There are two main layers to the misinformation that dominates coverage of the economy during this election campaign.
The first is the Coalition relying on major media to report its economic narrative for the entire ‘policy’ component of its re-election strategy. Everything else is meat pies and footy, horserace ephemera, church on Sunday, pub on Anzac Day.
[This post was first published on the evening of 11 April at the group blogging site Ausvotes 2019, which I have signed up to for the duration].
Some time in the first half of 2019, the third conservative Australian prime minister in five years will be compelled to call an election, which his Coalition government will lose. That man is Scott Morrison, the dodgily-selected member for Cook, representing one of the whitest and most racist areas of Sydney.
This post is written on the assumption that the current Australian government is defunct. Every outward sign appears, on my reading, to be the tip an iceberg, moving rapidly across the rising electoral oceans, to sink the Liberal Party of Australia. Good.
Around the time former Attorney-General George Brandis was made High Commissioner in London, I read that the Liberal Party of Australia caucus is an estimated two-thirds conservative and one-third ‘classical’ liberal. The context was the creation of a Home Affairs ‘mega-ministry’, a kind of government-sponsored corporate raid.
It is not in the public interest to predict a ‘race-based’ election, which in real life means a racism-based election, like the losing campaign that Matthew Guy ran in Victoria this weekend.
There was no issue until the prime minister made it an issue; and there is no question that Prime Minister Scott Morrison heard what he wanted to hear, and did what he wanted to do. What he heard and acted on, according to Morrison, was advice from ex-ambassador to Israel Dave Sharma. This is a man billed by his colleagues as the best and brightest of Liberal Party recruits, a position duly amplified by major media outlets.
In the 2010 federal election, the Liberal Democrat Party in New South Wales polled around 96,000 votes. In 2013 their first-placed candidate polled around 416,000 votes. This analysis shows that the party increased its vote by over 50 times, or 5000% between 2007 and 2013.
Wow! That party is on the up and up! It must be quite something, right?