Dirty deeds and cheap tactics the new election norm

We’ve seen experts have to go into hiding, former PM’s be labelled unrepeatable words and voters who still have no idea what the major parties stand for. This really is an election for the ages, writes Peta Credlin.

Even though this is an absolutely vital election, it’s been a really dreadful campaign.

It’s a vital election because a Shorten Labor government would be the most left-wing in our history. And it’s been a dreadful campaign because the would-be PM is trying to evade his responsibility to explain the impact of his policies and to detail how much they’d cost.

Instead of responding to damaging climate costings with credible detail of his own, Bill Shorten has stooped to personal abuse of an expert economist who’s served both Labor and Liberal governments. Likening the former head of the Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics to a tobacco-company doctor spruiking that “smoking is good for you” was yet another low blow in a week that brought a new level of malice to our politics.

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Dr Brian Fisher is a former Sydney University professor of agricultural economics and faculty dean, respected senior bureaucrat and long-term adviser to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. When this universally acknowledged individual says that achieving Labor’s climate change targets (depending on the final design of the policy) would knock nearly half a trillion dollars off GDP by 2030 and reduce average wages by $9000 a year, the proper response from a credible alternative PM is not abuse but an alternative analysis.

Even though this is an absolutely vital election, it’s been a really dreadful campaign. Picture: AAP/David Clark

But as well as being bullied by Shorten and his shadow minister Mark Butler, Fisher had his home address published by activists on line and his eggs hurled at his front door. He now says he’s withdrawing from public debate to avoid further intimidation. Is this really the new normal when anyone now challenges the Zeitgeist — Folau, Fisher, who next?

But this wasn’t the only encounter of disrepute. Activists who want to see Tony Abbott ousted from his seat of Warringah daubed cartoons calling the former PM a “c — t” in prominent places along the main road in his electorate; and unions funded a front-page ad masquerading as a news story in the health minister’s local paper asking “who will Greg Hunt stab in the back next” (trying to link Hunt to Turnbull’s departure).

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As well as this malice, there’s a new level of intolerance in this campaign too. For those on the political left, the people you disagree with are not just wrong, they’re bad. Hence the tendency in this election not to argue a case, but to bully opponents into silence; and to not so much to disagree, but to denigrate.

When a political party that’s favoured to win promises to cut emissions by 45 per cent and move to 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, it’s only right and proper to probe that policy, given that the existing 23 per cent renewable energy target has helped to double power prices over the past decade and drive local jobs offshore.

The Liberals have really made this game on. Picture: Kym Smith/News Corp Australia

Likewise, when the Real Estate Institute of Australia says that Labor’s capital gains tax and negative gearing changes will reduce the value of people’s homes by at least 10 per cent, the party proposing these changes has some explaining to do. And never mind 50 per cent electric cars by 2030! But this is a Labor Party that thought it wouldn’t have to justify its policies because Malcolm Turnbull at least half-agreed with most of them. Now that Labor’s up against a PM in Scott Morrison who’s a tribal Liberal (and savvy politician), it prefers vitriol to explanation, with Shorten dismissing Morrison as a “coal-wielding, climate-denying, cave dweller”. Really?

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If we keep heading the way of making our power unaffordable and unreliable, it’s Labor that will have us back living in caves, not the government!

Right now, both leaders are battling to determine the ground this election will be fought on. That we’re now into the final fortnight and it’s still a contest, shows just how close this race is. By focusing on Labor’s tax and spend agenda, Morrison has at least tried to make it about the economy. By refusing to cost or even detail his policy, Shorten has made it about the theology of climate change.

Last year, Labor thought this campaign would be Bill’s coronation tour but by changing the PM, the Liberals have really made this game on.

Originally published as Dirty deeds and cheap tactics the new election norm