By NICK BRYANT
SYDNEY: This campaign is starting to feel like trench warfare – a drawn-out stalemate in which neither side is gaining nor conceding much ground. The latest poll shows Labor with an election-winning lead of 10 points – which has pretty much been the same since the beginning of the campaign and the start of the year.
Already, the Howard government has fired off much of its ammunition: the mighty howitzer of A$34 billion tax cuts on the first full day of campaigning; and big ticket spending promises, like much-needed new infrastructure projects.
It has also relentlessly targeted Kevin Rudd and his shadow cabinet colleagues. But like an artillery unit struggling to find its range, it has yet to register to a wounding direct hit. Howard is usually something of an ace hit when it comes to sizing up his enemies and identifying their points of vulnerability. But Rudd seems to be coated with both kevlar and teflon: bullets seem to ricochet off, mud doesn’t seem to stick.
The propaganda campaign has so far failed. At a time when the Reserve Bank of Australia was clearly going to raise interest rates for the first time during a an election campaign in fear that the booming economy is overheating, which bright spark came up with the slogan “go for growth”? It simply implies that more rate hikes are in the offing. Talk about emphasising the “mess” in “message”.
The government’s advertising also looks stale and ineffectual. The “learner plate” advertisements might have worked on the former Labor leader Mark Latham, whom many voters considered erratic and untrustworthy, but Rudd looks and sounds too learned for that tactic to work.
And so often have television viewers been bombarded with negative ads claiming that 70% of the Labor front bench is either a trade union official or a trade union member, they have lost the “fear factor” – if, indeed, they ever had it.
As for the campaign events, they look dreary and unimaginative. Howard visits a shopping centre, an old age people’s club or a small business, then answers reporters’ questions in front of the same pale-blue backdrop, emblazoned with the same slogan – Go For Growth. Australia has some of the most stunning visual backdrops in the free world. There are photo opportunities in abundance. But only once during this entire campaign – when Rudd did his Finding Nemo moment in a glass-bottomed boat during a visit to the Greet Barrier Reef – has either side sought to profit from them.
For the Liberal Party, precious days have been lost on trivialities, such as arguing over the semantic difference between saying sorry and apologising. And at times, the logistics unit has looked hapless.
Who, for instance, scheduled an important health announcement in Melbourne on the morning that the health minister, Tony Abbott, was supposed to be in Canberra for a televised debate? Almost inevitably, he arrived over 30 minutes late, and then compounded his time-keeping lapse with a verbal one: swearing in front of the cameras when his opposite number, Nicola Roxon, complained about his punctuality. Another rash of unhelpful headlines. Another day lost.
The official launch of the Coalition campaign, which has just taken place in Brisbane, sought to retool, refocus and revive the flagging crusade. There were modern-sounding new policies on child care, education and housing affordability. And this was by far the glitziest and best stage-managed event of the campaign so far.
Still, for all its upbeat music and broad smiles, the whole event had the feel of another fruitless “over the top”, with field marshall Howard ultimately sounding a rather weary battle cry that Australia would be gambling with prosperity if it elected a Labor government – one with a deficit of expertise and experience and surplus of trade unionists. – BBC