 Hi and welcome to Off the Hill, the ANU's weekly look at what's been happening in the 2016 federal election campaign. As always, I'm joined by my colleagues Dr. Ryan Goss, constitutional law expert and Dr. Andrew Hughes, political marketing expert. If you've missed any previous episodes and you want to catch up, just go to the website at anu.edu.au. If you find yourself in Canberra on Tuesday evening, you can get along to our policy forum of the vote. This week we're talking about health policy. Again, details are on the website. Now we're halfway through the election campaign. So we're going to take the chance to really take stock of where we are and talk about what's been happening so far. And I mean really, in a lot of ways, not much has been happening. In another way, it's all been happening. The polls are at 50 all. This should be, this should be going gangbusters. You know, this is, it's on, right? It's on like Donkey Kong. Free polling starts this week. We know that up to a third of all voters might vote before election day, which is huge. A lot of those are commuting workers. So people who, you know, end up in the city on their lunch break, decide to go and vote. Not a very deliberate kind of act, but they're just there. And people like us, who work at universities, who work at schools, who are going on school holidays. And students. Students. Who I assume is all that is watching us. I've won a vote beforehand. This has huge ramifications for the campaign. Before we sort of talk too much about that, what's going on with the polling, Andrew? Yeah, look, you know, you get the sense that Bill Shorten should be a lot happier, a lot more confidence in what, how he talks about policies and how he should be acting. Because look where he's come from. Political graveyard where people are writing him off six months ago, no chance at all of winning the election. And now look where the polls are and look where his personal approval ratings are as well. He looks happy enough. You think so? I don't think he looks happy enough. He's having a great time. I think, I think at this stage, you know, Bill Shorten looks like he's having a great time. Malcolm Turnbull is sort of grinding this one out. Yeah, he seems that way, doesn't he? I agree about that. Malcolm Turnbull seems like he's not having a very good time at all. Is it the jogging that doesn't? I'll tell you, Shorten looks fit. He looks really fit, doesn't he? Yeah. And look, and he's got that momentum behind him a bit too. Look, and I just sense when he does the big policy announcements like the other day about the economic policy, he just didn't seem like he always had that passion. You'd feel of a leader who feels like they're about to win an election. Now, I think one of the reasons probably we're not seeing, you know, giddy heights of excitement from either leader or, you know, on the other way, the sort of pits of depression is because, you know, nationally we're 50-50, but that's not the main game, right? Yeah, that's right. And I think that's what we're going to see. That's going to be the interesting story over the next three or four weeks is that we have national polls that are, as we say, about 50-50. But if you look at the state by state polls, there's wild variations. The coalition is so far ahead in Queensland, so far behind in Victoria. Very different pictures. And no one knows what's happening in South Australia. No one knows what's happening in South Australia. And that's before we even look at the marginal seats in Queensland on New South Wales, right? So the national polls are going to be what gets the headlines for the most part, but they're not necessarily telling the full story, are they? It's all happening below the surface. Or so we would assume. Yeah, exactly. And as Ryan said, the marginal is where the action is at the moment. You look at a seat like, for example, Crangamite. I hear he's not budging at all. Even though there's been a lot of visits there by both sides, it's still quite solid to the coalition at this stage. They need to pick up a good swing in that seat to win. And it's a seat like that across the country, where they have to really pick up Labor to win this election. We're starting to see some preference deals in out-of-suburban seats. The shady deals are happening. The Greens. I don't know that they're shady so much as a democracy in action, Andrew. Shady, backroom deals. Come on. But the Greens have said, you know, they're going to leave open tickets in some of these out-of-suburban Melbourne seats. Yeah. Barnaby Joyce is heard. So how do I say, I don't want to say throwing money, but announcing projects, announcing big capital expenditure in New England, up in his seat. We're starting to see some of these things that we would expect to see in a normal campaign. Yeah, and this is a segmentation approach. Now, you do the national campaign, but you have to store it at the local seats and you have to do the segment quite well. You have to think, okay, this seat here, what are the real important issues? Or I can throw money out and put the promises into a tangible form. You want to call the consumers out, aren't you? They are. Come on. They're voters and real men and people. They are. They're not science experiments either, Jill. Oh, it's too shady. Let's think about those promises that Andrew mentions, because I think one of the interesting things we're seeing with all the pre-poll voting, right, so many people are going to be voting weeks or days before the election, is that they'll be voting potentially before some policies are announced, before some promises are announced, so they won't have the full picture. They won't be fully aware of what's going on. So that's a really weird dynamic that Australian politics is still getting its head around. It's something we haven't quite faced yet, and I think the major parties are really struggling to come to terms with what this means for election timing. This is why we've seen such a slow burn, right? But this week, pre-polling starts, so we're going to see people start heading to the booth. Not the normal booth, as we know it, but an early booth. And I think this week, what we've seen is, and a part of this is really because of the terrible fact of this East