​Prepare for the scare. The final days of a tight election campaign are getting fast and loose, as all sides of politics forget that blanket accusations of untrustworthiness and lying reflect badly on all of them and wild hyperbole overtakes common sense. Here’s a quick guide to the competing scares, and why they really aren’t very frightening.

The Labor/Greens/independents ‘alliance’ is a ‘caravan of chaos’ that threatens political and economic stability. Whichever major party forms government will have to get support from other parties and independents in the Senate and, in the event of a hung parliament, in the lower house. Even if the Coalition wins a lower-house majority it is highly likely to have to get votes from Nick Xenophon’s senators and a number of the other minor-party senators likely to be elected – perhaps Family First’s Bob Day or Jacqui Lambie or even Pauline Hanson. Is that scenario any more or less “scary” than a Labor victory in which it needs the votes of the Greens and Xenophon to pass legislation? According to the Coalition, only the possibility of Labor relying on the votes of Greens or minor parties is fear-inducing, whereas a Coalition government needing minor party votes in the Senate would be a recipe for total “stability”.

In other permutations, this scare focuses on the bids for re-election by lower house independents Rob Oakeshott, Andrew Wilkie and Tony Windsor, whom the Daily Telegraph mocked up as horror movie characters like Freddy Krueger and Hannibal Lecter on Tuesday because they are allegedly “economy killers”, a point quickly taken up by the treasurer, Scott Morrison, who claimed the independents were “not what our economy needs” because they also threatened “stability”.

No government has had a majority in both houses since 2004 and such an outcome is highly unlikely in this election, which makes this scare a nonsense.

Labor’s plan to end negative gearing for existing houses and halve capital gains tax concessions is also a threat to Australia’s economy. The Coalition has returned returned to this theme based on a new report by Adept Economics which found that the policy could possibly reduce house prices by “up to 4%” and reduce the annual rates of return enjoyed by property investors who buy a property, after it is scheduled to take effect from next July, from about 14.2% to 12.7% for new property investors and to 11.8% for people buying existing properties. According to Morrison, this proved the policy had been developed with “wilful disregard” for Australia’s economy and would seriously “undermine” the country’s economic wellbeing.

Actually, the Adept report itself says while its estimated price impact of “up to 4%” was higher than estimates by the Grattan Institute of 2%, “this would certainly not imply a property market crash.”

Adept principal, Gene Tunny, told Guardian Australia the estimated reduction in house prices “would probably happen over time, not immediately”.

“It’s a one-off impact based on returns to investors being lower,” he said. “The rate of growth would ease over a few years and then the market would absorb the policy change.”

That doesn’t really sound like a huge threat to Australia’s economic stability.

The Coalition is planning to ‘privatise’ Medicare. This was never true. In fact, when you think about it, it’s hard to know what “privatising” Medicare even means: Medicare already works by making payments to private providers – they are called doctors.

The government definitely was thinking about outsourcing the ageing back-office Medicare payments system, and other government payments systems as well, which is a different thing. It announced as much in the 2014-15 budget, and it set up a departmental committee to look into it, and it awarded a $5m contract to PricewaterhouseCoopers to advise on it and freedom of information documents show that lots of work was done on it, and submissions were sent to cabinet about the process.



Malcolm Turnbull has now ditched all that to kill the Medicare scare – saying the public service work will continue but it now can’t consider any private sector involvement, which will make the job difficult since that was the whole point of the exercise. And in his determination to end the “privatisation” claims he also insisted the matter had never gone to cabinet, when FoI documents, and decisions, indicate pretty clearly that it has.



Bill Shorten continues to insist the Medicare privatisation is on the government’s agenda, despite the government’s insistence that it isn’t. He links the claim to other Coalition health policies, including the freeze on Medicare payments to doctors.

