Word on the hustings is that Anthony Albanese’s disastrous first week has forced Labor strategists to frantically re-calibrate their campaign. Policy announcements are apparently being hastily re-scheduled — including what presumably would have been Labor’s last-week big guns.
The frenzied re-scheduling is also playing havoc with Labor’s preferred “small target” strategy. The simple fact is that the party has put out notably little policy detail so far. Presumably it had planned on keeping the act up for as long as possible, giving the government as little time as they could to attack them.
Especially when Labor’s big campaign gun is nothing more than a reheated version of the same lie they’ve run for the last three elections.
Opposition home affairs spokeswoman Kristina Keneally has ramped up Labor’s attack on the Coalition over claims it would cut funding to Medicare if re-elected on May 21.
So, it’s Mediscare III: The Return of the Fib. This will be the third election in a row that Labor has run the campaign scare that the Coalition is imminently planning to “privatise”, “slash”, or “defund” Medicare. In 2016, the campaign of dishonesty included a fake text message, targeting key electorates, which falsely claimed to have been sent from “Medicare”. In 2019, I personally asked Labor MP Brian Mitchell for evidence of his claim that the Coalition had set up a “Medicare privatisation task force”. Mitchell ended the conversation.
Labor are scrabbling just as desperately, this time round.
The attacks follow historical remarks made by Social Services Minister Anne Ruston in parliament in 2015, when she told the Senate that “Medicare in its current form is not sustainable into the future without some change being made”.
Ruston has also said that there “would not be any cuts”. But it is also a plain fact that the current Medicare setup is unsustainable — the dead weight of the geriatric Boomer generation will see to that.
Speaking of unsustainable Labor boondoggles.
Labor would launch a review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme to stop rorting “cowboys” and “unfair cuts”.
Opposition NDIS spokesman Bill Shorten flagged a possible Productivity Commission inquiry next year, which would invite submissions from people with a disability.
The Australian
The NDIS, remember, was the flagship policy of the Julia Gillard government. Even at the time, it was never fully costed. Gillard resorted to the accounting trick of moving most of its funding past the Forward Estimates, meaning that the bulk of the costs of the scheme never appeared on her government’s books. With Gillard but a distant, dark political memory, her hare-brained scheme has become a 20-billion dollar a year albatross. With more than half a million “clients” on its books, its costs will shortly overtake the entire cost of Medicare.
For all that, though, disability advocates are constantly complaining that the most needy are being ignored, while dodgy claimants clean up. It’s also alleged that “disability” has become a de facto unemployment benefit.
That Labor are trying to pull off such a brazen con-job, at the same time that they’re reheating the unpalatable leftovers of Medicare for the third time, shows just how little they’ve actually got to offer voters.