Albo’s cheap tricks
With the election campaign now under way, Tuesday night’s Budget is already long forgotten. Let’s be honest, it was never going to be memorable anyway.
But Albo rushing to see the Governor-General before the sun had even come up the day after Peter Dutton‘s Budget reply speech was too tricky by half.
Doing so was designed to take attention away from anything Dutton had to say, lest it help the opposition build momentum.
Usually prime ministers call elections on a Sunday to maximise eyeballs watching the announcement in that evening’s news. It is also considerably less mean and tricky than doing it so soon after the opposition leader’s Budget reply.
It will be interesting to see if voters mark the PM down for such game-playing.
Speaking of playing games, the news that Labor paid for a bunch of influencers to fly into Canberra for the Budget almost knocked me off my chair when I read about it.
Flights, Ubers, accommodation, you name it. Talk about cash for comment! I’m not sure you can classify a paid trip to Canberra to listen to the Treasurer drone on about the national finances a junket, but either way it’s dodgy.
The sun hadn’t even come up between Peter Dutton finishing his Budget reply speech and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese barging in to call the election
Albo’s timing was too tricky by half. It will be interesting to see if voters mark the PM down for such game-playing, writes Peter van Onselen
The purpose was so that these influencers could positively write about the experience and, in some cases, even do sit-down interviews with the PM.
The chats weren’t what you might call forensic cross-examinations, which of course was exactly what Labor hoped they wouldn’t be.
The aim was to get political face time with younger voters who are less likely to watch or read more traditional media. But paying for the content? That’s a terrible precedent to set.
Where will it end?
I haven’t forgotten, Jim
It’s been almost 18 months since our Treasurer did a profile piece for Good Weekend magazine that raised more questions than it answered.
It’s a well-worn debate topic: are politicians private lives public business?
They certainly become public business when politicians do family profile pieces like the one Jim Chalmers did.
It’s been almost 18 months since Treasurer Jim Chalmers volunteered he used to ‘drink too much’ after ‘there was talk of him cutting a bit loose socially around Parliament House’
Everyone in the press gallery seems to have forgotten about this eyebrow-raising admission, but as Chalmers sets his sights on the Lodge, I expect it will become an important issue later on
But like it or not, politicians’ private lives are probably public business anyway, given they talk about values and use their family in campaign literature all the time.
The profile piece on Chalmers raised the issue of him drinking too much earlier in his political career, to the point where he now doesn’t drink at all.
‘I can’t have [just] one beer. I can’t do it,’ Chalmers said.
The journalist who wrote the piece remarked ‘there was also talk of him cutting a bit loose socially around Parliament House’.
‘Because I was drinking too much,’ Chalmers responded.
So many questions! What was the drinking doing to his behaviour? Are there skeletons in his closet? Why didn’t the journalist burrow into this issue in a profile that was billed as a warts-and-all story?
Does the probable future PM (because that is certainly how Chalmers sees himself) really think he can dangle a carrot like that then assume we’ll all just forget it ever happened?
It’s like the Men in Black flashed their memory-wiping pens across the eyes of every political journalist in the country. Sometimes I feel like I’m the one who’s crazy for still thinking this is an admission worth investigating.
I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that after I started musing on these unanswered questions, I suddenly dropped off the Treasurer’s media email distribution list.
Petty, probably. Intentional payback? You be the judge.
Budget locked-out
Speaking of the Budget, I almost didn’t get into the lock-up last Tuesday, which, being frank, wouldn’t have been the worst outcome.
Having my phone taken away and being locked in a tiny room for hours on end with only Chalmers’ boring Budget papers as reading material isn’t exactly my idea of a good time.
But having done it 15 times before, I’m at least acclimatised to the pain!
Lock-up starts at 1:30pm, but you don’t have to get there on the dot. It’s not primary school. Plenty of journalists head in a little later on, especially if they want to first see some of the day’s Question Time, which starts at 2pm.
I find it useful to see what the focus of QT is before poring over the budget papers.
But when I turned up at the entrance at 3pm, a somewhat misguided security guard told me I was locked out and couldn’t get in.
He didn’t seem to understand the whole point of the lock-up isn’t to prevent latecomers getting in, it’s to stop anyone getting out and distributing what’s in the Budget early before the Treasurer starts his speech at 7:30pm.
But the gentleman blocking my entry was more than a little adamant it was a lock-out rather than a lock-up, so he wasn’t budging.
I had to seek the assistance of a Treasury official, who was much more sympathetic to my plight. Especially when I pointed out that not getting in would make a great colour story as a substitute for a piece analysing the Budget papers.
But even her green light wasn’t enough to convince the guard to let me in. Eventually, after a number of calls and radio check-ins, he finally accepted defeat and I was granted access.
Is it bad that I was quietly hoping the guard might have got his way?
