Labor came out swinging in week two of the election, but only ended up knocking itself out
Week two of the election campaign was a brutal and bruising affair for Labor – unfortunately most of the blows were self-inflicted. DAVID KILLICK laments the week’s highlights.
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AFTER a slow start, Labor finally revealed its fighting zeal during the second full week of the 2021 state election campaign — kneecapping candidates and scorching policies.
Unfortunately, for the most part, it was their own.
This has been a brutal and bruising election campaign for both sides so far. And if the hyperactive rumour mill is to be believed, there is more to come.
On Tuesday, from the outside at least, it looked like Rebecca White might have solved the great insoluble problem of Labor’s campaign to date by getting Kingborough mayor Dean Winter aboard, although it took intervention from the federal party to get that over the line.
For a moment, the troubled seas were stilled. Ms White’s press conference with Mr Winter took place at 4pm on Tuesday.
The brokered peace lasted a bare six hours before Fabiano Cangelosi’s letter slamming the party’s pokies and protest policies was leaked to the media.
At his subsequent press conference, he clarified that he detested the policies, would campaign to have them overturned but would be bound to vote for them if elected.
The political maxim that disunity is death in politics is never more true than during election campaigns. Dean Ewington was ejected for similar dissent the week before.
On Wednesday, ALP state president Ben McGregor gave the Labor leader a mighty serve as he exited the Labor campaign over what were described as ribald text messages sent to a colleague seven years ago.
Thursday’s revelation was that Braddon Liberal candidate Adam Brooks was facing criminal charges over the storage of ammunition.
He denies the allegations, which carry with them the possibility of a fine or a term of imprisonment.
This plethora of scandals points to the drawbacks of this snap election. Even the major parties have struggled to prepare.
It may be that after May 1 there is time for some reflection on the difficulties of attracting suitable people to political life and the barriers to greater participation.
In the meantime, the signs are pointing towards the government being returned for a third election victory on the trot.
The clock is ticking down for a Labor reversal of fortune. Voting starts at pre-poll centres on Monday.
The Opposition has shifted up a gear with the start of its campaign to heal the state’s ailing health system.
Perhaps the next stage of the campaign will be the part where policies rather than personalities the focus of debate. It doesn’t seem much to ask.
Who will hold the government to account?
It has been a strange election campaign so far and Labor is off to a very rocky start. DAVID KILLICK analyses the events of week one.
THERE are hospital cleaners and clerks, nurses and community workers who will toil today to pay their dues to unions whose faceless faction chiefs are knobbling the party that says it represents their best interests.
It has been a strange election campaign so far and Labor is off to a very rocky start.
It’s unusual to see a party that loses a candidate have a better week on the hustings than the party that doesn’t.
We learned during the week that the Kingborough Mayor Dean Winter tweeting about wanting to buy a coffee on a public holiday was “anti-worker” and fatal to his preselection chances.
Yet sabotaging an election campaign to maintain an iron grip on a deeply divided Labor Party somehow is not.
Nor is signing a secret deal that includes a clause offering to go easy on wage theft, handily leaked to the media by someone keen to cause embarrassment.
Dissenting Labor members argue that the union apparatchiks’ central belief is that having total control of an opposition — and its next leader — is more desirable than having partial control of a government.
It is a belief founded in embracing defeat as inevitable.
Those cleaners and nurses are possibly just as bewildered at how their union leaders and the political party they run are performing on their behalf after seven long years in opposition.
Labor is squaring up against a government that has presided over a familiar list of searing failures: in health, in housing.
As city commuters are stuck in worsening traffic, they can ponder the halting delivery of infrastructure spending and ballooning government debt.
Vulnerable children have been abused in hospitals and schools and detention centres or shuffled off to Northern Territory work camps, bumbling ministers have misled parliament, while 15,600 unemployed people complete for 5700 job vacancies as social security supports are cut.
In their years of making an art form of under-delivery, the Liberals have shown an allergy to hard reform, have outsourced their hard thinking to consultants and have shown an endemic disdain for transparency. And their federal branch is drowning in scandal born of their own ineptitude.
Who will hold them to account? Labor wants to talk about TAFE.
It is not to say that TAFE’s 21,000 students and 800 staff are not important.
But where should they rank compared to the 50,000 people languishing on the outpatient waiting list or the other myriad failings a smart campaign would focus on?
TAFE is the cheap gong Labor will bang again and again over the coming days. It is not resonating.
The Liberals must be delighted, no less so than because their opponents’ central claim that the education provider is being privatised is demonstrably untrue.
Regardless of the wafer-thin justification of the government’s plan, the education provider is no more being privatised than Aurora or TasRail are privatised entities at present.
TAFE is being corporatised. It is a symptom of a neo-liberal ideological antipathy for the state-run provision of well-funded public education but it’s not the same thing. The central plank of Labor’s major campaign issue is staggeringly weak.
Another disorganised campaign from the opposition is in nobody’s best interest.
A vigorously fought election is our best hope of keeping a mediocre government on its toes.
But on what we’ve seen so far, the question is not whether the Liberals will win a record third term in 2021 but whether Labor will be in a position to mount a decent challenge in 2025 — or in 2029.
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