Australia’s election race evenly matched in polls and blunders

The longer an election campaign runs, the more likely it is something will go wrong. If week one of Australia’s marathon eight-week contest is anything to go by, there may be trouble ahead.

How a party handles various roadblocks is important, especially when the polls have the governing Liberal-National coalition and the opposition Labor Party neck and neck. When it emerged that Western Australia Labor candidate Chris Brown was convicted of drink-driving and assaulting a police officer in the 1980s, Labor moved to nip negative backlash in the bud by immediately distancing itself from him.

The government, however, has not been as assured in handling a revelation about the prime minister. Malcolm Turnbull, whose net worth is estimated to be more than AU$200 million (€130 million), has been named in the Panama Papers as a former director of a British Virgin Islands company set up and administered by law firm Mossack Fonseca to exploit a Siberian gold prospect.

Turnbull ended his involvement with the company in 1995 and there is no suggestion that he acted inappropriately. A spokesman said the prime minister was not aware of Mossack Fonseca’s role as the registered agent of the company, but that has not stopped Labor trying to make hay. Its campaign spokeswoman, Penny Wong, called on Turnbull to explain himself.

“How many other companies was he involved in which were established in tax havens?” she asked. “How many other companies was he involved in that Mossack Fonseca was involved with? He should be very upfront in answering questions about what he did or didn’t know.”

But despite Labor’s best efforts, the circus moved on.

Bizarre

The Panama connection followed a bizarre live television spectacle in which the assistant treasurer, Kelly O’Dwyer, looked like a kangaroo caught in headlights as she tried to explain how trickle-down economics works to a man who earns the minimum wage and wants to get the same tax cut wealthy Australians are about to get.

O’Dwyer did her best to explain what George Bush snr dismissed as “voodoo economics” until Ronald Reagan made him his running mate in the 1980 US presidential election, but her questioner would not buy it.

“Rich people don’t even notice their tax-free threshold lift. Why don’t I get it? Why do they get it?” asked Duncan Storrar. “If you lift my tax-free threshold, that changes my life. That means that I get to say to my little girls: ‘Daddy’s not broke this weekend, we can go to the pictures.’”

As well as unforeseen gotcha moments, elections also lead to a certain amount of disingenuousness from politicians and a suspension of disbelief from the electorate. The first such moment this time saw the government and Labor trying to damn each other over preference swap deals with the Greens.

Labor’s denial is hard to take seriously, given its history of such deals. The Liberals have rarely asked their voters to give their preference to the Greens over Labor, but there is no doubt it is going to happen this time. In gentrified inner-city seats in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, where the Liberals have little chance but the Greens could topple a Labor candidate with preferences, deals will be done. With compulsory voting and voters having to number every candidate in order of preference, who you put second last really matters.

Frontbencher

One of the Labor MPs who could lose his seat to the Greens is frontbencher Anthony Albanese. His Green opponent, Jim Casey, is on record as saying he would prefer to see a conservative government than a Labor one because that would lead to an increase in “disrupting things in the streets”.

The Rupert Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph tabloid, which normally finds fault with anything to do with Labor, put Albanese on its front page with a headline that read: “Save our Albo.” It was a temporary digression only though; the Telegraph’s anti-Labor service resumed immediately, and its sister News Corporation papers attacked Storrar, who must have wished he’d never asked about tax-free thresholds.

Apart from the coalition paying lip service to the right-wing Australian Christian Lobby organisation during campaigns, religion rarely plays much of an election role in a very secular nation. But Catholicism is unusually well represented this time. Turnbull converted from Presbyterian to his wife’s Catholic faith, while the other three major party leaders were all cradle Catholics.

Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce each went to expensive Jesuit schools, while Greens leader Richard di Natale was educated by the Christian Brothers. Shorten did a reverse Turnbull in 2009, when he took his second wife’s religion and became an Anglican.