In short:
The federal election will be called tomorrow for May 3, the ABC has confirmed.
It triggers a five-week campaign to convince voters whether Labor under Anthony Albanese or the Coalition under Peter Dutton is most fit to lead the country.
What’s next?
The prime minister will head to government house tomorrow morning to call the election.
I was discussing this just a couple of days ago. Greens have terrible marketing and are in desperate need of a rebrand. I’m curious though: Which of their policies are you opposed to? Because honestly: if breaking up bank cartels, restoring Internet privacy laws, promoting local manufacturing, science and research as well as improving the calibre of education are bad, then I guess I’m bad.
For me, my criticism of Greens comes mainly from putting stuff in policies that would be better suited to “dreams and aspirations”. They have a tendency to put stuff in there that are unspecific or at least out of the realms of what government does. But for all of that, I struggle to point to anything on their policy stuff and say “that’s an awful position”. At least, even if I’m not totally on-board, I see where they’re coming from. And that’s another point. Their policies page overwhelms you with too much to actually go through in one sitting. But, look at the Liberal/Labor equivalent pages? Greens are super open about what they stand for and what they would like to achieve. Labor have a few bullet points and Libs have a marketing brochure.
That Labor page is a bit pathetic isn’t it.
I imagine they’re going to roll out something fancy once the election is announced.
I’m a bit surprised neither of the two major parties really seems interested in environmental sustainability. Last election the teal independents really stole the show.
LNP’s nuclear power plan is just an excuse to keep burning coal for another 30 years. I think most people who actually care about emissions will see that, but the existence of a plan will ease the conscience of LNP voters.
Labor has updated their policies this morning with the campaign announcement:
https://alp.org.au/policies
In my other comment I mentioned LNP’s climate change position, here is ALPs:
https://alp.org.au/protecting-our-climate/
So I had a brief look at the Labor policies, and to be frank, it all looks reasonable. I didn’t see anything there where I thought “that’s an awful position”.
So I re-visited the Liberal version. Maybe they all sound fine at first. Oh wow the Liberal one is awful. It’s all ‘Labor bad’ and ‘Under Labor…’ and ‘fix the mess of Labor’. Why are they the only party of the three to trash talk their opponents?
I think that’s pretty classic conservative politics isn’t it?
Not specifically whingeing about everyone else maybe but certainly undoing all the mistakes the progressives have made.