Australia 2022 Election

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Albanese spent the last three years hiding in the basement and it means that he hasn't had very much practice.  It shows.  He's just lucky that this happened now and not one week out from election day.

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The problem with Albanese's opening gaffe was that it underlined a common Coalition line of attack, that Labor is no good at managing the economy.  (By the way, perception matters just as much, if not more, than reality in an election campaign.)  The subsequent headlines have not done anything to neuter that line of attack, indeed they have re-enforced it.  For instance, Albanese insists that his policies are fully costed; his finance spokesperson has now corrected him.  The costings are coming before polling day, but it was an unprovoked error for him to be unequivocal that he only releases costed policies two days before backtracking and admitting that the policy has not yet been costed.

Again, none of these things will make the difference in isolation.  But right now, Albanese is succumbing to a narrative that does not cast him in a positive light.  Incompetent and complacent.

The election is still his to lose, but he's in a bit of a catch-22, in that the more people see of him, the less they will like him, but he can't just continue to hide because Morrison works his hardest when there's an election on.

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Labor are leading by 14 points in the polls over the LNP.

Not even a Hillary Clinton style choke will stop Albo from losing this election.

Labor has got it in the bag.

Women just don't like Scomo.

Link please?

He's probably not referring to this:

Albanese pays a price for bad week as voters swing back to government

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has paid the price for a damaging opening week in the election campaign after voters cut their support for the opposition from 38 to 34 per cent while swinging back to Scott Morrison as preferred prime minister.

Primary support for the Coalition rose from 34 to 35 per cent, and Morrison made gains on his personal approval and performance on key issues including economic management and national security.

The first major survey of the campaign revealed a reversal of fortune for the two leaders, with Morrison leading Albanese as preferred prime minister by 38 to 30 per cent after the Labor leader held the advantage two weeks ago with a lead of 37 to 36 per cent.

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Polling continues to show the ALP is favored in a 2PP count, but polling also continues to show that the key issues for voters in this election are the economy and the cost of living.  Traditionally, the Coalition leads on the economy and Labor leads on the cost of living.  But polling indicates that the Coalition and Labor are running about even on the cost of living, while the Coalition has a clear lead on the economy.

People would love to attribute a potential tightening in the race to the inherent stupidity of Australian voters or the bias of the Murdoch media, but consider also that perhaps people are only beginning to acquaint themselves with Anthony Albanese, and they simply do not like what they see.

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Is there any party that considers the horrifying, totalitarian Australian lockdowns a grave mistake and actually promises no more lockdowns? This would be my issue 1, 2, 3 etc. in Australia.

Not among serious parties (but there is the populist United Australia Party, which is polling 3-5%).  However, it's very interesting the degree to which covid does not feature in the campaign so far.  Morrison says he doesn't want more lockdowns, but by enabling the state governments with tons of emergency payments, he wears some of the responsibility for them.  Few doubt that Albanese would be worse on this issue and it is a massive relief to me, personally, that on the federal level nearly all of the restrictions are gone now which means that Albanese would have to re-instate them, which would be much more controversial than simply maintaining them.

The political atmosphere is such that both instating another lockdown, and criticising the past ones (making people feel as if their sacrifice was worthless, perhaps), are both political losers.  Morrison therefore is straddling the line between saying that there won't be more and claiming credit for the perceived "lives saved" by the past ones.  Albanese wants to prosecute the case that he would have done everything Morrison did but faster, better and harder; but he also doesn't want to say that he would bring back lockdowns.  So the best bet for both of them is to say very little about it.

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I hate when this forum "Americanizes"--you know, overstating the "totalitarianism" of lockdowns.

If you think opposition to totalitarian lockdowns is a purely American phenonenon, it might be you who has an America-centric worldview.

If you genuinely think Australia's lockdowns were totalitarian you're listening to too much Ted Cruz and not enough of us who actually went through them.

Speak for yourself.  Being confined to a 5 kilometre radius for 3 months at a time, repeatedly, under the threat of thousands of dollars of fines, is not an experience that I care to repeat.

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Whelp, it was inevitable.

After Morrison's horror debate last night, the comment making the rounds is the fact that he's apparently "Blessed to have children without a disability".

