Federal election 2016: PM keeps powder dry as Shorten ditches Keating playbook

The collapse of media and political standards in Australia has never been more obvious than this week, yet we have never had more media coverage of our politics, and that coverage has never been less prescient. Nor has the politics been less effective.

Media critics from the Left and Right decried Sunday night’s debate at the National Press Club in Canberra for its lack of fireworks and the refusal of Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten to answer properly the seven questions they faced. Yet those questions, derided on pay-TV and talkback radio as obscure questions from newspaper journalists, were just as shallow as the rest of the week’s coverage, dominated as it was by “gotchas” on superannuation.

It shows how debased our media culture has become that it has taken until yesterday for serious journalists at the ABC to question Labor on growth and taxes rather than simply let the Opposition Leader claim his plan for jobs and growth depended on defending Medicare (at a time when bulk billing is growing) and spending more on schools (when the nation has never spent more and the results in international tests have never been worse).

Not only did Shorten claim all week that this implausible plan would improve national productivity, he bought a stupid line from The Saturday Paper on May 7 that has reverberated around Twitter like a thunderstorm since: the idea that trickle-down economics is dead. As if that means tax cuts don’t stimulate investment and growth, as even the most cursory look at the past 30 years in this country would prove.

But by yesterday morning at least Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan could agree on the ABC’s RN Breakfast that Shorten was now facing a problem on his own personal previous support for small business tax cuts. On the corporation’s showpiece radio program AM host Michael Brissenden did a good job testing Labor finance spokesman Tony Burke on his party’s 30-year history of reducing company taxes.

Five days earlier, on Monday night, Chris Kenny on Sky News was quick to call Shorten on his scorn for the government’s very modest plan to reduce corporate tax for small and medium businesses to 25 per cent over the next four years and the whole corporate rate to that level in a decade. Kenny played a long extract of Shorten’s 2015 budget reply speech appealing to the government to join him in a project to lower company tax rates to — guess what? Yes, to 25 per cent.

As former Business Council of Australia chief Tony Shepherd said on the same program, governments don’t create wealth, they redistribute it.

But for weeks on Twitter, former Labor economic adviser Stephen Koukoulas and Crikey political editor Bernard Keane have led an army of dissenters who see no link between corporate taxes and prosperity. Tell that to Paul Keating, who — as this column has pointed out — cut company tax rates from 49c in the dollar to 39c as treasurer in 1987; and, as Niki Savva said on Thursday in The Australian, cut it again as PM from 39c to 33c in 1993.

No, the debate was compelling for one reason. If you listened you could hear the real point of this election. The Prime Minister uses “jobs and growth” to appeal to the 80 per cent of Australians employed in the private sector. He links his own success as a businessman to the successes of our part of the world, which has been the engine of global growth since the GFC.

Labor, repudiating everything the Hawke and Keating governments achieved, looks to old Europe for an economic model that seriously claims that benefits equal productivity. It takes Labor back to former Marxist trade union leader Laurie Carmichael and his Australia Reconstructed report of 1987, based on a study of the long moribund Scandinavian economic model. In the post GFC, post-Occupy Wall Street world, Labor wants more big government spending on social programs, just like the failing governments of welfare dependent Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It stands for handouts over effort.

Turnbull appeals to the aspirational, self-employed voters of the marginal seats of our capital cities most of whom have left the trade union movement during the past 30 years to become self-employed small businessmen dominating the trades. Labor seeks support from those who want a bigger slice of someone else’s cake.

All week Shorten claimed the Coalition wanted to take money from ordinary Australians and give it to big business. Paul Murray on PM Live on Sky News railed against this fraud, pointing out the proposed cuts were allowing businesses to keep only a little more of their own money. This Labor attitude to profit and tax is the triumph of entitlement culture in the party that modernised the Australian economy in the 1980s and 90s.

As usual during this campaign, one of the sharpest observers was Mark Latham, who on Sky News on Tuesday night excoriated Shorten for his campaign against company tax cuts, and said he was ashamed that the party he once led would repudiate the best of its history. He likened modern Labor to the party of Arthur Calwell in the 60s.

This has always been the point of “jobs and growth”: to sharpen the differences in vision for our future. The electorate can choose a party that goes for growth that lifts the living standards of all Australians, or a party that has returned to a time when class envy was the basis for electoral support for the left of politics, which just happens to be a time when Labor was out of office for 23 years.

As Paul Kelly wrote in this newspaper on Wednesday, no one wants poorer services but social policy does not exist in a vacuum. Turnbull is arguing our ability as a nation to run strong welfare programs depends on growth. “Everything we need to deliver … requires a strong economy,” the Prime Minister said on Sunday night.

By midweek Labor had its second negative ad on high rotation. Turnbull was cutting $80 billion from health and welfare, it claimed.

That would be the same $80bn Wayne Swan never funded and left as a landmine to blow up future generations of young Australians.

Many conservatives worried in the media that the Coalition was still on its positive growth campaign ads. But a blizzard of attack ads on Labor awaits. As Bill Leak’s cartoon in yesterday’s edition of The Australian suggested, Turnbull has a huge stockpile of attack weapons on asylum-seekers, trade union corruption, debt and deficit and electricity price rises built into Labor’s climate commitments.

My funniest moment of the week came on ABC TV’s The Drum on Monday night when David Leyonhjelm, Lee Rhiannon and Glenn Lazarus were all given a free kick to deny the mandate theory of politics. I guess 100 years of political theory has just fallen to the penetrating glare of the “brick with eyes”.

And a dishonourable mention for ABC TV’s Insiders on Sunday morning, which for the second week in a row largely glossed over yet another shambolic performance by Labor member for Batman David Feeney, who blew himself up two weeks in a row.

No such escape for Barnaby Joyce over his Indonesian live cattle export comments or Mathias Cormann who misspoke Shorten’s name for Turnbull’s.