ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the party fortunes in opinion polls before the election are covered. The chapter explores the marginal seats and how the parties attempted to reach voters in them. It also argues that in every election, unexpected pressure points emerge to divert campaigns from their focus on promoting policies and responding to their oppositions, and that concentrating campaigning in all its forms on seats where winning margins are tight, means greater opportunities for either holding or winning these seats, especially in the context of recent Australian elections, which have resulted in either minority governments, or holding office with slim majorities. However, the chapter points out that in strategic communication planning, identifying mid- to long-term issues, as well as tracking how they subsequently play out in debates about them, is an essential task. For politics, this task is vital and is about more than day-to-day issues and how they are framed in the news media. In the campaign mode, political parties naturally react tactically, often daily, to deal with immediate, unexpected issues; this is one of the dynamics of an election campaign. However, adequately identifying mid- to long-term emerging issues means communicative action can be planned and implemented to ameliorate them as threats long before they turn into immediate, unexpected campaign irritants. Even with a necessary focus on the pandemic, the Government’s political communicators should have identified the emerging issues that were damaging its standing with voters. Labor and the Teals and other independents appear to have been doing this. Yet the Government continued its tactical, news-media-centric communication designed to capture the news agenda and avoided the issues that concerned voters. This approach reinforced the view that it lacked a well-planned communication strategy.
