Australian Prime Minister launches his election campaign days before the polls | Health and fitness

CANBERRA, Australia (AFP) – Australia’s embattled prime minister on Sunday formally launched his conservative party’s campaign less than a week before an election, highlighting the nation’s early success in containing the pandemic and its robust economic recovery.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s coalition follows center-left Labor opposition in most opinion polls as the administration seeks a rare fourth three-year term in elections on Saturday.

Morrison focused the party’s launch on economic management, which has traditionally been seen as the strength of his conservative liberal party.

He described the election as “a choice between a strong economy or a weaker economy that makes your life more difficult, not better.”

“The choice is between a stronger future or an uncertain future in an already uncertain world,” Morrison added.

The government is counting on voters choosing familiarity over change after upheaval in a series of disasters of nearly biblical proportions since the last election in 2019.

Besides the epidemic, Australians have been hit unprecedentedly by bushfires, floods, droughts, heat waves and a rat epidemic.

The Morrison government has been widely praised for keeping the number of COVID-19 deaths in Australia relatively low in the first two years of the pandemic. But more transmissible variables have overshadowed defenses and Australia now has one of the highest infection rates in the world.

Australia’s economic recovery from the pandemic has been faster and stronger than that of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan, a government minister boasted at the launch of the campaign.

But rising inflation has made Australians’ costs of living, including housing costs, a prominent electoral issue.

Morrison announced on Sunday that the re-elected government would allow Australians to use their pension money to buy a home, an option government leaders have rejected for decades.

The controversial policy could increase home prices, which rose 24% last year and are an important driver of inflation.

Labor campaign spokesman Jason Clare condemned the policy as “adding fuel to the fire”.

Morrison’s personal decline since a vaccine rollout in Australia fell behind schedule for months last year is increasingly seen as hampering his government’s re-election chances.

Morrison’s critics say he admitted his popularity was a drag on his government last week when he promised to be a more sympathetic leader if reelected.

Morrison said the unusual challenges of the pandemic forced him to be “a bit like a bulldozer” as prime minister during his first term.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese responded, “Even Scott Morrison distances himself from Scott Morrison.”

“This prime minister is not going to change, which is why we need to change the government,” Albanese said.

Albanese attended a labor rally in Brisbane, the same Queensland city where Morrison launched his party’s campaign.

Queensland Key Elections. The government holds 23 of the 30 seats in the coal-rich state. Labour, which has more ambitious plans to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions, holds just six seats and holds nothing outside of Brisbane, the state capital and largest city.

Labor launched its campaign last week in Western Australia, another major mining state where the government also holds the vast majority of seats. The government is holding 11 and PT five in the state of iron ore.

Morrison takes comfort in his narrow 2019 election victory against poll expectations.

The split of votes between government and labor in 2019 was 51.5% to 48.5% – the opposite of the result predicted by Australia’s top five opinion polls.

An investigation by the Australian Social Research Industry and Market Climax found that Labor voters were overrepresented in the survey samples.

The 2020 study was unable to determine whether “pastoralism,” the process by which pollsters manipulate results to match the results of others and avoid damaging the credibility of being the only fault, played a role in the 2019 failure because pollsters refused to disclose their results. Data draft.