Day three of the Australian election campaign, and Anthony Albanese’s week isn’t getting much better. The opposition leader might have drawn some hope from a slight blunder from PM Scott Morrison — if Albo hadn’t immediately kicked the ball back into his own goal.
For Scott Morrison, the flawless opening salvo of the campaign faltered somewhat when he pitched his job creation plan at a factory which, it turned out, is shortly to off-shore some of its jobs.
A factory visited by the Prime Minister while he spruiked a promise to create over a million jobs if re-elected plans to cut jobs at the facility and move them offshore to Vietnam […]
In a statement, Rheem managing director Chris Taylor said […] “However the refocus of Rydalmere towards more sophisticated products will mean that job losses will be contained to well below the number of people likely to be seeking voluntary redundancy.
ABC Australia
But while the opposition leader sought refuge in safe ground — a room full of left-wing nurses’ unionists — he wasn’t doing himself any favours by trying to puff up his resume a little too blatantly.
Anthony Albanese has tried to inflate his status as an “economics adviser” to the legendary reformist centre-right Hawke government in a bid to pump up his damaged economic credentials but was in fact a “research officer” to a hard-left out-of-cabinet minister and was strongly opposed to the major reforms of the time, including privatisation, HECS and financial deregulation.
OK, granted, this is a tad hair-splitting. Albanese kinda-sorta did give “economic advice” to Tom Uren, an old Labor-left die-hard who was mostly a sideshow MP in the Hawke government. But the “advice” mainly consisted of “a young Trot”, as Uren described him, saying that the Hawke government’s economic reforms were all wrong, cuz, y’know, capitalism is bad, man. For his part, Uren only mentions Albo once in his memoirs — and doesn’t acknowledge him as an “economics adviser”.
So, it’s pretty obvious puffery for Albanese to claim:
“I have an economics degree from Sydney University. I studied both orthodox economics and political economy. I spent four years there doing it, and then I became an economic policy adviser to the Hawke government.”
The Australian
The last statement absolutely isn’t true, and neither is a Labor’s spokesman’s claim that “Anthony Albanese was employed as an economist by Tom Uren”. Still, you can hardly blame Albanese for trying to repair his reputation on economic affairs.
The basic assumption for months before the election was called was that if Labor could concentrate on the Prime Minister’s perceived failings and unpopularity with a frustrated electorate the ALP was on a winner.
But, if the argument is to be about economic management and recovery after the global pandemic and recession, the Coalition is far more likely to win thanks to world-beating employment and growth figures.
Besides this, rightly or wrongly, the Coalition is traditionally seen as on the right side of economics (in more ways than one). It may or may not be true, but it’s what people believe — and that’s what matters. No Labor government since Hawke has won an economics argument. Which makes Labor’s challenge to the Coalition to “bring it on” all the more perplexing.
On Wednesday Jim Chalmers, Labor’s Treasurer if the ALP wins, issued a challenge to Morrison that if he wants a debate on the economy “to bring it on”.
“So if Scott Morrison wants his economic record to be a big part of the election campaign, we say bring it on,” Chalmers boldly declared.
This was just before his leader once again was subjected to scrutiny about his economic knowledge, his accuracy on various essential figures and his claim he was an economic adviser to the Hawke Government.
Well, this is exactly what Morrison and Josh Frydenberg want.
The Australian
And more fool Albanese, if he keeps on delivering his own goals.
