But Labor is in trouble. Its problems aren’t so much, as was suggested by some commentators, that it is being squeezed by the Coalition appeal to blue-collar conservatives on one side and the Greens’ appeal to inner-city types on the other — although that’s not helpful — but the party’s culture. As Guy Rundle has elsewhere pointed out, the growing absence of a core philosophy and its replacement by an assemblage of carefully-targeted micro-policies is not sustainable over the long term.

At best, you can win the battles but eventually you lose the war, particularly against an opponent like Tony Abbott who is more remorselessly negative and permitted by the mainstream media to get away with minimal actual policies on critical issues. Labor’s campaign foci of aiming money at Family Tax Benefit A recipients, appealing to the irrationality of outer-suburban voters and in effect campaigning against Rudd-era Labor was a collection of tactics masquerading as a strategy. And in the end it couldn’t even win the battles, let alone the war.

Worse, the deadening effect of this approach was to silence Julia Gillard, until late June one of Federal Labor’s most formidable communicators, and replace her with a mannequin usually capable only of repeating the day’s talking points. Forget the Ruddbut, the campaign trail was stalked by the Gillardroid. But if voters had wanted a mind-numbingly boring female politician with a glue-like adherence to talking points instead of a political philosophy, they would have made Penny Wong Prime Minister.

Only rarely did “real Julia” break out, and it had nothing to do with the fake “Real Julia” launched with all the dexterity of New Coke in the third week of the campaign. The Gillard on display when she fired up after the leak, or toward the end when fatigue made her less amenable to staying on message, was the real Julia, the one that voters liked, and Labor strategists’ failure to capitalise on that popularity must, along with their decision to dump the CPRS, remain one of the most mysteriously inept decisions in a year full of them from Labor.

Regardless of whether it goes into opposition or clings on to minority government, Labor must start fixing its culture, and start applying a reality check to the advice offered by the likes of Arbib, Bitar, Shorten and the other powerbrokers who have guided Labor into such a dire electoral position. It must also, somehow, bring in at the highest level some experienced strategists and media people who understand that effective political communication doesn’t consist of asking what Malcolm Tucker would do.

That seems about right to me.

Morris Iemma, who should know something about it, called for Karl Bitar to resign today.

It also seems bad timing that Australian Story tonight features a show on the “Labor powerbroker”, Paul Howes.

However, that does leave open the question of whether we’re witnessing an ideological conjunction between Labor and Liberal.

To some degree, ideology is in the eye of the beholder.

For instance, some Greens supporters will agree with some libertarians that there’s little difference between the two major parties, though for ostensibly different reasons. For the Greens, they’re stuck in the same paradigm and for the libertarians, they’re both irredeemably statist.

Similarly, some Labor lefties will agree with small l liberals that immigration is a good thing, and the rhetoric about a ‘Sustainable Australia’ damaging. There are nuances here, but the same argument is being made by those who like the idea of cosmopolitanism for cultural and political reasons, and those who have an attachment to freedom of movement and think economic growth is best served by population growth.

Most of these folks are looking at the parties from a similar social and class location – professionally educated, often eschewing religious belief, and working in relatively comfortably paid jobs in the public or private sector, depending on political and cultural orientation.

If you’re working with the homeless, or the unemployed, or you are yourself homeless or unemployed, you’re likely to have quite a different take on what the social outcomes of a Labor or a Coalition government would be.

I remember reflecting, when I was a university student in 1993, that the election of a Hewson government would be in the self interest of people like me – the white male middle class. For me, with my politics, that was a reason to resist the pull.

But it’s easier to make political decisions based on self interest when your circumstances are reasonably comfortable or your prospects promising.

So, while we all like to think that we think for ourselves, a confluence of factors to do with our geographical location, our occupation, our gender, our education, and a host of other stuff is likely to give us a powerful predisposition to vote one way or another, or conceive of the purpose of politics one way or another.

That implies we should be wary of the condescending sneers at swinging voters in marginal seats whose vote is purportedly driven only by what the government can do for them personally.

What we can conclude is that the actual conduct of this election, and the campaigning style which has shaped its conduct, appeals to the lowest common denominator in terms of both recognising the real choices at stake and framing the issues.

