Federal election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull accentuates the positive

The junior woodchucks of the Liberal Party, those who panicked over published polling last year and swung in behind Malcolm Turnbull, now know why The Australian, in dozens of editorials criticising Tony Abbott from the 100 days in office mark in 2013, always said Abbott was well placed to win a negative election campaign against Labor on asylum-seekers, climate policy, the unions, and debt and deficit.

But Turnbull wants to campaign on his own positive agenda and, as former Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin said on Sky News’ PM Agenda on Thursday, he has been right to play rigidly to the Coalition’s traditional perceived strength. He is also correct about growth being the way out of the nation’s budgetary problems.

Wholesale spending cuts would risk tipping us into recession at a precarious time in the economic rebalancing after the mining boom. Yet the Prime Minister’s reluctance to get into a dirty war with Bill Shorten is allowing Labor to escape too easily from having to account for the unresolved problems that have bedevilled it since the global financial crisis in 2008.

Experience from the latest Queensland and British elections suggests modern campaigns can surprise those who think they are home safely a fortnight from polling day.

Labor’s move left presents dangers for the government because up to half the working population pays no net tax and sees benefits as a right. Former Labor leader Mark Latham nailed the trouble with modern Labor and its relationship to the thinking of former treasurer Wayne Swan in a piece in The Daily Telegraph on Tuesday, and on Jones & Co on Sky News on Tuesday night. Swan is reprising, through Shorten, his juvenile championing of multi-millionaire rocker Bruce Springsteen as a class-war hero of the Left. He first outlined his rage-against-capitalism thinking in a puerile essay for The Monthly in 2012.

This week Latham wrote, “The puzzle of Bill Shorten’s leadership is why he has regressed to an economic manifesto relying exclusively on the role of government.” Latham blamed Swan, head of the Inclusive Prosperity Commission at ALP think tank the Chifley Research Centre. Paul Kelly joined Latham and Jones in the second half of the program for the best conversation about the direction of modern Labor I have heard in the entire campaign.

Later that night Credlin, now one of the sharpest performers among in the election commentariat, pointed out that, just as former PM Julia Gillard had so often bragged, Labor’s last government had managed to pass 86 per cent of its legislation. The Abbott government barely had passed half its program. The July 2 double dissolution, which was meant to fix this anomaly, may only make it worse by increasing the number of independents in the upper house. You know, the sort of independents numbskulls imagine will keep the big parties honest.

Heaped on top of Labor’s repudiation of its own role in creating the prosperity of the past 25 years came a stunning page one story in The Daily Telegraph on Thursday that Labor was planning to offer citizenship to 30,000 asylum-seekers on temporary protection visas and soften policy on turnbacks. As Peter Dutton said on Sydney Radio 2GB on Thursday morning, the people-smugglers will have a product to sell soon if there is a change of government. Yet the Prime Minister refuses to roll up his sleeves and do the negative politicking that is his duty as leader. He leaves it to his ministers, particularly Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, to prosecute his government’s attack on the opposition over asylum-seekers, union corruption, debt and deficit, and the electricity price rises the country will face under a Labor leader committed to an unfunded 50 per cent renewables target by 2030. It is no wonder the Coalition base and conservative commentators such as Andrew Bolt, Chris Kenny and Paul Murray despair.

A fascinating segment by Sabra Lane on the ABC’s 7.30 on Wednesday night showed polling researcher Tony Mitchelmore interviewing a group of swinging voters from the western Sydney seat of Lindsay about the PM. The panel had liked the change to Turnbull when interviewed six months ago but now felt he had done too little. They longed for a leader who stood for something. You guessed it. They thought Abbott was OK in hindsight.

Yet there was also good news for Turnbull from the swinging voters. Many were worried about Labor and its high spending and deficits. Murray on Sky News has lamented several times this week the failure of many journalists to call out the opposition on its claims about the government’s zombie tax cuts, those counted in the government’s projections but still blocked in the Senate. Opposition Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen, who refused all week to admit his deficits were higher than the Coalition’s in the forward estimates, has now accepted more than $33 billion of zombie cuts, according to David Uren in this paper on Tuesday.

Many commentators have branded this election boring. They are wrong. This is the first really important philosophical election since Fightback in 1993. It is a battle for the heart and soul of modern Australia. Labor offers a model with big government as the engine of growth based on increased spending on education and health as the drivers through productivity improvements, while the Coalition points to the role of business in creating the condition for prosperity as the employer of 80 per cent of working Australians. It is no coincidence Britain, among the worst affected countries in the EU after the GFC, is now growing strongly. The Cameron government, which came to power in 2010, cut company tax from 28 per cent to 20 per cent and has flagged a further cut to 17 per cent.

ABC 7.30 hosted Bowen and Morrison on Tuesday night to debate the parties’ competing economic visions. Leigh Sales kept them on track and Bowen bragged again that Labor had set the agenda on policy for two years. But as Morrison said several times, it is easy to set an agenda based on high spending, lifting taxes and blowing the budget’s bottom line. It is a strategy that does not leave the nation much room for further stimulus in the event of stronger international economic headwinds, as Turnbull said during his trip to Perth on Wednesday.

Funniest media moment of the week? On Seven’s Sunrise on Thursday morning, Bob Katter, defending his ad comparing himself to a cowboy who has just outgunned his LNP and Labor opponents, saying he did not know about the Orlando terror massacre five days earlier. Get out of town, Bob.