Australian vote: Week two marked by dog whistle and police raid

Dog whistling made its expected appearance in week two of Australia’s longest election campaign in 50 years.

The source – immigration minister Peter Dutton – was also inevitable. "They won't be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that," Dutton said when asked about opposition Labor and Green proposals for a rise in Australia's refugee intake, currently 13,750 a year. Confusingly, as well as taking Australian jobs, Dutton said the refugees would be on the dole.

Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull backed Dutton, saying he was an "excellent" minister. Turnbull addressed the comments as if they were just about the cost of a humanitarian programme. They were not. Dutton was making a straight appeal to the anti-immigrant vote, which might backfire given that 24.6 per cent of Australia's population was born overseas and 43.1 per cent of people have at least one overseas-born parent.

Almost every commentator outside the Liberal-National government and its champions in the News Corporation press condemned Dutton, but the simplest response came from Labor senator Sam Dastyari, who said that when he arrived in Australia from Iran as a five-year-old he "couldn't speak a word of English".

Feeney’s own goal

Labor's problems in week two of the campaign were mostly self-inflicted. It was first revealed that frontbencher David Feeney forgot to declare a AU$2.3 million (€1.48 million) rental property he owns in his Melbourne constituency, and then it emerged he charges taxpayers a AU$270-a-night travel allowance to stay in a flat in Canberra owned through a trust by his wife.

While neither action is illegal, it is a bad look for Feeney when his seat is under threat from the Greens. The tenants in his house kept the story going by putting up a two-metre high "vote Greens" sign.

Feeney, whose father is from Belfast, is one of several Labor candidates with Irish connections. Brendan O'Connor, who grew up in Co Kerry, should hang on to his lower house seat, while Deborah O'Neill, a former Sydney Rose of Tralee whose parents were from Cork and Kilkenny, will almost certainly be re-elected to the senate on Labor's New South Wales ticket.

In Western Australia, Patrick Dodson, who is Irish on his father's side and Aboriginal on his mother's, should also be re-elected to the senate. Dodson was Australia's first indigenous Catholic priest, but left the priesthood in the 1980s.

On Thursday night, federal police investigating the leak of documents raided Labor Party offices in Melbourne. Some in Labor said the raids were politically motivated, but as the documents expose a massive cost blowout on infrastructure construction, that is far from certain.

The first leaders’ debate between Turnbull and Labor leader Bill Shorten had a live audience of just 100 and, given it was shown on low rating cable channel Sky News, was not seen by many on television.

Most observers thought Shorten won, which may be a tribute to Dean Frenkel, who lectures in public speaking at Victoria University. Frenkel had been working with him to improve his communication skills. Shorten's previously robotic, singsong cadence and rising intonation is almost gone.

While the main show is between the government and Labor, there are a host of niche candidates. Most are on the far right, including the Australia First Party, which is obsessed with combatting the halal certification of food.

We have not yet heard from a candidate who thinks God decides the weather or advocates the return of smoking in pubs, but there are six weeks to go. It’s early days yet.