Squiz Shortcuts - Week 2 of the election campaign

Your Shortcut to… Week 2 of the election campaign

We're into the swing of things now, but it's been an unusual week with US President Donald Trump's tariffs dominating the agenda. So we'll get you across:

• how the tariff debate intersects with the campaign

• the Coalition's work from home backflip

• and the focus on Labor's handling of the economy

And we have some excellent questions from Squizers in our reboot of Ask The Squiz. This week, we cover the debates, how do we know if the claims they raise are true, and whether falling off a stage matters.

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Squiz the Shortcut

We're coming to the end of the second week of the campaign, what’s been happening?
Well, the topic of the US tariffs has been a big one, given that it's dominating news all around the world. There are so many questions about what it will do to our economy, to the global economy, to our strategic and defence alliance with the US, and those questions have been put to our leaders... 

What have they said?
Both PM Anthony Albanese and Coalition leader Peter Dutton are on a unity ticket that the 10% tariff on imports from Australia to the US is unfair - but they differ on how they might go about tackling it with the Trump administration. 

What’s Labor’s strategy?
Albanese has outlined a 5-point plan to shore up our economy. He’s also talked more broadly about not retaliating, and engaging to demonstrate why Australia should be exempt. That could involve talking about how we actually import more from the US than we export - so we're a nation that has the sort of trade relationship with the US that Trump's trying to establish everywhere else... 

How about the Coalition?
He’s taken a different approach... One of the levers he said we had to pull with America is our defence relationship. He says we have a strong defence manufacturing sector here in Australia, and those businesses can help Trump and the US achieve their defence and national security aims. He reckons we should be talking to the US about doing more with them and in a negotiation that could be a good bargaining chip in this tariff conversation... 

How did that go down?
There was a bit of a sense of unease about it - tying defence aims to trade... Labor was very vocal in criticising the Coalition for that and saying the 2 issues should be kept very separate. One former Foreign Affairs official told the ABC that we don't want to get into a situation where "issues that are quite important to our national defence are potentially moved around in order to deal with a commercial issue."

What else happened this week?
Dutton backflipped on the Coalition's Work from Home policy, which would’ve seen all public servants return to the office 5 days a week. Reports say the research showed it tanked with women. The link there is that if public servants are pinged, then all workers will be pinged eventually to go back to the office. But work from home arrangements - according to research - are helping many Aussie women balance work and family responsibilities.

What was the reaction?
It's a big thing to ditch a policy in the middle of the campaign, and the Coalition spent a couple of days having to speak about getting it wrong. But some Coalition supporters said that's not a huge deal - and in fact, sometimes it's good to see our politicians admit to an error and show they’re able to listen and adapt.

Did any other big issues crop up?
Cost of living is still a huge issue for Australians, and PM Albanese and Treasurer Jim Chalmers remain under pressure on that front. After the global shockwaves caused by Trump’s tariffs and the escalating US/China trade war, they fielded questions during the week about a possible recession. That led to Chalmers wading in on possible interest rate cuts…

That’s unusual for the Treasurer, isn’t it?
Yep. He pointed to market speculation that there could be a 50-point interest rate cut in May - so that's half a per cent... And that was a cue for the Coalition to come after Labor saying if the economy was in better nick and if they weren’t spending so much, the Treasurer wouldn't have to cheerlead for a cut. That’s a wrap on Week 2, now onto answering your questions…

Ask the Squiz

From Nicole: After watching the first debate, I wondered if these events matter in this day and age? Do debates move the dial at all? 
No doubt they do help some people make up their minds about who they want to vote for, but with the ability for all of us - politicians included - to get their messages to you directly, these occasions have lost a bit of their potency. But politicians still do them because election campaigns are expensive to run, and advertising costs a pretty penny. So if any of the media outlets want to host and broadcast an hour of the leaders putting their case, they're going to take it. In terms of the actual performance, there's little room for error, so you don’t want to stuff it up. 

From Penny: How do we know what is true when politicians are spouting off information that contradicts each other? 
That's a good one. We hear that a lot during campaigns - one guy says the other cut funding, for example, which is rebutted but not verified. And often, the answer is quite nuanced and not fit for a 5-second sound bite. So our advice is to keep an eye on the news websites - as we round the corner to the end of the campaign, there are often explainers they publish that debunk the claims. Because it’s so difficult to do in the moment, after the fact is sometimes the only way to really dig into the nuance. 

From Shane: How much of an impact do the gaffes have? We’ve seen a couple of those with the PM falling off a stage and Dutton kicking a ball into a camera operator and drawing blood. 
Both of those incidents were big for the snappers and camos, but we’re sceptical about whether they have a big impact on how anyone votes. What it can do is derail the thing they want to focus attention on. If airtime is taken up with pictures of the off-script moment, it limits the space for the policy or funding announcement that you've spent a lot of time developing. It can be a real pain for the campaign - literally in these cases...

Keep ‘em coming…

Keep sending us your questions about the election to [email protected]. You can ask us whatever’s on your mind about politics or how the election works, and we'll pick a few to answer next week.

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