53-47 does not give me much comfort. We are always some set of happenstance away from another bout of Labor. Kevin Rudd may have the most poisonous personality in the world but he might have pulled it off had he gone to an immediate election when he reclaimed the leadership. A very large proportion of the population want what Labor offers who now make up a near rock solid half of the voters in this country who cannot be turned off voting for these people no matter what. You do have to wonder what would cause them to vote non-Labor and non-Green. If they’re not turned off now I cannot think of a thing.

The democratic poison is now the media. It’s all very well for Labor to complain about the Murdoch press but however number of times I have turned to The Australian‘s editorial page to see one and sometimes two cabinet ministers putting their views across is however many times too many for me. Cabinet ministers have others ways to reach us that do not require them to block out comment from their critics.

But I did my duty today and read The Age editorial on why you should vote Labor and quite quite oddly their list is almost exactly the same as my list on why you shouldn’t. In order, they were the NBN, increases in the superannuation guarantee, Gonski, the carbon tax (which will be morphed into an ETS), boat people under the heading of a “humanitarian intake”, maintaining the $4.5 billion in foreign aid that is to be cut, the need to cut carbon emissions (“a fundamental economic imperative”), support for more public transport but not more roads and on it goes. A priority list that exactly matches the ALP agenda. Every one of which draws down on our productivity, every one a drain. None of it rebuilds our nation. All of it is an additional burden with no evidence of an intention to make the economic infrastructure any better able to support these increased demands.

Who doesn’t want more if you can afford it. But like the NBN, on the front page of today’s Australian, the shoddy work that’s been done will require a second go just to get it started. If this is the best they can do, governments should not be determining our economic priorities in this way. This is something so obviously available for market determination that it is pathetic to find the government leading the way with such a second rate scheme.

But further into the media, there is now The Economist‘s own editorial which came out on 31 August. Here is what it says about the Coalition:

Of the country’s two main parties, the Liberal Party, now in opposition in a Liberal-National coalition, is the natural home of The Economist’s vote: a centre-right party with a tradition of being pro-business and against big government. But the coalition’s leader, Tony Abbott, does not seem an instinctive fan of markets, and one of the few key policies he has let on to possessing is a hugely expensive federal scheme for parental leave. That may help him persuade women voters that charges of misogyny are unfair, but he has not properly explained how he intends to pay for it. His social conservatism does not appeal to us: he opposes gay marriage and supports populist measures against Afghans, Sri Lankans, Vietnamese and others who have attempted to get from Indonesia into Australia in rickety craft that have drowned thousands in recent years. Indeed his promise to “turn back the boats” seems to be his only foreign policy.

This is near idiotic if not actually disgusting. Rudd, who has slagged the “neo-liberal” persuasion and is a dirigiste, evident not just from the policies he has adopted but from his very words in his Monthly article back in 2009, has no market credibility. The notion that The Economist is centre-right would only be true if the centre is now deeply socialist. The actual issues that grab this writer are all of the things that turn us in Australia off. But that is where the media are today, whose views will be just as strongly rejected as will be the views of the Labor Party. Unfortunately, the ability for the media to moderate and mitigate the disgust with Labor will mean exactly that, that Labor will not get the bashing it actually deserves.