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The day's campaign: Coalition on the defensive over Medicare plans – as it happened

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Newspoll shows two parties neck and neck a fortnight from poll as ALP pushes health, education and infrastructure and Turnbull turns to the cities and climate change. All the day’s developments on the campaign trail with Katharine Murphy, live

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Mon 20 Jun 2016 02.29 EDTFirst published on Sun 19 Jun 2016 16.38 EDT
Malcolm Turnbull looks at the town plan drawing at Oran Park Town in Sydney after announcing his Smart Cities policy.
Malcolm Turnbull looks at the town plan drawing at Oran Park Town in Sydney after announcing his Smart Cities policy. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images
Malcolm Turnbull looks at the town plan drawing at Oran Park Town in Sydney after announcing his Smart Cities policy. Photograph: Stefan Postles/Getty Images

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Key events

The treasurer Scott Morrison is coming up on the Ray Hadley program and we expect the prime minister to address reporters in Oran Park very shortly.

'The prime minister has not ruled out improving the service delivery'

Coalition campaign spokesman Mathias Cormann has been on Sky News.

Q: First of all on the issue of Medicare. It was the focus of Labor’s campaign launch yesterday and already it’s forced a retreat from the Government in terms of outsourcing the processing of payments.

Mathias Cormann:

That whole campaign by Bill Shorten is based on a lie. There never was a plan to privatise Medicare. Bill Shorten knows that. He is seeking to deceive the Australian people in the same way that he’s deceived Bob Hawke.

Q: But you’d outsource, you had planned to look at outsourcing the processing of payments. That’s been shelved because of that scare campaign.

Mathias Cormann:

What we have planned to look at and what we continue to look at is how we can improve the service delivery in relation to Medicare and other parts of government ...

Q: The prime minister has ruled that out now.

Mathias Cormann:

The prime minister has not ruled out improving the service delivery and making service delivery more user friendly. What the prime minister has ruled out and what all of us have ruled out is the privatisation of Medicare. What we have ruled out is contracting out services provided by Medicare. And that most certainly will not happen. But what the government will continue to do is to ensure that patients around Australia get the best possible service in a way that is as user friendly as possible.

'Look at their record'

Labor’s deputy leader Tanya Plibersek has been on ABC television.

Q: The PM over the weekend said in his words a re-elected Coalition would never ever privatise Medicare. That sort of kills Labor’s claims stone-dead, doesn’t it?

Tanya Plibersek:

That’s like they said before the election that there would be no cuts to health and no cuts to education and no change to pensions and no new taxes and no cuts to the ABC. They broke all those promises.

For 40 years Labor has been fighting to establish and protect Medicare and since coming to government, the Abbott/Turnbull government have tried to introduce a GP copayment, they’ve cut tens of billions of dollars of hospitals, they’ve slashed Medicare so that doctors can’t bulk-bill anymore. They’ve cut support for diagnostic imaging and pathology, hundreds of millions of dollars again. They’ve cut funding for preventative health.

If you look at their record rather than what the PM’s saying 12 days out from an election, people understand that it’s only Labor that will protect Medicare. If you want to keep Medicare, you have to vote Labor.

Q: We had the Newspoll out today showing both parties, both major parties neck and neck, 50% each on a two-party preferred basis, what does that say to you about where the electorate is at at the moment?

Tanya Plibersek:

It says to me that we need to work really hard over the next two weeks to tell people that if they want to keep Medicare they have to vote Labor.

A couple of things you’ll already know if you tuned in for the live coverage yesterday: Labor is flicking the switch to Medicare in the final push, and the opposition is pretty much past the policy announcements now – it will be pure politics for the final fortnight.

Helen mentioned before the shadow health minister, Catherine King, was on AM this morning. In that interview she acknowledged that Medicare’s computer networks will have to be upgraded “at some point” and that might involve some input from the private sector. “But under no circumstances would you flog it off,” King told the program.

