Aspirational voters in marginal seats are key to election result

The Coalition’s “jobs and growth” mantra is designed to ­appeal to Coalition voters and business owners. It is also a slow burn that will take time to set in the minds of the aspirational voters who dominate the marginal outer suburban seats of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. These are the people Paul Keating said were the class created by his reforms of the 1980s and 90s. Keating was urging Gillard Labor to appeal to those voters, variously tagged “Howard battlers”, “Tony’s tradies” and Rudd’s “working families”.

Bill Shorten, once the union leader of preference for big business, is not yet targeting ­aspirationals and does not care much for small businesses despite wanting a 25 per cent tax rate for them only a year ago. He is gambling that a giveaway to traditional public sector union members, welfare-dependent Labor voters and those families who receive more in transfers than they pay in tax will give him victory. It is an old-fashioned Labor message and former leader Mark Latham nailed it on Sky News on Tuesday night when he said it was the first time he could remember a Labor leader going to the voters without a plan for growth or improved productivity. Yet it is an easy message and many in the media are buying it.

All week Labor’s leaders told voters that silvertail Turnbull was giving tax cuts to big business and the rich and Labor was “making a choice” to save Medicare and boost hospitals and schools. As Paul Kelly argued on Wednesday in The Australian, it is a false choice. Spending on all three has never been higher and bulk billing rates have been rising.

Former Tony Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin summed up the task for Malcolm Turnbull on Monday night’s Bolt Report on Sky News. The national published polling was irrelevant, she told Andrew Bolt who, on his blog and in Thursday’s column in the News Corp Australia tabloids, remained fix­ated on any national published polling negatives for the Prime Minister. Credlin said she looked only at marginal seat polling and thought Turnbull needed cut-through in those seats. That meant putting flesh on the bones of “jobs and growth” and turning a slogan into a story for real voters.

John Howard showed everyone how to do it in an interview from Penrith in with Paul Murray on Sky News. Howard was campaigning for Fiona Scott, who a week earlier refused to say if she had supported Turnbull in the Liberal leadership spill. Howard made a very simple link between jobs and growth, revenue rises for government, budget ­repair and a better future for the nation’s children.

By Thursday morning Scott Morrison was answering Credlin’s chal­lenge. Growth was essential to budget repair, he told Michael Brissenden on ABC radio’s AM. It was the key to increasing federal tax revenues and the creation of jobs. Growth and jobs had to be driven by the private sector, hence tax cuts for small and medium businesses. It is early days in a long campaign but this is likely to be an ­appealing message to the tradies with kids who dominate the mar­ginals of the capital cities and are the fastest growing group enrolling their children in new outer suburban private schools.

Just as Julia Gillard’s Medicare Gold campaign as health spokeswoman in the Latham 2004 challenge to Howard was initially thought a winner but ended up being treated with suspicion by ­aspirationals who knew there was no such thing as free money, the government needs the slow burn of jobs and growth to morph into doubt about Shorten’s billion-dollar giveaways.

As usual this week, much of the media is misreading the campaign. Those on the Left like Peter Hartch­er calling last Saturday for the real Malcolm Turnbull to ­reveal his inner leftie and Bolt on Thursday demanding the PM harness his inner Abbott are missing the point. Neither progressives nor the conservative Liberal Party membership base will decide this election. Neither group lives in the marginals. Another important point about growth that neither media progressives nor conservatives have been able to understand? At last year’s national reform summit in Sydney hosted by this newspaper and its rival, The Australian Financial Review, stakeholders settled on economic growth as the answer to reform stagnation. This paper has warned for a decade of the need for productivity reform and structural repair of the budget. But it also knew that in the transition from the mining boom, in the face of a collapse in the terms of trade foreseeable a decade ago, a simple throttling of government spending would plunge the country into ­recession. Even the Business Council of Australia and the Reserve Bank were on board. This growth line is likely to be more ­potent as July 2 nears ­because it is the only real ­answer to the nation’s problems.

Murray on Paul Murray Live said on Wednesday night that Labor had spent another week talking about the issues the government wanted to discuss. The uproar over the massive overreach by the Treasurer and Mathias Cormann in their Tuesday news conference alleging a Labor $67 billion black hole was an insiders’ folly for the media. Whether the figure was $67bn or $32bn, the voters, largely disengaged, would have been left with only one impression, Murray said: Labor had a big black hole.

By Friday morning on RN, Fran Kelly and Michelle Grattan agreed that even though Labor had been forced by the Cormann-Morrison attack on Labor spending to drop two of its signature “fairness measures” — its school kids bonus and its opposition to the government’s pension assets test — the Coalition was nevertheless still wrong to launch its original black hole attack. Go figure.

In the softening up before pre-polls open on June 14, this is one of a ­series of important suspicions that Liberal campaign director Tony Nutt wants to leave in the minds of voters. The Libs want swinging voters to believe Labor is ­unreformed from the Rudd-­Gillard years on debt, asylum-seekers and, in the remaining weeks, climate change taxes and the party’s relationship with corrupt trade unions. This will be when the negative campaign ads really sharpen. Similarly, the outrage of Brissenden on AM on Thursday and of Fran Kelly and Paul Bongiorno on RN Breakfast about Barnaby Joyce’s comments linking the Gillard live cattle export ban of 2011 with the increase in boat arrivals from ­Indonesia at the same time will have served once again only to ­elevate suspicions in voters’ minds about the 30 Labor candidates who have expressed doubts about their party’s platform. Despite the breathless condemnation of Joyce on the ABC’s The World Today on Thursday, a careful analysis of what the PM said of his deputy’s comments, and the comments themselves on ABC 24 in Goulburn the night ­before, would have picked up the “dog whistle” and care taken with the precise wording by both men.

One of the political media’s best brains, former Wayne Goss adviser and now Courier-Mail political editor Dennis Atkins, made some good points in an interview with Ray Hadley on Wednesday. Like many of the hostile Liberal base, Atkins believed Turnbull was not a natural at negative politics. The PM preferred his points to be discursive in the way of “eastern suburbs dinner party conversation”. Atkins said Shorten was trying to avoid negative attacks and leaving that work to Chris Bowen and Tony Burke. He ­believed the government would roll out a very negative campaign against Labor on boats with actors and would not seek to turn Turnbull into an attack version of his predecessor.

By lunchtime Thursday the ABC reported Bowen was confirming Labor would drop the $4.5bn school kids bonus that stumped David Feeney in an interview with David Speers the previous afternoon. This may be a hint Labor has a few tricks left with which to counter-attack on budget repair. Bolt has long suspected Labor may produce a better bottom line than the government. This would feed into Bowen’s accurate critique of the ­Coalition’s failure on budget ­repair since the debacle of the 2014 budget.

Much of this slow third week’s reporting focused on howlers by Feeney, who did not seem to know what the schools bonus was and then left his Labor briefing notes behind after a Sky News interview, and Cormann, who mixed up the PM and the Opposition Leader several times in a Canberra news conference on Wednesday. Peter Reith, also on Sky News, took my award for funniest moment of the week when he claimed in all seriousness that Cormann did it deliberately for a laugh.