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Labor shifts its focus and ramps up a whole new set of election promises

Bill Shorten has promised a string of announcements in the lead up to Christmas.

Bill Shorten has promised a string of announcements in the lead up to Christmas. Photo: Getty

Yes, it’s October already and the Christmas decorations have appeared in our department stores. This means voters are keen to get the next eight weeks out of the way with as little fuss as possible so they can wind down for the summer holidays.

This also means we’d prefer the next two months to involve as little politics as possible, given the tumultuous political events that have already occurred during 2018. But that’s not what our politicians have in mind.

Instead, we’ll be bombarded with a mini-election campaign over the next eight to ten weeks, as politicians road-test messages and political parties fine tune their strategies before the real thing occurs in early 2019.

The Labor opposition has been relatively quiet in recent times, sticking mostly to social media to remind voters how ‘united’ it is compared to the shambolic Coalition government. But behind the scenes Labor strategists were likely using the time to adjust their campaign plans to take into account the change of Liberal leadership.

And so the first part of Labor’s new campaign emerged this week when Opposition leader Bill Shorten announced his government would ‘re-imagine’ child care by extending the pre-school system to provide early education to three-year-olds. This is an innovative and long-sighted initiative that promises better educational outcomes and, ultimately, an economic boost as these better-educated kids enter the employment market.

How it’s received by stay-at-home mums (and their likely defenders in the conservative commentariat) is another matter altogether. It’s tempting to suggest the proposal is not only good policy but also a new front in the culture wars deliberately opened by Labor to wedge our new – and more socially conservative – prime minister.

The pre-school announcement also suggests Labor is moving away from its previous class war battle, which was built on the distrust that low-income earners held for a prime minister who came from the ‘top end of town’.

With its references to educational excellence and getting ahead, as well as ‘handing a better future to our kids than we got from our parents’, Bill Shorten’s pre-school announcement is aimed squarely at a group that has until now been unsure about trusting the Labor leader, namely middle-income aspirational voters.

These are the voters that Scott Morrison has been trying to connect with when he talks about ‘giving a go to those who have a go’. They’re not the low-income voters that Labor has been appealing to in recent times, such as the under-employed and workers stranded in the gig economy.

Mr Morrison’s aspirational voters are likely to include dual income families with McMansions in the suburbs, prosperous small business operators and successful tradies. They don’t see themselves as rich but are concerned that Labor does. And so these voters, many of whom live in marginal seats, are worried that Labor’s ‘anti-rich’ policies, such as those against income tax cuts and negative gearing, will inadvertently hurt them.

Labor’s pre-school announcement this week is the Opposition’s first real attempt to demonstrate how some of the money it plans to redistribute from the ‘wealthy’ will be spent to benefit middle-income as well as low-income earners.

It may have been Labor’s plan all along to transition from the politics of envy to the politics of aspiration once the election drew closer. According to reports, Bill Shorten will make a series of speeches and announcements before Christmas, some of which will propose additional benefits for aspirational voters.

This strategy certainly has risks, the least of which is exposing popular policies to being cherry-picked by a newly-cashed up Morrison Government before the election. Or the PM could re-deploy Kevin Rudd’s line from the 2007 federal election, turning Labor’s largesse against it by arguing that Bill Shorten’s ‘reckless spending must stop’.

However the biggest challenge for both Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten over the next two months will actually be to get through to Australians, who’ve already had more than enough politics this year. It will be tempting for voters to simply ignore anything that makes the wait seem longer between now and the summer holidays.

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