Welcome to the end of week four of the political campaign, which means we’ve made it halfway through. Polling day seems almost visible on the horizon now. Almost.
This week has been dominated by talk of superannuation, and we can all thank Julie Bishop for that, who on Tuesday failed to explain the Coalition’s superannuation policy during an interview with Neil Mitchell.
By Thursday a backbench revolt was looming over the policy, Liberal party donors were threatening to withhold donations, and nearly every MP to give a press conference or radio interview was asked to explain what the policy means.
Will this furore continue into Friday? We’ll see.
The big picture
Fairfax reports that the Labor party is furious with the ABC over the Vote Compass website. Labor has demanded a disclaimer be added to the website, which aims to help people decide how to vote based on how their own views align with party policies. Fairfax explains:
New ABC boss Michelle Guthrie has been sent a blistering letter by Labor national secretary George Wright demanding the website stop using party logos, return data provided and publish a prominent statement noting the ALP “does not believe it is an accurate representation of our party’s positions”.
Labor is furious with the ABC over its Vote Compass website, arguing it misrepresents the ALP’s position on election-deciding policies including penalty rates and boat turn-backs.
Vote Compass has been used more than half a million times during the 2016 campaign and features prominently in ABC news coverage of the federal election.
And while it is usually the Coalition that has public stoushes with the ABC, Labor believes the site seriously misleads voters over key policy positions and unfairly directs voters to support the Greens or the Coalition.
In The Australian, independent senator Nick Xenophon features heavily this morning, with reports that he failed to declare his directorship of a company run by his father.
The Aus reports that the company once owed $2.5m to the Australian Taxation Office in unpaid company taxes and developed an apartment tower that housed international students who later turned some units into illegal slums.
The South Australian independent, who stands to win the balance of power in the Senate, initially denied any involvement with Adelaide Tower Pty Ltd but after checking admitted he had failed to declare the directorship in his parliamentary register of interests in an “embarrassing oversight”.
Senator Xenophon personally owns two units and Adelaide Tower owns two or three others in the King William street block, where students created bedrooms in kitchens and living rooms using partitions made from shower curtains and wardrobes.
“It is not good enough that it [the directorship] wasn’t disclosed; I’ll be getting an independent auditor in,” he said.
“I am embarrassed it wasn’t disclosed but I have to take responsibility for it. It was a genuine oversight. It’s a matter of public record through ASIC [Australian Securities & Investments Commission] that I am a director of it.
In a separate story, the senator warns he will be “ruthless” in using his numbers in the upper house to impose his agenda on the next government.
The South Australian independent yesterday seized on the fate of Arrium’s troubled Whyalla based steelworks to oppose Australia’s entry into a World Trade Organisation procurement agreement as well as the landmark Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact covering 48 per cent of global GDP and delivering a $1bn boost to Australian farmers.
The prime minister faces growing calls to tackle senate intransigence, with the chair of the government’s 2014 commission of audit, Tony Shepherd, warning that the Senate represents a potential threat to the “future welfare of Australia”.
Tipped to win at least three Senate seats at the July 2 election, Senator Xenophon said his team would “unashamedly use our votes to hold out for Arrium to get the help it needs” after its Whyalla steelworks was placed into voluntary administration in April. He claimed the WTO procurement agreement and TPP covering 12 Pacific Rim nations would destroy manufacturing jobs and called for a review of the impact of free trade deals on the domestic manufacturing sector.
On the campaign trail
For the second time, Turnbull will be in South Australia. He’ll be visiting the electorates of Mayo and Makin.
In Mayo he’ll campaign with Jamie Briggs, who resigned from the ministry in December over unacceptable behaviour involving a female public servant at a bar in Hong Kong, during which he allegedly tried to kiss her on the neck. Then, he was criticised for sexist comments made to his former staffer, Rebekha Sharkie, who is now running against her former boss in the electorate who and is polling strongly.
While in the electorate, Turnbull will announce a package to drive “jobs and growth” in Mount Barker by investing $3.75m towards the new Mount Barker regional sports hub.
Shorten is in Launceston, Tasmania, in the electorate of Bass, held by Liberal Andrew Nikolic.
