Welcome to week 2: Liberal transphobia saga continues as both parties trade scare campaigns

As the second week of the election campaign kicked off, we are finally starting to look beyond Anthony Albanese’s gaffe last week. 

That could be because the latest Newspoll showed, despite a fall in Albanese’s personal approval, Labor maintaining an election-winning lead. But it could also be that journalists, already broadly dissatisfied with the state of campaign reporting, are moving on.

They’re also moving on to things uncomfortable for Scott Morrison. Today the prime minister was trying to brush aside a series of stories about transphobic comments by Liberal Warringah candidate Katherine Deves.

In now-deleted Twitter posts, Deves accused trans women of using “womanface”, claimed half of trans men were sex offenders, and compared trans rights to the Third Reich. 

Today Morrison claimed Deves had simply stood up for women in sport.

“I’m not going to allow her to be silenced. I’m not going to allow her to be pushed aside as the pile-on comes in to try and silence her,” he said.

“I think there are many Australians who agree with me about that.”

Except the “pile-on” was coming from Morrison’s own side of politics. This morning, NSW Treasurer Matt Kean reiterated his calls for Deves to be disendorsed. Trent Zimmerman, the moderate facing an independent challenge in the neighbouring seat of North Sydney, also wants her gone.

Deves, who yesterday hid from media in her garage, has vowed to continue. Morrison, who picked her to run after a tortured preselection process, will keep backing her, even though Liberals privately conceded months ago that Warringah was all but gone.

Notably, Albanese didn’t really take the opportunity to unequivocally condemn Deves’ views today, instead calling it another sign of the “chaos and division” within the Liberal Party. 

Part of Labor’s “let the government hang themselves” strategy involves running from anything that could be construed as a culture war wedge. But that would be little comfort to trans people watching this play out just months after the religious discrimination debate.

What Albanese, in Brisbane again today, wanted to talk about was Labor’s renewables-tinged energy plan and emergency management. His predecessor Bill Shorten, meanwhile, was out unveiling the party’s plan to fix the NDIS.

But what really rattled Morrison was an alleged scare campaign over expanding the cashless debit card to include pensioners, which he called a “despicable lie”.

The fear has its roots in a soundbite from 2020, when Social Services Minister Anne Ruston talked about putting “all income management” onto the cashless debit card. She later ruled out putting pensioners on the card.

But something only needs the tiniest kernel of truth to become an effective scare campaign. Like the myth of Labor’s “death tax” three years ago, and 2016’s “Mediscare”, the Coalition’s support for the cashless debit card opens them up to attack. Already, it seems to be cutting through in Northern Tasmania.

Morrison moaning about Labor scare campaigns is pretty funny, and another reminder that all political discourse is just the Spider-Man meme. The government had plenty of scare campaigns of its own today. One, run on the front page of the News Corp tabloids, was a claim Labor’s energy plan would raise power bills, based on… mystery government modelling.

The prime minister was in Perth today, paying homage to the resources sector and trying to sandbag Western Australian seats. In a speech to the WA Chamber of Commerce he promised never to introduce a carbon or mining tax.

Labor hasn’t dared go near either of those things since 2013. But in an election based on “vibes”, fought between two competing, meagre visions, it’s not surprising that lines of attack so rarely aim for actual policy.