|
There is a reason opposition parties don't release their costings until the dying days of a federal election. The more time you can spend on your opponent, the less time those you're trying to beat can pick away at your plans.
Both sides of politics do it, which hardly makes it the right thing to do.
The release of the Coalition's costings on Thursday afternoon, well after Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had held his daily press conference, offered a reminder of why costings come with little upside for campaigns.
Dutton ensured he wasn't even on the mainland when his key economics spokespeople, Angus Taylor and Jane Hume, fronted up to explain how they plan to manage the nation's finances.
As it turned out, they'd be worse off, to the tune of $8 billion in the first two years, not that the party was mentioning that when it partially released details on Wednesday evening.
Instead, the Coalition wants to focus on the budget bottom line being $14 billion better than Labor's over four years, along with a $40 billion improvement to the national debt.
Like Labor, there would be no surplus in the near term but Taylor insists the Coalition would achieve one sooner than Labor.
The Coalition's biggest saving measure is a $17.2 billion cut to the public service, closely followed by pocketing $17.1 billion from repealing Labor's legislated next round of tax cuts. It's biggest expenses would be $12.7 billion in extra defence spending and $10 billion for the cost-of-living tax offset.
The confusing state of cuts in Canberra
The release of the costings brought with it more confusion over the Coalition's contentious plans to slash the federal public service by 41,000 jobs. Dutton has been adamant the cuts would only come from Canberra, even if the
Liberal senate candidate in the ACT says it is "unrealistic". Having initially said public servants would be sacked, that's since been ruled out.
Campaign spokesperson James Paterson earlier in the campaign said voluntary redundancies would be offered, only for Hume to contradict that today.
"We aren't expecting voluntary redundancies," she said, before adding the policy was for natural attrition and hiring freezes.
She also fell short of Dutton's earlier guarantees that the cuts would only be in Canberra.
"Focused on Canberra," she said.
The costings also show the cuts to permanent migration would cost the budget $4.2 billion and $3.6 billion would be raised from regulating and taxing vaping. They also have little to say about the nuclear energy policy, besides $36.4 billion in equity investments over the next decade.
These could be recouped if the Coalition sold the stake in the future but it doesn't currently have plans to do that.
Re-writing the record, not the curriculum
Coming into the campaign, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price seemed likely to be a leading Coalition spokesperson.
Having savaged the Voice referendum, Dutton offered the NT senator a pre-election promotion, giving her his newly created government efficiency portfolio (you'll be immediately sent to Dutton's naughty corner should you dare suggest it sounds anything like Elon Musk's DOGE in Donald Trump's America).
So committed was the Coalition to efficiency that it suddenly had two people tasked with improving efficiency, which on paper sounds, well, rather inefficient. But with comparisons to Trump and his administration proving more of a burden than a benefit, not to mention
Price's MAGA moment, she's largely been left off centre stage.
And yet from the wings she's managed to steal Dutton's spotlight as he sought to dump plans to overhaul school curriculums. Dutton used his budget reply speech to assert that he would return classrooms to the core fundamentals.
During the campaign he vowed the days of students being "indoctrinated" by agendas would be a thing of the past, as would "the woke agenda". Facing questions to outline what exactly he had planned for the curriculum,
Dutton told reporters on Thursday "we don't have any proposals", a message that seems to have gotten lost arriving with Price.
"With the conversations I have had with our shadow cabinet minister, Sarah Henderson, there is a plan to ensure that schools are no longer ideologically indoctrinating children, that they are actually teaching education," she said mere hours after Dutton made his comments.
"I know that Peter Dutton is absolutely and utterly all about ensuring our children in this country receive an education and aren't indoctrinated."
Rather awkwardly, the curriculum that is causing such distress among Coalition frontbenchers was last reviewed and updated in 2021 and 2022... when the Coalition was in power.
Leaders barnstorming the country
The final days of the campaign is seeing Albanese and Dutton barnstorming the nation, hitting every state in a frenzied blitz aimed at winning the increasingly few votes yet to be cast.
Albanese awoke to welcome news in the west, with two polls both suggesting Labor was leading the Coalition 53 to 47, which if replicated in the election, would see an improvement for the ALP on the last election on a two-party preferred basis.
It's a different story on first preferences, with the major parties seeing a dwindling of their primary support, leaving preferences to play a bigger role than ever before.
With the polling trend looking good for Albanese, there have been suggestions the PM is showing growing confidence (and even hubris) at being re-elected, not that he was letting on in a series of early morning radio interviews.
"I'm nervous," he told Sydney's Kyle and Jackie O.
Dutton started the day in his own electorate, Queensland's most marginal, before heading to Tasmania, where he's hoping to defend Braddon and Bass and pick up Lyons from Labor. If the YouGov poll is to be believed, Dutton would hold onto his seat with barely a hair's-width margin.
Single-seat polling is always fraught and it's hard to work out what is real and what is Labor hype. Either way, Dutton told reporters the election isn't a referendum on his campaign but the last three years.
"Australia knows there is a sliding doors moment for our country," he said.
John Scales, from the independent JWS Research, urged caution in the polls and said the national figures struggle to detect local issues.
"It's a different picture seat by seat," he told RN Breakfast. "And that's going to play out differently than what you'd expect based on the national polls."
Good day for...
Labor's electoral chances. The polling trend is increasingly the government's friend ahead of election day.
Bad day for...
Jerome Laxale, the Labor MP in one of the nation's tightest races in John Howard's old seat of Bennelong. Laxale was forced to apologise after it emerged his father had made homophobic slurs at a Liberal volunteer.
"I love my dad, but the things he said were deeply offensive and completely unacceptable," Laxale said in a statement. "He should not have said them. I’ve spoken to him and he regrets them, and apologises unreservedly.”
Honourable mention to Kyle Sandilands, whose hopes for a prime ministerial joint have been dashed. The shock jock asked Albanese if he could imagine ever smoking marijuana with him (the possession of which has been decriminalised in the ACT).
"No, I can't imagine that, Kyle," Albanese responded.
What to watch out for
Inside Labor's campaign, the party is increasingly bullish about its chances in four seats in Melbourne's east.
Albanese is expected to visit that part of the city tomorrow, where Labor hopes it can hold Aston (which it won from the Liberals at a by-election) and win Menzies, a Coalition-held seat that's now notionally in the ALP's hands. |
