Andrew Leigh

A few thoughts on the election debate tonight.
* Opening and closing statements: I found Howard’s opening bizarre: diving straight into emphasising his love for Medicare. Regardless of how important his pollsters are telling him this is, opening in such an atypical way seemed very un-leader-like. His closer was solid, but uninspiring. But Latham didn’t look any more leaderly, since while the rhetoric was good, he was looking at the wrong camera throughout his opening and closing statements.
* Howard’s best moment: On terrorism, Howard put pretty much the same argument as Mac did in his recent blog posting: the argument that we shouldn’t have gotten involved in Iraq for fear of terrorist attacks is a pretty poor one. I agree with both of them, and thought that Howard made that case very articulately tonight (though I might be in the minority; the Worm showed that many people in the studio audience were cold towards Howard on this issue).
* Latham’s best moment: If there’s one thing Latham looks passionate and natural on, it’s education.
* Worst answers 1: Howard clearly anticipated the “How long will you stay in office?” question. But he never sounded terribly convincing.
* Worst answers 2: Latham must surely now be wondering about the wisdom of excluding the $600 annual child payment from his weekly tax policy costings, and having to waste a question justifying it today.
* Worst questions 1: Neil Mitchell’s use of his first question to argue a point of view, rather than to ask a question, merely demonstrated the oddity of putting a shock jock on a serious election panel.
* Worst questions 2: Labor’s tax policy is hard to understand. But I would’ve thought that journalists could actually engage with the issues a little better than Malcolm Farr’s question to Latham: “how can you say you’re lowering taxes when you’re raising five taxes?”. According to the Tele’s most senior political correspondent, I shouldn’t be worried about how much tax I’m paying, just how many taxes I’m paying.
* Most open question: Howard’s claims that school choice is a good thing seems to rest mainly on faith. There’s some evidence in the US that school choice boosts the performance of all schools, through competition. But I know of no good Australian research on this topic.
* Statement that will have least effect on the punters: Howard pointed out that Latham’s stance on Iraq puts him at odds with George Bush, John Kerry, Tony Blair and Michael Howard. My guess is that this will not affect anyone’s vote.
* The question we at Imagining Australia wish they had asked: “Mr Howard/Latham, can you please describe your vision for Australia in 2020?”
* Line of the night: “You only need a safety net if you’ve turned Medicare into a high wire act” (Latham)
* Format: Painfully rigid. Each question allowed 60 seconds for each candidate, plus 60 seconds’ rebuttal for the first respondent. It didn’t look to me as though either candidate ever faced an unexpected question, or delivered an unscripted answer.
* Style: Gweneth is firmly of the view that Howard’s navy and white striped tie showed more authority than Latham’s gold number. But she would’ve advised Howard to lose the kerchief. On body language, she scored it narrowly for Howard, and advised Latham to use his hands a bit more.
* Winner (updated Monday): I’d score it a draw. According to Annabel Crabbe, the Worm scored it as a win for Latham (67% to 33%). According to Centrebet’s odds on Monday morning, Latham had seen his first improvement since the campaign started two weeks ago.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 12th, 2004 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Election. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.