Christmas comes earlier every year and seemingly so do election campaigns. Didn’t we just have one of these?
The lights are being strung up, the plastic pine trees are littering shopping centres; candidates are being announced, protesters are interrupting PMs.
And while we still don’t know exactly when we’ll be going to the polls — despite a few days of fervent speculation that began in the West — two recent events have given the parties some ideas what issues might be winners.
Queensland’s election was a pulse check for both Labor and the Coalition for how they might fare in a federal campaign.
The mood after it and the US election, according to the pundits, is that culture wars are out.
Debate over abortion pulled newly-elected Queensland premier David Crisafulli and his team off their election message, and his federal colleagues like Nationals leader David Littleproud now say it cost them votes.
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Dutton keeps to the straight and narrow
Even before the US election was called for Donald Trump, opposition leader Peter Dutton was telling his MPs not to become distracted in the same way.
He and prime minister Anthony Albanese, and anyone else with an attachment to politics, have been sifting through the entrails of Donald Trump’s winning result to see what they might divine for Australia.
Dutton has tried on a few Trump lines — “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” — to see how they fit.
But this week suggests he knows there are limits to what might apply here, or be successfully imported.
Trump, who once touted himself as the “most pro-life president”, distanced himself from the abortion issue through the most recent campaign.
That didn’t stop it from being a central issue in the minds of voters, a key campaign point for some Republicans, as well as a question that appeared directly on the ballot paper in several states.
There are some in the federal Coalition still pushing the boat out on the issue, like senators Matt Canavan and Alex Antic, who are refusing to withdraw their private bill on abortion.
But Dutton reminded his colleagues this week that he believes the party’s narrow path to victory runs firmly through the issue of bringing down inflation.
The prime minister-aspirant said he supported “a woman’s right to choose” and had no interest in a “crass” election debate on abortion.
Dutton’s narrow path might even mean jettisoning even some of the policies that Liberals would traditionally campaign on, like tax cuts, because they would be inflationary.
Conservative and progressive governments alike have sunk or shrunk under the wave of inflation. And all signs point to it still being front of mind come election time.
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Internet fights
The government has opened another front in its ever-expanding war with the social media giants, who have managed to regain ground over much of the year.
It announced last night that it would put the onus on social media companies to take preventative action to stop the foreseeable harms their platforms cause.
It has had little success so far elsewhere.
Elon Musk succeeded against the Australian government in his battle to keep repellent content on his platform, X, including the graphic footage of a Sydney bishop being stabbed in a declared act of terror.
Meta has so far escaped without punishment from its decision to simply stop complying with the Coalition-era News Media Bargaining Code, which requires it to pay news companies for the privilege of hosting their content on their platforms.
A separate bill to force social media companies to act on misinformation and lies that proliferate on their watch is looking very poorly, after independents David Pocock and Tammy Tyrrell said they were not on board.
The government is now effectively relying on the unlikely trio of ex-Labor senator Fatima Payman, ex-Greens senator Lidia Thorpe and ex-Liberal senator David Van as its only chance to pass its legislation (and it also still needs to win over the Greens).
Meanwhile, the untested proposal to ban children and teenagers younger than 16 from social media seemed like it would sail through parliament before the year’s end, given the opposition has been pushing for a social media ban since at least April, well before the government’s announcement.
But cracks are emerging there, too. The possibility of some platforms like Snapchat being left out entirely from the ban, and others being granted part-exemptions for dedicated platforms like YouTube Kids or Instagram Teens, has caused ire in the Coalition.
Elsewhere on the internet: beauty influencers online are chided for how they might be impacting impressionable youngster’s body image, but did you know they are also hoarding precious medical fluids?
And at least one Trump loyalist is making sure Kevin Rudd knows that the internet never forgets, even if you delete your old tweets.
