Circus was next door, but plenty of elephants in the room for Peter Dutton’s Coalition election launch
But, oddly enough the Liberal Party campaign launch at the Liverpool Catholic Club had more elephants in the room than there were under the big top.
On a rare day of double campaign launches – Labor and Anthony Albanese in Western Australia and the Opposition Leader and the Coalition in western Sydney – both leaders decided there was a new narrative for 2025 electioneering and that was that debt and deficit are no longer selling points in Australian campaigns.
It’s clearly possible to be elected and re-elected while facing a decade of deficits as long as there are plenty of promises for hard-pressed citizens, their children and grand children, even if they are unlikely to be fulfilled or have already failed.
As well as the interment of the decades-long mantra of trying to deal with debt and deficit here is also the assumption that no tough decisions – like those of the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello eras which increased productivity and put the nation back into a surplus and debt-free – can even be whispered.
The Prime Minister’s confident presentation on the other side of the continent of Labor’s achievements was a guarantee of more of the same from Labor.
As for the ability to pay for those promises from either side – forget about it!
Dutton’s launch was small on crowd size – less than 250 party faithful even including a raft of front benchers and the grey hairs of past leadership, John Howard, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison.
The launch was also deliberately low-key, no balloons, no booming music and no placards outside the modest western Sydney club next to the site of the circus.
In part this was a modern-day development of tighter security but it was also part of the Liberals’ appeal to no-fuss, low budget and no razzmatazz while asking people facing cost-of-living pressures in the outer reaches of Howard’s battlers for their vote.
There was plenty of substance and new announcements skewed towards restoring the “dream of home ownership“, extending the relief of the popular cut to petrol tax excise with a complementary (and temporary) tax cut aimed at lower-income earners, protecting retirement savings and superannuation, lowering energy costs, particularly gas, and creating new investment funds to help regional growth.
For a federal election campaign launch there was an extraordinary emphasis on the western suburbs of Sydney including a sombrely clad Melissa McIntosh, the prospective first cabinet minister for Western Sydney.
The reason for that is, as Dutton said, Western Sydney is a key battleground for the election – an election he says the Liberals “can and must win” to save Australia from the failure of the Albanese government.
Part of this emphasis is borne of a belief that there is a simmering and silent resentment among the outer suburbs and regions which is not captured in national polling or picked up by the “elites”.
There was even a pointed mention of the “silent” majority of the Morrison miracle victory of 2019.
But it seems that the old narrative and economic argument of addressing debt and deficit and managing economically with restrained spending are now part of that disregarded “elite” argument.
While arguing that Labor has destroyed the economy and trashed people’s lives with its spending and fuelling of inflation the Coalition simply adopted the same approach of big-spending promises.
In dollar terms the Coalition matched Albanese’s $10bn for first-home buyers and effectively matched Labor’s budget tax cuts to take effect in late 2026.
Clearly conscious of the success of offering “immediate relief” through the petrol excise cut and not waiting for 15 months, Dutton announced his tax cuts for lower- and middle-income earners as being complementary to the cheaper petrol promise.
The risk of the low-key launch is that it looks like the Coalition is still running slow and without momentum with only matching spending to offer.
It also meant Dutton had the elephants in the room of how is he going to pay for it, what is going to be the big-spending defence announcement to come, how is he going to deal with Donald Trump and why is his spending better than Albanese’s if there is the same outlook of a decade of deficits?
Stardust Circus doesn’t have elephants perhaps because they have all moved into political headquarters.
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Peter Dutton and the circus both came to Hoxton Park in western Sydney for a show and there was no doubt the Stardust Circus had a bigger venue, was more entertaining and certainly had a bigger crowd.