Federal election 2016: Scare built on a lie spurs ALP, Coalition plays to its strengths

Peta Credlin on SkyNews was tipping a pick-up for Labor.

Voters needed to know a prospective prime minister really wanted the job and would do anything for the privilege of leading the nation, Paul Murray told his audience in a panel discussion with former Tony Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin and former Julia Gillard chief of staff Nicholas Reece on PM Live on SkyNews on Tuesday night.

Discussing Bill Shorten’s false but effective Medicare scare campaign, the centrepiece of the party’s launch at the Dame Joan Sutherland Centre in the western Sydney seat of Lindsay on Sunday afternoon, the panel agreed Shorten had campaigned well and was leaving the electorate in no doubt he really wanted the job.

Malcolm Turnbull much less so, the panellists thought, despite a more assured performance on the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday night when, battling a heavy cold, he put host Tony Jones down for doing the Labor Party’s bidding and stood strong against the Medicare privatisation lie.

After all, bulk billing rates in this country have never been higher and how on earth could a partly unfunded system (the Medicare levy does not cover the cost of the system) designed to shell out tens of billions of dollars a year ever be privatised?

By Thursday night on ABC 7.30 Leigh Sales finally put the Medicare scare to the sword when Shorten refused to take up her challenge to “put your hand on your heart and look Australians in the eye” and tell them you believe the Coalition plans to privatise Medicare. After the AMA rejected that notion on Wednesday Shorten had nowhere to go, but he will keep the scare running.

Many in the commentariat — both the ABC and Fairfax left and conservatives such as Murray — will have egg on their faces if Shorten scrapes over the line next Saturday.

Chances are he will fall short and this was always a two-term recovery operation for Labor.

But if he pulls it off, and the trend has been to Labor for several weeks, no one will look as stupid as Turnbull. Progressives from all sides of politics thought he would bring a new, more reasonable tone to the country’s top job, but in reality he brought economic indecision and a patrician, remote air with an unwillingness to take part in hand-to-hand combat, the sort his predecessor excelled at.

Experience tells this old newspaper editor when the swing is on, it’s on and talk about sandbagging marginal seats in such circumstances is usually deluded. If Fairfax’s notoriously volatile IPSOS poll was right last weekend and Labor is leading 51-49 then it will likely form government.

Turnbull’s advisers need to crank him up to show voters he can be tough and take the government to a lead in the two-party preferred vote. By Thursday afternoon on SkyNews PM Agenda, Credlin was tipping Labor would do better than the eight to 10 seats her Labor contacts were telling her it would pick up, and by yesterday morning Fran Kelly on Radio National and Kieran Gilbert on SkyNews AM Agenda were both tipping 14 seats to Labor with more to come.

Turnbull seemed to have been stung into action by Wednesday, fighting off the Medicare scare and launching, with the help of his Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton and Wednesday morning’s News Corp tabloids, a devastating attack on Labor over asylum- seekers after the interception of a boatload of Sri Lankan refugees.

As Dennis Shanahan argued in The Australian on Thursday, many Labor candidates are uncomfortable with their party’s policy on asylum-seekers. The advantage of Turnbull’s attack was that it was based on the truth, unlike Shorten’s false Medicare scare. “Turnbull must now make sure he persists — as Shorten is — and uses Coalition conservative strengths to kill off a dangerous all-or-nothing Labor strategy,” Shanahan argued, quite correctly.

By yesterday Shanahan was picking up Turnbull’s harder rhetoric against Shorten on his union connections, especially in Victoria where the Andrews government’s dispute with volunteer country firefighters threatens two Labor seats and makes two marginal Coalition seats safer.

Credlin told her Tuesday night audience Shorten had campaigned well and the Medicare scare was a legitimate and most likely effective strategy. The political editor of The Courier-Mail, Dennis Atkins, in Tuesday morning’s paper and on Ray Hadley on Mornings on Sydney’s 2GB and Brisbane’s 4BC, described one of the first, most effective scares in his time as a young political reporter. Liberal Party director Tony Eggleton built a scare for the Fraser government out of an interview given in opposition by former Labor Party finance minister Peter Walsh on capital gains tax on the principal place of residence. This was not Labor policy but a general discussion on the economy. The scare worked, lie though it was.

On the Bolt Report on Monday night former Queensland premier Campbell Newman cited a Labor federal ad running in the Sunshine State in which Turnbull’s face morphs into Newman’s.

He and former NSW Labor treasurer Michael Costa agreed this sort of campaigning made reform in the national interest almost impossible.

And that has been there for all to see this week. Everyone who understands Medicare knows the ancient payments system should be outsourced. Labor Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen looked hard at the issue as minister for human services in 2009. But Turnbull has had to rule out that much needed change, which would have no effect on actual health service delivery and would save the country money to combat the scare campaign.

Best performance of the week was Shorten’s strong speech to his base at the Labor launch and best interview was Bolt’s with Tony Abbott on SkyNews on Wednesday night. Abbott did his best to quell the ardour of conservatives who it seems would rather lose the election than see Turnbull win it. As Abbott said, the country always deserves the best government possible.

Funniest moment of the week: Julia Baird on The Drum on ABC continues her new weekly segment with an Uber driver who says the main issue in the campaign for his passengers is marriage equality, mentioned by 15 of his 18 passengers the previous week. He must be driving in Turnbull’s Sydney eastern suburbs electorate.