As I said on a previous post, the best way to get a handle on how most voters are perceiving the campaign is to watch the first ten minutes of a commercial tv news bulletin. By way of illustration, Channel Nine viewers heard Tony Abbott tonight decrying debt and deficit and promising to save $1.2 billion by cutting bureaucracy.

That’s about it, apart from the PM claiming to be an economic conservative, and Real Action Man Abbott riding his bike around Melbourne this morning.

All this was bumped from the top news spot in Queensland by a story about a recall of dangerous baby products.

You’d have had to watch the 7.30 Report to have heard Wayne Swan point out that very little of the Coalition’s claimed savings are anything of the sort (selling Medibank Private or abolishing the NBN not being savings on recurrent expenditure, not to mention the fact that they’re still claiming phantom savings from the RSPT). Read more »