Only Australia’s No1 family newszine The Bug will keep you up-to-speed with each and every day of the campaign though the cutting-edge analysis of our in-house political experts, how the mainstream mediocre is behaving and a close watch on poll trends and betting markets.

Can we at The Bug be perfectly frank and honest, as we always strive to be?

At top is the graphic we got our artists in our creative design hub on our mezzanine level to prepare late yesterday – far too early as it turned out – to what we expected to be the result of Wednesday night’s debate between Treasurer Jim Chalmers and his shadow Angus Taylor. That’s right: the LNP’s numbers man drifting in and out of consciousness in an intensive care unit after Chalmers ripped him a new Angus.

But apparently it didn’t turn out that way. Sticking with our claim of honesty, we didn’t watch the debate. We’re all a bit squeamish and have never liked nature films of crocodiles eating wilderbeast, pythons squeezing to death their hapless prey or cats playing sadistically for hours with mice.

But we’ve snared a few comments from X that maybe help explain what happened.

We’ll have to watch the debate after all. Sounds like Ross Greenwood ran a protection racket for Taylor.

So, did anything else happen on DAY THIRTEEN, Wednesday, April 9?

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Yesterday Peter Dutton doubled down on his Trump-style attack on immigrants – just minus the bit about building a 26,000 kms wall around the nation’s entire coastline.

Although we wouldn’t write off that idea just yet. We do have a few weeks to go to polling day.

Dutton announced as PM he would “straight away” cut the annual net immigration figure by 100,000 – from 260,000 to about 160,000.

But experts The Bug spoke to who do not wish to be identified, said if he and the Coalition do win on 3 May he may need to do some fast and fancy footwork to keep that “straight away” promise.

According to the experts, the only option for him to live up to his commitment would be to stop immigrants entering the country as soon as he is sworn in as PM.

“Being the hard man he is, Dutton would find it easy to freeze the entire immigration system, perhaps with our version of a Trump-style executive order,” one expert told us.

“Of course taking action ‘straight away’ would mean halting immigrants already on their way here, even if they are abiding by migration laws and are in mid-air heading here on scheduled commercial air services from their own nation.

“To underline his hard-line tactic Dutton could even issue orders for those aircraft carrying legal and processed immigrants to turn around in mid-air and head home.

“That would certainly be in line with his Trumpian approach,” the expert said.

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Another expert we spoke to agreed, but pointed out that it would mean Dutton and the Coalition would need to update the three-word slogans with which they have been indelibly identified since the days when another political hard man, Tony Abbott, was opposition leader.

“Abbott famously employed the three-word slogan ‘stop the boats’ to scare shit out of voters, which worked for him,” the expert said.

“Dutton would need to use a modified version – ‘stop the planes’ – if he wants to freeze immigration numbers immediately.

“He could even go the full John Howard and promise to ‘turn the planes around’ in mid-air. Don’t rule that out.

“The modified slogan would sit comfortably with another Abbott era three-word campaign mantra of ‘axe the tax’ – his promise to ditch the so-called carbon tax that never was a carbon tax, a fact which never fazed Tony.

“Given Dutton’s promise to reverse Labor’s latest tax cuts outlined in the recent Federal Budget, he’d need to update that slogan to ‘axe the tax cuts’.

“But otherwise, I’m sure the Libs still have thousands of corflute signs that could be easily recycled in coming weeks,” the expert said. (below)

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Now for our uncoveted ….

We’ve awarded it jointly to Andrew Clennell and Simon Benson. We’re still trying to find out what leaders’ debate they watched.

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No new polls lobbed overnight, so our two-party-preferred averages of the five opinion polls we’re now keeping an eye on – Newspoll, Resolve, Roy Morgan, YouGov and Redbridge – stay at…

Labor: 51.7; Coalition 48.3. Labor in 2022 got a parliamentary majority by the slenderest of margins on a similar 2PP.

As mentioned before, Guardian’s Essential Poll thinks it’s professional or clever or somehow responsible not to publish a two-party-preferred figure. The Bug again calls bullshit on that. Nevertheless, its latest primary figures suggest however a slight Labor lead.

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And how did the online bookies fare on the day after Dutton, according to just about every “journo” at Newcorpse and many others too, wiped the floor with Albanese at their first leaders’ debate.

Here are the odds we snared at around 9.30pm last night (Wednesday), compared with 24 hours earlier.

Sportsbet: Labor $1.36 ($1.40 ); Coalition $3.22 ($2.87)
Ladbrokes: Labor $1.36 ( $1.40); Coalition $3.19 ($2.75)
TAB: Labor $1.32 ($1.36); Coalition $3.40 ($3.10)
bet365: Labor $1.36 (unchanged) Coalition $3.00 ($3.20).

LATE UPDATE: Sportsbet early on Thursday morning pushed the LNP’s odds out to $4 for the first time; Labor was around $1.24. By 8am, the $4 had slipped to $3.62.

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