 Hi and welcome to Off the Hill, your weekly roundup of the 2016 federal election. I'm Jill Sheppard and each week I'll be joined by my colleagues from the Australian National University, Andrew Hughes and Ryan Goss to discuss the week that was in Australian politics. And what a week it's been so far. On Tuesday, Treasurer Scott Morrison handed down his first budget and by this weekend the Prime Minister will have likely called a July 2 election. There's certainly lots to talk about, so let's get started. First of all we're going to talk about the narratives that have come out of the budget. Then we're going to talk about a bit of the uncertainty that I think is surrounding this budget so far. Then we're going to finish up talking about the logistics of the forthcoming election. We'll make it sound a bit more fun than that might seem. So let's get started. Andrew, what did you think about the narratives coming out of the budget? Safe, steady, bland, unexciting, which is what they want it really if you think about it. They didn't want us to fear or scare anyone and also make it hard for Labor to build that message against them during the election campaign itself. So they met all their targets, I think. I think they really had the first exciting announcements in the first couple of minutes. Once that had died down, the rest of us sat there wondering what on earth this budget was doing to try and make us be engaged with it. But that was the whole point. It didn't want us to engage with it. It wanted us to realize its status quo, steady as is, there's opportunities there for growth in the future. And very much to an inclusive budget, a lot of talk about we and how we build this and this is your chance to do something. So it's not the kind of strategy that we see often, right? Yeah, I think that's right. And it's an unusual, I suppose, in the sense that the budget is falling just so close to an election campaign. There hasn't been one like this in recent memory. And I think Andrew, would it be right to say that in addition to building that steady narrative, that steady image about the government, there was also an attempt to contrast that with what was portrayed as a labor black hole, even in the couple of days before the budget. So we saw this extraordinary thing where in addition to the budget leaks about what would be in the budget. Scott Morrison seems to have leaked information about what he argued was a labor black hole in a hypothetical policy that had been reduced some months before. And that's right. I'm looking at Chris Bowden's face when he realized there's a huge black hole of that significance and how do you then correct it in like a short space of time they have to them and in an election campaign too. And remember, Malcolm Turnbull has made this really clear. He wants to run the election on economic leadership. How do you do that when you've got a budget black hole of 20 billion dollars? And we have seen this before from the UK, right? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think the slogans and the language that we've seen around or the Prime Minister doesn't like three word slogans, but the language we've seen around the government's budget is very similar to that that was used by the UK Tories to win the 2015 general election. And so the slogan in the UK was our long term economic plan. And Malcolm Turnbull used those exact words talking with Fran Kelly the day after the budget. So there's similarities there. And there's although the two countries obviously very different, there are similarities in the way that the Conservative parties are trying to sell their economic management. Yeah. And so it's really put Labour in this bind where they can only be accused now of class warfare. Exactly. And Scott Morrison's already said that. Yeah. And by also the coalition tactic of copying some of Labour's big policy announcements and putting them into their budget, where do Labour go now? What announcements can they make, which seem as though, OK, this is about them also being economic leaders, puts it really, you know, hard on them on the back foot in particular to try and come up with ideas for reform, ideas so they can grow in the traditional strong areas of, you know, education, welfare, the environment, things like that. One place that at the ALP really may be able to attract the government at this point is the uncertainty that we've seen surrounding this budget. I mean, there wasn't much in and on Tuesday night. And since we've seen a lot of those announcements really get unpicked. Talk us through it. Yeah. Well, I think what's interesting there, Jill, is the extent to which the budget served as a proxy for a policy platform launch. It was so close to the election. And yet it had the disadvantage that unlike during an election campaign, these policies couldn't be rolled out one after another one per day in the announcements. And so we saw a lack of clarity, a surprising lack of clarity from government ministers in the days after the budget about, for example, whether or not the path internship program was voluntary or compulsory, exactly what the cost would be over 10 years of the business tax cuts. And those are things from the Prime Minister and the treasurer and other ministers that we might have expected a little bit more clarity around that clarity may come. But it reflects, I think, the difficulties posed by the proximity to the election. Yeah, absolutely. And that's not something that we see much of, as you say, this this kind of back to back budget election is feeling you ground for a lot of us. I think what and reflecting that is this really strange announcement that they've gotten the budget that's costed, but it's just sitting there as a bit of a blank space. They're going to sort of fill the details in later. We haven't seen that before. And I think that's fascinating from a political scientist perspective, from a, you know, what are we voting for perspective? Or at least when we're starting to think now, voters are starting to think at this point. OK, I might have made up my mind entirely, but now it's crunch time. Now we have to start thinking about it. But there are these