Big Pre-election Special And Talking Politics With The Very Reason-able Jane Caro

We’ve never seen a government in so much trouble entering an election campaign and it’s just a question of whether Scott Morrison has the political skills to turn matters around. But before everyone starts drawing a line through the Liberal–National Coalition and ending nine years of brutally poor government and incompetence, it has to be remembered that we’ve seen this story before – 2016 and 2019 – when a divided Coalition was expected to at least lose one of those elections – 2019 – before being return by a wafer-thin majority on both occasions.<br /><br />But as bad as a government has been for most of its existence, it only has to be on its best behaviour for five weeks – the length of the election campaign – of a 156-week parliamentary term, and all sins can be forgotten by the electorate. That is what Scott Morrison is hoping for. The big problem this time around is Morrison is not an unknown figure: the electorate suspects that he’s working for someone else, and not for the Australian electorate. They suspect he lies for most of the time, even when he doesn’t need to; they suspect that he’s incompetent, and they suspect that he might even be corrupt.<br /><br />He’s also looking for the same tactics and election tricks that worked so well for him during the 2019 election – the photo opportunities, the grand misrepresentation of Labor policies, and Bill Shorten the bogeyman, also known as the “Bill Australia can’t afford”. Again, it’s 2022, and it’s all so different. The electorate is tiring of the endless photo opportunities; they’ve worked Morrison out. Bill Shorten is no longer the leader of the Labor Party, replaced by the innocuous and inoffensive Anthony Albanese – but after years of division promoted by Morrison at every opportunity, being innocuous and inoffensive might be just what the election is looking for as they enter the third year of this COVID pandemic.<br /><br />The free character assessments offered by Liberal Party MP – and the long-departed Michael Towke, who reappeared like Banquo’s