THE undoubted low point of this drawn-out election campaign has been Opposition Leader Bill Shorten's scaremongering over the future of Medicare.
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Mr Shorten and Labor candidates across the country have not let a single opportunity go by without accusing the Coalition of planning to privatise Medicare.
Worse, they have stated the claim as fact and more often than not targeted their message to society's most vulnerable, those who would lose most under any Medicare privatisation.
It's been the same mantra for more than six weeks now, yet Labor has not produced a shred of evidence to back their claim.
It is political scaremongering at its very worst and demeans both the Labor MPs who persist in pushing the line and the whole process of our democracy.
Of course, the Labor Party is not the first to use such negative campaigns and, sadly, won't be the last.
Oppositions always find it hard during an election campaign to present a positive picture of the future under a change of government and, instead, are too often reduced to tearing down the achievements of the incumbent.
Tony Abbott is celebrated as a master of the art and most commentators now agree that his style of politics was much better suited to life as an opposition leader than prime minister.
He found it impossible to go from the opposition leader who just said “no” to a prime minister who could lead with a sense of purpose and unity.
Mr Shorten's [so far] baseless attacks on the Coalition's plans for Medicare threaten to paint him into the same corner.
Malcolm Turnbull's solo performance on Q&A on Monday night delivered the most direct antidote to Labor's attacks that we have seen in this campaign, as he categorically rejected plans to privatise Medicare. He made his point directly and succinctly, and eschewed the politician's tendency to speak in shades of grey.
It should have put this issue to bed.
The sad reality, though, is that the electorate has seen too many direct promises delivered during election campaigns become "non-core promises" once the votes have been counted.
Both sides of politics are to blame, and today's politicians are no better or worse than their predecessors. As the saying goes, truth is the first casualty of war - and politics.