Veteran political commentator Michelle Grattan has dubbed PM Julia Gillard's early announcement of a September 14 federal election as the opening of the “longest election campaign in history”. She says it's “clever tactics” on Gillard's part. Another prominent political commentator, Lenore Taylor, says that this is an attempt by an embattled ALP government to “reboot the political debate”.
Whatever is the Gillard government's intention, we now have a date for when there is a good chance that Liberal leader Tony Abbott will become PM. The average of all the opinion polls over the last years has shown the Liberal-National Coalition being consistently well ahead on a two-party preferred basis. Some polls predict a landslide win for Abbott.
It is a grim prospect because there can be absolutely no doubt that the election of an Abbott government will accelerate the attacks on the rights and living conditions of the majority and on our already embattled environment. One only has to look at how the Newman LNP government has taken an axe to social spending and public sector jobs in Queensland or the Ballieu Liberal government's attack on hospitals in Victoria to see what is coming.
Abbott has succeeded in distracting attention from this by staying aggressively on the attack, focusing on the Gillard government's minority status and the corruption that is being exposed in the ALP and Health Services Union and ratcheting up the racist scapegoating of refugees.
Shamefully, but predictably, the Gillard government's response on the latter has been further to shift its refugee policy to the right. In the process it has abandoned humanity and international obligations and added to a despicable race to the moral bottom.
In this long federal election campaign Green Left Weekly will seek to lay out — with clear evidence — the truth. Not just the truth about what a likely Abbott government will mean for the collective interest of the huge majority, but also the truth about why we face the prospect of an Abbott Liberal-National government, and the desperate need to build a real alternative to the pauper's choice between one major party for the billionaires and another paler version of the same.
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