Senator Hollie Hughes has managed to dig the hole even deeper by saying that she didn't feel particuarly blessed when she had an autistic child, and basically engaging in a lot of victim-blaming towards the disabled community.

Everyone will of course forget about this in a day or so because it'll no doubt be swept under the rug in less than a week by Murdoch and Costello, but  . . . oof.

I don't mean to be impolite, but your commentary is borderline delusional.

"Horror debate" is an incredible reach.  In fact, Albanese is getting credit for managing to (mostly) speak in complete sentences, given how low expectations were after his first week on the campaign trail.  His answers on foreign policy questions lacked coherence and raise his competence into question yet again.  He had a good closing statement but I saw nothing in the debate that will substantially alter the trajectory of the campaign (and not just because nobody watched it).  He's lucky that it was on Sky News, frankly.  Scott Morrison even handled a question about electric vehicles better than he did- pretty embarrassing for Labor.

There is now a real risk that due to Albanese narrowly winning the focus group straw poll*, he will think that his performance yesterday was good enough to win the election, when I would tend to think that he will need to put in more work to convince the undecided and apathetic.

*For anyone interested, the result was
Albanese 40
Morrison 35
Undecided 25

Remember, the election is still Albanese's to lose, but he has to actually convince people that he will be better than Scott Morrison, rather than convince people that Scott Morrison sucks.  Those are two different tasks.

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Not sure how it's delusional when even Sky News' talking heads couldn't spin it positively for Morrison.

You seem to be (intentionally?) missing the point.  Everybody knows who Scott Morrison is, and many people have a hardened, unfavourable impression of him.  That he ran nearly even with Albanese in this debate when Shorten won all three easily in 2019 is a bad sign, not a good sign.  It's an indication that Albanese is having significant difficulty closing the deal despite widespread disaffection for the incumbent.

The Labor party literally began tweeting mid-debate about how much more cruel and inhumane they plan to be to asylum seekers.  Don't tell me that this is the sign of a confident performance, let alone a "horror debate" from the other side.

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Personally (as someone on the NDIS for Autism) I can see the point he thought he was making, and many would agree with it, but the way he worded it couched in his evangelical holier-than-thou was truly vile.

The average person would not see it as a 'holier-than-thou' comment largely because it was clearly not intended as one.  In fact, Morrison and his wife had a lot of difficulty having children and needed to use IVF along with the increased risks that this entails.  The Labor party would be wise not to overplay their hand because it just comes across as insincere finger-wagging.

It's astounding, really.  The attempt to continue to make an issue out of Morrison's religion has got to be some of the stupidest political strategy out there.  Labor has clearly learned nothing from 2019- they only listen to their own circle.

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Other than the fact that his church is now under investigation for child abuse, right?

Another example of people believing their own propaganda.  Hillsong isn't his church.

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Other than the fact that his church is now under investigation for child abuse, right?

Another example of people believing their own propaganda.  Hillsong isn't his church.

So it's fake news that he's been to Hillsong services multiple times?

Consider employing your critical thinking skills.

Now, we know that politicians attend religious services on a regular basis.  This does not mean that they are members of that congregation, or in any way affiliated with the religious denomination.

All it would take is a simple fact check - you could very easily find out which church Scott Morrison attends in his electorate, and it's not Hillsong - and you would not be spreading misinformation.  Take a moment and consider that if the sitting PM were in any way involved in the cover-up of child abuse at Hillsong church, then the media would be working its very hardest to investigate and expose that link.  This isn't happening because of some conspiracy; it's not happening because Morrison literally is not a member of Hillsong church.

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So, at this moment, where would y'all place Labor's chances at winning the election? Percentage terms...

It's a really interesting election, with a lot of variables.  I think Labor's chances of forming majority government are slightly declining week to week, but still looking at 50% chance at this point, with a hung parliament also looking like a good possibility.

The small target strategy by both major parties is probably a net advantage to Morrison.  But it's entirely possible that there is some movement in inner-city seats towards the Holmes a Court funded independents, which presents challenges to both parties: more acutely to the Liberals in retaining those seats, but also to the Labor party is negotiating with them to form government.  Nobody seriously doubts that all of these independents would support an Albanese government, but the cost for extracting that support remains undefined.

