Who's campaigning? 'This is just me,' Scott Morrison insists
“This is me just doing what I do,” Scott Morrison says, when asked whether his four-day blitz through Queensland is the start of a marathon election campaign.
The state has more than a dozen seats that could turn the election, due early next year. But on Tuesday, Morrison took his campaign bus directly past a band of five marginal electorates in Brisbane and disembarked at a pie factory in safe territory on the Sunshine Coast.
He was there for “a pie and a punt” on Melbourne Cup day.
“Here in Queensland, I’m listening and most importantly I’m hearing, and that means we’re doing,” Morrison told reporters, repeating his message from the weekend.
Apart from listening and hearing the people of Queensland, Morrison has spent the past two days apparently workshopping lines for his election pitch. He had no announcement on Tuesday; instead he spoke unprompted about small businesses, Medicare, industrial relations, pensions, transport, tax and the economy.
“At this next election there’s a choice,” Morrison said, slipping into campaign mode. “You can trust a government that can pay for Medicare because we’re running a stronger economy.”
Morrison used the phrase “small and family businesses” six times in the space of two minutes. He said, again, that “those who are having a go should get a go”.
Morrison’s “daggy dad” image has been lampooned on social media. He wore a Beefy’s Pies baseball cap and ate half a beef pie before breakfast, using his hands chomping down aggressively. He wasn’t offered a knife and fork, but had minders close by with paper towels to help him clean up before he reappeared in front of the cameras.
At the Corbould Park racecourse, Morrison mingled in the Champagne Garden, a members’ only area. He clutched a schooner of beer as he spoke to women in fascinators and men in linen jackets, who lined up to take selfies. Later when he walked among the punters at the racetrack, Morrison chose a can of local delicacy XXXX.
Fairfax Media reported on Monday that Morrison’s bus was a “ghost bus”, covering most of the journey up the Queensland coast without the prime minister.
He confirmed he would fly to Rockhampton on Tuesday night, after watching the Melbourne Cup at the Caloundra races, because “the bus can’t get me there quick enough”. The bus would meet him there.
What was the point of the bus, a reporter asked, if Morrison wasn’t on board?
“I am on it – I just got off it,” Morrison replied.
“It’s a practical thing. I want to spend as much time on the ground with Queenslanders and when I can get on the bus and go from place to place on the bus, that’s great. Well, I’m not going to sacrifice time with Queenslanders, listening to them and hearing them and talking to them about what’s important to them just to satisfy the media’s interest in the timetable for the bus.” The Guardian Essential poll on Tuesday found voters increasingly disapprove of Morrison. In Queensland he faces his toughest task; winning back regional and conservative voters lost to the LNP under Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership, while sandbagging city seats where voter priorities and key issues are often
very different.
The most recent Newspoll showed Labor with a four-point lead across the state, a swing of 5% compared with the 2016 election. But the trend appears to have reversed in some key regional seats. Recent polling by Lock the Gate in three central and north Queensland marginal seats – Herbert, Capricornia and Dawson – showed the LNP had taken comfortable leads in all three contests, underscoring the complexity of the state.
Two protesters waited for Morrison on Tuesday morning, one a unionist and another with a Stop Adani shirt. As the prime minister stepped off the bus, plastered with his face and his name, one heckler yelled at “Turnbull”.
A few members of the public crowded around as Morrison left. They weren’t too interested in the prime minister; they were looking for the “Hot 91 cash man”, a promotion by a local radio station.