Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday called for a May 21 election that is to be fought on issues including Chinese economic coercion, climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.
Morrison advised Governor-General David Hurley as representative of Australia’s head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, to set the election date.
Morrison’s conservative coalition is seeking a fourth three-year term. The date is the latest available to him.
Photo: EPA-EFE
He urged voters to stick with a government that delivered one of the lowest pandemic death tolls of any advanced economy rather than risk the opposition Labor Party.
“This election is a choice between a government that you know and that has been delivering and a Labor opposition that you don’t,” Morrison said.
Morrison led his government to a narrow victory at the last election in 2019, despite opinion polls consistently placing the center-left opposition Australian Labor Party ahead.
The Liberal Party-led coalition is again behind in most opinion polls, but many analysts predict a tight result.
The last election occurred in the hottest and driest year Australia had ever experienced. The year ended with devastating wildfires across Australia’s southeast that directly killed 33 people and more than 400 others through smoke.
The fires also destroyed more than 3,000 homes, and razed 19 million hectares of farmland and forests during the Southern Hemisphere summer.
Morrison was widely criticized for taking a secret family vacation to Hawaii at the height of the crisis while his hometown Sydney was blanketed in toxic smoke.
He cut his vacation short due to the public backlash, but was further criticized over his explanation for his absence: “I don’t hold a hose.”
His government was criticized for its responses to the fires and also record flooding this year in some of the same areas in Australia’s southeast that were razed two years earlier.
The government and opposition have set a target of net-zero carbon gas emissions by 2050.
Morrison was widely criticized at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in November last year for failing to set more ambitious targets for the end of the decade.
The Australian government aims to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels, while other countries have made steeper commitments.
The Labor Party has promised to reduce emissions by 43 percent by 2030.
Australia was initially successful in containing the death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic largely through restrictions on international travel.
However, the more contagious Delta and Omicron variants of SARS-CoV-2 have proved more difficult to contain.
The opposition criticized the government over the pace of Australia’s vaccine rollout, which was derided as a “stroll out,” as it fell months behind schedule. Australia’s population is now one of the most vaccinated in the world.
The government has defended its pandemic record and takes credit for Australia having the third-lowest death toll among the 38 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.
With China imposing official and unofficial trade sanctions against Australia in the past few years, the government says that Beijing wants Labor to win the election because the party was less likely to stand up to economic coercion.
Labor takes credit for thwarting the government’s plan in 2014 to sign an extradition treaty with China. Bilateral relations have since deteriorated, and the government now says that Australians risk arbitrary detention if they visit China.
Several experts have said both sides of politics are largely united on national security issues and that the government in confecting differences on China.
“The government is seeking to create the perception of a difference between it and the opposition on a critical national security issue, that is China, seeking to create the perception of a difference when none in practice exists,” said Dennis Richardson, a former minister of defense and foreign affairs, and head of the spy agency Australian Security Intelligence Organization as well as a former ambassador to the US.
“That is not in the national interest. That only serves the interests of one country and that is China,” Richardson said.
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