Good morning, this is Naaman Zhou bringing you a special election edition of the morning mail for Saturday 27 April.

The week that was

Like Jesus, Barnaby Joyce went “out of range” on Friday, but rose, with trumpets blaring, on Easter Monday. The former water minister graced Patricia Karvelas’s RN Drive on Monday night with the most memorable interview of the campaign yet.

Over a bizarre 30 minutes, Joyce offered a spirited defence of his role in the growing water buyback affair, talked over Karvelas as she tried to ask questions and repeated the word “Labor” in an uninterrupted stream as powerful as the Murray-Darling used to be.

The latest Newspoll unearthed riches for Clive Palmer in four marginal seats. In the seat with the closest contest at the last election (Herbert – where Labor MP Cathy O’Toole won in 2016 by 37 votes), the poll gave him a primary vote of 14%. By Thursday, the Liberal party had done a preference deal, despite the fact Palmer had compared Scott Morrison to Himmler three years earlier.

Elsewhere, the hard-working people of the Australian Electoral Commission donned their blindfolds, rolled their barrels and picked out the order of every ballot across the country. On Tuesday, they revealed this election will have the highest enrolment rate ever (96.8%), with young voter enrolment also at an all-time high (88.8% of those eligible).

Play Video 1:37 Federal election week three roundup: kicking goals, avoiding questions – video

The big issue

Water. The curious affair of the Murray-Darling buyback – previously extensively reported on by Guardian Australia – resurfaced over the weekend with another report from Channel 10’s The Project and rumbled on through the week.

If you’re in need of an explainer, read this from Anne Davies, and this from Maryanne Slattery to catch up.

The day after Joyce’s interview, in which he said he did not set the price and “negotiated at arm’s length”, Guardian Australia revealed that he specifically requested updates on the $80m sale. On Thursday, Guardian Australia broke the news that calculations the government used to judge the value of the water were based on figures from 1995.

In response, the Coalition announced that the auditor general would look into all buybacks over the past decade. Labor asked for a judicial inquiry, but only into this deal.

On the ground

In the rural Victorian seat of Indi, Lisa Martin reported on the battle to keep the independent streak going. With the retirement of Cathy McGowan, Helen Haines is looking to make history as the first independent to succeed another independent MP. In the wings, two Coalition challengers are circling, hoping to win it back.

Meanwhile, Calla Wahlquist roamed the picturesque streets of Deakin, the Melbourne seat so classically suburban they film Neighbours there. Previously a safe Liberal hold, it’s now a major Labor target after the Daniel Andrews landslide in the state election.

Good week for …

Clive Palmer. Unlike the 800 workers of his Queensland Nickel company, the leader of the United Australia party received instant dividends this week on his $30m advertising blitz.

It remains to be seen if his numbers actually stack up, but he’s already sealed a preference deal out of it. Monday’s poll only looked at four seats, and had a 3.9% to 4.3% margin of error – but by Thursday the Liberals agreed to preference the UAP ahead of Labor in all lower-house seats and in the Senate.

Bad week for …

GetUp. Somehow, two weeks in a row, GetUp have handed a free-kick to a Liberal politician they were trying to bring down. The progressive action group decided to withdraw an “insensitive” ad in Warringah that featured a Tony Abbott lookalike in Speedos who refused to save a person from drowning.

But in a seat now dominated by purposely bad, confusing, self-parodying campaigning (ie the anti-GetUp parody Captain GetUp), this could be a deliberate tactical masterstroke. Either way, GetUp were back on the horse days later, sending a mass text to their same-sex marriage volunteers from 2017, asking them to win “a parliament free of homophobes”.

Meme warfare

On a Tuesday tear through Victoria, Scott Morrison decided to play as many different sports as was humanly possible. The series of unflattering photos was memed into the world’s worst sports carnival.

Nick Schadegg (@nickschadegg) you may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like pic.twitter.com/GQVYA2gL82

Stilgherrian (@stilgherrian) It’s a bit rough, but you get the idea. #ausvotes pic.twitter.com/fkE7aluWFw

The next day, AAP’s Mick Tsikas caught him with a fly nestled in his mouth, with much the same reaction.

Mick Tsikas (@AAPMick) Scott Morrison comes close to swallowing a fly during a press conference in Darwin #auspol #AUSVote19 pic.twitter.com/ZoIfUaQxhx

Campaign dog of the week

Keisha the husky (left) in Adelaide. Honourable mention to unnamed smaller dog (right).

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The prime minister, Scott Morrison, with Keisha the husky outside GD Wholesale Fruit and Veg at Hawthorndene near Adelaide. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

They said it

“Let’s face it, it’s a terrible river.”

~ Former NSW Liberal minister Pru Goward on the Murray-Darling

In case you missed it in the Guardian

Peter Dutton has sold his Canberra apartment but still says he will stay in parliament, reports chief political correspondent Sarah Martin.

Liberal candidates around the country have also silently dropped the word “Liberal” from their posters, in another dispatch from Martin.

Katrina Hodgkinson, the Nationals’ candidate in the four-way contest of Gilmore, is still on the payroll of a powerful lobbying firm but denies a conflict of interest, reports Lisa Martin.

And read this from political editor Katharine Murphy – How Shorten the Redeemer met Morrison the Disruptor

What we read elsewhere

Michael Rowland’s analysis on the ABC of the interactions between journalists and other users on Twitter during the election sparked lively debate about the level of criticism the media should be expected to accept.

On Inside Story, Frank Bongiorno canvassed some similar themes in a more detached way, digging into the frequent complaints on Twitter about the mainstream media’s alleged failures to cover hot political stories, in this case #watergate.

And in the New York Times, Damien Cave and Isabella Kwai looked at Australia’s immigration debate in the context of the election, finding “two competing visions” competing for votes: “the Australia longing for a nostalgic past, and the Australia trying to figure out the next phase of integration for a more globalized nation”.

What do the polls say?

A national Morgan poll had Labor’s lead narrowing to 51%-49%, with the Coalition’s primary vote up 1.5% to 39%.

In Newspoll’s polls of four marginal seats, the high UAP vote (14% in Herbert and 8% in Lindsay) could spell trouble for Labor now the Liberal preference deal is confirmed. The poll was conducted before the deal, and assumed Palmer votes would flow 50/50 to each party.

But both were already two of Labor’s closest contests, and Monday’s predicted 2PP was the same as the election result in 2016 (50/50 in Herbert, 51/49 in Lindsay).

The other two seats of Pearce (Western Australia) and Deakin (Victoria) are previously safe Liberal seats that have now become marginal. Pearce was won on 54% after preferences in 2016, and Deakin on 56%. Monday’s poll put Pearce at 51% to the Liberals, and Deakin at 50/50.

Again, caveats abound for the seat polls, with a 4% margin of error.

Coming up

Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten will debate each other in Perth on Monday (screened on the Seven Network’s second channel, 7TWO, at 7pm AEST) and in Brisbane on Friday (Sky News at 6.30pm AEST).

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