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Cameron Murphy is the President of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties and the Secretary of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties, unpaid and voluntary positions that he has held since the year 2000.

Polls are tightening as day draws near Thu, 08 Nov 2007

With a little over two weeks to go the election issues pushed by each major party have significantly narrowed. Instead of talking about climate change, work choices health and hospitals we are now back to the economy. This week’s interest rate rise is the sixth since the last election when Prime Minister Howard promised to keep them at record lows. Howard is now playing to his strength and gambling everything on voters trust. He is trying to convert this interest rate rise to his advantage by bringing the focus back on economic management. Despite this sixth consecutive rate rise he is now asking voters to trust him again when he claims that interest rates will be lower under him than under Labor. If people forgive him, and continue to trust him, he may well win the election.

 

The test for Kevin Rudd is whether he can show people that Howard has broken their trust over interest rates and that Howard can no longer be trusted to manage the economy. After all, we know that if the coalition is re elected that Peter Costello will become Prime Minister during the next term but we still don’t know who will be his Treasurer – who will be in charge of the economy that Howard wants to make the central issue of this campaign? 

Fake campaigning ends Sun, 14 Oct 2007

After a fake election campaign that has been running most of this year we are now down to the real thing. The good news for all of us is that those annoying government ads, which are costing us more than a million dollars a day, will soon be at an end. The bad news is that the party ads will start.
 
This election is all about the future of Australia – are we going to move ahead or look back to the past? It is about the future of our grandchildren and issues such as climate change and housing affordability for young people.
 
The government claims that ‘we have never had it so good’ but most people are doing it tough. People are finding it harder to make ends meet now than they were eleven years ago. Parents are grappling with huge mortgages and struggling with issues such as childcare. These days both parents are forced to work to pay for their mortgage.
 
Climate change is perhaps the biggest issue that we will face as a nation over the next few decades. We need solutions to this complex international problem for the long term and not just quick fixes. We can all see the impact that climate change is having already with a drought that just won’t break and extreme storms around Australia.
 
The challenge for each party is to articulate how they will go about solving these problems that confront us now and into the future instead of simply seeking to rely on their past record.