That’s a great pity.

Where are the leaders in all this?

I have no doubt that Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott and Bob Brown are all actuated by genuine convictions, among other motivations.

And while a leitmotif of early commentary about Gillard’s leadership was that it was difficult to discern the nature of those convictions, that’s not the case.

The Prime Minister’s speech on July 15 to the National Press Club, ‘overshadowed’ by Laurie Oakes’ leak, actually repays careful reading. The transcript can be found here.

Gillard’s political beliefs are a form of social liberalism – perhaps more in the Deakinite Liberal tradition than might be thought – the emphasis on nation building, on the horizontal value of care and concern for others, and her strong belief in equality of opportunity are all hallmarks of this style of thought.

‘Market design’ and agnosticism as between the state and the private sector as vehicles for service delivery are themes which resonate strongly with New Labour practice in Britain. There’s a tendency in Gillard’s practice towards a species of social neo-liberalism.

Of course, ideological consistency is not something that exists outside the philosophy books, so we shouldn’t be surprised that the pull of perhaps misguided electoral pragmatism overpowers what are probably Gillard’s instincts on social policy such as same sex marriage.

But it would be quite wrong to say of Julia Gillard that she stands for nothing.

What’s more telling is that what she stands for is not really the same thing as traditional Labor social democracy – the emphasis is more on equalising opportunity than remedying inequality.

Tony Abbott, on the other hand, is less easy to place.

He seems to waver between statist instincts – more akin to those of the conservative advocates of the welfare state in continental Europe’s Christian Democracies than what we normally see in Australia – and a skepticism about the efficacy of state action which is more conservative than liberal.

There’s an internal tension in his thought between activism and the time-honoured conservative style of governance where keeping the ship of state afloat is much more important than what direction it’s pointed in.

There is also no doubt whatsoever that his instincts are socially conservative, and that’s demonstrable in this campaign through the sotto voce appeal to the ‘traditional family’.

But it’s more than possible for Abbott to be a conviction politician and not have a strong sense of how he would like to transform Australia – John Howard was at his least conservative when he succumbed to the vision of the largely former leftists among the culture warriors commentariat.

So, aside from real social and economic differences in outcome which can be anticipated from the result of this campaign, whichever way the choice goes, the ideological heritage and instincts of the two leaders will make a significant difference to the way the nation is governed over the next three years.

The big problem with this campaign is not an absence of differentiation, but the wrong sort of differentiation. In other words, the softly softly approach of electoral strategy has obscured what’s at stake, and will leave neither major party with a strong mandate to do what, in other circumstances, they might be inclined to do.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

As a result, this brings our Pollytrend down to 50.9 on the phone pollster trend for today.

Of interest, too, are his comments about a number of other questions asked:

The issue that the Coalition would be cheering about here is Abbott’s Newspoll debut on “Trustworthy” with what can only be described as a substantial score, as that was always a concern about perceptions of Abbott – a concern that Essential Report has highlighted before when they ask similar questions. As Newspoll doesn’t ask these questions often, we have gaps of up to nearly two years on some of these results, so the change values are mostly useless.

That said,Abbott’s lead on “experienced” shows how Labor has sacrificed one part of the ordinarily beneficial incumbency equation by the ascension of Gillard to PM, while the lack of a large Labor lead on vision, in touch with voters and issue understanding highlights how Labor has thus far failed to sell their program – normally they lead substantially on these measures.

It’s also worth speculating whether the various Labor attempts to shake up the campaign today – “Let Julia Be Julia” and the challenge to Tony Abbott for another debate on the economy will have any effect on turning around public sentiment. Certainly, Christopher Pyne on Lateline sounded very wooden in defending Abbott’s decision to squib, which is hard to square with their previous statements.

Pyne attacked ‘spin’ while repeating his own bot-talking points.

Whether or not the fact that Leigh Sales put Pyne under pressure on a range of issues translates into a trigger that will shape tomorrow’s turn in the narrative, and how that’s communicated to a much larger proportion of voters than watch Lateline is another question.

