Extract from ABC News
There is only one issue on the minds of voters right now and it is not boat people, or even migration in general. It is certainly not the future price of utes.
Australians have been experiencing their biggest cost of living shock in decades — and generations. Only us old folk remember the high inflation which came to a screeching end in the recession of the early 1990s, or even the sudden inflation OPEC oil shocks of the 1970s.
Pollster Tony Mitchelmore, who listens to swinging voters in focus groups for a living, told the ABC's 7.30 program: "All the indicators we get show that people think the economy's worse than it's ever been, worse than it's been in the last 15 years."
And, Mitchelmore says, "it's personal this time".
"It's not about macroeconomic indicators. It's about their own personal hip pocket. And the government is really in a position where they're riding that.
"So if things go bad, the natural response of people and voters is to blame it on the government, or to at least not feel good about the government."
Mitchelmore says that the cost of living issue is so potent that the first targets of voters' anger — the thing that brings focus groups to life — is actually supermarkets, rather than politicians.
The Coalition focused on something else
With a by-election in the Melbourne seat of Dunkley this weekend, you would think this made the cost of living the major focus of the Coalition's political attack on the government in the lead-up. Or even that it might just be out there talking about it a bit.
No. The political attack in parliament all week has been on migration, occasionally drifting into the cost of living issue by claiming, for example, that migration is putting "immense pressure on housing, transport and basic services on top of [our italics] the cost of living crisis".
More time seemed to be devoted to arguing that the government wasn't keeping people safe because it was not re-detaining "149 hard-core criminals from immigration detention, including seven murderers and 37 sex offenders", who had been released as a result of a High Court ruling last year that people could not be held in indefinite immigration detention.
This line of attack — which has not moved or developed much since that ruling last year — seemed to offer the opportunity to continue to go after Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, who is in the invidious position of, gasp, being constrained by the fact that governments of the day can't just ignore the rulings of the courts, but can only legislate — as the government finally did — to make life as tough as possible for this particular group of people.
Cynics would say that the line of attack neatly dovetailed with the campaign that has been running on the ground in Dunkley, which targeted "crime" as an issue.
It all seemed to be paying off towards the end of the week when Victoria Police announced they had charged one of the released detainees with sexual and unlawful assault.
Deputy opposition leader Sussan Ley led the charge in question time on Thursday and then, now almost infamously, upped the ante by tweeting: "If you live in Frankston [that is, in the electorate of Dunkley] and you've got a problem with Victorian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor. If you do not want to see Australian women being assaulted by foreign criminals, vote against Labor."
The only problem was that a couple of hours later the police announced they had got the wrong person, and were withdrawing the charges. Their new suspect, they said, was not a released detainee.
Peter Dutton claimed the opposition had been entitled to rely on the original statement from the police. But the incident only highlighted the absolute paucity of the Coalition's messages of late.
Earlier in the week, it had leapt on a story in The Australian that suggested the government was delaying approving an increase in health insurance fees until after Dunkley. The story was not only denied by the government but also by the private health funds.
Nobody from the opposition, it seemed, had bothered to check.
Political campaigns are shifting
The closest the Coalition got to the cost of living issue in its various public parlays was its attempts to revive another old campaigning chestnut — suggesting Labor was attacking people's love affair with the ute with its new fuel efficiency standards, which would make cars more expensive.
Once again: is this issue front of mind in Dunkley?
By-elections are strange political beasts. In general, they have no impact on the nature of the parliamentary numbers but take on sometimes mythical status for changing perceptions of the political game.
Yet this one is being fought out in a bizarre world where the opposition isn't talking about the biggest financial crisis most households have faced in a generation, and the opposition leader has been largely absent, not just in terms of campaigning on the ground in the electorate, but even in parliament.
With the polls due to close in less than 24 hours, and talk of the Coalition actually being in contention to possibly win the seat, Dutton emerged on Friday to do an actual press conference with his candidate and some other media.
It was his first appearance since the Liberal campaign launch on February 18 and he had made just a handful of interventions during Question Time this week.
There may be an obvious answer to why the Coalition hasn't been talking about the cost of living in the lead-up to Dunkley: the government's decision to rework the stage 3 tax cuts (which went through parliament this week) meant that it had a ready and immediate answer to the question of what it was doing to alleviate the pressure on households (whether or not you think the tax cuts are a good or sufficient answer).
The static about migrants and utes (and a flurry of outrage about political traitors in the wake of remarks by the head of ASIO) may have served a purpose in masking or crowding out talk about tax cuts.
But the approach of the opposition leader to speaking in public is something altogether different. Normally, only the unwise would stand between Dutton and a microphone.
Whoever wins Dunkley will get the chance to declare the victory as all part of a cunning political plan.
But with the conservative Advance Group campaigning hard in the electorate, and the opposition seemingly eschewing many opportunities to have a conspicuous presence on mainstream media — and instead often going directly to voters by platforms like Facebook — the way our political campaigns are fought is morphing before our eyes. And poses big questions for the next federal election.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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