Historic bushfires, floods, a pandemic and now soaring prices — Australians have a lot to worry about before voting in a federal election tomorrow.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison is fighting to stay in power and fend off opposition Labor Party leader Anthony Albanese, who was ahead in opinion polls.
These are five battlefields in which the Australian election is being fought:
Illustration: Mountain People
PRICES
Inflation is running hot at a 20-year high of 5.1 percent as prices soar at gas stations, in shops and for housing — an average home in Sydney now sells for A$1.5 million (US$1.05 million).
Adding to the pain for borrowers, the Reserve Bank of Australia raised interest rates this month for the first time in 20 years.
Morrison said that rising prices are a global phenomenon and Australia is doing better than most countries, and his Liberal-National Party government has slashed the state fuel excise for six months.
Albanese said that Morrison’s cost-cutting measures are like “a fake tan — they disappear once people have cast their vote.”
However, he said he would also let the state fuel excise cut expire.
Albanese has said he would support a rise in minimum wages to keep up with the cost of living.
He also said he would “fix” aged care with more nurses and better pay for nursing home staff.
CLIMATE
Australia’s “black summer” bushfires of 2019 and 2020, and subsequent deadly east coast floods, have highlighted the consequences of climate change.
However, Morrison has said he would mine and export coal for as long as there are buyers, and touted a “gas-fired recovery” from the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also resisted global calls to cut carbon emissions faster than the current commitment of up to 28 percent by 2030.
Labor said it would upgrade the electricity grid, boost use of renewable energy sources, promote electric vehicles and commit to a 43 percent cut in greenhouse gases by 2030, but it made no promise to phase out coal or ban new coal mines.
PANDEMIC
Morrison takes credit for Australia’s robust post-pandemic economic recovery, with a jobless rate of just 4 percent.
Australia’s closure of international borders and individual states’ strict lockdowns helped to curb deaths linked to COVID-19 to about 7,500 so far in a country of 26 million people.
Morrison is widely credited with spending huge sums to protect jobs and the economy, but he has been criticized by the opposition for a sluggish rollout of vaccines and self-administered rapid antigen tests.
TRUST
When reporters asked French President Emmanuel Macron if he thought Morrison had lied to him over a French submarine contract from which Australia abruptly withdrew, he replied: “I don’t think. I know.”
Morrison denied the allegation, but has faced similar criticism at home.
A leaked text message from last year, from the man who is now Australian deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, said that Morrison was a “hypocrite and a liar,” adding that he had “never trusted him.”
Just eight days before the vote, Morrison said that he had been a “bulldozer” to get things done during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I know there are things that are going to have to change with the way I do things, because we are moving into a different time,” he said.
The prime minister has asked voters to judge him by the job he has done, warning that Albanese is an unreliable “loose unit” on the economy.
Early in the campaign, Albanese could not recall the unemployment rate and the main lending rate. More recently, he stumbled in explaining his own disability insurance scheme.
“That doesn’t sound like someone that deserves a second interview, let alone the job,” Morrison said.
CORRUPTION
Morrison has not delivered on his three-year-old promise during the previous election to establish a corruption-fighting federal integrity commission.
He has blamed the opposition for not supporting his proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission, which has been criticized as toothless.
The Australian leader provoked outrage among supporters of the state of New South Wales’ independent corruption watchdog — which some have proposed as a model for a federal body — by describing it as a “kangaroo court.”
Albanese has said he would set up a “powerful” national anti-corruption body as a priority if elected.
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