Federal election 2016: Canberra press gallery falls for Bill Shorten’s Medicare con

Labor has pulled an enormous media con job on much of the Canberra press gallery. Journalists have been prepared to praise Bill Shorten and his ­Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen for “doing the hard yards on ­policy”.

As Chris Kenny said on Sky­ News’s Viewpoint last Sunday night, all this supposed policy work adds up to this: higher taxes, higher spending and higher deficits than the government across the four-year forward estimates of $16 ­billion. And Labor gets there only by counting more than $30bn of so-called zombie savings measures (the Tony Abbott cuts Labor itself blocked from the 2014 ­budget), yet it continues to get away with criticising the government for counting the same measures, as Bowen did to Leigh Sales on ABC’s 7.30 on Monday and on Sky News’s Beattie & Reith on Wednesday night. Breathtaking and largely unremarked were it not for Paul Kelly and David Uren in The Australian this week.

Much of the progressive media and many vocal conservatives have spent the campaign pointing out the Prime Minister has soft­ened his progressive positions on social issues to accommodate the right of his party, which supported Abbott in the leadership spill in September last year. Imagine that: a politician being political. Too few have been willing to call out Shorten for the fraud he and his campaign are. Let’s look at it:
• His 100 positive policies have morphed into a single negative Medicare scare based on a lie. It is likely to persuade voters this man is just not prime minister ­material.
• Shorten pledged after the budget to make the election a referendum on the government’s decision to cut the $4.5bn Schoolkids Bonus, only later to accept the revenue savings in his own mid-campaign costings release on May 26.
• After a year of criticising the 2015 Coalition changes to the ­pension assets test, Shorten accepted the change and banked the associated revenue mid-campaign.
• All campaign Labor maintained the fiction that the government had cut $57bn from health funding across 10 years. This money is part of Wayne Swan’s 2013 budget bomb committing to $80bn of completely unfunded spending on health and education across the decade. Labor’s final costings, revealed under the cover of the government’s campaign launch last Sunday, restored only $2bn of the mythical $57bn.
• Shorten has called anyone who supports a gay marriage plebiscite homophobic, only to be con­fronted by Dennis Shanahan in this paper on Wednesday citing a video three years ago of him supporting a plebiscite. The Labor leader too must be a homophobe. I mean, obviously anyone who says voters should have a say on the issue is homophobic, right? What rot. The gallery is too dumb to point out Labor’s own platform ­allows a free vote for its MPs on the issue until 2020. Remember many on the Catholic Right of the party do not support a change to marriage laws. It took this paper’s Troy Bramston to bell the cat on that one on Sky News’s Paul Murray Live on Wednesday night.
• Shorten has dismissed the concerns of at least 30 of his own candidates who do not support his party’s platform on asylum-­seekers by saying for eight weeks that his policy is the same as the government’s. He told Michael Brissenden on ABC radio’s AM on Thursday morning that the government knew Labor would stop the boats. Yet he persists in opposing temporary protection visas, won’t rule out resettlement of refugees from Manus Island and Nauru to New Zealand, and maintains the fiction the Gillard government’s Malaysia Solution — for only 800 refugees when 50,000 had arrived — was the answer. Many journalists, 15 years after the Tampa standoff, still do not understand the issue.
• The Opposition Leader and Bowen, heaping praise on company tax cutters Bob Hawke and Paul Keating at Labor’s launch last Sunday week, both denied the role of company tax cuts in stimulating jobs.
• This despite Bowen having written exactly that in his book about Australian treasurers last year and Shorten in his 2015 budget reply speech having ­pleaded with Abbott to join him in a plan to lower company taxes.

As a leader with little real-world experience outside the trade union movement, who knifed Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard and was central to the 2013 return of Rudd, nothing in Shorten’s past better sums up the true man than his April 2012 interview with David Speers about Gillard’s statement while overseas in Turkey supporting Peter Slipper’s return to the Speaker’s chair.
Shorten: “I haven’t seen what she said, but let me say I support what it is she said.”
Speers: “Hang on, you haven’t seen what she said?”
Shorten: “But I support what my prime minister said … I am sure she’s right.”

Niki Savva summed it up well on Thursday in The Australian: “The vision was wrong, the tone was wrong, the content was wrong.”

Shorten campaigned hard but that does not mean he had a good campaign.

And Malcolm Turnbull? He finally fired up last Sunday at the Coalition launch at Homebush in western Sydney, obviously smarting at the damage done the previous week by the Medicare scare that by then was falling down around Shorten’s head.

Despite a silly story in the News Corp Australia Sunday tabloids last week suggesting Abbott would have done much worse than Turnbull, it is clear on climate policy, electricity prices, asylum-seekers, defence and trade union corruption that Abbott would have torn Labor to shreds. Abbott had a good point on Paul Murray Live on Wednesday: gay marriage was coming to prominence as an issue in the past week only because Turnbull had been so quiet on the government’s key issues.

By Thursday at the National Press Club in Canberra, the Prime Minister for the first time looked truly ascendant and like a winner.