Election 2022: Buoyed by jobs data, Scott Morrison’s pitch is one of trust

Scott Morrison at the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce lunch in Melbourne on Wednesday. Picture: AFP

Scott Morrison will head into the final 48 hours of the campaign with the momentum behind him as unemployment data released on Thursday confirms the lowest jobless rate in half a century.

Having tactically narrowed his message this week, Morrison’s pitch is simple.

His housing policy is about the future and the jobless rate provides the evidence that the economic plan is working.

He is presenting a simple choice for people – who do you trust more to manage the ­economy? Morrison wants voters to have this singular focus come polling day.

The unemployment numbers provide this springboard.

With Liberal Party advertising doing the heavy lifting on the negative message about an Albanese government, Morrison is out trying to sell the positive and ­appealing to aspiration.

This strategy stands in contrast to Labor’s final week, which risks repeating the mistakes of the 2019 campaign with the promise of doing lots of things but lacking a unifying principle.

Anthony Albanese’s final setpiece speech failed to articulate a specific agenda beyond the ­rhetorical promise of doing things better. And lots of them.

He gave a wide-ranging speech about all the things he wants to do in government, some of which he will have little ability to influence, such as inflation – a global problem as confirmed by Britain’s inflation rate rising this week to the highest level in 40 years.

With the sense that the contest is tightening ahead of Saturday, Albanese on Wednesday sought to reassert and sharpen the ­ideological and policy differences between Labor and the Coalition.

But the underlying message was one of fear and loathing.

To punctuate the point, he made an incredulous claim that the Coalition’s proposed efficiency drive through the public service would kill people.

It was a broad-ranging pitch, in a safer environment than he has been exposed to during the campaign, constructed entirely on a ­rejection of Morrison.

This only served to confirm that personality politics has been, and continues to be, the central plank underwriting Labor’s claim to government.

With economic management sharpening as the key election issue of the last four days of the campaign, the key contest has come down to a test of the government’s macro-economic success against Labor’s assertions that only it can solve what it is trying to project as the new crisis – wages, cost of living, aged care and climate change.

Albanese presented as the most confident he has been throughout the campaign, but was cautious not to provide answers that would trip him up at the finishing line.

He has wrapped himself in ­cotton wool with the palpable fear that another mistake could cost him the election.