Federal election 2016: Bias blinds many in media to Labor’s reckless spending

Writing this column presents many amusing opportunities each week to reflect on the surreal nature of political media coverage and the personal biases all journalists cannot avoid, no matter how hard they try.

Late Wednesday afternoon presented a spectacular such moment to contrast the coverage of what I admit I believe is Labor’s biggest mistake of the campaign, Bill Shorten’s glossy economic policy brochure and admission that day that Labor’s spending would not be pared back in the traditional budget four-year forward estimates period to match the, admittedly timid, restraint planned by the Coalition.

After 5.30 on PM Agenda on Sky News, host David Speers crossed to his panel including Paul Murray. Murray was scathing and compared Shorten’s decision with John Hewson’s Fightback document, which cost the Coalition the unlosable election in 1993. He announced with great passion and assuredness “today Bill Shorten lost the election”.

I switched to ABC 24 and The Drum, hosted by Eleanor Hall, as soon as Murray had finished speaking and there industrial lawyer and regular abusive tweeter Josh Bornstein began pronouncing on the genius of the Shorten announcement. The Coalition was relying on the discredited (except by Treasury and all serious economists) idea tax cuts for business would boost jobs and growth.

No, Bornstein opined, the economy would get a real kick-along from Labor’s proposed increases in spending on education and health, Labor’s superior NBN plan and its commitment to jobs-enhancing renewable energy technology from its (unfunded) plan for 50 per cent renewables across the economy by 2030.

I instantly recalled Labor’s last two budgets under Julia Gillard. In 2012 treasurer Wayne Swan had proudly declared “the four surpluses I announce tonight”, and in 2013 this newspaper’s budget front page ahead of the rugby league State of Origin match had featured a Bill Leak cartoon of Swan (a Queenslander in a Maroons jersey) kicking the high-ball fiscal time bomb of unfunded Gonski education reforms and an unfunded National Disability Insurance Scheme to then opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey (in NSW and Liberal Blue jersey). This week Labor decided to pick up Swan’s bomb and run with it. It seems likely to explode in Treasury spokesman Chris Bowen’s hands.

That is if Coalition HQ can ever get its act together and produce a strong negative advertising campaign building on its “same old Labor” spending ad that got a run this week.

On Thursday morning even The Sydney Morning Herald’s left-leaning political editor, Mark Kenny, was forecasting dire trouble for Labor on the debt and deficit issue. Terry McCrann on the front page of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney and Ellen Whinnett on the front of Melbourne’s Herald Sun both declared Shorten would plunge the nation deeper into debt. McCrann said Labor’s 32-page plan was mush that would destroy Bowen’s reputation.

So what is it Bornstein and the Twitterati are not getting? This is a time bomb for Labor because it plays into voter suspicions the party has learned nothing from the failures of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd years.

Just as the 30 candidates dissenting on Labor’s formal position on asylum-seekers raise doubts in voters’ minds, the party has not learned its lesson there. And as Shorten’s electricity price rises built into his renewables commitment will suggest to many voters that Labor also learned nothing from its carbon tax debacle.

Those of us who know Labor MPs personally understand it is a legitimate suspicion because many in the party do not believe they got anything wrong when last in office other than the Rudd-Gillard rivalry. As this paper remarked after the 2013 election, the danger for Labor was always that it would learn the wrong lessons from its defeat: that it would believe it had the right policies but the wrong leaders.

After the debate that wasn’t at the Broncos leagues club in Brisbane where Shorten appeared alone while Malcolm Turnbull was grilled in typically tough fashion by ABC 7.30 host Leigh Sales, dedicated election watchers were treated to a stunning brawl on Murray’s Paul Murray Live between former NSW Labor premier Kristina Keneally and former Tony Abbott chief of staff Peta Credlin. It was vicious.

Keneally claimed voters would back the Shorten spending plan for its fairness. Voters had rejected Abbott’s first budget for its unfairness, she claimed. She did not mention the unfairness of Labor’s non-means-tested childcare subsidies for multi-millionaires announced by Kate Ellis on Monday. And I seem to recall it was the Senate crossbench that rejected the 2014 budget and can only wonder two years later whether voters might have been happier had its spending cuts passed.

Credlin launched a strong attack on the former Labor government’s lack of fiscal discipline and the blocking tactics in 2014. Murray had trouble restoring order to what has been my favourite television moment of the campaign.

But no one from this rhetorically challenged Coalition managed to fend off the accurate claim all week that under the Coalition the deficit, which Hockey had promised to transform into a surplus, had actually doubled.

So time for a little economics history lesson. When Swan constantly complained about revenue writedowns he was actually referring to rises usually of about 6 per cent in his last three years compared with Treasury’s budget forecast rises of about 8 per cent. Swan was, in fact, running giant deficits at the height of the boom in mining exports and the terms of trade. Never mind the GFC spending of 2009-10, this went on for another three budgets. And Labor had inherited a $22 billion surplus from John Howard and zero net debt. Hockey, in contrast, was confronted by a real-world collapse in the terms of trade as iron ore and coal prices fell by 75 per cent from 2014. Hockey faced real revenue writedowns and Swan simply did not get increases as big as he had hoped and boosted government spending faster than real revenue.

Both sides are vulnerable to another economic charge made on ABC’s Lateline by excellent new political reporter David Lipson and by Speers ahead of his hosting of the Shorten appearance in Brisbane. Turnbull’s business tax cuts and Shorten’s economic blueprint once would never have been taken seriously because of their 10-year timeframe. As Credlin said on Wednesday, in an era when forecasts don’t survive the six months from the end of year MYEFO to the May budget, 10-year forecasts are fairytales.

By yesterday, The Australian and the News Corp Australia tabloids carried stories forecasting Shorten was about to announce a series of cuts to better target family payments in an effort to pare back a budget black hole the government says is as high as between $35 billion and $66bn.

On ABC radio’s AM Scott Morrison said Labor had learned nothing from its years of ramping up spending now and promising spending restraint later. He told host Michael Brissenden Labor should be held accountable for recommending savings now after blocking the Coalition’s proposed savings in the Senate since 2014.