But it’s interesting to observe that the Liberals, in refusing a debate, are now playing the classic front-runner’s game. That’s usually followed by increased pressure, as the media pendulum swings the other way.

Whether or not a few bad days from the Coalition (if that’s what we see) then has an impact on the polls will be an interesting test of how much attention voters are paying; and also of whether there’s a lot of volatility underlying the poll trend. That may well be the case when there’s a lack of enthusiasm for either contender.

Interesting days ahead.

As about a million people have already observed today, announcing that the switch has been flicked to a “Let Julia Be Julia” strategy, while it might command attention, also invites derision and cynicism.

They should have just done it. Josh would have.

Labor’s central problem in this election is that it’s supposed to be all about Tony Abbott, but it’s all about Julia Gillard and the Labor Party. And Kevin Rudd.

The ALP faces a diabolical problem getting its message out through the media noise of meta. Another, perhaps better strategy, would have been to challenge Tony Abbott to a series of prime time debates. Forget the fact that only one was promised. It’s time to take a risk.

After all, Abbott performed poorly in his debate with Kevin Rudd.

Another American election ploy, and perhaps one more to the point, is when in doubt, sack your campaign team. The Sussex Street geniuses with their mad campaign skills have proved their worth. Both Wayne Swan and Stephen Smith have enormous experience in campaign strategy and execution.

The ALP has everything to lose in this election. So it’s time to double down, and hope that might result in a win.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

Reviews have been underwhelming.

The debate was apparently difficult to follow under the hashtag #penrithdebate, and the filtered stream shows that it wasn’t particularly illuminating.

A number of points can be made about this ‘innovation’:

(a) Twitter has a very small footprint among Australian social media users, and various surveys have demonstrated that most people who set up a Twitter account rarely or never use it. It’s also very far from being the micro-blogging or messaging platform of choice for teenagers, despite all the usual misunderstandings about “digital natives”. In Australia, as far as politics goes, it’s been taken to heart by political tragics and journos, whose widespread distaste for the blogosphere has been overcome by a medium where their ‘brands’ ensure that they’re easily able to hoover up the most followers.

I very much doubt any considerable number of Penrith voters were watching, or participating. To the degree that this sort of thing will have any electoral impact, it will only be insofar as it feeds into media and political perceptions.

(b) Although techno-utopians and the more excitable will claim that this is some sort of harbinger of the future, politicians are always much more likely to see social media aspects of campaigns as add-ons rather than core vehicles for messaging. For this reason, and because those who are Tweeting are a very select portion of the electorate, claims about direct democracy are also radically over-blown.

(c) Again, despite the stereotypical way various media platforms are discussed, newest isn’t always best. Anyone who’s followed any of Crikey’s election live blogs, which use software which enables the panel to be highlighted, and which update in a more elegant fashion, and which provide for a more detailed and focused discussion, might well conclude that an online debate might be more productive on a blog than via Twitter.

Elsewhere: Stilgherrian and Ben Eltham.

Parliament is only sitting for two weeks, and then won’t return until September. The delivery of valedictory speeches in the budget sitting shows that this term is reaching its parliamentary conclusion.

Let’s leave aside all the faffing about of the confected ‘Rudd’s leadership on the line’ narrative.

One little noticed facet of the recent onslaught on the government has been the virtual disappearance of Tony Abbott.

In one respect, that’s sensible politics – keep the focus on Rudd. But that may backfire, as I said earlier. It also suggests that the Coalition are well aware that Abbott’s terrible personal ratings, while not the subject of febrile media commentary, make him a liability when it comes to the campaign. Nor is their much evidence that the Antipodean ‘Party of No’ has spent much time on policy development.

So, there might be some advantage to going early. It would put a stop to the endless repetition of Rudd and doom noise, and particularly if there are attractive policy options in development, there may be advantages in catching the Coalition unprepared. And the polls may indicate volatility rather than doom for Labor.

Those are the arguments for. What are the arguments against?

