Prime Minister Scott Morrison has kicked off Good Friday by sitting in on a church service in Melbourne’s west where the local sitting Liberal holds the electorate by a thread.
Mr Morrison and Chisholm MP Gladys Liu attended the Good Friday service at a Baptist church in Glen Waverley as the prime minister prepares to tour Melbourne for the day.
Ms Liu holds Chisholm by just 0.57 per cent with the seat considered a key target of both major parties at next month’s election.
Leaders promised a campaigning detente for Good Friday, with limited official events to take place, but both are expected to be on the road again for Easter Saturday.
Labor leader Anthony Albanese is due to attend a Catholic mass in Sydney’s west on Friday.
Mr Morrison and Mr Albanese have confirmed they will go head-to-head on Wednesday in their first debate of the election campaign.
The leaders will face questions from audience members in Brisbane in what is being billed as a “people’s forum” of undecided voters hosted by Sky News and the Courier Mail.
It comes after the prime minister cancelled a planned speech at a defence conference in Tasmania on Thursday afternoon after a car in his security detail crashed and rolled en route to the event.
Mr Morrison wasn’t involved in the crash and four police officers were taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries.
The driver of the other vehicle involved was unhurt.
The prime minister is under pressure over his captain’s pick for the seat of Warringah Katherine Deves, who was forced to apologise after a clip of her comparing her activism to Nazi resistance resurfaced.
Ms Deves founded the lobby group Save Women’s Sport, which aims to stop trans-women from participating in women’s sports.
“Many people would say to themselves … oh I would have been part of the French Resistance, the underground,” she said on a YouTube podcast in February 2021.
“When all of this was happening and no one was speaking out, I thought ‘this is it’, this is the moment in my life when I am going to have to stand up and say something.”
Ms Deves recently deleted her Twitter account after she came under fire for anti-trans posts, including claiming “half of all males with trans identities are sex offenders” and claiming transgender children were “surgically mutilated and sterilised”.
Mr Morrison was also under fire on Thursday when reporters pushed him on failing to introduce integrity commission legislation to parliament in the last term of government, despite promising to do so at the 2019 election.
Mr Morrison denies breaking his promise, saying the government had detailed legislation but didn’t introduce it because Labor said it wouldn’t support it.
Meanwhile, Mr Albanese was forced to clarify his party’s border policy after saying boat turnbacks would mean there wouldn’t be a need for offshore processing.
Mr Albanese said he supported boat turnbacks – which he dubbed “effective” – and the preference was not to have people in offshore detention.
But the opposition leader reiterated his support for offshore detention.
