Tim Colebatch writes in Inside Story (4.6.16) about the federal election campaign at its halfway point, arguing that, with the Coalition increasingly turning to slogans and scare campaigns, the race to an election victory is wide open and too close to call.
‘Scare campaigns sometimes work, sometimes don’t. They worked for Paul Keating in 1993 when he demonised a GST, yet not for Kim Beazley when he tried the same trick in 1998. They helped give Tony Abbott a landslide victory in 2013, yet so far the opinion polls are showing no sign that they have done any good for Malcolm Turnbull.
‘At the halfway mark of this campaign, the polls are, if anything, continuing a slow drift towards Labor. On average, they have Labor marginally ahead, 51–49, which puts the election on a knife edge. Yet oddly, as the polls drift towards Labor, the punters are drifting towards the Coalition, which Sportsbet now has at almost 3–1 on.
‘ … I’m with the pollsters, not the punters; I think this election is wide open. One of the signs is that Turnbull is not campaigning as his normal self. The smartest man in the room, a natural communicator with a persuasive fluency, is resorting to endlessly repeating propaganda points and three-word slogans, as we (those of us who felt professionally obliged to watch it) saw in the debate. And this week, he and Scott Morrison launched the latest in a series of scare campaigns that seem to assume that the average Australian voter is too dumb to recognise them as such.’
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