I’m starting to think it’s all over bar the shouting. The Prime Minister’s increasingly relaxed and confident style is central to Labor’s recovery.

Tony Abbott’s campaign has looked strangely static since his campaign launch. It’s not clear where the Opposition Leader goes from here, and the ALP will be hoping for a momentum boost near the finishing line from Monday’s launch.

When the Coalition hit the mid-40s in the polls, for the first time since WorkChoices made its debut in 2005, an Abbott victory looked possible. But, in retrospect, this seems like a blip caused by the scrappiness of Labor’s campaign. It now appears that an enduring pattern of voting intention has re-asserted itself, and in the absence of a compelling campaign from either major party, will get Labor over the line.

The two big stories of this campaign are the continued surge in Greens support, evident since the Rudd government appeared to reverse course on climate change, and the fact that the election resembles a state race, with micro-announcements and service delivery trumping the big picture issues of 2007.

But a re-elected Labor government, if that’s what we get on 22 August, with a strong Greens presence in the Parliament, will almost by necessity have to tackle many of the issues left off the agenda during this campaign – not the least of which is climate change. In doing so, a second term Gillard government will not have a strong mandate, but the Coalition will also be forced to reconsider its position.

Stories in the papers today emphasise how strongly involved John Howard has been behind the scenes of the Coalition effort. The bigger picture, on the conservative side of politics, is that this contest is being treated as an attempt to vindicate Howard’s period in office, and to effect a restoration of Howardism. The shift which both Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull sought to make, in very different ways, towards a different sort of Liberal party has been stopped in its tracks.

But a Liberal opposition would have a lot of unfinished business after 21 August to consider.

It’s going to be an interesting term.

Members of the Liberal Party have been creating a minor storm about the matter of Indigenous recognition. In statements made to the Adelaide Advertiser yesterday, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott implied that formal recognition of traditional owners at the beginning of significant events is superficial and unnecessary. ‘I guess this is the kind of genuflection to political correctness that [Labor ministers] feel they have to make’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s appropriate to do those things, but certainly I think in many contexts it seems like out-of-place tokenism.’ Liberal backbencher Wilson Tuckey weighed in a few hours later, claiming such recognition was a ‘farce’, while Senator Eric Abetz called it ‘outdated’ and a ‘fad’.

One of the more eye-opening things to come out of this, for me, was learning on Q&A that the soporific Peter Dutton had actually offered his resignation to Brendan Nelson, so strong did he feel about not attending the Apology.

These sorts of culture war debates are, of course, plagued by false dichotomies. They’re also plagued by sneaky elisions of meaning – if something is ‘superficial’, that doesn’t imply that it is ‘unnecessary’, but rather that the meaning embodied in the words should provoke thought, stimulate reflection, change minds, incite action. To that degree, there’s a sort of validity in the criticism, as Stephanie Convery says, but not of the sort that Abbott and co. think:

But the problem is not in the act of formal recognition but in the assumption that lip service is all there is to it. The truth is, there is a disconnect between political symbolism and action on Indigenous issues in Australia. The recognition of traditional owners, the welcome to country, is essential if only because it draws attention to this disconnect. It reminds the non-Indigenous listener of the fact of their colonial heritage, of the continued existence of Indigenous people and culture, and their direct relationship to everyone who calls themselves Australian. Or at least, it should.

I think her conclusion is spot on:

If the mere act of speaking recognition has become tired, perhaps that is because we are no longer paying attention to what we are saying. It doesn’t follow, however, that the act of speaking should be omitted. Formal recognition is a sign of respect for Indigenous people, their cultures and their status as first Australians. It should be seen as an important step, but only one of many towards mainstream recognition of the complexity and breadth of Australian history and identity, and ultimately, reconciliation.

Elsewhere: Pavlov’s Cat:

What floors me is that even people whose stock-in-trade is language seem to feel quite happy about trashing language as essentially worthless. It’s nothing more than intellectual laziness: an acceptance of the notion that words and deeds are somehow the opposite of each other, each with a clear moral value and no prizes for guessing which is which. The lure of the false dichotomy is strong, I know — it makes opining so much easier — but you’d think a Rhodes Scholar would have been taught at some point in his education how to avoid its simplistic snares.

Because speech is an act, and so is thought, and so is decision-making about how you will behave. To acknowledge traditional owners at a public function is to remind everyone present of Aboriginal history and culture. It’s a small reversal of erasure and a little raiser of consciousness. Recognition is an act, and so is the expression of respect.

