I’m not sure where my childlike naivety comes from: with the Internet, the telly and the letterbox all crammed with election guff, why would the flicks be any different? Anyway, there in the Palace Centro in New Farm – between ads for James Boag and Audi – the Libs had one more shot at trying to convince me that I should vote for them.

It wasn’t good. I have scoured the Party’s website and youtube for a reproduction of their widescreen pitch, but its nowhere to be seen. Maybe no one wants to own up to it. Basically, except for a very brief snippet at the beginning where three teenage girls were shown agreeing that JWH was doing a good job, the ad was a procession of blokes – middle aged and older – lecturing the audience about how terrible it was when Labor were last in, offering gruff assertions that everyone should vote for the Coalition.

That might all be true, but it’s the semiotics that count. A party that’s desperate to win over around a million voters under fifty should not be trying to tell youngsters how bad the old days were. At best, it’s patronizing; at worst, it’s playing to the weakness of the party and its leader. It says they’re negative, out of touch, reliant on an older constituency, fixated by the past, and may just remind viewers of someone familiar who is a little O-L-D.

Anyway it got a few catcalls and shouts of “get off “ from the audience: no surprise, I guess, in an art-house cinema in a safe, inner-city, Labor seat. But sources close to the current writer summed it up well: “why would I listen to a bunch of old men telling me how to vote? It makes my blood boil…” Surely not the desired effect, and another indication that the Libs’ campaign is failing to find its rhythm.

* 3 stars - good performances and very pretty but they could have shaved half an hour, easy.  

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