On Sunday the government ditched the idea of outsourcing the Medicare payments system in order to head off Labor’s intensifying political attack about privatisation.

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Projecting back the *meh*

Katharine Murphy
Katharine Murphy

Good morning everyone and welcome to the final sprint. We are in the final two weeks, and we will be sprinting, right to the finish.

I want to open this morning with the Liberal party’s new political ad, the one that Helen has already shared this morning, the one Twitter has dubbed #faketradie. Enormously good sport #faketradie – but let’s stow the wisecracks and try and unpick what this ad is telling us about the contest.

We are now at the final pitches stage of the campaign. The TV advertising up until now has been about creating impressions. The Liberals have had a benign-looking Malcolm Turnbull talking about the components of his plan. The nonsense attack ads that Scott Morrison has been launching are social media creations. Labor, for its part, has pushed it services message with a negative tagline about Turnbull being out of touch. Bob Hawke has fronted the Medicare ads, and they’ve been so successful they’ve pushed the Coalition into retreat. Now we have the beginning of the Coalition’s final pitch, a tradie telling us Bill Shorten can’t be trusted. As former union boss and experienced campaigner Tim Lyons pointed out on wisely on Twitter last night when the laugh fest about #faketradie was at its peak: “If the ad isn’t about persuading you, chances are you won’t like it.”

This isn't a criticism of anybody - but if the ad isn't about persuading you, chances are you won't like it. Even if it's your team.

— Tim Lyons (@Picketer) June 19, 2016

The point being this is a highly targeted ad, pitched at voters who are currently undecided, who could be persuaded to vote Coalition. It’s from a highly recognisable genre of political advertising, let’s call it “don’t change horses midstream”.

But I’m taken with the ambiguity of the tagline, which urges voters to stick with the current mob for a while. Given how heavily these things are workshopped and focus grouped and tested, it cannot be an accident. Broadly, I think the purpose of the appeal is stability. It’s the equivalent of there’s been a long period of uncertainty, why don’t we just give the government a go. But it’s also equivocal. Give them a go for a while. It’s a weird pitch isn’t it? Try Coke (for a while). Buy this car (for a while). Less than compelling, right?

But clever in this way: the ad explicitly references fatigue and disaffection in the electorate. As political blogger Margo Kingston noted again on Twitter last night, it returns power to the voter by saying all of this is highly disposable. This isn’t a life or death decision, it’s just three years. You can vote differently in three years time. In that way it’s a fascinating piece of political communication. Partisan loyalties are on the wane, people are jack of the same major party appeals at election time – how do you deal with that? By playing the voter’s own disaffection game, apparently. By projecting the meh right back at them. It’s OK to be meh, we get it, we politicians all kind of suck, but some of us suck more than others. Will it work? Who knows, but it’s interesting, I reckon.

Anyway let’s press on. A reminder today’s comments thread is open for your business. If the thread’s too bracing for you, Mike Bowers and I are up and about on the twits – he’s @mpbowers and I’m @murpharoo. If you only speak Facebook you can join my daily forum here. And if you want a behind-the-scenes look at the day and the campaign as a whole, give Mike a follow on Instagram. You can find him here.

Hold onto your hard hats, here comes Monday.

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With friends like these...

News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt is begrudgingly throwing his support behind the PM, in a column titled I admit it: Turnbull is better than Shorten. But let’s look long-term.

“Conservatives must now admit it,” he writes. “Whatever we think of that backstabbing Leftist Malcolm Turnbull, Labor would be worse.”

And with that to end on, I’ll hand over the blog to Katharine Murphy to carry us through the lion’s share of today’s developments.

See you again bright and early tomorrow.

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Senator Matt Canavan is in the Top End today, and has made a few hundred million dollars of announcements before breakfast.

So far we’ve had about $130m for Northern Territory roads, including an extra $28m for the Outback Way, and $985,000 to fast-track a feasibility study into irrigated agriculture.

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