Leaders' debate shows we're back where we started — stick with the known, or risk the new?

Updated

The great West Australian dream — aside from elusive secession, of course — is that on election night it all comes down to who wins what seat west of the Nullarbor.

Alas, for those election-loving sandgropers, election nights have long been stitched up well before the canapes and the cheeky Margaret River Semillon sauvignon blanc are dragged from the ageing Kelvinator on the verandah.

So at least the blessed WA folk get the first leaders' debate to boast about, even if the May 18 blockbuster doesn't end up coming down to the electors in Hasluck, Swan, Stirling and Pearce.

Then again, the debate was consigned to a television backwater, otherwise known as 7TWO, with coverage sandwiched between Bargain Hunt (moustachioed BBC host Tim Wonnacott in a fetching mustard two-piece) and the umpteenth re-run of Vicar of Dibley.

But that's unkind.

As is the question — if you were to ask it — as to who won the night.

Because that's like asking whether two relentlessly on-message politicians could really have a debate when they are talking at deliberate cross purposes.

If, as Scott Morrison saw it, the purpose of the hour-long affair was to find points of attack on your opponent, then the Prime Minister won it narrowly.

But if, as Bill Shorten saw it, the night was an opportunity to give a grand tour of your bold suite of alternative policies, the Labor leader won it handsomely.

Here's the point. They are one and the same: points of attack for the Coalition are the ALP's platform pride (if only some of them weren't so damn tricky to handle).

And so the first "debate" reflected the election contest as a whole. They are both campaigning on the same platform — just that one's pro and the other's con.

Labor's bulging cupboard of policies, accumulated and stacked over several years, offers a vastly different future.

By comparison, the Coalition policy offering is rather threadbare.

In essence, the Morrison Manifesto's key ingredients boil down to the May Budget's 10-year schedule for tax cuts and not being Bill Shorten.

It urges voters to stick with the known, whatever reservations they might have with it, rather than dare try the radically new.

Labor is unashamedly redistributive in its tax agenda, with tax relief earmarked by the Coalition for the higher end repurposed for social spending in childcare and health.

But some of those ALP policies are so thorny, they are prone to leaving spines in fingertips with even the lightest touch.

And here's how Shorten came closest (albeit not that close) to a "gotcha" moment in Seven's leaders' debate.

The Labor leader was asked, in a roundabout way, about Labor's franking credits policy.

He responded that pensioners were quarantined in his policy, which aims to generate about $55 billion over the next decade by eliminating cash rebates on investments to those who don't pay any tax.

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Trouble is, as the PM pointed out, there are tens of thousands of pensioners who have self-managed superannuation funds that are caught in the Labor tax net.

Read the Labor fine print, Mr Morrison effectively urged.

While this might be easy to say when your policies are so few they don't need fine print, the PM insists voters should similarly show caution on Labor climate and energy policy, even if the Coalition has brought shocking ruin on itself with the same subject.

If anything, the first debate affirms that the 2019 election is a conflict between a big target who argues the virtue of new direction and a small target arguing the dangers of swerving from the current path.

So it's back to where it started.

If the election becomes a referendum on the Coalition's past three chaotic years, Labor wins.

But if Mr Morrison can unnerve enough voters about Mr Shorten's ambitious plans, the Coalition senses it has a fighting chance.

Topics: government-and-politics, federal-elections, australia

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