Outsmarted by a superior fear campaign. - Michael Owen, analysis, The Australian, March 17, 2014 As Tony Abbott can attest, fear campaigns often work the best. In South Australia, Liberal Opposition Leader Steven Marshall simply did not execute his negative campaign strategy well enough in the marginal seats that mattered. Marshall certainly ran a persuasive campaign on the fear of spiralling debt and stagnant job creation that resonated across the state. This saw the Liberals again win the two-party-preferred vote. But in those key marginal seats in metropolitan Adelaide that major parties, under South Australia’s electoral system, need to win to govern, the ALP outsmarted the Liberals with a better fear campaign: what might happen to take-home pay packets if penalty rates were cut? This is primarily a federal issue but that did not stop unions and state Labor exploiting the fears of everyday workers. **(Lame-brained leftards who cannot think for themselves, of course). A senior Labor figure could not stop smiling on election night after it became clear an expected Liberal landslide had been averted. “The penalty rates stuff was gold for us,” he said. And Premier Jay Weatherill agreed yesterday, acknowledging that despite his lofty ideals to fight the election squarely on state public policy, he had no qualms about a decision to go negative and “hit back hard” in the campaign’s crucial final week. “People aren’t stupid. They know that if you actually breach the principle of penalty rates for some groups of workers, what’s to say that that’s not going to flow through the system?” he said. “That’s certainly the ambition of Tony Abbott, and we know that Steven Marshall wants to do that with the half-day public holidays here. There’s a lot of workers out there that have about a third of their income comprised of penalty rates. That was a bread-and-butter issue for them and, sure, we campaigned on it hard.” Did they ever. SA Unions, backed by the ALP, spread fear in the marginals with Marshall’s planned “commission of cuts, just like Tony Abbott”. They fired off 200,000 “robo-calls” to marginal-seat voters to drive home the message. And then the Prime Minister arrived a few days before the election to announce a defence project without inviting the Premier, which Weatherill says was “very helpful”. “When Tony Abbott came to town it obviously reminded people of the federal dimensions,” he said. Most Liberals are blaming Saturday night’s result on the electoral rules, which do need urgent reform, but the key to winning is not so clear-cut.
Posted on: Mon, 17 Mar 2014 13:03:55 +0000
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