Reports of the amount of money the Libs have been spending suggest that they must be seriously worried about Higgins. It’s difficult to say from this distance, but a number of observers suggest that The Greens’ Clive Hamilton has not run much of a grass roots campaign. That could be scuttlebutt, and I’d be very interested in any views from those closer to the action. But the prospect of the Liberals losing Higgins to The Greens is quite an extraordinary one, and the converse to the ‘Labor should have run’ argument is that it would be an even greater reverse for the opposition than the seat falling to the ALP (though, as Hugo Kelly and Rebekka Power argue, it could be a case of Labor strategists being too clever by half in handing The Greens an inner city Melbourne base).

If Hamilton runs Kelly O’Dwyer close, it will highlight the absurdity of the argument that the Liberals, in rejecting the ETS and elevating Abbott, were playing to their ‘base’. If Higgins isn’t a blue ribbon Lib seat, it’s hard to think of one. As Antony Green observed, while the margin has sometimes been deceptively narrow, the consistency of the Liberal hold on the areas that make up the core of the electorate is what counts.

The other fascination about these by-election contests is that they represent the first test of the new Liberal leader in seats held by one of his two predecessors this term (both of whom now hold sinecures courtesy of Kevin Rudd and the Labor government), and of course, the former electorate of the Great Pretender to the Liberal crown. A loss in either one would be a devastating blow. I wonder how the results will be called, and if there’ll be a bit of bar raising by the commentariat, but serious reverses on the primary vote in either or both seats should speak for themselves. Again, the case for Labor not running candidates in by-elections in Liberal seats is that the focus will be all on the opposition, as opposed to the usual media predictathon when governments lose traction at by-elections.

It should be interesting to watch both unfold. Please feel free to add any reports and links to this thread throughout the day!

Update: The Liberals have retained both seats, it would appear with increased margins on the 2PP. Looking at Higgins, the key is the fact that the Greens’ primary vote is less than Labor’s at the 2007 general election. [Update: That previous comment was made with a number of booths still outstanding. But see also this analysis from Rebekka Power.] It’s evident that there are a fair few ALP voters who won’t vote Green, something I noted on a number of occasions. No doubt these results will be spun as a great victory for Abbott, but the missing element in the equation is the absence of a Labor candidate.

Having said that, I still think The Greens made a big mistake by nationalising the contest, and running a candidate like Clive Hamilton. Kelly O’Dwyer’s ‘Mayor of Higgins’ campaign capitalised on his outsider status well, it would seem. I suggested previously that The Greens might have done better to run a well known local – parochialism always plays well in by-elections, particularly against blow-ins, as the Liberal research no doubt showed. As I intimated in the post, there may have been an element of expectations management going on, with the Libs talking down their chances in advance of the vote.

But I think it’s fair to say that The Greens won’t, and shouldn’t be, happy with the outcome.

But the Libs shouldn’t be all that happy either, as they know full well they ran defensive strategies avoiding the big issues of national politics. These seats should be a total shoo-in for anyone with the Libs’ label on the ballot paper.

The final verdict – the whole thing is probably a bit of a side show.

Brendan Nelson, in his extended “I was right about everything” valedictory speech, included the much-debated Super Hornet purchase in the collection of things he was right about. Frankly, I remain unconvinced. If it was such a good piece of planning, why didn’t we make sure that the legacy Hornet and the Super Hornets fire the same missiles? That said, the cruise missile we are intending to fit to the legacy Hornets is suffering severe reliability problems, and some reports claiming that the missile might be cancelled (though it’s hard to know how credible those are).

But the big story doing the rounds at the moment is Greg Combet’s announcement of a plan to conduct a new study of performance requirements for various roles in the armed forces, with a view to removing outright gender bans and placing restrictions based on the physical demands of the role:

Mr Combet, a former ACTU national secretary, told parliament yesterday the Defence Science and Technology Organisation would develop a new set of physical employment standards for the army that would accurately measure a person’s ability to perform the broad variety of jobs in the modern defence force. “A priority of the government is to improve the recruitment and retention of women in the ADF,” he said. “My own view is that all categories should be open to women. The only exceptions should be where the physical demands cannot be met according to criteria that are determined on the basis of scientific analysis, rather than assumptions about gender.”

If you have the stomach for it, you can read this excreable piece opposing any possibility of women in “combat roles” by Greg Sheridan. Apart from anything else, I can’t recall the last time I read a column containing more examples of argument by assertion. Guy Rundle responds, arguing that women will be more reluctant to sign up for wars of choice.

Personally, I think it’s got less to do with the sensibilities of the soldiers themselves, and more the sensibilities of those at home, a point Rundle makes in the context of his critique of the Afghanistan war in his final paragraph. The real issue is that female soldiers, particularly mothers, coming home in body bags is likely to harm public support for war more than male soldiers coming home in body bags, something that the likes of Sheridan, who seemingly has never met a war he didn’t like, simply couldn’t cope with.

