Election 2022: Winning figures may count for nothing

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Finance Minister Simon Birmingham on Thursday. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

Scott Morrison will race to the polls with two new sets of numbers under his arm.

One tells the story of the government’s economic success on the back of a spectacular jobless rate.

The other reveals the folly of any claim Anthony Albanese may make to a genuine interest in budget repair.

The release of Labor’s costings may have been a “tick a box” exercise for the Labor leader a day and a half before people have to vote, but they are fundamental to the economic contest.

Labor is proposing to increase the deficits by some $8bn – not reduce them.

It is also adding a further $54bn to the government’s debt profile.

Perhaps opposition Treasury spokesman Jim Chalmers believes that the current debt and deficit numbers are so large by comparison that people won’t notice another few billion dollars added to the ledger.

And perhaps Labor believes people won’t notice the $400m irony of abolishing the temporary protection visa system brought in by the Coalition to address the human disaster of the last Labor government’s asylum-seeker policies.

All this should be fodder for a Coalition campaign focused on the issue of trust when it comes to economic management and concerns about Labor’s commitment to a strong border-protection regime.

It intellectually undermines Labor’s premise that it has learned from its past profligacy.

While attacking the Coalition for its pandemic spending in one breath, it proposes to spend more in government.

The question at this late stage of the game, however, is whether either the good news on jobs numbers or Labor’s admission of bigger debt and deficits if the ALP wins will turn any votes.

With more than a third of eligible Australians having already cast their ballot, the Prime Minister is trying to appeal to a considerably smaller audience.

The window is closing for the Coalition to get its message to resonate among those voters left who may not have yet made up their mind or are a chance of being turned.

Meanwhile, Albanese keeps making mistakes without consequence.

Such has been the consistency of the Labor leader’s gaffes that they no longer seem to matter.

Albanese’s belief that Australia’s borders were still closed was possibly the greatest howler of the campaign.

But as one Liberal strategist conceded, most Australians probably have their heads under the covers, haven’t tuned in and simply aren’t paying attention.

It is the tale of two communities, with the larger group of people so disinterested they are actively avoiding engagement because they are so annoyed with the choice they are now forced to make.