Surging inflation has given Labor the chance to turn economic management to its own purposes in the campaign, as cost-of-living and coming interest rate rises (“rate rise looms”, to use the journalistic parlance) dominated the day after the shock March quarter CPI rise.
The golden rule of progressive campaigns on the economy (which we’ve named the “Fingerhut Rule” after longtime US Democrat pollster Vic Fingerhut) is that progressive parties do well when they make the economic debate about who manages the economy best for working people, not just who manages it best.
The inflation result has shifted the campaign economic debate on to the cost of living and impacts on working families facing higher prices for basics and rising mortgage costs — right where Labor would prefer it to be.
Labor’s Jim Chalmers led the way this morning, the opposition Treasury spokesman using a childcare announcement to take aim at the government’s economic legacy: “Skyrocketing cost of living, falling real wages, interest rates rising and $1 trillion in public debt.”
(Crikey is old enough to remember the financial crisis, when opposition Treasury spokesmen Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey argued that Commonwealth borrowing to fund stimulus measures would “crowd out” private investment by lifting interest rates. Nearly a trillion dollars in debt later, it seems that argument has been crowded out of the debate, and not before time, given it was always horseshit, as a decade of falling interest rates and government bond yields demonstrated.)
Scott Morrison, forced on to the defence on an issue he’d been hoping might at least split in his favour, found himself denying that he took credit when the economy went well and blamed external forces when it didn’t — he fielded that question on Sky News, of all places — while insisting indeed that external forces were to blame, that things were much worse overseas, and indeed that things were much worse when John Howard suffered an interest rate rise during 2007 election.
(Morrison is right to reject the Howard comparison: Howard, despite throwing money at anything that moved in an unsuccessful attempt to buy the 2007 election, was at least running a budget surplus at a time of high inflation, whereas Morrison is tipping $80 billion in deficit spending into a tight labour market.)
On that theme, in Cairns for some particularly high-quality pork-barrelling ($24 million wasted on something called a “marine precinct” in Warren “I was born marginal!” Entsch’s seat, which comes on top of $60 million just a month ago) the prime minister continued promising jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs for everyone, a line somewhat at odds with the reality that the labour market is already tight as a drum and states like NSW are delaying spending because it can’t find enough workers.
By May 21, Morrison might be the first prime minister to promise a negative unemployment rate — although presumably that still won’t be enough to shift wages growth.
Speaking of marginal MPs, Pauline Hanson has thrilled the psephologists by threatening to preference against the Coalition in key marginal seats after the Tasmanian Liberals did a “dirty deal with the devil” (erm… OK) and preferenced the Jacqui Lambie Experience (I think that’s its name) ahead of One Nation. Guardian Australia reports One Nation will preference against Trent “Don’t Go To (North) Sydney” Zimmerman in his battle royale with North Shore teal independent Kylea Tink.
(I happen to live in North Sydney, and can advise that 1) Tink posters significantly outnumber Zimmerman corflutes; 2) of the six or seven likely One Nation voters in the electorate — a Hanson candidate didn’t stand in 2019 — the main problem will be getting them out of the Artarmon TAB on a Saturday; and 3) the local by-law requiring Arthur Chesterfield-Evans to stand in all North Sydney elections has now been repealed.)
The Greens, meanwhile, have demonstrated there’s at least one party taking the climate emergency seriously, unveiling a policy to end coal-fired power by 2030 and ban coal exports by then, ending new fossil fuel projects, and guaranteeing jobs for workers affected by decarbonisation.
Oddly enough, the Greens’ plan is the closest we’ve seen from a prominent party to the plan put forward by the international lobby group for fossil fuels, the International Energy Agency, to reach genuine net zero (i.e. nothing like Morrison’s farcical “net zero by magic” policy) by 2050, which includes phasing out unabated coal emissions in developed countries by 2030.
It’s a demonstration of the extraordinary extent of state capture in Australia that the major parties being profoundly outside the global consensus on the need for urgent climate action attracts little if any media scrutiny. Though, of course, much of the media is itself an arm of the fossil fuel industry, so don’t expect to hear much about the Greens’ plan.
Morrison promising jobs reminds me of an old satirical comedy sketch which had dialogue something like:
Happy guy: The jobs market just gets better and better – I’ve got three jobs now!
Cynical mate: Oh yeh? You’re still not making a living.
Is there a better proof of the failure of neolib nutbaggery as slavishly adhered to by both B1 & B2 (esp the appalling Charmless, with whom we are threatened as being the next Treasurer!) than the concept of “the working poor“?
What’s that nauseating slogan that tories, from Smokin’ Joe Leventy through Fraudi to Scummo constantly trot out “the best form of welfare is a job“?
Demonstrably not, Q.E.D.
Jim Chalmers will be an intelligent knowledgeable Treasurer. So…that’s something new. I’m pretty sure he won’t lose $60b hey Joshy?
Depends on your definition of ‘lose’ – of one thing we may be certain, he’ll be arid abacus without any indication of a pulse.
Or other recognisable human attribute.
I could be condescending and say suck it up love but I’ll be generous and tell you to buy some tissues.
Get back to us when he starts wielding the welfare axe “for their own good, cruel to be kind, kill to save…” the usual B/S.
Yet another who went straight from tepid BA (Comm) & PhD in political science (not the Dismal pretender but the truly deleterious one) to be a gofer for older pollies, sleazing up the greasy pole to preselection and gold plated pension for life.
