So, they’re off. The election is on and we’re in for the longest bloody campaign anyone can remember.
Today Prime Minister Gillard started well. Her speech at the National Press Club, effectively a campaign launch speech, struck the very tone I’ve been begging someone to lead with, overturning her Treasurer’s two-bit optimism:
Despite low inflation and low interest rates, we still feel these pressures on living standards.
Superannuation returns are only just beginning to recover from the hit delivered by the Global Financial Crisis. Capital city housing prices have not grown at all in the past twelve to eighteen months, compared to the average yearly gains of eight to ten per cent in the years before the GFC.
These two impacts have us worried that our dreams of financial security are harder to achieve than ever before.
Today, we save over 10 per cent of household income. In the years before the GFC, we used to save nothing as a nation.
It was a phase that could not last – but unsurprisingly, many Australians miss those days when they could spend all of their income, see wealth increase through ever-rising house prices, and through easy credit, borrow against the house again to spend more
She went on to outline priorities of jobs, fiscal conservatism, competitiveness, industry policy and education. Sadly, like the Coalition, Gillard accepted the high dollar was here to stay. There will be no policy help on the that front for the RBA.
You can agree or not with specific policies but the tone of this speech was just right in my view. In what is a now financially conservative polity, Gillard promised to spend only on what could be saved elsewhere. She offered job security for a community concerned about never-ending global ructions, uncertain house prices and a mining boom that is clearly ending. Sensibly, there was no mention of the fiscal surplus that obsesses the Coalition.
This is a tone and set of ideas that will seek to paint the Coalition as a cold and technocratic machine that may count the beans mighty well but has failed to move with the difficult times that Australians know they now face.
As I said of Joe Hockey last week, it is a tone that can win.
aec3c666-6a85-11e2-a0c1-05f75803383d_Prime Ministe2.pdf by Belinda Winkelman
