In the middle of Jim Chalmers’ lengthy budget update press conference, he dropped a reference to the page number of a particular table in his economic papers.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher pulled a face, put on her glasses and started flipping through her own copy of the document.
“Katy’s checking that for me,” the Treasurer said, noticing the action next to him.
“Oh, yeah, you’re right, there we go!” Gallagher said, to a smattering of laughter.
Gallagher was standing with Anthony Albanese on the first day of the 2022 election campaign when he infamously could not recall the unemployment rate and RBA interest rate, and reluctantly rescued him when asked by reporters.
That day cast an image of the now-Prime Minister as someone not across the detail.
It’s a perception the Coalition has emphasised over the past 36 months.
But Peter Dutton and key shadow ministers including Angus Taylor also give the distinct impression they too are not across details — of their own policies.
The Coalition has pursued a deliberate tactic of offering as little as possible about its plans.
“We’ll have more to say” has been in heavy rotation.
You don’t win elections with policy is the thinking among its ranks — a remarkable turnaround from last year’s slamming of the Government’s lack of detail about its plans for the Indigenous Voice.
Even the Opposition’s signature policy for nuclear power had six months between the release of the idea and costings being produced.
The nuclear plan is supposed to be the Coalition’s answer to soaring household electricity bills — on the east coast at least.
But the Frontier Economics modelling that costs and informs the policy (excluding the proposed reactor in WA) explicitly does not make any conclusions about what will happen to consumer prices beyond the general statement that if system costs are lower then power bills should also be lower.
But Dutton and his frontbenchers have offered a mixture of promises about what will happen to your power bill.
“It’s going to bring prices down by 44 per cent compared to Labor’s cost, which will be the difference between families being able to pay their bills and not,” Dutton said on Friday when releasing the costings.
Later in the same press conference, shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien reminded people the Frontier work was “not a pricing analysis”.
Yet Dutton told reporters on Tuesday: “The work of Frontier says that over time electricity prices will be 44 per cent cheaper under our policy than Labor’s.”
And Taylor on Wednesday: “It will bring down electricity bills by 44 per cent, there’s no doubt about that.”
The shadow treasurer went on to explain further.
“To the extent that over time what you see, basic economics — as long as you have good competition policy in place, and we absolutely intend to do that — that prices paid reflect costs, underlying costs. That’s, that’s what you expect to see. And that’s economics 101.”
Got it?
Another key policy battleground the Coalition wants to drag the election campaign onto is immigration.
As with energy, the basis for this debate is very different on the east coast to WA, but it broadly feeds into housing shortages, stretched infrastructure, and a strain of fear of the “other” that sustains tough national security rhetoric.
It’s an area the Government has been struggling with after the twin shocks of pandemic border closures then an explosion in temporary skilled workers and international student numbers.
Wednesday’s mid-year budget update again revised upwards the forecast for net overseas migration — the number of people arriving minus the number leaving — to add an extra 80,000 people to what Treasury thought would happen back in May.
But again, the Opposition policy lacks detail and its salespeople can’t get what detail there is straight.
The Liberal Party website is quite clear about the end goal: cut permanent migration (which is mostly people already living in Australia anyway) from 185,000 to 140,000 then slowly lift it back up.
Dutton and Taylor have across media appearances over several months variously appeared to confuse net and permanent migration, add a whole separate policy leg of drastically reducing net migration, walk that back, and finally say their policy depends on the post-election state of the economy.
All while claiming no change in position.
On the economic front, the Opposition blasts Labor’s “reckless spending” without specifically nominating where it would cut.
It has also pointed repeatedly to the 36,000 extra bureaucrats now employed — as Taylor referenced on Wednesday, saying now was not the time to make government bigger when Australians were struggling to make ends meet.
Which departments had the biggest growth and could be targeted for cuts?
“Well, there’s been — you know, that’s a very good question to ask Jim Chalmers.”