2004 Federal Election Diary Labor’s Fatal Mistake?

2nd October, 2004  - Richard Farmer 
The researcher Hugh Mackay has a fine record as an interpreter of the mood of the Australian people so it is reassuring when his view coincides with your own. I wrote a few days ago (see Delaying the Announcements) that it was a mistake for Labor to have released its policies such a short time before polling day. In today’s Sydney Morning Herald Mr Mackay has advanced the same argument.
"That Latham has left it all so late would not be such a problem if he himself were a better-known and better-understood leader" he writes. "But voters need one or the other if they are going to hand the reins to an Opposition: either the leader must be a known quantity or all the key policies - not just one - must be so compelling as to compensate for the unfamiliarity of the leader. This time around, Labor is offering neither."
You can read the views of Hugh Mackay in full at the smh
Not that I am yet prepared to take the question mark off the above headline and declare that the Coalition will win the election. A week, as they say, is a long time in politics and Prime Minister John Howard is not acting like a man who believes he is a shoo-in. His spending spree is evidence that his own advisers are telling him that he is no certainty.
And then there is that question of the underdog factor where, if the people think you are going to win easily, some of them change their mind at the last minute and give the other bloke a vote.

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