Andrew Bolt: May 21 will be an election about nothing

Right now voters are being offered no more than this: a Liberal Prime Minister with few plans and a Labor leader saying “me too”. 

No, Prime Minister, this won’t be a “very important” election. May 21 will instead be Australia’s first election about nothing.

Nothing, if we judge by the first extraordinary election ads from Labor and the Liberals.

Both simply beg you to just trust the leaders, just when polls suggest many voters trust neither.

The most astonishing is the one Labor leader Anthony Albanese put out on the weekend.

I don’t want to use the word “liar”. But this long-time Socialist Left man is now selling himself as a better version of Liberal leader Scott Morrison.

Looking through his new nerd glasses, Albanese insists “I know the value of a dollar”, and he aims to “get spending under control to keep taxes low”.

Yes, you’ve probably heard all that before – but from Liberal prime ministers. That’s always their promise.

Here’s Tony Abbott, for instance “Lower spending, lower taxes – that’s this government’s core business.” Here’s Morrison: “The best guarantee against higher taxes is lower spending.”

And now Albanese is saying this? Albo? The man who fought like fury against Abbott’s spending cuts? Who fought for years against some of Morrison’s tax cuts?

Scott Morrison’s election pitch is fundamentally like Albanese’s. Picture: AFP.

Weird. Albanese also pledges to “work with business”, and says not a word about unions. I’ve never seen such a conversion since St Paul took a donkey to Damascus.

But Albanese’s ad makes clear that he realises he’s got a big credibility problem. He actually has no experience in handling our nation’s finances.

Here’s how he tries to paper over that in his ad: by boasting (?) about “graduating in economics and serving six years as infrastructure minister”, which he claims “taught me what makes our economy tick”.

Never have I heard someone running for such a serious job put so much faith in what he learned at uni as a teenager.

But there’s one more wild thing about Albanese’s ad that confirms he’s trying to sneak into office as a fake conservative.

Spot what’s missing from the list of things he rattles off as his big plan for a Labor government: “making childcare cheaper, reducing power bills and investing in fee-free TAFE, and I will make it easier to see the doctor”.

Hello? What happened to global warming, which an earlier Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, called the “great moral challenge of our time”?

I can understand a Liberal leader not wanting to mention global warming – Morrison sure doesn’t in his own ad – but a Labor one?

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese is now selling himself as a better version of Liberal leader Scott Morrison. Picture: Flavio Brancaleone

Seems to me he’s trying not to scare voters about Labor’s expensive and useless plan to change the world’s temperature and turn back the tides.

On the other hand, Morrison’s ad at times sounds like a Labor one, checking off his alleged failures.

“You always have setbacks,” he admits. “You always have imperfect information.

“There’s drought, there’s floods, there’s fire, there’s pandemic, there is now war.”

Labor would just love to talk about those floods and fires and pandemic, too. And it would say a lot more about the government’s response than that it’s just karma, and the information it had was “imperfect”.

But Morrison’s pitch is fundamentally like Albanese’s: just trust me, and not that other bloke.

Or as Morrison puts it: “We’re dealing with a world that has never been more unstable since the time of the Second World War” but “we’re actually in a really strong position”.

And as he added at his press conference after calling the election: “Now is not the time to risk that” with Albanese.

In the ad, there’s even a curious, lingering shot of the wedding ring on Morrison’s hand.

Is this to emphasise that Morrison is a family guy you can trust? Or is it also a dig at the divorced Albanese, who voted for same sex marriage?

Who knows? Rule nothing out, because when the two parties have blurred their big differences, all you have left is this “trust me” talk. And when they can’t talk policy, they’ll get personal.

But is that so wrong?

Take Albanese, now selling himself as Mr No-New-Taxes.

Really? Can you really trust that when Albanese wants to remove the cap on the tax the government can raise, and when his deputy, Richard Marles, on Sunday refused to say if Labor will spend more on hospitals and schools?

And what about Morrison. What’s his big vision?

These things may be spelled out before the election, but right now we’re offered no more than this: a Liberal Prime Minister with few plans and a Labor leader saying “me too”.