Coalition burnt by campaign fire

AS POLITICIANS bickered about cost of living last week, petrol stations hiked prices to about

$2.15 a litre in some places.

That was despite a fuel excise cut the federal government introduced, and which both major parties intend to keep for just six months.

Both sides of politics have tried to work the inflation problem into their political prism during this campaign.

The Coalition says it’s a dangerous time to change, because Labor is a risk and could increase hip-pocket pain.

Labor says hip-pocket pain came under this government’s watch, and so it’s time for a change of approach.

Last week, the argument focused on wages. This has been a central theme of Labor’s campaign, arguing that people are falling behind because wages are not keeping pace with cost increases.

In other words, even if you feel like you should be getting ahead, you’re actually falling behind.

Tapping into this angst plays to people struggling to make ends meet and aspirational middle-class types who are keen to move up in the world.

When Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese said last week that he “absolutely” wanted to see minimum wages hiked by 5.1 per cent to match the rate of inflation, it wasn’t an accident.

For some reason, and to Albanese’s benefit, some commentators called it “another gaffe”.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison seized on that, blustering that Albanese was “incredibly reckless”.

“It is like throwing fuel on the fire of rising interest rates and rising cost of living,” he said. Attacks lasted for days.

The problem was, this had the potential to sound like the Prime Minister was against higher wages.

Disinterested voters heard one leader pushing for higher pay packets, the other calling it reckless.

Morrison, of course, had a point, and was backed up by some economists who worried about the inflationary impact of a relatively big hike in the minimum wage.

Small businesses, for example, could be flustered by the proposition that wages were about to spike.

Morrison, we assume, believes that those small businesses will be the ones to turn the tide, not workers on the hamster wheel. Perhaps this is why, during a national debate with Albanese, he started to answer a question about whether everyone deserves the minimum wage with “it depends”.

This had the potential to be more damaging than forgetting what the unemployment rate was.

Albanese ate it up, holding up a $1 coin to show what his minimum wages “hike” meant per hour to people on low incomes.

Nuance is often lost in political debates.

Would your average voter hear the reasoned debate of economists, or hear one leader saying wages should go up and the other effectively saying “whoa, steady on”?

Do they care if there’s an absence of detail showing how Labor thinks wages could go up?

There have been some strange decisions made during the Coalition campaign.

Take the way the party responded to advertisements put out by the Labor Party, about Morrison.

Labor’s attack ads cut chunks of audio from Morrison’s time in office when he used the phrase “that’s not my job”.