What the first couple weeks of the campaign have showed is that a few key assumptions going in may not have been correct:
1. It was generally believed by both sides that Victoria was going to be very strong for the ALP and that the Liberals would not be able to make gains here.  Reporting from on the ground seems to indicate that the Labor party is actually struggling in outer suburban Melbourne with constituencies that they have always been able to take for granted; these electorates are ethnically diverse and greatly affected by cost of living pressures.  Support for Palmer's UAP appears higher than the national average.  Whether gains among white, higher-income voters in the inner city are enough to offset this trend is an open question.  There is also some evidence that Daniel Andrews is beginning to act as a drag on the federal ALP here.

2. It was also generally understood that the ALP would have serious room to grow in Western Australia and Queensland, based on the positive performance of the Labor state governments there.  I think the WA seats are very interesting but I'm less convinced that Queensland is going to be as fruitful for the ALP as they would like.

3. The Liberal strategy to victory was defined as sandbagging NSW, maybe even gaining a seat or two there, and managing not to lose any further seats to the independents.  (They're also making a play for both seats in the NT, Lingiari being considered competitive because of the retirement of the popular ALP incumbent.)  Even as Labor's chances of forming a majority government begin to slightly decline, it's just not clear to me how the Coalition would be able to pull this off - it relies on just about everything going right.

Albanese needs to draw a sharper contrast between the parties if he wants to drive this home.  And both candidates for PM will be merely hoping that their opponent just "continues to be himself."

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The other issue is that the Australian population is far more concentrated in state capitals than in other countries, Queensland aside. If the Liberals wrote off Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth they would mathematically be locked out of rule in those states.

No disagreement there, but I will add an observation: the National party is likely to do quite well in this election, regardless of how the Liberals fare.  The agricultural policy debate was missed by most urban commentators but it did not go unnoticed in regional electorates.  The general vibe is that the ALP has completely written off any attempt on making any gains with rural or regional voters in this election - which is not to say that they cannot win without them, but it will certainly complicate the task.  And with party operatives no longer expecting any seats in Queensland to change hands, it does limit the number of options available.  The strategy now is to dominate in WA, make gains in NSW and Tasmania, and hold the fort in Victoria (Chisholm remains a possible gain to offset likely losses in McEwen and Dunkley).

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I do think the Coalition will end up winning. A decade of Liberal government and nothing accomplished.

This feels a weird election to assess. Not sure whether 2019 trauma is to blame or whether it's because of how people see the candidates (Scotty disliked but approvals holding up better than you'd might expect and Albo not really being seen positively) but I honestly have no idea where this could go. I could see the Coalition pulling it out of the fire, I could see Labor winning in a landslide.

Most likely result seems a narrow Labor majority but it's certainly not something I feel comfortable prediciting.

The problem with predicting this election is that it feels more like there are dozens of simultaneously held by-elections than a truly national election.  There are a lot of unknowns and wildcards.  And it's entirely understandable that people would take the mood of themselves and those around them and extrapolate that onto the wider public, but the nature of Australia's state border closures over the last couple of years means that certain economic conditions vary wildly from location to location.  And then we also have the growing phenomenon of inner-city electorates embracing what is sometimes comically / erroneously referred to as a "post-materialist" position on environmental and social issues.  (Obviously, if the teal independents, or indeed even the Greens, posed a genuine threat to their accumulated wealth, then we would be having a very different discussion.)

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Was the ALP ever able to compete for farmers ?. Seems like a loosing stratagey to focus on a block that almost never votes for you and isn't located in that many competive ridings.

They typically don't support the ALP, no, but there is widespread discontent among regional electorates if the ALP would bother to even make the effort to tap into it.  It's not wise to read too much into these debates*, but the performance of the Labor shadow minister was so bad that even the left-leaning papers admitted it.  That being said, it's interesting how little I've seen about regional independents this time around - there was quite a lot of hype in 2019 (misplaced, as it turned out).

*Another one today - Josh Frydenberg vs Jim Chalmers for the treasurers debate.  I haven't had time to review the whole thing but the clips seem to indicate that Chalmers was the winner, for whatever that's worth.  (Frydenberg is obviously pretty distracted given the difficulties he's facing in keeping his own seat.)