Elsewhere: Richard Farmer:

There’s only one good reason why Kevin Rudd will not scurry off to the polls early in August and that’s if he thinks he certainly can’t win. Even if the prime ministerial judgement is that the prospects are a little dicey he will be encouraged to take the plunge. For delay that allowed Parliament to reconvene after the winter break would be confirmation that Rudd thinks defeat is likely and faced with that prospect his Labor caucus colleagues would start seriously thinking about the Julia Gillard option. If being thrown out even before an election is too horrible to contemplate, then it is time to get a hurry on.

So far the idea of a leadership challenge is no more than that — a vague thought in the back of the minds of those in the most vulnerable seats as they mull over all the “what ifs” about the forthcoming election. Opinion polls — the unreliable and meaningless guide that they are at this stage of the electoral game — do influence backbenchers and especially so when they are pointing in the same direction as their own interpretation of what the public in their own electorate thinks. When a young hard head such as former federal ALP secretary Gary Gray starts getting anxious, we can deduce that the message he is getting from the people of Brand is certainly troubling.

Not that even a new leader would fix the big problem that Gray has identified. Labor will go to the election advocating a super profits tax on mining whether it is a Rudd, Gillard or some-one-else led government. The best that ALP members from Western Australia and Queensland can hope for is a change or two at the fringes that will take enough heat out of this particular debate to get people thinking about other things as well.

The best way of broadening the issues of the political debate would be to call an election quickly and if Rudd was listening to my advice, he would be driving out to Government House this coming Sunday afternoon and thus neutering any talk of a caucus revolt before the next Newspoll produces a predictable next round of leadership speculation.

Update: According to Barrie Cassidy, the Coalition have been coming up with some policy ideas. Whether they’re policy ideas or thought bubbles and stunts, though, is another question.

Update: Possum has published a leaked minute which suggests options are being kept open for an August 28 election.

But the third party’s surge has thrown the Labour and Tory camps, particularly the latter, into confusion, forced to turn their guns on the Lib Dems, rather than taking potshots at each other.

The Lib Dems have been channelling voter rage over bank bailouts and the political expenses scandal, and to their credit, are the only one of the three parties the premise of whose campaign isn’t based on lies about the fiscal challenges ahead in the post-GFC UK.

Britain’s election system delivered the Lib Dems 9.6% of parliamentary seats for their 22% of the vote in 2005. If the Lib Dems come first or second this time around, they’re likely to end up with somewhere around 100 seats, and Labour could be the largest party in the House of Commons despite coming third. In these circumstances, a shift to a fairer voting system would be irresistible, and the Tories, who’ve been sticking doggedly to first past the post, could find themselves staring down the barrel of a future where they would be most unlikely to ever form a majority administration again. It’s also becoming more likely that the next British Prime Minister will be Labour (although it may not be Gordon Brown), despite all the doom and gloom predictions of the last couple of years.

NB: Previous LP discussion of the British general election here.

Elsewhere: Guardian coverage of the election here.

Update: Interesting piece on the view of the Lib Dem surge from the Labour and Tory camps.

Update: New post.

Table borrowed from Possum.

Make of that what you will, but I find it very interesting indeed. One consequence, if you go with the hypothesis about Abbott firming up the Coalition’s base vote, is that Labor voters may also be becoming more confirmed in their partisan choice. We don’t have data on this, except for this one snapshot, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the Liberals’ strategy of opposition to pretty much everything has begun to polarise parts of the electorate.

Of interest also will be the new media narrative. That bit of it which will emanate from the Abbotariat is so predictable it’s barely worth sketching. But Kevin Rudd and Labor won’t be at all unhappy with this result (which, remember, still has them in much the same winning position as in the last election). It’ll fit perfectly their strategy of putting pressure on Abbott to answer questions as if he were a possible PM (arising, for instance, from the Intergenerational Report and the associated issue of healthcare costs, his stance on the private health rebate). As I’ve remarked, his climate change policy, to be released tomorrow, will be framed by the Government as economic pie in the sky, which will reinforce perceptions turning up in focus groups that he’s a risky economic proposition.

And there’s no harm at all in geeing up your own troops in the face of the possibility of an Abbott ascension. That’s the flipside of the Women’s Weekly kerfuffle, which Labor will hope on one hand will play into perceptions that Abbott wants the state to intrude too far into private matters (which the Essential Research polling is showing up), and on the other, will prompt those of us who are very much agin this sort of thing to have a yarn to less committed friends and colleagues.

