'You're a space invader': Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison clashed in a feisty debate on Friday night. And the audience verdict showed the tightness of the contest -- and perhaps the election. auspol ausvotes2019
The competing values of two aspiring leaders were made clear in the first minutes of their election debate on Friday night when they began a long tangle over tax.
Shorten responded with a defence of freedom of religious speech but countered, gently, the questioner’s point about speaking up against abortion. Shorten argued that women seeking abortions should not have to run the gauntlet of protesters trying to stop them. But Morrison was fighting on his preferred ground from the start. After a sedate opening, the debate picked up as soon as the subject turned to Labor’s policy to raise $56 billion over a decade from changes to franking credits on shares.The Prime Minister turned this into a hit to older Australians who deserved a tax break rather than a tax grab.
Morrison kept away from these details. If it is possible to send an emotive message about tax, he did it. Shorten’s response was to wade into the details. Morrison was quick to chip the Opposition Leader for his lengthy explanations. “He’ll have to talk for longer because he’s got more taxes to explain than I have,” he quipped.This did not stop Shorten coming back to tax throughout the debate. He wanted every minute to argue that the Commonwealth could not afford a tax concession that had once cost $500 million a year but had mounted to more than $5 billion and was on its way to $8 billion.
This eagerness for detail bore fruit toward the end of the debate when Shorten cited an estimate from the Australia Institute that about $77 billion of the government’s income tax cuts would go to the top 3 per cent of Australians by income.
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