Week 4 Election Wrap, Labor Launch, Albanese At The Kitchen Table, The Economy And Corruption

Four weeks into the campaign and real votes are being cast, with the acceptance of postal votes and the prepoll period commencing soon. In 2019, Labor won the two-party preferred vote – but lost the vote by a wide margin during the prepolling period and, as a result, has reworked it’s campaigning processes and is viewing the 2022 election not just as ‘election day’, but the ‘election fortnight’.

Some people were bemused by Labor’s relatively early campaign launch, but it makes sense when taking this ‘election fortnight’ strategy into account. The Liberal Party will hold their campaign launch in the final week – which means they’ll still collect public funding until this time – but this epitomises Scott Morrison perfectly. If there is a public handout available there, he’ll be there to collect it.

As predicted, there was a cash rate rise during the week, but it’s not the Prime Minister’s fault: it’s all about external events, the war in Ukraine… maybe it’s even Labor’s fault, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s not about politics and mortgage holders have factored into account these rate rises through their savings. Apparently.

Morrison takes the credit when the good news arrives, and always finds someone else to blame when the bad news arrives. But it cannot be like this: a Prime Minister has to take responsibility for everything, not just pick and choose the narrative that suits their agenda at the time.

And, once again, Morrison claims a federal ICAC will be a ‘kangaroo court’, but we feel he doesn’t want an anti-corruption commission because he is likely to one of the first MPs to appear once this body is established. And, more than likely, followed by many of his frontbench team: this has the potential to keep a federal ICAC busy for a least a decade, decimate the Liberal and National parties, and keep them out of office for another decade on top of that, so it’s obvious why Morrison is not keen on a federal ICAC.

A debate between Josh Frydenberg and Jim Chalmers focussed on ‘cost of living’ pressures: a civil affair, but if the Coalition wins the election, will Frydenberg actually be the Treasurer? He’s facing a difficult task in the seat of Kooyong and there’s inside speculation that the seat might already be lost to the independent challenger, Monique Ryan.

There was also a new batch of opinion polls, and it’s the same story as before: no change – if anything, they’ve become worse for the Coalition. Labor is in a winning position in all of these polls, and has been for the past 104 surveys, but we have to remember what happened in 2019: Labor ahead in over 100 consecutive opinion polls, only to lose the election. It’s unlikely, but it could happen again in 2022 – the only hope for the Coalition is that it’s happened before, but this time around, they are much further behind.

And we answer audience questions: this week, our opinions on the chances of The New Liberals; and the possibility of a Royal Commission into COVID management. We think there should be one.