Update: Possum on Newspoll.

Update: Jonathan Green at The Drum.

At Pineapple Party Time, I’ve had a look at the seats that are in play, arguing that the LNP can win without taking a swag of Brisbane electorates, and more recently, at another couple of bad campaign days for Labor. These aren’t “who won the day” style accounts, but rather critiques of a deeply flawed strategy. William Bowe reports on the Newspoll figures, and my latest post contrasts the ALP circa March 2009 with Peter Beattie’s reign.

Whatever you say about Beattie, I certainly won’t resile from the claim I made ages ago that he’s one of the best politicians we’ve seen in this country. Politically, Anna Bligh is much more congenial to me, but she’s not displaying the same range of leadership and campaign skills Beattie deployed effortlessly. Most of all, she’s failed to establish her authority over the party – an authority which was not guaranteed by the factional machinations which smoothed her path into the Premiership.

That’s a real pity in my book.

Not least because neither major party is doing much to address the genuine problems we have in this state.

If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.

The blurb claims:

In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.

Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.

If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.

But it gets worse. The much vaunted analysis is trite or obvious, and the insider sources seem to have all been on the Liberal side of the aisle, but even then we learn nothing much of any great interest over and above what informed observers perceived at the time. There’s a heavy leaning to the uncritical acceptance of whatever sources say, just as with Jackman, although obviously Van Onselen and Senior had fewer sources. There’s also an uncritical leaning to the right, with Rudd’s policies often being described as thin or symbolic but with enconiums about “the [Howard] government’s sound economic management” being regularly repeated.

Bernard Keane observed in Crikey that while the authors claim that “the press gallery” wanted a change of government, the day in day out nutsoid denialism and cheerleading of the News Limited hacks in the then Government Gazette passes entirely unmentioned. Actually, about the only interesting bit of the book is a bit of ex post facto insight into where the Shanahans, Milnes and Pearsons were getting their psephological theories from – there’s an odd parallelism between the delusions in Howard’s own office (noted as having contacted Shanahan to ensure that a story made the front page of The Australian on one occasion) and Crosby Textor and all the batty lines the punditariat served up – principally the theory that Labor could lose with 52% of the vote and that marginal members might have up to a 4% personal vote. Tony Abbott and others also get portrayed in passing, with no reflection on the significance of all this, as suggesting angles for the punditariat. Anyone for fearless journalism, Dennis? Hold the front page, Chris!

[There are also a few bizarre mentions of Piers Akerman columns that add nothing to the story. Though his prediction that some National Party era scandal in Queensland whose name I can't even recall now would be a sleeper issue in the election goes unmentioned. Rather, he's portrayed writing searing critiques of the Rudd opposition. I really hope someone wasn't touting for a favourable mention in the Daily Terror to increase their book sales?]

So – ironically – we have an underplayed and unconscious indictment of Australian political journalism in a book that – despite being written by two academics – manages to convey even less insight and analysis, let alone matching of social trends and political developments – than Jackman’s book – written by a political journalist. It’s another completely “insider” account where the electorate appears to be a cipher, appearing only through polls and John Howard’s apparent intuition, and with politics reduced to the most mechanical of campaign methodologies and strategies.

Again, the question that should be raised is one for Melbourne University Press. These books are just underdone. This one, frankly, feels like Van Onselen left much of the writing to his junior author Senior – a PhD student – and then never quite got around to adding the analytical gloss or shaping much of a narrative. It cries out for an editor. It may well be that there’s a commercial calculation at work here – that a book with John Howard on the front cover is going to have a very limited shelf life in Borders or wherever – but when are we going to see some serious and considered writing on the 2007 election? The Christmas quickies were mostly better than the books that apparently had a longer gestation period.

Van Onselen and Senior – in their academic papers – demonstrate that they actually are a lot better than this. I don’t know if it’s deliberate dumbing down for a supposedly mass market, but if this sort of tome produces only yawns in the rather small market of political bloggers, well – why not wait longer and put more effort into something that lives up to its hyped promise?