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The snippets of the second leader's debate featuring Albanese gave me PTSD flashbacks to when I would interview for jobs and internships in my late teens whilst hungover and having done no preparation beforehand.

Unfortunately, it looks like he is headed for victory regardless of how uninformed and incompetent he is.  He has a funding boost for just about every subject that he mentions, but somehow isn't going to reduce spending elsewhere or raise taxes.  Many people will be worrying about the pressure that this spending will put on inflation and in particular whether this means that interest rates will rise even more than they otherwise would have.  Labor is banking on any exodus of mortgage belt voters being outweighed by the appetite for change among white, wealthier, and older voters who were insulated from the over-policing in the lockdowns and are insulated from interest rate rises because they own their homes outright and can afford the rising costs of groceries and transportation.  It is very difficult to imagine that such a national 2PP lead could result in anything other than a majority government.

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Who are you supporting Ebowed if you support someone/plan on ranking the main two parties? I remember you supported Labor before the pandemic but I'm not sure who you are supporting?

I've supported the Greens and Labor in every previous election.  I'd number them this way this time

[1] Liberal Democrats
[2] Liberals
[3] United Australia Party
[4] Greens
[5] Labor
[6] One Nation

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Albanese is simply using Abbott's playbook.

Agreed.

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Sportsbet have Labor shortening to $1.37 and now Liberals are $3.10.

https://www.sportsbet.com.au/betting/politics/australian-federal-politics/47th-parliament-of-australia-4664855

Sportsbet would have the best research in the market as their money is on the line. They have an impressive research process with sports, and if that translates to politics, Albanese has a new house in Canberra to live in.

You don't lose from $1.37 unless you are named Hillary Clinton.

You may want to get your memory checked.

Sportsbet to lose at least $5.2 million thanks to election bungle
By Anthony Colangelo
May 19, 2019 — 5.12pm

Sportsbet will lose at least $5.2 million thanks to its decision to pay out early on Bill Shorten winning Saturday's federal election as large bookmakers again had to admit they had misread the political landscape.

The betting company paid out on Mr Shorten becoming prime minister two days before Australians went to the polls, where voters surprisingly chose to re-elect Scott Morrison's Coalition government. Sportsbet said on Thursday Mr Shorten was at Winx-like odds of $1.16 to win.

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Who are you supporting Ebowed if you support someone/plan on ranking the main two parties? I remember you supported Labor before the pandemic but I'm not sure who you are supporting?

I've supported the Greens and Labor in every previous election.  I'd number them this way this time

[1] Liberal Democrats
[2] Liberals
[3] United Australia Party
[4] Greens
[5] Labor
[6] One Nation

Protest voting against Labor?

Well, I've always despised Albanese, ever since I met him when I lived in his electorate ten years ago.  He was handing out pamphlets at the Marrickville train station and I turned up with a couple of my housemates, hungover, reeking of booze and cigarettes, wearing pajamas, and he said to us; "Thank God youse guys are here, I couldn't understand what any of these people are saying!" as we had been waiting in line after a large group of Vietnamise-Australians.  Those are his loyal constituents that he was making fun of to a few whiteys he mistook as bogans.  Oops.

The more pertinent reason that I'm backing the Liberals over Labor is that Scott Morrison is a better Prime Minister than Anthony Albanese could ever hope to be.  They have identical policies on most issues, but Morrison is placing less emphasis on nationalism, insularity, and xenophobia - ergo, Labor is no longer a viable choice for somebody badly affected by prolonged border closures and punitive lockdowns.  I don't like Morrison, and I don't like the Liberals, but they are easily the lesser of two evils at this election.

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Anyone with the Liberal Democrats as their primary is not a serious person.

I can live with that.

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The more pertinent reason that I'm backing the Liberals over Labor is that Scott Morrison is a better Prime Minister than Anthony Albanese could ever hope to be.  They have identical policies on most issues, but Morrison is placing less emphasis on nationalism, insularity, and xenophobia - ergo, Labor is no longer a viable choice for somebody badly affected by prolonged border closures and punitive lockdowns.  I don't like Morrison, and I don't like the Liberals, but they are easily the lesser of two evils at this election.

