Comment

Whoever wins this election, Australia’s next government will face enormous challenges across the full spectrum of foreign and domestic policy. But the arsenal of policy tools available to the incoming government will have been undermined after nearly a decade of short-term thinking, deeply politicised decision-making and misspent political capital. For the national interest, this must stop.

Whether or not Scott Morrison can engineer the miracle of his second coming on May 21, he will leave significant negatives in terms of the Liberal Party and public policy in our country. The standard of political debate, and the respectability and responsibility of candidates, has nosedived to its murkiest levels. We are there – we are in the mud.

Scott Morrison is desperately looking to generate a last-minute momentum shift in this election, but Anthony Albanese believes it is already occurring around the kitchen tables of the nation.

Looking at the offerings of both major parties, their ambition seems no higher than to get through to May 21 with enough seats to win government. Whoever wins will then have to sit down and work out what to do next.

Isn’t it reasonable to expect our political leaders to put our people first? It is instructive to recognise that the election campaign has spent most of its time on point-scoring against opponents, blame-shifting and gotcha moments. 

This week, the Reserve Bank of Australia played itself into the federal election campaign in a way we haven’t seen for 15 years. Whatever the impact of its 0.25 percentage point rate rise on Tuesday – the first in more than 10 years – it is certainly not a positive for the struggling Morrison government.

Here is one truth about this election: the Liberal Party is risking its future on a prime minister who likely doesn’t have one. After years of neglect, it should come as no surprise that many Liberal voters would be looking for an alternative.

Morrison can argue that Albanese has never held an economic portfolio and can’t recall key economic data. However, Morrison would have to concede that his opponent is better able to manage industrial relations, with a Bob Hawke-like capacity to pull employers and unions together for accord-style discussions and pathways forward.

Unfortunately for the prime minister, he himself is a known known, with a record over the past three years that he is having great difficulty defending or explaining. How sweet must be the memory of the blank page that he presented the last time he faced the voters.

My own view is that the Liberal Party in NSW is irredeemable and the federal Morrison government is unfit to hold office. The latter assessment is based specifically on the question of government integrity.