Coast low that we've had, storms battering up and down the East Coast, loss of life, incredibly traumatic series of events. I would have expected to see a bit of a pivot from the leaders at this point, getting into campaign mode, getting out there, where are your waders, your lugging sandbags to help? We saw this with Rod. We've seen this before. Why aren't the leaders doing this? We don't have an answer for it, I think. Well, is your suspicion, Jill, that the leaders don't want to look like they're capitalising on a crisis or capitalising on a tragedy? I think there's absolutely that, and I think there's also the sense that we don't know them particularly well yet, and we don't sort of have the trust in them that they would be doing this without seeming disingenuous. And these are two of the, relatively speaking, less experienced leaders to take major political parties to elections in Australia for some time. And we're seeing them do things which we haven't always seen in Australian politics. This week Malcolm Turnbull released the autobiographical film about his childhood as a single parent household and his life before he made his millions in his various careers, and really emphasising to the Australian people where he's come from, but also that now he's fond of saying he's a grandfather, he's been married to Lucy for a long time, and trying to personalise and reintroduce himself to the Australian people. I was the main object of everything he wanted to achieve. He was very focused on doing what was right for me. On 7.30 last night, Malcolm Turnbull said that women can do everything and so can grandmothers. And I thought it was an admirable effort to shoehorn his grandparents status into every possible conversation. He must be impossible to talk to at the moment. Childcare policy, we've seen the flip side of this this week short in having a human moment where he said, and I defend him to the ends of the earth on this, but he did say when taken out of context, this sounds terrible, let's face it, men in Australia rely on the women in Australia to do the childcare and to organise the childcare. Now, as a woman in Australia, I cheer him, I say thank you for acknowledging all the unpaid and undervalued work that I do, but it hasn't played well for him. No, not at all. And look, I think maybe it's because we're in the middle of a campaign and the cynics out there are seeing this as basically, oh, this is Bill trying to connect with people, engage with people. But what a way to say it and have it come out. And it's a campaign, it's going to be misconstrued. People are dissected on social media and it sounds absolutely appalling. But he did follow it up with, I understand how difficult it is for a working woman with the kids trying to work out, how on earth does she go to work if 80% of what she's earning gets eaten up in childcare fees? This is an incredibly legitimate and pressing and important issue. And childcare is a massive issue. I mean, for some people anyway, me personally, big issue, massive, sensitive, wedge for sure, you're there on me on childcare because I couldn't do that. Whoa. Yeah, no, can you tell? Can you tell? Can you guys tell? But it's like that because you're paying so much money for childcare. It's the price of an elite private school and you're thinking, where does this money go? Why am I paying so much money for? Why can't they have worked out a policy? And Ryan and I were talking about this earlier about maybe a policy where, for example, why can't you put a childcare center next to a school on government land and they have it nationalized across the country, national standards for the sector once anyway. There you go. It's my policy. We're not going to nationalize childcare. But I think I can say with all confidence that funding for childcare is only going to get up. No one's going to pull money from adorable babies. Well, and I think if anything, it's a surprise that it's not more of an issue, I think. Absolutely. I think for generation X, increasing generation Y, things like childcare and housing affordability, are only just beginning to be talked about in politics to the same extent that they talked about around the barbecue and around the park. Well, in those, the younger generations, like some of us in the room, I'm not cast to his versions here. We do swing more from party to party than other, than other older voters. That isn't on childcare. Would childcare influence your vote at the end of the day? My kids in school. Final thoughts for the week, Ryan? Well, my final thought is that we are, we're filming this on a university campus in the capital city. And on another university campus in a capital city, not too far from here in Port Mosby, students are protesting and putting themselves in danger in order to express certain democratic rights. And as we go through an election campaign, it's worth remembering that this is happening now. One of our very close neighbors. There are bigger things happening than this campaign. And our thoughts are very much with, I think our colleagues in P&J. For sure, 100%. Yeah. Andrew? Just to change tack a bit, I think I'll look at the advertising front this week. We noticed a change finally in the coalition's messaging strategy. First time this week, we've seen a negative ad being used by them across the airwaves. So I think it's a sign of, perhaps we're now getting to that final part of the campaign proper itself. They've switched finally to being negative. Hats off to Labor as well, who only this week did a multicultural campaign of most of their campaign ads. Great work. I mean, I really admire them for doing that too. Again, the cynics out there all say it's a ploy. To me personally, it should have happened elections ago. Yeah. And it's a sign of things that come. Yep. So in Arabic, Hindi. Hindi. And I think the other languages involve Chinese, traditional and mainland. So it's going to just pick up in the elections. It's really important. Now, I think mine's a bit of a downer too. I think we're going to see insurance claims start to roll in this week from the affected areas, the storm hit areas on the East Coast. And I'm fascinated to see how that plays out as a political issue. Yeah. So until next week, we'll see you then.