MORE POLLING
New polling this morning tells a fairly familiar tale with the latest Newspoll for The Australian showing Labor and the Coalition neck-and-neck on a two-party preferred basis and the latter’s now seven-point primary vote lead not equal to an election-winning position.
The Sydney Morning Herald says its news polling shows the prospect of a “tight federal election that forces the government to scramble for power in a hung Parliament”. Resolve Political Monitor analysis for the paper shows the government’s primary vote has dropped to 29% in NSW and 30% in Victoria. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is ahead of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as preferred prime minister in both states, but on a national level the pair are tied on 35%, with the remaining 30% undecided.
The Newspoll for The Australian also found that housing, including interest rates and rents, is now by the main cost of living concern for voters, surpassing the likes of energy bills and grocery prices.
The SMH reports the prime minister is set to campaign in marginal electorates this week, including in Western Australia, after returning from his trip to US President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware for the Quad summit.
Overnight, the ABC ran on Biden’s “hot-mic moment” in which he was heard telling Albanese, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida that Chinese President Xi Jinping was seeking to “aggressively pursue China’s interests”. The Age carries the full quote as: “We believe Xi Jinping is looking to focus on domestic economic challenges and minimise the turbulence in China’s diplomatic relationships, and he’s also looking to buy himself some diplomatic space, in my view, to aggressively pursue China’s interest.”
The ABC said the leaders agreed to increase maritime cooperation — such as joint coast guard operations in the Pacific for the first time — and on health, including increased immunisation programmes.
During a meeting at Biden’s former school, the American president said he was confident the Quad alliance would remain prominent, regardless of who wins the upcoming US election. “While challenges will come, the world will change, [but] the Quad is here to stay, I believe, here to stay,” he was quoted as saying.
DUTTON’S NUCLEAR PITCH
Previews of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s nuclear speech in Sydney today are attracting a fair amount of column inches. The AFR says Dutton will call Labor’s attacks on his energy plans “juvenile” during his address to a Committee for Economic Development lunch.
“Yes, our nuclear plan does have a significant upfront cost. But a whole new and vast transmission network and infrastructure won’t be needed. Moreover, the cost of our nuclear plants can be amortised and spread over a reactor’s 80-year lifespan. Under Labor’s renewables-only plan, every solar panel and wind turbine will need to be replaced three to four times over the same period,” the paper previews him as saying.
Last week, research from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggested the Coalition’s plans could add hundreds of dollars to the average annual power bill, while Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen released departmental analysis claiming they would lead to blackouts and significant demand-supply gaps (see Friday’s Worm).
Treasurer Jim Chalmers told Sky News on Sunday Dutton’s proposal to build seven nuclear power plants was “economic insanity”. “It costs more, it will push power prices up, it will take longer, it will only at best deliver a sliver of what we need in energy, and it will turn Australia’s back on our unique combination of advantages,” the treasurer said. Chalmers called on the opposition leader to reveal today how much his plan would cost.
The AFR reports Dutton will once again refuse to do so, claiming: “We will release our costings in due course — at a time of our choosing.”
Chalmers also spoke to Sky News about the Reserve Bank of Australia’s interest rate decision on Tuesday. Guardian Australia reports he expects the monthly inflation figure, released on Wednesday, will have “come down quite substantially”. Despite this and the Federal Reserve in America cutting rates last week, the widespread expectation, especially given governor Michele Bullock’s previous comments, is that interest rates will stay where they are at present, Capital Brief reports.
All of which is bad news for the government’s proposed plan to create a specialist monetary policy board at the Reserve Bank, with the AFR reporting the Greens will not support the reform until rates are cut, meaning it will likely fail.
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
A penguin chick at the Sea Life Melbourne Aquarium is causing quite the stir due to his size.
The Associated Press reports nine-month-old Pesto, a king penguin chick, weighs 22kg — as much as his parents combined. His impressive size has made Pesto a social media star, with the newswire quoting the aquarium as claiming (perhaps a tad OTT given we know views don’t equal individuals…) almost two billion people had viewed him online (again, really?).
Regardless of how many views the big lad has attracted, there’s no denying he’s generating a lot of buzz.
The Age quotes Sea Life spokeswoman Olivia Wilson as saying: “Guests are arriving at admissions and double-checking Pesto is definitely on site. We have had messages on social media from people who are booking flights to Melbourne and want to know that Pesto will be here.
“People seem to relate to this chunky guy.”
The paper adds young Pesto eats 25 fish a day and is the largest chick the aquarium has ever had.
Say What?
China continues to behave aggressively, testing us all across the region.
Joe Biden
At the Quad talks on Sunday, the US president was heard telling the leaders of Australia, India and Japan that Chinese President Xi Jinping was seeking to “aggressively pursue China’s interests”.
