As I wrote recently, the myth that Labor are a superior campaigning machine is busted by the facts. For as long as polls have tracked election campaigns, Labor’s poll numbers have invariably gone steadily backward from the campaign, start to finish. Even in elections that they’ve gone on to win by a landslide.
Which puts into perspective worries about Peter Dutton’s lacklustre first week of campaigning. As Al Jolson said, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. As we head into week two, Dutton is starting to lob the heavy artillery. Most notably, taking aim at the left’s biggest salients: the education bureaucracy and the taxpayer-funded media.
The opposition leader says he will take a razor to “wasteful government spending” on education, health and the ABC if elected.
Peter Dutton on Wednesday said the coalition would commit to funding in the budget for health and education.
However, he said his government would consider redirecting funds if it finds “waste in the department” in areas that are not delivering frontline services.
The left media will whinge and whine, of course. Teacher’s unions will foam and gibber. But Australians who’ve paid more and more taxes into public education, only to watch results slide without stopping for decades, might see it differently.
“Does it help to employ additional public servants in Canberra with classroom sizes, or with additional support for kids with disabilities and learning difficulties?” Mr Dutton told Sky News.
“I’m happy to be convinced of it, but I suspect … the prime minister has ceded to the position of the unions, which is not about service delivery.”
Australians, who watch the ABC least of all the major networks, will also be happy to see some of the billion-dollars-plus taxes they pour into a blatant left-wing propaganda network clawed back.
Peter Dutton has accused some ABC journalists of being “partisan players” and says he would need to “go back a fair way” to name his favourite one.
Dutton is wisely reminding voters that it’s their money the ABC is living on.
“It’s about making sure that where we’re spending money, we’re doing it wisely, we’re doing it sensibly and we’re respecting the fact that people have worked hard for those taxes,” he told 2GB.
“Nobody at the ABC gets a dollar of pay without it being funded by Australian taxpayers.”
The bloated public service, another taxpayer-funded left-wing redoubt, is in line for the razor, too.
The coalition plans to cut 41,000 public service jobs that have been added during Labor’s term in government, targeting public servants in Canberra […]
Speaking to reporters in outer Melbourne on Wednesday, Mr Dutton again took aim at what he described as a “bloating of the public service in Canberra”.
“The reality is here in the suburbs … where families cannot afford to pay that bill,” he said.
“Ballooning the public service by 41,000 is not an efficient way of helping families.”
But it is a good way of sandbagging Labor’s ever-decreasing voter base. Which is why every Labor government, at federal and state level, invariably adds tens of thousands of public sector leeches to the taxpayer-funded payroll.
The opposition leader earlier told Sky News a coalition government would also examine NDIS spending.
“I’m committed to the NDIS and I’m committed to equity for people with disabilities, but against waste and rorts and rackets,” he said.
Which pretty much describes the entirety of the NDIS.
What have Labor got in response? ‘Orange Man Bad.’ That’s it.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers on Tuesday said the opposition leader’s threats to cut services “was right from the DOGE playbook”, referencing the Trump Administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
Which, given that DOGE has so far saved $155 billion and counting, sounds like a ringing endorsement.
“This guy says ‘Nup, we can get rid of the education department’,” [Anthony Albanese] told reporters in the Melbourne suburb of Croydon.
Sounds good to me.