Whether this is true in an empirical sense or not, I find the logic behind it pretty troubling. If we’re not collectively prepared to send women off to die in a war of choice, we shouldn’t be prepared to send men off to do so.

UPDATE: Deborah has some fun with Sheridan’s logic.

That anniversary has been marked, among other things, by an impassioned speech in the Coalition party room by his predecessor, Dr Brendan Nelson. Nelson argued against any compromise on emissions trading before Copenhagen, and all this has been tied in with a theme that the opposition has to stand for something – the tried and true Liberal verities of individual workplace contracts, of course, being one of those…

Nelson, however, says someone whom he diagnosed as having narcissistic personality disorder can still become PM.

Update: Nelson’s off to be ambassador to NATO (and Kim Beazley to the US).

In fact, this whole poll is pretty much identical to Nelson’s last…

On the beauty contest that is Preferred Prime Minister, Turnbull’s PPM rating has, for the first time, ducked below Undecideds.

Possum subtitles his post “Perpetual Honeymoon Edition”. In fact, the media seems to have finally given up (at least for now) the claim that Kevin Rudd and Labor are enjoying a somehow undeserved or ephemeral honeymoon. The prevailing press gallery assumption has shifted to the next election being a Labor cert and a Liberal rout, and I’m not sure that only a double dissolution over climate change would see 20 or so Coalition seats topple.

Is Rudd’s only enemy now complacency?

While Bishop has been massively unconvincing in the Treasury portfolio, it’s not only the Deputy Leader who should be concerned over this latest outburst of leaks to The Australian. Malcolm Turnbull and the rest of the Libs should also recall that Brendan Nelson was brought down as much by the constant dripfeed of negative stories to their mates in the press gallery, as by his own hapless efforts as Leader. What is now being done to Bishop (and the articles have been cleverly framed to keep the “narrative” alive for quite a while – by forcing her putative replacements to deny an interest, and thus further fuel the story) could be done to Turnbull tomorrow. As if to lay down a few markers, Peter Van Onselen published an otherwise bizarre op/ed on Saturday praising Peter Costello as the best available leader.

I’ve observed before that the opposition’s coziness with the press gallery does them no favours. It shouldn’t be too difficult to find a way of resolving problems internally rather than in newspaper columns.

This is quite interesting:

Coalition attacks on almost every aspect of the Government’s response to the crisis have had no impact.

Possum on Malcolm Turnbull:

These ratings trends differ slightly from Newspoll (conveniently seen over at the Polling Charts page) with Nielsen suggesting that Turnbull is failing to convince those that were initially undecided about his leadership to the point of slowly alienating them, while Newspoll is continuing to show slight growth in Turnbull’s satisfaction.

Intuitively, I suspect Nielsen is right about Turnbull. We might be a better barometer here than might be expected, unrepresentative sample that we no doubt are. If you cast your mind back to the reaction of LP commenters when Malcolm became opposition leader, a lot of us were prepared to cautiously welcome his election, having in mind his performance in the past and his social progressivism.

In the pontificating stakes, Clinton Porteous writes:

However, there are warning signs for the Prime Minister if economic woes continue.

Because of the plethora of polls these days and the multiplication of different and differently worded questions, I doubt there’s any time series data showing a correlation between “economic woes” and government support, though I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to anything in the political science literature. What I think can be demonstrated is that a posture of constant (and high profile) negativism is rarely a plus with Australian voters. I suspect Malcolm Turnbull is himself responsible for alienating support and goodwill he might have had.

I wonder when the political class will wake up to the fact that the media’s darling isn’t the electorate’s. If they do, Brendan Nelson has conveniently announced he’ll still be around in 2010.

Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger, Party Games.

Newspoll has Labor on 55% 2PP (up 1 point, within the MOE). Kevin Rudd is on 62% (up 3) on the PPM to Malcolm Turnbull’s 22% (down 3).

Brendan Nelson peaked at 16%.

The Opposition Organ says:

But it remains substantially higher than his predecessor Brendan Nelson.

How substantial is substantial, I wonder?

The way Turnbull is being treated by the press must have poor old Emo Man feeling rather out of sorts, even if he’s no longer kept up nights sitting around in the gutter at Kings Cross at 3am. I wonder how long it will take for the punditariat to realise that the honeymoon is over – Turnbull’s, that is. Not that it was every all that impressive. We might get some leadership stories during the silly season, I suppose. But the contrast between Turnbull and Nelson’s press really should tell us something.

Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger.