I think the return of Rudd would put the spotlight on Abbott’s total fraudulence, maybe even paving the way for the Rudd vs Turnbull election we should have had last time.

That’s an interesting reflection, because amidst all the sound and fury that surrounds the Gillard government, the related facts that Tony Abbott is not popular and that no one knows what an Abbott government would do except try to return to Howardia are not highlighted enough.

Tony Abbott stands for endless upheaval. He’s the permanent revolutionary of the Coalition side.

On his stated platform, there would need to be another election should he become Prime Minister. In quick order.

That’s simply because what he says he wants to do (repeal the carbon price, undo the resources tax, shift towards individual bargaining in workplace relations, dissolve the NBN and so on) would not, in all likelihood, be capable of being carried through a Senate where the probability that The Greens will retain the balance of power is high.

So an Abbott government would be more of the same. Lots of yelling and posturing, with the view to forcing a double dissolution.

Abbott’s implied assurance that calm and stability and Howardian goodness would return in an instant, and all the many, many grievances he has fostered would be instantly wiped away is impossible of attainment.

Having won power, it’s hard to see the Coalition (which is always of the view that power is the oxygen it ought to breathe) chancing it on another throw of the dice. It would be under a PM whose sole virtue is his not-Gillard-ness.

It is not at all impossible, indeed I’d say likely, that there might be a Liberal leadership change either before the 2013 election (which may occur earlier) or shortly afterwards. Put your money on before. I suspect that John Quiggin is right that a Labor shift to Kevin Rudd (and probably only to Rudd) would act as a catalyst.

On the Labor side of things, reality has to be confronted.

Labor’s primary vote has collapsed, and Julia Gillard’s approval has collapsed.

In reading over the thread about Peter Beattie’s little play, two themes are interesting:

(a) It’s all the fault of the media;

(b) Julia Gillard’s government has done good things.

(a) can be disposed of easily. Kevin Rudd did not have News Limited in his pocket, and he and the ALP enjoyed very high popularity from the end of 2006 to the end of 2009. A hostile and febrile press gallery, and “campaigning” newspapers are simply just the environment in which a Labor government now has to operate.

(b) mistakes legislative command, more often than not, for political and governmental authority. No one is really going to vote Labor because 188 (or whatever) bills have been passed by Parliament this year. A government which looks to be in a state of panic, like a bunny in the headlights, when confronted by the inevitable implosion of an ill-judged and rushed policy fix has little claim to authority.

The good things that have been done (a proper paid parental leave scheme, health funding reform, the NBN, and so on) do not redound, for whatever reason, to the government’s credit.

Over and above that, as Malcolm Farnsworth makes clear in an excellent piece at The Drum, there’s a longer term hollowing out of the Labor project which is really starting to show.

Kevin Rudd’s removal, whatever his faults, were symptomatic of that decline.

Kevin Rudd’s removal also explains most of why Julia Gillard has not been able to make a success of things. The accusation of a ‘lie’ gains so much traction because she can easily be perceived as having seized the leadership by stealth.

Now, that is not true, but the fact that the political logic behind that perception is at work is a fact, and a fact that must be reckoned with.

I don’t think the “hold the nerve with Gillard” strategy is a goer any more.

The three policy issues Julia Gillard herself nominated at the time she became Prime Minister are causes of the government’s pain. Principally, climate change and asylum seekers, but the resources tax is also not settled, and the departure from the original design has, it’s become clear, exacerbated all the political issues associated with the “two speed economy”.

On climate change, Labor gave the issue away to The Greens. On asylum seekers, Labor gave the issue away to the Right.

What we need is a return to sanity in Australian political life. So, Quiggin is probably right that a Rudd-Turnbull contest would promote that. We may not get there. Anything can happen. But Julia Gillard’s effective Prime Minister-ship is almost certainly over.

Again that is not fair, but there it is.

I think that if the leadership were to change, the most likely outcome would still be a sizeable Coalition win. This Labor government is beyond saving. But some of the furniture needs saving, one of Australia’s two principal parties of government needs to recover some dignity and self belief, and the country needs anything other than an Abbott-slide.

Julia Gillard should think about that.

…the motivating force behind these groups appears to be more about expressing resentment about social and economic change in recent decades, and particularly because such changes have delivered nothing but difficulties for the demographics we’re talking about: social change has undermined the once-dominant status of older white heteros-xual people and males in particular, and, in the Australian context, economic changes have squeezed them, along with everyone else, into a far more competitive, market-based economy that no longer delivers the sort of certainty they grew up with and that Generation X, in particular, never had.

For such people, Gillard’s gender (and unmarried status) or Obama’s race are not so much a problem as a high-profile, indeed inescapable, symbol of how much the world has changed and changed in ways that deliver nothing but pain for such people.

I think there’s probably an aspect of the phenomenon he identifies in the second para, but I am very far from being as confident as he is that racism and sexism are not a big part of the picture.

He’s also spot on about the ludicrous claims about ‘censorship’. And about the way the Coalition is essentially using this diffuse ressentiment to contribute to its recreation of the febrile atmosphere of 1975.

On that, 48% of respondents believed Labor should form a government as opposed to 36% for the Coalition. That suggests it’s really only Liberal and National partisans who are of the view that they ought to have formed a government, though as Essential Research found yesterday, they hold that view very strongly.

Essential also had the two major parties on 50-50 two party preferred.

At any rate, this should throw a spanner in the works of the “Election Now!” crowd. I imagine News Limited will get on with their campaign of writing non-stories about “extreme Green” policies threatening the Labor government’s stability.

Crikey has a liveblog, and ABC News 24 and News Radio are carrying Bob Katter’s press conference live.

Update: Bernard Keane summarises Katter’s press conference.

Update: Tony Windsor supports Labor.

So what we have is a media strategy rather than a negotiating strategy, setting the stage to continue the onslaught of bullying and blather if a Gillard government is sworn in this week.

Perhaps the last throw of the dice in this game is a bizarre opinion piece by Tony Abbott himself in the comfortable environs of the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Presumably if this absurd combination of hyperbole and untruths doesn’t influence the Independents at this late stage, Tony Abbott is preparing to resume his career as “Australia’s Most Successful Opposition Leader” to the general acclaim of Paul Kelly, Dennis Shanahan and David Penberthy.

The question, though, is whether another installment in The Party of No show will work in the actual parliamentary conditions under which an Abbott opposition will operate. If the prospect of an election recedes, and conciliation becomes entrenched, could the Liberals start looking for a less combative leader? And are they confident that every single one of their 72 members will follow Abbott’s lead on every vote?

Elsewhere: Grog’s Gamut.

Also, Mr Rabbit has a sad.

Two points you may not read elsewhere:

(a) It’s not at all unexpected that Adam Bandt would side with Labor – it was an explicit promise to his electorate of Melbourne, which had it not been made, may well have dissuaded many former Labor voters from coming across to The Greens. Bob Brown has done well to press for something substantive on the back of a negotiating position where there was never a prospect of Bandt agreeing to support a Rabbit government.

(b) All the “OMG! Labor will be destroyed in the regions and the burbs!” stories ignore the fact that the ALP lost far more votes to The Greens in this election (particularly in Queensland) than to the Coalition. It’s eminently rational to send a signal to those voters that Labor and The Greens are able to lay the foundations for a progressive alliance.

In any case, the balance of power in the Senate was always going to lie with The Greens even had Labor been able to put together a majority of House seats in its own right.

How all this plays out in the longer term is another question – in that The Greens will certainly be looking to increase their presence in the House of Representatives, where Batman and Grayndler are now also Labor/Greens contests on the 2PP. But, in the short and media term, there’s little room for doubting that this agreement is smart politics for both Julia Gillard and Bob Brown.

Reading the piece, I was reminded of Mark’s point yesterday:

It’s all interlinked. The professionalisation of politics rests on the existence of career paths which take major party members from staffer to Member to lobbyist, or straight from staffer to lobbyist. “Government relations” or “public affairs” staff grease the wheels which are further oiled through donations, and the existence of Labor or Coalition aligned consultants, think tanks, economic advisors, law firms and so on. The media uncritically reports a host of advocacy research, done only because it provides talking points intended to influence the policy process through both personal contact and framing public debate. And so it goes on, making a mockery of both evidence based policy and the public interest.

This is most starkly illustrated by looking at the AEC’s national count, which distinguishes between votes and seats won by the Liberals, the Nationals, the CLP and the LNP. The WA Nationals are not distinguished from the Nationals, but have made it clear that their relationship with the federal National party is somewhat tenuous.

All are aggregated in the two party count as the “Liberal/National Coalition”.

But, looking from the vantage point of Queensland, there is no doubt that the formation of the Liberal National Party represents a significant shift on the conservative side of politics. Its confused manifestation in the federal arena has new MPs like Scott Bucholtz in Wright sitting with the Liberal party because of internal deals, though he’s Barnaby Joyce’s former chief of staff. The Wright preselection was widely and correctly seen as a victory of the Nationals over the Liberals.

While it’s been pointed out in some of the recriminations on the Coalition side in NSW that significant resources were diverted from Sydney Labor seats to regional contests between Libs and Nats, the same effectively holds true in the LNP, except that the contest is internal, rather than at the ballot box (and thus has less effect on the outcome of electorates).

That’s what was intended in the LNP’s formation, and at state level, it’s rightly seen as a Nationals dominated bloc. Over time, the pull at organisational and state level will be towards a submerging of the two former parties’ identity, and a development towards a distinctive regional party.

None of this necessarily has implications for the stability of the federal election, though that may change in the case of federal defeat. But the point is that the LNP is an attempt to straddle the divisions of demographics pulling in different directions, and a response to the upheaval in partisan identification and stability represented by the surge of One Nation in Queensland in the late 1990s, and the subsequent success of state Independents and the entrenchment of a culture of only allocating first preferences in state elections.

The SA and WA Nationals are also clearly different beasts from their Eastern counterparts.

Part of what is at stake in the current situation is the ability of the Nationals to argue that they, rather than Independents, are the most effective voice of rural and regional voters, an argument becoming hard to credit.

So the federal Coalition is an amalgam of 4 and possibly 5 parties. There are real shifts in voting behaviour underlying this fracturing, and the logic of a two party contest (to which people like Paul Kelly are so attached) may be headed for further erosion.

All that is before we get to the fact that it’s becoming evident that The Greens are able to win, and be competitive in, House of Representatives seats, which poses a real issue for Labor.

There are a range of centrifugal forces operating, both at the level of voting patterns and party calculations, in the context of a decline in partisan identification. All of that may be enhanced by this election result.

I think there’s a range of evidence that this election result is one marker of a shift in the traditional pattern of our politics, though a lot is being invested in pretending otherwise.

I suspect Tony Abbott’s understanding of process issues doesn’t go much beyond the staple promises oppositions always make – a better question time and an independent or more independent Speaker. The Parliamentary Budget Office idea was Malcolm Turnbull’s.

Abbott is not talking a more inclusive game, but as of today, he’s still completely unable to say anything without making his standard litany of partisan points, and effectively trying to steamroller himself into office.

My own answer to the question, and I hope very much we don’t see it tested in practice, is that an Abbott government would be likely to be “nasty, brutish and short”, to quote Thomas Hobbes, who’s probably lurking somewhere behind what passes for Abbott’s political credo.

Tingle suspects that the Coalition, if Gillard can form a government, will be tempted into parliamentary obstructionism, on the “we were robbed” grounds they’re likely to revert to after trumpeting their supposed triumph over Labor (which is looking less triumphal since Saturday night).

She also makes the intriguing point, something to which I think Tony Windsor was alluding last night on the 7.30 Report, that a House of Reps without a government majority is going to make it the focus of legislative horse-trading and negotiation (generally, independents and minor party MPs only sign on for confidence and supply votes, not support for government legislation). That renders the role of the Senate somewhat curious, and also spotlights the fact that a Coalition opposition would have two choices on legislation – blatant obstructionism or constructive criticism and negotiation.

I’d have thought, if a more robust legislative process does attract public support, a continuation of the Coalition’s negativity would be precisely the wrong direction for them to take.