it might irk you. Given how much ScoMo and Howard before him have abused the word ‘mate’ for political ends and to further parochial small mindedness, I don’t have any love for it. Not anymore.
Never forgetting the trashing of the word maaaate by Wotevs Richo which meant,”watch out for your toes“.
“At the federal election, Scott Morrison will face at least four opposition leaders — and only one sits in Canberra.”
So, which Labor leader is being ignored – the Chief Minister of the ACT or the leader of the federal Labor Party?
This is a particularly egregious example of using Canberra when you probably mean something else.
The Ken Behrens are outraged again! I agree it must be annoying though!
It is absolutely bloody annoying when the term Canberra is used as shorthand for the federal government. It is lazy journalism and I spent all of 2020 correcting it by making BTL comments wherever I could.
MJM Good on you- Could not agree more- it is lazy, sloppy journalism. Trite and cliched. Stop it!!
It’s just synecdoche! A common rhetorical device in all sorts of contexts.
I think you’re being much too kind. It might be synecdoche if the federal parliament was a part of Canberra, but they are different entities even though the parliament buildings are part of Canberra. It is anyway confusing, ambiguous and tiresome to refer to the federal government as Canberra. But even if we allow it, there remains the problem of this Labor leader who “sits in Canberra”. Albanese’s seat is Grayndler in NSW. The only Labor leader with a seat in Canberra is Andrew Barr.
I can’t see how Morrison is going to thread a path thru to election victory via the end of Covid restrictions, unless he can manage to squeeze in a quickie between them lifting, and the (likely) dire consequences that will come from lifting them.
He’d really need the NSW experiment to be a smashing success.
If that happened, and the rest of the country could confidently follow suit, then I reckon with an “in principle agreement” (to use one of his favourite get-out-of-jail expressions) for climate action, the last three years of scandals and rorts would be forgotten and forgiven and he’d pull off a victory that would indeed be miraculous.
Morrison needs to continue lying, failing and dodging responsibility right up until election day, to lose the election. I don’t think Albanese is anywhere strong enough a performer to win it alone, Morrison has to help him by losing it.
It’s a bummer, to find myself wishing bad times to continue a bit longer, but it’s even worse to think that so much badness that has already happened, and would no doubt continue in a new term, should go unpunished due to a lucky break in the traffic for Morrison.
I suspect that the NSW experiment will be smashing for all the wrong reasons.
If even the AMA says that the public health system won’t cope, using the numbers generated by the federal government, then it won’t cope.
Maybe this is supposed to be the hammer blow which will really break our health system, so that the Neo-Con’s can get their version of the US style system up and running, whilst bankrupting or killing by neglect the “unworthy”.
What an odd piece of journalism. What is the point of this information free spiel? Laying the foundation for the “Morrison is underdog” narrative?
Madonna King always writes odd articles. The headlines over-promise. There are a lot of words but no real thesis. There’s usually some bash at Qld.
Think of her as a gossip columnist – it will all fall into place.