CRIKEY RECAP
How many Crikey readers watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills? There is a pivotal, iconic moment from the first season of the reality show, which originally aired in 2010, that the Labor Party chose to communicate to young people about the fate of its Help to Buy housing bill.
Here’s the context: After having a fight at a cocktail party, sisters Kyle and Kim Richards get into a screaming match in their limo ride home. Younger sister Kyle insists that Kim does not appreciate “everything I’ve done for you”. Older sister Kim, whose success as a child actor in the 70s supported the entire family’s lifestyle, shrieks in return: “You stole my goddamn house!”
This moment, as posted to the Australian Labor TikTok account, represents “Australians after Peter Dutton voted down building more affordable housing”. Kyle Richards is Dutton and Kim symbolises the Australian people, naturally.
Both men’s grating smugness — the result of egos exposed to decades of irradiated partyroom hijinks — masks a similar baseline cruelty. ScoMo’s village-oaf approach to the tragic bushfires received a lot more attention from our media (weirdly obsessed with “rudeness”) than Albo’s sneering glibness towards, say, the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Still, the blank-faced inhumanity is essentially the same. It’s the kind of leadership required to survive in contemporary Australian politics, one that promotes a self-conjured personality disorder that insists upon indifference towards suffering of all stripes.
In that sense, both men are natural endpoints of our proud nation’s long assembly line of dullards, duds and dimwits. But the real question, the one that would have Labor’s rusted-ons squirming in their sleep if they were capable of self-reflection, is whether 2024 Labor is the new Coalition. Perhaps you can measure out the difference between this government and the last with a Geiger counter designed to pick up cringe, but beyond that, it is hard to parse the difference between the two more often than it should be.
At the end of the day, I think Albo would be a fairly successful Coalition prime minister, which may be his main point of divergence from ScoMo.
Is Albanese’s there still there? The PM would have progressives believe so, often defending his slow pace of change as a necessary part of maintaining it. Speaking to RN Breakfast on Thursday, he pushed back (brittly, of course) on the idea his government had been “timid”, pointing to changes to the stage three tax cuts as proof they were not so. But it’s telling that tweaking a regressive Coalition tax policy, following months of defending it, in a way that still left the rich with the biggest cut, is the bravest move this one-time revolutionary can cite, at a time of acute economic pain for the poor.
Much of that pain is not Albanese’s fault; he is clearly frustrated at being lashed for this inflation crisis, for our broken housing market, and for the deep inequities in Australian society. But that frustration won’t be enough to convince voters he deserves another go, just as Morrison’s self-pity fell flat. Minority government now looks all but guaranteed. And a bulldozer is the last thing a multi-partisan Parliament will need.
Anthony Albanese, who once professed to enjoy “fighting tories”, is not Scott Morrison. But perhaps it’s time he stopped acting like him, lest he find himself out of office, muttering “not my job, not my job, not my job…”
READ ALL ABOUT IT
Weakened and infiltrated, Hezbollah vows ‘battle without limits’ against Israel (CNN)
Mass shooting kills 4 and wounds 17 in nightlife district in Birmingham, Alabama (Associated Press)
Murdoch family drama plays out in court with fate of Fox News at stake (The Guardian)
Olaf Scholz fends off far-right AfD in Brandenburg election (The i paper) ($)
CPS twice did not prosecute Fayed over sex abuse claims (BBC)
Controversies erupt as Trump and GOP make critical push to voters (The New York Times) ($)
THE COMMENTARIAT
On interest rates, once again Labor is in a half-negotiation, half-cage fight with the Greens — Paul Karp (Guardian Australia): Labor can disagree with proposals to reform capital gains tax and negative gearing, which Albanese suggested on Thursday may harm supply. It can disagree with whether interest rates should be a political football.
But by fighting to retain the power for the government to overrule the RBA, and in other areas of policy, the Greens will offer choice. Perhaps populist, perhaps not what Labor would call responsible. But not unserious.
Differences of opinion on monetary policy will remain in the democratic sphere, not a purely technocratic affair.
Waiting for Albo: Is the PM really timid, or just tactical? — Sean Kelly (The Sydney Morning Herald): Of course, getting anyone to care much about anything outside of inflation is difficult: it continues to dominate, more than any other issue in recent memory. Voters in focus groups say they are “treading water”. This, to my mind, is a good description of the pervading political atmosphere: on the edge of exhaustion, waiting with growing desperation for something to change.
And so, perhaps feeling something of this themselves, and certainly aware that voters feel this way, and not wanting the blame to fall on them, everyone in political life suddenly seems eager to point the finger somewhere else.
