Election diary Saturday 14 July 2013

"The first rule of being a political junkie is to always remember that you are a very weird person, and most people are not like you."
Ezra Klein
Small pickings for the poll addicted. Another dismal day to those of us slavishly hanging out for the verdicts of the opinion pollsters. The Sunday papers were threadbare.

The best I could find were a couple of references in Sydney's Sun-Herald and Melbourne's Sunday Age.


There's not much of interest in that lot.

A dash of class warfare. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd might be scurrying to shed any suggestion of Labor engaging in class warfare but the Greens are happy to move into the space. Only a party that knows it is not running in this election to actually become the government would dare to make increasing an income tax rate a key policy.

But that is what Greens leader Christine Milne has promised. Creating a new top income tax rate of 50 per cent for millionaires, she said this morning, would pay for a $50-a-week increase to Newstart and a $90-a-week increase for single parents. And, for good measure, the Greens want a new tax of 0.2 per cent on the four major banks' assets over $100 billion that would raise $8.4 billion over three years.

The shedding of electoral liabilities continues. Treasurer Chris Bowen continues the process of trying to get rid of unpopular policies of his predecessor. This morning it was the much previewed abandonment of a carbon tax and its replacement with an emissions trading scheme.

Let the advertising campaign begin. Political party advertisements in newspapers are real page turners for ordinary readers. They are nothing more than an attempt to influence journalists like me to take a subject seriously or to satisfy leaders who are too busy to catch the really significant messages on television but like to know that their party is doing something to help the cause.
(Click to enlarge)

Hence my suggestion not to get too involved with the actual content from this morning's opening salvo in this morning's tabloids. The real business of trying to persuade will start at prime time this evening.







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