Both party leaders had setpiece events today — the prime minister addressed the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce and Anthony Albanese addressed the National Press Club (NPC), a traditional pre-election address Scott Morrison is refusing to do, possibly given he was caught out by cost-of-living questions last time he appeared there.
However, the theme of the day was wages and how Australian workers are falling behind — and fast. The Australian Bureau of Statistics released Wage Price Index (WPI) data for the March quarter this morning, showing wages growth stuck at 0.7%, and 2.4% in the year to March.
That means real wages have fallen, on average, by 2.7% over the year to March given the March inflation result of 5.1%. That was manna from heaven for Albanese, given he has backed wages to increase enough to maintain real wages and argued that wages stagnation is a deliberate policy choice of the government.
Campaign momentum has swung back to Morrison, with polls showing Labor’s primary vote has fallen in recent days.
Albanese’s address to the NPC was his now-standard treatment of how Australia could do better, although he announced that if elected Labor would dump two of the most heavily rorted Coalition programs: the Community Development Grants Program and Regionalisation Fund, together worth about $700 million.
He fired up during questions (which compared with his daily press conferences were decidedly less hostile and contained far fewer yelling News Corp staffers), and gave a strong response when asked about costings of his policies.
Yesterday they stood up and said we’re going to cut the public service even more. You know what that leads to: robodebt. It doesn’t save money, it costs money, because you take humans out of human services and it has devastating consequences. For real people. It costs lives. Lives. As well as over $1 billion to taxpayers.
In his press conference (held in the morning before the WPI figures were released) Morrison was — finally — asked about Australia’s surging COVID infection and death rates, and immediately sought to deploy it as a wedge, declaring that under the Coalition there would be no more lockdowns (which, of course, are not his call anyway, but under the control of state governments):
We are living with COVID, and not going back to those daily press conferences of people talking about COVID every day and putting the threat of shutdowns and lockdowns and interfering in people’s lives again. That is not what I’m going to do if I am reelected on Saturday. I will not drag Australia back to those times again, and I have noticed that Anthony Albanese is keen to get back into that type of approach, and that is not the approach I have taken.
That was on a day with 53 reported deaths from COVID and more than 55,000 cases.
COVID is also going to have a direct impact on the election. The Australian Electoral Commission announced this afternoon that due to labour shortages, it may not be able to staff polling booths in regional areas on Saturday — specifically in the electorates of Capricornia, Flynn, Kennedy and Leichhardt in Queensland, Barker and Grey in South Australia, and Durack and O’Connor in the west.
“Recruitment difficulty is exactly what we advised could occur, both earlier in the pandemic and in the early stages of the election period, and why we’ve been urging people to assess all voting options,” commissioner Tom Rogers said.
“Current labour shortages in regional areas have been well documented. No front-line service has been immune to resourcing difficulties and we’re running the nation’s biggest in-person, manual event.”
The AEC is still desperately trying to find staff for election day, and is considering amalgamating polling booths, which on election day are staffed by a vast army of workers hired for the day.
Let us be absolutely clear on this. Big business and the economy have won they have made themselves a far higher priority than keeping people safe. Even a large number of Australians have forcefully placed there self-serving demand for ‘absolute freedom’ at the forefront in order to indulge their desire for the ‘nice’ things of life like shopping and travelling ahead of their many vulnerable fellow citizens.
In calling for virtually all COVID19 restriction to be cut back or eliminated Australia has now become little ‘Sweden’ and the ‘let it rip’ policy of economy first and foremost, individual self-interest and government vote seeking now clearly holds sway in Australia. Obviously to these clowns and imbeciles not enough Australians were killed during the Omicron wave last Christmas?
Ever since the fool in NSW and the biggest fool of all the compulsive liar daggy dad prematurely opened the borders late last year Australia now sits near the head of the pack (top 10 nations)in terms of new COVID cases in the world. Additionally our position on rate of deaths from COVID has also ‘improved’ considerably as we ‘race’ into the top 30 nations for deaths in the world
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Apparently this is still not enough for the lovers of the ‘let it rip’ policy The resulting leap in cases and deaths from COVID that will follow from virtually no restrictions are both entirely foreseeable and preventable hence those pushing for total freedom bear responsibility and are culpable for these foreseeable consequences
Yet Morrison has no policy with regard to this ongoing high death rate and infection rate. Memo to the fool in the baseball cap having no policy is akin to having bad policy. Probably gone right over the fool’s head.
But why would Morrison and those of his cause care, the vast majority who we be adversely impacted will be the elderly, the sick and disabled and the poor, all acceptable collateral damage in Morrison’s quest for power, the economy and ‘freedom’..
Yep. Bad news is good news for Albanese. Really with Australia’s poor response to and handling of the COVID pandemic, vaccine roll-outs, slow lockdowns, inconsistent lockdowns and messaging, Morrison’s poor response and performance during the 2019/20 Summer Bushfires and the flooding emergency of 2022 and the plethora of weak economic data over the last 3 years, Albanese should be streets ahead. he fact he is not says a lot about him and a lot about Labor. In 1993 Keating won by 15 seats in an election everyone was expecting him to lose and with unemployment at 11.3%. Labor under Hawke was by a larger margin 10 years earlier during a recession then as well. Rudd won in 2007 during a boom period and Gillard won in 2010 post-GFC, although it was minority government and a touch and go thing. Why when things are going so poorly economically for Australians with real wage falls, cost of living rises and inflation and interest rates rising isn’t Albanese going to win in a landslide? What unemployment with its dodgy measuring? To top it off we have the highest real estate prices in the world locking out a generation of young people and putting those that do not already own their home under further pressure.
I still don’t trust Albanese with real wages and wonder if he can do anything about it. The FWC has their hands tied. They rule on minimum wages usually and only move other award rates at their leisure. There is conflict and contrast between the “No disadvantage test” and the “Better off overall test”. A tautology surely. Enterprise agreements are left to wither and contract are never renewed – both operate on the basis of a perpetual lease. There is no court to rule and make orders. I tell this to my local Labor member. Finger in the ears and going la la la la la! and saying their industrial Labor spokesmen Joel Fitzgibbon is looking into this.
I just wonder how bad things have to get before Labor does win in a landslide and hopefully gets both houses.