Campaign more focused on rival handouts than rival plans for economy

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As a political staffer and a media commentator I’ve now been involved in every election campaign for the past quarter-century, and I can’t recall one that has been as empty of real debate about our country’s future.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this election is unimportant. There hasn’t been a more important one, given the direction the Albanese government is taking us. It’s just that whether we want our economy to be weaker or stronger, our society to be more or less divided and our strategic posture to be more or less robust are almost wholly unaddressed in a campaign that so far has been about whether we prefer a 25c-a-litre cut in fuel tax or a 70c-a-day cut in income tax.

I get that this election is about the cost-of-living pain that almost every Australian feels at the checkout, the bowser and when the bank takes out the mortgage payment each month. But there’s so much more to cost of living, and how it might best be addressed, than short-lived electoral gifts paid for with tax revenue that government takes from one pocket to put in the other.

Ultimately, our living standards depend on the strength of our economy, the productivity of our people and the safety of the wider world in which Australia has to operate – none of which is being substantially addressed as part of this campaign, mostly because any serious analysis would involve difficult choices and a willingness to challenge vested interests.

With $65bn in new handouts since Christmas, the Albanese government is essentially milking Middle Australia to buy its way back into office, forgetting there’s only so much that can be taken from Peter to pay Paul.

Some 40 per cent of income earners pay no net tax, while the top 10 per cent of taxpayers already pay 50 per cent of all income tax. While Peter Dutton, to his credit, has declared that countries can’t subsidise their way to success or tax their way to prosperity, the campaign is more focused on rival handouts than on rival plans for a stronger, more prosperous economy.

Take the Coalition’s now abandoned policy to get federal public servants to return to the office. Surely it is reasonable to question Labor’s rapid expansion of the public service without a concomitant lift in services or productivity.

The fact that the Coalition didn’t prepare the ground adequately to deal with the inevitable Labor scare campaign was the problem, not the policy, because we might as well throw in the towel if the conservative side of politics can’t argue for smaller government.

The very fact that the Minns government in NSW is still pushing on with its demand that state bureaucrats return to the office says it all. And in any event, the luxury to work from home remains alien to most workers outside the laptop class, a fact that’s missing in the WFH debate where socio-economic status is far more relevant than a worker’s gender.

It’s just the latest manifestation of the general dumbing down of public debate. It was once the expectation that both sides of politics would produce specific policies to be released during an election campaign covering all the main portfolios and with full upfront costing over the forward estimates. Both sides would typically have broad statements of direction and aspiration plus specific new initiatives in all the key areas of government such as health, education, defence, trade, foreign relations, infrastructure, social services, Indigenous affairs, tax and economic management.

NSW Premier Chris Minn joins Anthony Albanese on the campaign trail in Sydney. Picture: Jason Edwards/NewsWire

In every ministerial office I worked in, preparing these documents consumed many hours leading up to the election, and in the campaign proper they were adjusted based on strategic focus and the available funding envelope. If only fiscal discipline mattered as much today as it did in the Howard era.

Instead of reasonably comprehensive and plausibly thought-through policy positions, election campaigns now comprise daily “announceables”, such as $1bn for more mental-health centres from Labor on Tuesday and $2.4bn in extra subsidies for home batteries on Monday, pitched simply as “investments”, without any attempt to integrate them into a coherent broader policy.

For instance, there was no bid to explain why extra mental-health centres made more sense than the 10 Medicare-funded psychologist consultations that Labor had earlier deleted from mental-healthcare plans. And no attempt to explain how more domestic solar systems with batteries would integrate into broader energy policy.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that neither side really trusts the public with a proper explanation of its policy beyond the barest outline or political caricature.

With a generally dumbed-down media class that lacks the intellectual heft to expose policy spin and the ability then to convey it without bias to the voter, what hope do we have of educating people who consume their information via a one-second swipe rather than thoughtful analysis?

Take the Prime Minister’s daily stunt with his Medicare card. Not only does the Coalition have no policy to change the funding status quo, but Labor under Anthony Albanese has a worse set of bulk-billing numbers than those it inherited from its predecessor.

And as for health “cuts”, when Dutton was minister there weren’t any. Yes, the funding increase under the Coalition was not as much as Labor’s promised hikes, but it still increased substantially year on year.

Few journalists bother to work this out and fewer still bother to report it. And where is the analysis exposing the well-worn Labor ruse of promising sweeping spending increases in the areas of welfare, health and education over a 10-year period but putting very little of that into the actual budget (the immediate four years) with the rest backended into years five to 10, which in our three-year election cycle is close to meaningless?

Peter Dutton attends Blue Scope Steel in St Clair in Sydney’s west to discuss the cost of materials on the campaign trail. Picture: Thomas Lisson

In the last campaign Albanese defended Labor’s energy price modelling, and its promise to cut power bills by $275 a year, as “I don’t think, I know”. Well, now not only has the promise been junked, but so has the modelling. So how is it, with all the resources of government, that the now discredited modelling was never reworked or republished? Yet the government is still careering down the path to net zero?

Why are we still committed to the 82 per cent renewables target based on junked modelling, with the renewables rollout way behind schedule, way over budget and not backed up by the gas reserves needed to keep the lights on when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine? If a company tried to run out a large-scale transformation such as this, without updating the modelling it had walked away from, the ASIC would have charged the directors. Only in politics could these clowns ask to be rewarded with another term.

Likewise, immigration. Where is the adult conversation Australians are owed about the sort of country we want to be? How is it that we have a plan for everything under the sun but no population plan? Who is going to call out the Ponzi-scheme use of ever-increasing migrant intakes to prop up debt-ridden budgets? Or debate how we maintain Australia’s values with current immigrant numbers and backgrounds?

Perhaps these increasingly urgent questions are too divisive to be considered in the heat of a campaign. The trouble is, both sides of politics have treated them as too divisive to be dealt with at all. The Coalition would claim some of this is too hard to deal with from opposition, but for the Labor government there’s really no excuse.