Is this the worst election campaign ever?

It’s rare to see all of Australia’s major media outlets in accord. Even more rare that they’re all correct. From The Australian to the Financial Review to the ABC to the Nine papers, commentators are united in damning the major parties’ spendathon campaign launches.

Australia went into the weekend facing a decade of deficits and a persistent refusal to match what its federal government spends with what it taxes, with only commodity price-driven windfalls to spare our fiscal blushes. By the time Peter Dutton and Anthony Albanese sat down yesterday, they’d both materially worsened deficits over coming years, or locked in permanent reductions in tax, or both.

And not for any benefit beyond, in Dutton’s case, trying to salvage a losing campaign, or in Albanese’s case, keeping his foot on Dutton’s throat all the way through the holiday break that will eat up much of the time between now and election day.

Neither side’s housing policies will do anything other than push up demand by handing more money to first-home buyers via a variety of innovative but ultimately inflationary means. Making interest payments tax deductible (while not taxing capital gains — go figure) in the case of Dutton. Making universal a policy of taking on mortgage insurance for first-home buyers in the case of Albanese. All money that will end up in the hands of existing homeowners, inflating house prices still further.

Yes, both sides have policies aimed at encouraging more supply — Labor announced a program to build 100,000 homes just for first-home buyers. Dutton has a program to provide infrastructure to remove one of the major impediments to new development, and his tax deductibility is aimed only at new homes. But we’re already behind on Labor’s existing home building target. Want to build more houses just for first-home buyers? That will just take work away from the rest of the residential construction sector, which is already struggling to meet Labor’s commitment to build more social housing and 1.2 million homes. Billions of taxpayer dollars will be spent at inflating demand much more quickly than increasing supply.

Admittedly, both sides are having a crack at addressing one of the major policy challenges facing Australia. But in classic political fashion, they’re dealing with the symptoms, not the root causes — the way our tax system prioritises investors over first-home buyers, and the way our political and regulatory systems prioritise the interests of the much larger number of existing homeowners over the smaller numbers of first-home buyers.

But when it comes to other big — I’d argue bigger — policy challenges, it’s crickets. The terrible nature of this campaign isn’t just around its profligacy, it’s the wilful indifference to the need for serious climate action, to Australia’s loss of its traditional security guarantor and the economic chaos Donald Trump has unleashed, to the unfolding disaster that is AUKUS, and to fiscal sustainability and surging net debt that will mean we’ll soon be paying tens of billions a year in interest.

I’ve been watching elections since 1983. I can’t recall one that’s been as reckless, or where the big challenges facing Australia have been more persistently and deliberately ignored.

And, sure, it’s easy to be a grumpy old man complaining that things aren’t like they used to be. As Saul Eslake reminded me yesterday, I wrote a very similar column to this one during the last election campaign, which also saw heroic spending commitments by the major parties — and Labor produced two surpluses after that. Maybe something will come along. Hell, we better hope so. But it’s wise not to rely on that, which is what both sides are doing.

Ross Gittins has an excellent longer piece today on some of the factors that have delivered us such terrible campaigns. I’d add that the pandemic and the inflation that followed it changed the mood of the electorate: it lost interest in fiscal discipline and focused on declining standards of living. It wanted politicians who not merely understood its pain but were prepared to do something about it. The budget surplus and the fiscal discipline it signalled lost its allure for voters who were jack of corporations getting away with lifting prices and the Reserve Bank lifting interest rates.

That’s why Labor, which was given little credit for the two surpluses it racked up, is happy to engage in big deficit spending. And it’s why the Coalition, which spent most of the past three years bagging Labor’s spending as inflationary, is now happy to spend up just as big as Labor. What was reckless and inflationary a year ago is suddenly crucial spending.

If Kevin Rudd caught the electoral mood in 2007 when he declared that the reckless spending must stop, there’s no such mood today. If Dutton tried to match that moment, he’d probably end up even further behind.

Trouble is, those long-term challenges won’t disappear. Indeed, they’re being exacerbated by the policies of both sides. Whether on housing, climate, security or the budget, this is a campaign about making things even worse. But no-one’s looking beyond May 3.

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