uncertainties that are really lingering. Yeah, exactly right. And if you try to build a campaign and build a narrative for a campaign, and you've gone down the safe, steady, bland approach with your budget, but then you have this big question mark remaining, who are the winners and losers out of this $1.6 billion? It raises the very thing they're afraid of in the first place, uncertainty, back into their campaign, back into their narrative. They need to remove that really quickly now. The campaign could be launched. They might do these announcements, as Ryan said, won a day sort of thing out of the UK playbook, out of the Linton Crosby sort of strategy guide. But at the same time, there's a risk there because now people are thinking, well, every day do I have to look forward to being either a winner or a loser. And that's the very narrative you don't want to have happen to you come the start of an election campaign when you want to have all the narrative back on you and the opposition trying to chase what you're saying. If anything now, the opposition's got a good chance to actually build and construct their own certainty around this message. I hate the idea of winners and losers. So we're going to move on to something that I'm a bit more comfortable with. And that's electoral logistics. This is my particular interest. So Ryan, you're the lawyer. Talk us through what a double dissolution means for us. Yeah, well, this is the first double dissolution in three decades. And it does have all sorts of constitutional requirements around them and all sorts of constitutional technicalities. And we may see some of that. But at its heart, this is just a particular sort, a special sort of federal election. And the big difference here is that a regular federal election, the Senate is only half up for election and the full House of Representatives up for election. At a double dissolution election, all of the Senate and all of the House are up for reelection. So that is the difference in constitutional terms. It's a different way of electing the Senate. It means that the quota, the number of votes you need to get into the Senate is less in a double dissolution. So it's about 7.7% of the vote to get into the Senate. And I think that raises the prospect that we may clear out some of the current micro parties and current independents, but we might replace them with some other minor parties or other independents. I think the tumble might find that he had to be careful what he wished for. I think you're right there about that, Jill. I mean, in particular too, look, playing the short game, long game strategy here. Short game is, OK, early on, you can win the election. You can also, with a double dissolution, you come in clean, you can say, I have mandate. I have a clean mandate. Both houses are parliament. So you can run your policy early on. You can put in all the stuff you talked about, all the things you had the trigger for. You implement those ideas. At the same time, you still have to work at the Senate. You don't know how the numbers are going to fall on the Senate. Long game strategy here is you've done a deal with Nick Xenophon and the plays out. So the next three years, you've done a nice deal with him. He becomes, in a way, like the Democrats who were once upon a time for John Howard. Nick Xenophon will clean up two or three Senate seats when he jokes. You're both very optimistic. You're both very optimistic. I'm very dubious about Senate polling. I'm dubious about Nick Xenophon's chances of really turning a lot of the goodwill that he attracts into votes. I think that people still, you know, there's a homing principle in political science that people come back to their major party, the major party that they identify with. And so I think these things come in cycles. But I tend to agree that Turnbull may have got more than he bargained for. But I think maybe the short game strategy is replacing the long game strategy. And down the track, because as you say, Ryan, the lower quotas, who knows who could be elected? Exactly right. You're looking at Lazarus getting re-elected. You're looking at possibly Lambie getting re-elected. Who thought we'd be sitting here six months ago talking about this? Exactly right. Right? Maybe we should all predict a bit less. I think this is really interesting. And this really gets to what I guess is my analysis that I think Turnbull made a real error of judgment here. I don't think that he should have gone to double dissolution. And I think that when he launched this sort of rhetorical campaign, he wasn't expecting to. So let's see how this plays out. It's going to be really fun. Now, final thoughts for the week on that note, Ryan. My final thought for the week is that it looks like we will have a LNP opposition leadership spill in Queensland at the same time as the first few days of the election campaign. It's not ideal. The federal coalition needs to defend a lot of seats in Queensland. So they'll be hoping that the state-level bloodletting is quick and relatively painless. Absolutely. Andrew? I'm going for a Sunday afternoon election announcement. I think we'll see the Prime Minister using all the, you know, all the resources of the Prime Minister. The nice scene of, you know, in the car, the white car going down to Government House to make the election announcement, taking up the airtime just in time for the 6pm Sunday night news, which, of course, hits the coverage on Monday morning straight away, back on the government narrative, back again on their messaging, really hard for the opposition to counter. We'll see you down in Yarra-Lemler, waving to C1. With the kids. My... That's horribly sad. It's a great narrative. My final thought is that Manus Island, it's sort of being touted at the moment as possibly a negative distraction for the government. I think they're actually relishing this. That's incredibly cynical of me. But I think as long as people are talking about immigration, they poll well. And I think that's a very cynical electoral benefit for the government. You've been in politics for too long. I have been in politics for too long. Thanks, Andrew. Until next week, enjoy your politics.