I don't live in Australia (obviously), but I'd vaguely been rooting for an ALP victory at this election to punish Morrison and the Liberals for instituting the strict lockdowns and the restrictions on exiting the country. Are Albanese and the ALP really so much more hardline that it makes sense for single-issue "the lockdowns were wrong" voters to preference the Coalition over them? (Would be extremely bleak if true).

Great question, and an understandable perspective to hold from an international perspective: Australia handled covid in a very punitive way, and Scott Morrison could easily end up in a list of nasties along with Ardern and Trudeau for that, but the reality on the ground is that Morrison acted as a handbrake on the worst impulses of Australians throughout the pandemic.  On most issues, he had to be dragged kicking and screaming.  It is difficult for me to describe the relief now that the international border closure has already been lifted: I really do not believe that Albanese would lift it if it were still in place right now and he won the election.  How could he?  Australia has one of the highest, if not the highest, per-capita case rates in the world right now.  If ever we were going to have restrictions, it would be now: but Morrison did the politically unpalatable thing of removing them at a federal level already, and Albanese isn't going to ignite a political storm by re-instating them.

(You may be wondering how that makes sense: basically, the average person is under the impression that any restrictions that remain are based on "science" / "health advice", so they tend to oppose removing them if they are already in place, but the political and popular will to bring back new ones no longer exists.)

Throughout the last two years, the Labor party has demanded going "further" and has never then said that such things are no longer necessary: they banged on and on about the need to establish on-shore quarantine centers, which would doubtlessly transition to being detention centers for visa holders in a matter of absolutely no time at all, proposing to waste billions on the construction of camps where travelers would spend two weeks, presumably entrenching the ridiculous "border controls" that they had been demanding the whole time.

The reason for this is very simple; Labor wants to position itself as the party of health care.  While they have wisely chosen not to emphasise this for the federal election campaign, do not be under any illusions about their continued status as being entirely beholden to nursing unions and medical lobbies.  (Ironically, some of the worst ambulance ramping, indicative of overfilled emergency departments, is in Labor-run states such as Victoria and Western Australia.)

All of this being said, this federal election is certainly not about covid, or lockdowns, or border closures.  Really this is a cost-of-living election, and that's why Albanese needs to run an insular and xenophobic campaign, which is advantageous in the Australian electorate (particularly outside of NSW and Victoria).  The more that people pay attention to the global context, the more they see that Australia's economic position is comparatively enviable, aside from the ever-present risk of the housing bubble popping.  If Albanese can convince people to keep looking inwards (very likely), then people might buy the idea that high petrol and grocery prices are exclusively Scott Morrison's fault.

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Do you think you'd be voting differently with Shorten as ALP leader?

I do like Bill Shorten - he is a fundamentally honest and decent person, unlike his successor.

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Ebowed can ignore facts all he likes, but the fact is that statically, the Australian economy had been better under Labor

Not sure what this is referring to?  I'm not a Liberal hack, so I'm under no illusions about the last ten years of economic policy, but I'm also not relying on outcomes from the GFC to determine my support in 2022.  The economic conditions now are completely different.  I'm largely motivated by wanting to keep inflation as low as possible, and nothing that Albanese is saying is particularly convincing that he will be capable of doing that, despite his claims that he won't do anything differently to Scott Morrison (why is he running, again?).

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https://www.themandarin.com.au/188810-election-2022-almost-700-million-kicked-in-for-a-defence-reno/

The federal government has announced yet another renovation and expansion to a defence facility, with the promise of $694.4 million for the General John Baker Complex, which is home to the joint operations command for the Australian Defence Force here and overseas.

Defence minister Peter Dutton has made yet another spending promise in his portfolio, with $30 million towards the renovation and expansion of army reserve and cadet facilities in Tasmania.

That investment is a portion of a $1 billion that has been set aside to renovate army reserve and cadet facilities around the country.

A re-elected Coalition government would put in place a technology skills passport that will assist with getting Australians work ready.

It seems the Coalition is seeking to present itself as having lots of meat to its defense policy.

Frankly I find it impossible to distinguish the foreign and military policy of the ALP and Coalition.

Labor claims that it would not have "allowed" the Solomon Islands to sign a security pact with China, although I'm sure if the roles were reversed, the Liberals would be accused of neo-colonialism for saying that.  It's not like they have a fundamental difference in policy to have achieved such an aim, as you point out.