COST OF LIVING ‘FREE-FOR-ALL’?
As the hot takes keep on coming regarding the LNP’s victory in the Queensland state election, the Albanese government is attempting to change the conversation and reject the calls for knee-jerk responses.
The Australian Financial Review has led overnight on Treasurer Jim Chalmers saying there would be no cost of living “free-for-all” in the lead-up to the federal election, due in May. As flagged in yesterday’s Worm, places like The Australian have been reporting Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is facing pressure to unveil “populist cost of living measures” with the suggestion from some that outgoing Labor premier Steven Miles’ policies in the Queensland election helped minimise the scale of the defeat.
The AFR reports Chalmers has said that while additional cost of living assistance would be unveiled before the federal election, the government’s emphasis would remain on responsible economic management. The treasurer is quoted as saying: “This election was never going to be, from our side, a free-for-all of public spending. It wasn’t going to be before Saturday’s outcome, and it’s not going to be after Saturday’s outcome.”
In news that will shock no-one given the result, the paper quotes Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as claiming the Queensland election is indeed an absolutely perfect analogy for the upcoming federal election.
“If you treat people with contempt, if you run up huge debt, you mismanage economy, you create a cost of living crisis, you can expect for the electorate to punish you and that is exactly what happened Queensland,” he said.
“I think that is what is going to happen at the federal level as well, because the prime minister has promised a lot but delivered nothing.”
The PM is opening a new TAFE facility in NSW’s coal heartland today, the AAP reports, as he attempts to highlight support for the renewable energy workforce, before revealing a new renewable energy project in Wodonga, Victoria. The newswire says Albanese is trying to court regional voters and draw comparisons between Labor’s clean energy plans and the opposition’s nuclear proposal, echoing Queensland Labor’s campaign.
Meanwhile, former AFR columnist Joe Aston’s new book The Chairman’s Lounge and the allegations Albanese reportedly requested free upgrades directly from then Qantas boss Alan Joyce continue to generate headlines. While Albanese has defended the upgrades by saying he declared them, The Australian reports the Coalition is expected to probe the allegations at Senate estimates next week.
US ELECTION A WEEK AWAY
The US election is now just one week away with the polling still suggesting there’s nothing separating Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican Donald Trump as we enter the final stretch of the campaign.
Trump’s rally at New York’s Madison Square Garden at the weekend is still dominating coverage with both sides criticising comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who was one of the speakers at the event, for calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage”. The BBC reports his remarks sparked “fury” from Republicans and Democrats. The broadcaster said Hinchcliffe made a series of jokes that “leant on racist stereotypes” during his address and highlighted other speakers at the event also called Harris “the devil” and “the antichrist”.
On the same day as the Trump rally, Harris was in Pennsylvania courting the state’s significant Puerto Rican population, The New York Times highlights. The vice president has recently gained the public support of Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny as well as Jennifer Lopez and Ricky Martin, the paper added. The BBC quotes Martin as telling his fans that the remarks at the Trump rally show “this is what they think of us” and urged them to vote for Harris.
Speaking on Monday, Harris said former president Trump was “focused and actually fixated on his grievances, on himself, and on dividing our country”, The Guardian reports. Trump senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said of Hinchcliffe’s comments: “This joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign”, the NYT said.
Another speaker at the rally was billionaire Elon Musk and many sites are flagging the fact Philadelphia’s district attorney Larry Krasner is suing Musk’s pro-Trump fundraising group, America PAC, in an attempt to shut down the controversial scheme to give US$1 million a day to voters in Pennsylvania and other swing states.
Meanwhile, outgoing President Joe Biden spent 40 minutes waiting in line to cast his early vote in Delaware on Monday, the Associated Press reports. Speaking outside the polling station, Biden called the Trump rally on Sunday “simply embarrassing”.
“It’s beneath any president, but that’s what we’re getting used to. That’s why this election is so important” he said. “Most of the presidential scholars I’ve spoken to talk about the single most consequential thing about a president is character. Character. And he [Trump] puts that in question every time he opens his mouth.”
ON A LIGHTER NOTE…
Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has asked his followers on Instagram to be on the look out for 22 tonnes of missing award-winning cheddar cheese worth £300,000 (A$589,000).
The Guardian reports artisan cheese retailer Neal’s Yard Dairy delivered the cheddar to an alleged fraudster posing as a wholesale distributor for a large French retailer before realising what had occurred.
The Sydney Morning Herald says Oliver told his followers to be on the lookout for “lorry loads of very posh cheese”, calling the incident the “grate cheese robbery”.
“If the deal seems too gouda to be true, it probably is! Let’s find these cheese stealers,” he added.
