The final week of the campaign

Well it's hard to believe it's the final week of this interminable campaign (which admittedly has not been as long and protracted as the current American Presidential one). Jason Koutsoukis of The Age gives a nice summary of the disasters that have befallen the Liberal Party (oops sorry the Coalition) in their losing battle to cling onto power. This is not to say that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but you'd be a brave man to bet on the incumbents right now.

While I'm basing my vibes on what I read in the online versions of the print papers and the excellent vidcasts courtesy of the ABC, my impressions of Howard have been of a hectoring old man whose main appeal to the Australian people is "don't trust the other mob", which directly plays into the hands of Rudd's lines about Howard not having any fresh ideas for the future. Instead, he resorts to negativity and scaremongering.

What's worse is, what policies they have released add further vindication to the "no new ideas" and "stale government" line -- more tax cuts and more (non-means-tested) handouts. It must seem like a gross injustice to the Coalition in that "more of the same" ought to be a good thing, since that means we should be expecting continued economic prosperity and rising wealth. And yet Australians on the whole (based on the polls) don't seem to be buying it anymore, and certainly not on the back of consecutive interest rate rises.

Perhaps voters can finally see through the fact that tax cuts and handouts are byproducts of prosperity, but the more this largess gets distributed back to them, the more it's likely to simply push up prices for non-productive assets like real estate and essentials like education fees thus cancelling out any benefit they might have seen in the first place.

The greatest irony of the campaign has been the one-two sucker punch the Government delivered to themselves in relation to containing inflation and therefore interest rates. Howard likes to claim that the industrial relations reform no one except big business wanted, WorkChoices, has contained wages growth, thereby placing downward pressure on inflation and hence interest rates. But try explaining to punters how receiving _less_ money in your pay packet only to _still_ be paying a rising monthly mortgage bill is a good thing... How's that for out of touch?