It’s been a scrappy opening to the 2021 decider with unforced handling errors robbing one side of early momentum while the other still seems to be fighting among itself over who to put on the field.
In the election campaign the political polls – our default political scoreboard – takes on greater import: not as a predictor of what comes next but as an indicator of where we are now.
There is no sugarcoating the net 7% hit on Anthony Albanese’s personal approval levels after a rocky first week, but it is Scott Morrison’s low standing with female voters that reveals structural flaws that could well determine the outcome of this election.
This appears to me the bigger story from a week that was subsumed by gotcha moments and misspeaks and the hurly-burly of the early exchanges: the prime minister has got a women problem.
This week’s Guardian Essential Report confirms a substantial gender split in attitudes towards the PM, with men at plus six approval and women at net 13-point disapproval. This is also translating into a 10-point difference in gender voting intention (male 42, female 32).
Of even greater significance is that women are twice as likely to say they have yet to make up their mind who they will vote for, placing their issues and interests at the centre of the political contest to come.
Reducing the diverse and disparate experiences of more than half the population to a demographic risks the very stereotyping that alienates people from the political process in the first place.
But there is something about Morrison’s self-assured bellicosity that appears to jar with women – and that’s before we get to his policy agenda.
With these numbers the PM’s highly stage-managed hi-vis tour of manufacturing facilities seems dissonant. So too his refusal to cut loose former Cabinet minister Alan Tudge in the wake of complaints from a female Coalition staffer with whom he had a relationship. Tudge denies the claims and an investigation found there was insufficient evidence he breached ministerial standards.
Meanwhile, Morrison is leaning in behind his captain’s pick candidate in Warringah after her controversial comments about trans people on the basis she is standing up for women, something that a phalanx of Liberals – from former colleagues such as Julia Banks to outgoing senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells – question is an ongoing mission statement for the prime minister.
In fairness, Morrison’s re-election proposition appears to be gender neutral: landing on the blunt proposition that things are going so well economically that you can’t risk hoping for anything better than you already have.
Every day the PM recites a string of statistics that are largely outside his control and claims them as his own: low unemployment numbers obscured by closed borders, interest rates deliberately suppressed by central banks, record annual growth levels bouncing off a once-in-a-century pandemic low.
But beneath these noisy numbers lies the inconvenient truth that on the big economic challenges this nation faces, from energy transition to government integrity and the growing caring economy, the government he leads has been asleep at the wheel.
This week’s Guardian Essential Report suggests that beneath the campaign game which the prime minister plays like a pro – and his opponent is struggling to adapt to – there is a recalibration in public attitudes to these economic issues.
These findings pick up on some broader themes that have been emerging in recent months, where the traditional “Liberals as better economic manager” title has been under challenge.
When framed around specific economic outputs the Coalition advantage is marginal or, in the case of cost of living and ages, actually reversed altogether. Behind these headline figures it is women, again, who are significantly less inclined to accept the PM’s platitudes.
Cost of living and wages in particular are not highfalutin economic concepts that are constructed for market analysis, but inputs to basic living standards for ordinary Australians facing the struggle to make ends meet.
They do so while key sectors of the economy such as childcare, aged care and disability support services are placing untenable burdens on the largely female unpaid workforce expected to pick up the slack.
These have been traditionally considered the “soft areas” of public policy, reduced by some to gendered models of government where mummy cares and daddy rules the roost.
But economic analysis from independent thinktank Per Capita around the “caring economy” challenges this gendered binary by calculating the flow-on benefits of investment in these growing sections of the economy.
Early learning reform is about more than just cheaper childcare; it unlocks more women into the economy and ensures more children enter the formal education ready to thrive. That’s a long-term reform to our national skills base.
The government’s failure to implement the findings of the aged care royal commission risks entrenching a failed economic model which is not only treating our oldest Australians with disrespect but entrenching low wages in a growing part of the workforce.
Meanwhile the NDIS, the great social and economic legacy of the last Labor government – a world-leading scheme allowing people with disability to participate in the economy more fully – is delivering a dividend of $2.25 for every dollar spent, according to Per Capita modelling.
When these three sectors are functioning properly, they provide more secure jobs for a female-dominated workforce, higher wages that tend to be spent rather than squirrelled away and, critically, a more secure quality of life for those carrying the primary care burden.
Surely such a model of government that grows the human capacity of the nation, not just its morality but also its empathy, is serious economic reform.
As a final question from this week’s report shows, these are propositions that the general public is ready to embrace, opening the way for a far broader election debate on what economic reform and economic management actually mean.
So, to sum it up we have an election that will be decided by uncommitted female voters who are unconvinced by the prime minister’s leadership and being offered two starkly different approaches to the economy.
Say what you like about political scoreboard, but this election is not about nothing.
• Peter Lewis will discuss this week’s findings with Guardian Australia political editor Katharine Murphy at 1pm on Wednesday. Free registration here