Just what we need, another one…
I believe the first PM to utter that bit of filth was Julia Gillard, Epi. If memory serves me correctly, it was her justification to toss thousands of sole parent families into poverty by taking them off the Sole Parent Pension and onto what was then Newstart. And a Newstart it most certainly would have been- a thoroughly desperate and harsh one.
Labor supporters tell me she had no choice. Previous LNP governments had legislated it. Her hands were tied. Yada yada. Apparently legislation is set in stone when it comes to welfare – like the Ten Commandments. It can, of course, be changed very easily when it suits- look at Robodebt- but when it doesn’t suit- it’s like the Ten Commandments and there’s nothing anyone can do, sadly.
You have a point, though I’m not certain Gillard was responsible for that particular quotation. I got into bother while she was PM for pointing to the clear echo in the words of one Gillard speech, where she raved about the way work liberates, and a notorious slogan placed over the gates of a German concentration and death camp.
The slogan is from Bubba Clinton’s “welfare to work” cave-in to repugs in 1996 but Gillard’s Single Parent Pension will forever blight her name – the eradication of the last of Great Gough’s major innovations.
Running a close 2nd in the Reprehensible Selling Out to the Right stakes was her ranting at her last ALP annual conference as PM about how Greens were lazy lay abeds unlike the stalwart, horny hand sons (not daughters…odd that) of toil “who set the alarm clock at 5 or 6am and get up to work hard…”.
Lotsa yadda-yadda during that final curtain down for ‘Labor’ when Wong repudicated, yet again, a free vote on SSM.
In pinning the blame for increasing inflation nobody is mentioning the extremely low interest rates and “quantitative easing” measures by central banks around the world since 2008. When these steps were taken there were warnings they could lead to higher inflation but nobody seems to talk about it now.
Almost as if economists are crap at simple, basic arithmetic – a failing one expects with pollies.
Scummo only wants you to have a job thats temporary and insecure. Thats what his owners have told him and thats all he creates.
It slightly amuses me when parties say they will preference Candidate A over Candidate B in House of Representative elections. As if they have an actual say in where the preferences go.
Research shows significant numbers of voters, over 40% often, dutifully follow ‘how to vote’ cards from their preferred party, with variations, e.g. Green Party voters are particularly bloody-minded and difficult to direct.
There’s an interesting article Do Australians Follow How-to-votes? in Anthony Green’s election blog on the ABC site posted Wed 28 Sep 2011 and updated Tue 20 Mar 2018. (I’ll try posting the URL too in a minute but years of experience tell me this is futile.)
Like wow. Never followed (or even read) a how to vote card. My preferences go where I send them, which is one of the benefits of the Australian system over (eg) FPTP in the UK. I am sure you are right with the stat though. Civics education for all might be a good thing?
Whilst I am a big advocate for civics education, preferably starting midway through primary school and going until year 12, it is not much use in electorates with a high proportion of voters who were not educated in Australia. Those electorates can quite often be ones that will have a significant effect on the outcome of the election. Better still to not allow how to vote cards and replace them instead with a card which shows how to vote in a preferential voting system, which can be confusing if you are new to Australia.
That raises the ‘competency test‘ for voters – the fatal flaw with democracy which none of the bien pissant brigade dare address.
(For larfs, LNL this week had an entire program on giving 16yr olds the vote!)
It used to be a property test (retained in the UK case of women voting for 40yrs after it was abolished for real people, aka men) – presumably on the grounds that anyone had had not acquired a rateable property was not much cop in the thinking game.
Why do you think the idea of giving 16 year olds the vote is a “larf”? It’s a well-supported idea. Have you ever considered standing for something or do you just spend your life sitting on a fence pointing out grammatical errors?
If we must vote for representatives I would like each citizen’s vote to be weighted so it counts more the younger the voter is. The young have far more at stake than the old. So perhaps anyone under 20 might have a vote that counted 8 times, and with each decade older the value of the vote decreases by one. The very old would have a vote worth just one anyway.
Why stop at 16 anyway? That’s just tinkering. “The head of politics at Cambridge University has called for children as young as six to be given the vote in an attempt to tackle the age bias in modern democracy.
Prof David Runciman said the ageing population meant young people were now “massively outnumbered”, creating a democratic crisis and an inbuilt bias against governments that plan for the future.”
Let’s hear it for Universal Suffrage in Utero – there’s a cause for those untethered by reality.
Or, given Gen ZZZZ’s proclivities, in vitro.
Apologies to Zager & Evans.
I thought there would be a few that followed the how-to-vote cards, but I didn’t expect it to be over 40%.
Still, that means that more than 50% do not follow those cards.
They should, probably, be banned.
Voting above the line for the senate is, if anything, worse. It amounts to making your chosen party your proxy, voting in your place. There is a substantial contradiction in combining compulsory voting with such absurd provisions.
I found this article from 2020
https://antonygreen.com.au/should-how-to-votes-be-banned-at-australian-elections/
Having scrutineered at a number of elections at all levels of government I can say anecdotally that it seems that people do tend to follow the how to vote cards. You notice it especially in electorates where there are a lot of non English speaking voters. There are usually people who speak the predominant language spruiking for the major parties who catch them on the way in and suggest they vote as per their particular card.
“nothing like Morrison’s farcical “net zero by magic” policy”. That’s a filthy lie. Morrison’s plan didn’t involve magic. It involved pixies.