If day one of the 2022 Australian election is any indication, it’s going to be a lot more interesting contest than pollsters have assumed. Underdog Scott Morrison came out swinging, while media favourite Anthony Albanese tripped over his own feet with a howler that he’ll spend the rest of the campaign trying to live down.
Anthony Albanese has stumbled on the first day of the election campaign, unable to recall key economic figures while trying to spruik Labor’s credentials for government […]
After obfuscating on the cash rate, Mr Albanese was also unable to recall the national unemployment rate.
“I think it’s five point … ah four … sorry, I’m not sure what it is,” he conceded.
ABC Australia
To be fair to Albo, this is the sort of “gotcha” nonsense that journos love to spring. Just as, recently, the legacy media tried to flog Scott Morrison for not instantly recalling the exact price of a “loaf of bread” (whether the bog-standard white sandwich or artisan sourdough was not specified).
On the other hand, the gaffe is a lot more telling. Albanese is campaigning to be prime minister. Like a lawyer entering the courtroom, a serious aspirant kicking off an election campaign would be expected to have rehearsed this sort of stuff to death.
If there were any two numbers people would expect a prime minister to know, it would be these.
The risk for the Labor leader is that his inability to identify the cash rate and the unemployment rate, at worst, now comes to define the rest of the campaign.
At best it becomes a prominent feature of the Coalition’s central premise – that Labor can’t be trusted to manage the economy.
More to the point, it undercuts the entire Albanese narrative that he’s a safe pair of hands. That he’s rehearsed, knows his stuff, and knows what he’s doing when it comes to economic management.
It also highlights the danger of Albanese’s small-target strategy. He’s gone into the election more-or-less a blank canvas — and the first thing voters have seen is a candidate who either dodges questions or flubs them completely.
Albanese will now spend the first week on the defensive. To get beyond it, he is likely to bring forward announcements that Labor had planned to keep up their sleeves.
This was a serious blunder and goes directly to the question of competence.
The Australian
In a stark contrast to Albanese (and to his own behaviour so often as PM), Scott Morrison has come out swinging on day one, going for a knockout punch on some of his biggest obstacles.
Scott Morrison spent the first full day of his re-election campaign back in the bushfire zone that left the first scars on his reputation – and he took with him one of his harshest critics.
By heading straight into the danger zone, Morrison is apparently trying to turn the narrative around.
Andrew Constance, as the MP for the state seat of Bega, two years ago said Mr Morrison deserved a hostile reception from bushfire victims in the town of Cobargo.
On Monday, he would not back down from his past comments but declared it was “history” and he was focused on the future.
The Australian
The other great weakness for Morrison has been his continual spinelessness on culture war issues. Not this time.
Scott Morrison has backed a ban on transgender people competing in female sports and warned the education curriculum risked being “sold out to a left-wing agenda” in comments that could ignite the culture wars in the 2022 campaign.
The Prime Minister used a blitz of radio and television interviews on Monday to endorse the push from Liberal Warringah candidate Katherine Deves to ban transgender women from competing in female sports […]
In February, Mr Morrison said it was “terrific” Liberal senator Claire Chandler drafted a private member’s bill protecting sporting organisations from legal action if they ban transgender people from competing in women’s teams.
The Australian
Most likely, Morrison is simply sniffing the cultural wind. As Virginia’s “Mama Bears” showed in recent elections there, the foisting of radical Queer and gender ideology on children is a bridge too far. The more recent “Lia” Thomas scandal has also proved to be a wake-up call for many women that they are being disenfranchised in the name of “equality”.
With women making up one of the largest groups of undecided voters leading into the election, all the sound and fury of the rainbow activists may well signify nothing. In the voting booth, no-one can call you “TERF”.