Scott Morrison has attacked Bill Shorten’s character in a bid to discredit any Mediscare-style campaign during the election, accusing the Opposition Leader of “lying all the time”, as a dedicated team of Coalition “mythbusters” work behind the scenes to challenge Labor’s funding claims.
Still smarting from Labor’s Mediscare campaign in 2016, which former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull blamed for the loss of Coalition seats after he scraped through to win a one-seat majority, senior Liberal operatives said they had learned their lesson and would be on the front foot until May 18. While strategists would not reveal how many of the Coalition’s 130 staff based at its Brisbane headquarters were part of the special myth-busting unit, The Australian understands Liberal employees are working each day to point out fact from fiction.
“We’ve got a pretty strong digital media presence, that’s a departure from the past,” Liberal sources said. “Digital responses are just as important as traditional media these days. We’re not going to vacate the field on this and will hold Shorten and his lies to account.”
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Asked yesterday how he planned to combat a Mediscare 2.0 campaign, the Prime Minister targeted Mr Shorten and his $2.3 billion cancer package.
Mr Shorten, who yesterday announced $200 million for free blood tests for cancer patients, has come under increasing pressure to detail how much Labor’s proposed new Medicare item for specialist oncologist consultations will cost and what kind of consultations it will apply to.
“Bill Shorten lies … he wanted people to believe you could go to a public hospital for cancer treatment and that it wasn’t covered — he knows it is,” Mr Morrison said
“I know there are out-of-pocket expenses … involved in cancer treatment … but I think to suggest to people that are suffering with cancer that somehow there aren’t cost-free services … I think that’s very misleading and in its worst case it’s actually quite cruel.”
A Labor campaign spokesman said it showed how out of touch the Liberals were that they had created a “unit to fight Labor’s policy on cancer costs but no unit to reverse their cuts to hospitals”.
“It’s been 12 days since Labor announced our plan to tackle the out-of-pocket costs of cancer. For 12 days, Morrison has refused to support it,” the spokesman said.
“Morrison has a choice – he can help people with cancer, or he can lie about Labor. He’s putting his lies before the facts, his ego before people with cancer, and banks before hospitals.”
Liberal insiders acknowledged they were not quick enough to address Labor’s claim Medicare was being privatised at the 2016 double dissolution election and said this campaign there would be a concerted effort to tackle claims of cuts to health and education.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, the Coalition’s minister-in-residence at campaign headquarters, has also been using Twitter to call out “more Labor lies”.
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