Buyer’s remorse at Sky
Apparently the powers that be at Sky News weren’t exactly thrilled with the ‘stacked’ audience of supposedly independent swinging voters at its first leaders debate.
Question after question sounded like what you might expect to hear asked at an ABC dinner party rather than on Sky News after dark.
Here at Inside Mail we thought we’d cracked the case when we were told that ‘Q&A’ selected the audience members…
…after all, the ABC’s Q&A program on Monday nights is well-known for its biased audience and questions.
But it turns out the Q&A that selected Sky’s debate audience isn’t the ABC TV show, rather it’s a market research company the broadcaster tasked with the job.
Three years is a long time between drinks, but we’re confidently predicting Sky will go elsewhere next time it hosts a leaders debate on the campaign trail.
Liberals’ lesson in stupidity
Victoria likes to think of itself as the education state – that’s literally the line used on its number plates.
Which is why it was so odd that the Coalition decided to pick a fight with the state’s universities by coming up with a new higher education policy that takes an axe to international student numbers.
Higher education is ‘s second largest export industry after mining, and Victoria leads the way. Who came up with this vote-losing policy? Presumably the shadow education minister Sarah Henderson, who is meant to be a Victorian.
It’s the equivalent of a WA Liberal suggesting a mining tax.
Peter Dutton had been tracking rather well in Melbourne marginal seats, capitalising on the unpopularity of the long-in-the-tooth state Labor government.
Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory is a certainly skill – it’s just not one that’s especially becoming in a shadow minister.
Independents… united?
If being an independent MP is your thing, surely paying for a joint billboard with another ‘independent’ isn’t playing into that narrative?
Yet that is exactly what teal ‘independents’ Sophie Scamps and Zali Steggall have done, as you can see.
The teals froth at the mouth at the suggestion they are a de facto political party, yet all evidence points in exactly that direction.
Even if they have found a way around having to identity as a political party, as these billboards clearly demonstrate, they certainly aren’t the ‘independents’ they sanctimoniously claim to be.
Remember me? No?
The better Albo does on the campaign trail the more his Treasurer Jim Chalmers appears to be struggling with relevance deprivation syndrome.
So much so that he recently called a media conference just to tell the RBA that Trump’s tariffs mean it should cut rates next month.
Channeling former U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John McCain, Jim then suspended his campaign to meet with bank CEOs for a chinwag about the economic turmoil ahead. McCain had, of course, famously suspended his 2008 presidential campaign briefly to attend to the Wall Street meltdown.
No one within the Labor Party had the heart to tell our Treasurer that suspending his campaign went largely unnoticed, other than the strategically leaked news item that appeared on, you guessed it, the ABC.
He’s been as much of a non-entity in this election campaign as the shadow treasurer Angus Taylor, and that’s saying something! Jim had hoped that he’d get all the credit for an election win coming off the back of his Budget, but it seems more likely that voters casting their ballots for Labor might struggle to even name who the Treasurer is. Team Albo is laughing its way to victory already… assuming the PM doesn’t find a way to derail between now and May 3.
Enemies become friends on the campaign trail
There is no denying that Anthony Albanese had a much better first week in this year’s election campaign than he did back in 2022.
On that occasion, day one was dominated by him not knowing the cash rate.
The question was asked by Stela Todorovic, then a journo, now a press secretary for none other than Mr Albanese.
It was clever thinking by the PM once in office to hire the same reporter who made his life difficult on the last campaign so she couldn’t do it again.
That doesn’t explain him also appointing former Guardian political editor Katherine Murphy to his comms unit, of course, but we assume he knew the left-wing news site wouldn’t exactly lurch to the right without her.
This is a teaser for tomorrow’s edition of Inside Mail, the weekly media and politics column exclusively for Mail+ subscribers