Neal’s Yard wrote on Instagram: “Over 950 wheels of Hafod, Westcombe, and Pitchfork Cheddar were delivered before the fraud was discovered. We are currently working with law enforcement authorities to identify the perpetrators of this fraud.”
Say What?
That’s what girls have to think about all the time.
Saoirse Ronan
The 30-year-old actor silenced a conversation between Paul Mescal and Eddie Redmayne who were joking about needing to use a phone in self-defence during last week’s The Graham Norton Show.
CRIKEY RECAP
While this was undoubtedly a less-than-brilliant result for Labor, at least its elected members won’t be able to travel to Parliament in a shared Tarago, as was the case when the party was last evicted from office in 2012.
Also not borne out was my own suggestion, made in the wake of Labor’s substantially worse result in the Northern Territory in August, that Miles would spend election night sweating over his own seat.
It thus seems clear that a few advantageous things must have happened in the months before the day of reckoning — some of which may even have federal implications, which pundits are generally too eager to ascribe to state results.
New Premier David Crisafulli opened his victory speech by saying “Queenslanders have voted for hope over fear”. Given the campaigns of both major parties capitalised on fear, this was an odd choice of phrase.
Labor’s scare campaign — that women’s legal access to reproductive rights would be abolished under an LNP government — became slightly more concrete when, on October 8, North Queensland MP Robbie Katter pledged to introduce a bill to repeal or amend Queensland’s abortion law should his party form a minority government with the LNP.
The fear grew as Crisafulli declined to answer what his stance on abortion was until he had been asked the question more than 132 times. While he has said an LNP government won’t change the abortion law, he has not yet confirmed if he will let his party’s MPs — none of whom voted to pass the original bill — have a conscience vote should a repeal bill be put forward by the crossbench.
Crisafulli described his election campaign as “the result of a hell of a lot of hard work and a hell of a lot of strategy”. One of the main strategies was a promise to end the “youth crime crisis”. Data shows that the youth crime rate in Queensland reached its lowest-ever level in 2022, and rates have remained consistent since then. While there have been a number of high-profile tragedies in the past few years, such as the tragic stabbings of Emma Lovell and Vyleen White, many, many Queenslanders are genuinely afraid of a youth crime crisis that simply isn’t backed up by data.
News Corp killed most of its local papers in Qld, now pundits are left to guess at what results mean
And there’s that world-weary saw that seems so smart but, in truth, explains nothing: it was just time for change. If only politics were that easy.
Our pundits are groping in the dark, reaching blindly into the grab-bag of those ready-made political tales pundits in democracies across the world tell each other to explain what’s going on because that’s all they have. The collapse of regional and local news has ground down our once-variegated political discourse into uniform national — even global — narratives that seek to explain similarities, not differences.
Once, in Queensland, pundits would have looked to the news framing across the state’s many local newspapers to determine the narrative that explains the intricacies and variations of the election across this most regional of states.
READ ALL ABOUT IT
NATO chief confirms North Korean troops deployed in Russia’s Kursk region (ABC)
Second Washington Post writer quits over failure to back Kamala Harris (The Guardian)
Trump at the Garden: A closing carnival of grievances, misogyny and racism (The New York Times) ($)
Fertility rate in England and Wales drops to new low (BBC)
Inside NYC’s glorious, surreal Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (The Washington Post)
Colin Farrell finishes Dublin Marathon while pushing friend in a wheelchair (CNN)
THE COMMENTARIAT
The Queensland election result has sent a ‘decisive’ warning to federal Labor — Jacob Greber (ABC): Chalmer’s remark counters the lazy narrative that took hold in the first hours of Saturday’s election count that Labor did better than anticipated.
Too many still have the view that Crisafulli’s win was “narrow” or a case of the LNP desperately falling across the line.
The treasurer has effectively called that out as arrant nonsense.
Votes are still being counted but call it for what it appears to be: a comprehensive thumping of the Miles government.
Trump sells the dream while Harris warns of nightmare — Jennifer Hewett (AFR): The apparent closeness of the presidential race has persuaded the Democrat campaign to also focus the last days before November 5 on the vehement attack, emphasising Trump’s imminent threat to democratic norms and personal freedoms. The summer’s talk of the politics of “joy” has mostly been retired as a cooler autumn of caution sets in.
Democrat vice presidential nominee Tim Walz even compared the Trump rally at the iconic site to an American Nazi rally held there in the 1930s.
“There’s a direct parallel to a big rally that happened in the mid-1930s at Madison Square Garden,” Walz said from Nevada. “And don’t think that he doesn’t know for one second exactly what they’re doing there.”
And while a warm-up “comedian” at the Trump rally savagely mocked Puerto Rico as “an island of garbage”, Harris reminded Pennsylvania’s Puerto Rican population that as president, Trump offered nothing but “paper towels and insults” after hurricanes had devastated the island.