The campaign you should be watching
Let’s stick with Mayo in South Australia. As mentioned above, the Liberal’s Jamie Briggs is facing stiff competition to retain the blue-ribbon Liberal seat.
As AAP reports, “a candidate from independent senator Nick Xenophon’s team and a former staffer of Briggs, Rebekha Sharkie, is polling strongly and is poised to potentially cause a massive upset” in what has been a very safe Liberal seat.
Mr Briggs’ reputation took a battering after he resigned as cities minister late last year following revelations of inappropriate behaviour in a Hong Kong bar involving a female diplomat.
A ReachTEL survey of 681 residents on 16 May for activist group Getup found just under 40% intend to vote for Mr Briggs.
He’s trailed by Nick Xenophon Team candidate Rebekha Sharkie with 23.5%, followed by 18% for Labor and 10% for the Greens, News Corp reports.
According to the ABC’s electorate guide, third parties have always polled well in Mayo.
In 1990 the Australian Democrats polled 21.3%, and polled 21.8% in 1998 when candidate John Schumann came close to defeating Alexander Downer. The Liberal first preference vote fell to 45.6%, and strong preference flows to Schumann from Labor and One Nation came close to creating an upset.
Given these past results, the Liberals have much to fear from the Nick Xenophon Team if the Liberal party falls any significant way short of 50% and the Xenophon team outpolls Labor.
And another thing(s)
The former prime minister, Tony Abbott, has given a lengthy interview to The Conversation’s political editor, Michelle Grattan.
Apart from campaigning in his electorate of Warringah, Abbott has been largely keeping his head down throughout the campaigning, only appearing where he is invited by campaign HQ. Which is more than can be said for other ousted PM’s, namely Kevin Rudd.
Abbott says he hasn’t ruled out travelling to the Victorian seat of Indi where Sophie Mirabella is trying to reclaim the seat she believes is rightfully hers from Cathy McGowan. (Speaking of Indi, there is an excellent profile of the electorate in the Monthly here by John van Tiggelan).
I certainly have been talking to Sophie Mirabella about how I can help her because, as you know, Sophie’s a friend of mine. We’ve been mates for 20-odd years. And I was very, very disappointed that Sophie didn’t win Indi in 2013 because I expected her to be a strong member of the Abbott cabinet.
Abbott also said he hopes he and Bronwyn Bishop can be friends again one day following the choppergate scandal and her dumping from the position of Speaker.
I would certainly like to think that at some point in the future the long friendship could be resumed. But there’s absolutely no doubt that the loss of the speakership was a very hard blow for Bronwyn, and I can understand that. And I guess the difficulty with the things that have happened over the last 12 months is that a number of relationships have been strained.
But in an interview with Sky News last night, Bishop was more frosty. In a rather difficult interview where she didn’t’ give away a whole lot, Bishop said he hadn’t spoken to Abbott apart from to say “g’day” since being dumped. She also said:
When Tony asked me to resign himself I did to protect him. It was to protect him and I did. So that’s it. But it’s kind of yesterday’s news.
As to who she voted for in the leadership ballot:
Well, the world seems to have made up its mind about who I voted for, so let’s just move on. I think that’s adequate.”
Asked to explain chopper-gate...
We had to get there. The time constraints were there. But it was a pretty dumb thing to do.”
Back to Abbott, and he was also asked about the topic of the week – superannuation. Abbott threw his support behind the policy, even though, when he was PM, he vowed not to touch super. He’s changed his mind on that, he says, and staunchly defended the policy.
... there obviously is some disgruntlement among some people who are normally very strong Liberal supporters. But the point I keep making to them is that superannuation is not about building up your wealth, it’s about giving you a reasonable income in retirement. Now over the years some people have seen it as a vehicle for wealth creation.
The government, quite understandably in the circumstances, wants to return superannuation to its original purpose. The Labor party, likewise, wants to return superannuation to its original purpose, which is why Labor has some rather similar proposals on the table to ours.
The other point I keep making, Michelle, is that sure, superannuation is going to be less tax-advantaged for people with very large superannuation balances, but there is no way of doing the sorts of things we have to do with company tax without finding the revenue from somewhere.
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