EDITORIAL: Judgment day is a time to look past Liberals campaign debacle 

Voters can be forgiven for thinking this election is all a waste of time. One mob is as bad as the other; Anthony Albanese is a bit of a goose and Peter Dutton gives off thug vibes.

Both are multimillionaires out of touch with the struggles of families in the suburbs. Neither of them really gets Australia, they don’t understand business, and certainly have no idea how young people think.

They don’t care about us, so why should we care about them.

The narrative, promulgated by the lazy and the louche, is a cop out.

It’s an excuse which allows our politicians to get away with mediocrity.

If we want our political class to be better, we must demand more of them. Actively.

If we are being asked to decide who should govern Australia for the next three years — who should draw up the budgets and manage our economy, who should control the borders, who should negotiate with Donald Trump, who should oversee defence and who should decide how the highest tax take in history should be spent — based on the official election campaign, then it would be a straightforward proposition.

Unfortunately many are not paying attention to the detail, choosing instead to rely on the vibe. And the vibe over the past month has been Albanese good enough, Dutton a shambles.

The reality is, the past three years of the Albanese Government has been dreadful. It’s almost as though it has been so bad for so long that we are suffering an extended outbreak of repressed memory.

The Voice. (Oh yeah, forgot about that.) Your power bills through the roof. (Shit, that’s right.) Your spending power shot to pieces. (Hang on hasn’t it always been this bad) Your local businesses up against the wall. (It’s always tough). Your mortgage payments careering out of control. (Come on, interest rates were much higher in the 1990s).

It’s trite but as a nation we have been gaslit by the Albanese Government.

It has created the economic conditions — surging power bills, a diabolical crash in the standard of living for every household— only to turn around and claim to be delivering the relief to the crisis of their own making.

The Coalition has failed over the campaign to make the case of how and why the Albanese Government has failed.

That’s not an insignificant thing.

If you can’t run a good campaign, can you run a good government?

It’s a legitimate question, and it is why the polls are showing the Albanese Government, rather than being punished for their poor record, will be rewarded for their exceptional, and exceptionally misleading, campaign.

The truth is the Labor Party is expert at skewing the narrative.It has exploited a disengaged electorate.

The Opposition has been disappointing during this campaign, but when we vote on Saturday it’s a judgment on the past three years of compounding failure. And Anthony Albanese should be punished for it.