The Victorian Left MP ruminates on the damage done by the excessive use of focus group techniques and a soulless approach to the techniques of campaigning, and at the same time argues that Labor needs to formulate principled policy which can appeal to its support bases in both progressive and working communities. That’s normally seen as a bridge too far by modern Labor, post-Keating. Yet I’ve seen very little evidence that most of the outer suburban vote targeted by ALP “hard heads” actually does swing on the basis of issues such as asylum seekers and “social issues”.

The smallest swing against the ALP in Queensland, for instance, was in Petrie – a classic outer suburban “battlers” seat. I suspect there’s a refusal to recognise that the consequences of economic decisions taken under Hawke and Keating actually contributed mightily to the erosion of Labor’s vote. The backlash against the Howard Liberals over WorkChoices also suggests that the cultural project of reconfiguring class identities around notions of “aspiration” and “entrepreneurialism” was only ever skin deep.

Meanwhile, over in Milne-land, the veteran transcriber of leaks purports to report the defensive bile of the NSW right, and to present it in the best possible light. Karl Bitar, it seems, is going to voluntarily look for career opportunities elsewhere, while the rightsters heap blame on the PM for the exact same reasons they heaped blame on Kevin Rudd.

You could take all this with a massive pinch of salt, of course, but it’s interesting that a serious piece of reflection from a Left MP is ignored in the MSM while the almost totally discredited NSW right’s recriminations are still treated as if they’re gospel (and headlined as a “crisis for Labor”).

Something I’d regard as a plus is treated as a negative:

Where has she been? We learn today she is now planning to move into the Lodge, making her ascension formal. Until her appearance on Wednesday where she delivered the latest episode of the soap that is becoming the Speakership we had not heard from her in person since her Ben Chifley, “Light on the Hill” moment on September 18.

Meanwhile the vacuum is being filled by the Greens and, wait for it, Rudd as shiny new Foreign Minister. Can you imagine John Howard or Rudd as prime minister going missing for that long a time? Perhaps it was an inauspicious outing. Gillard used it to claim she would be as an audacious and ambitious leader as Chifley was, faced by his own straitened circumstances of a parliament and a government reliant on independents.

I’d have thought that not compulsively fronting the cameras for the message of the day, making serious appearances to talk about serious things, and getting on with the business of governing in a new environment was actually a very good move by the PM.

Enter the big guns, such as they are, firing broadsides from their Monday columns.

The theme of both Peter Van Onselen and Glenn Milne‘s pieces is that Kevin Rudd has one more Newspoll left in him (or two, according to Milne, if reality fails to play to script and the bar needs to be moved).

Newspoll returns after the return of federal parliament this week, and according to Van Onselen, “Rudd has one week to shape up”.

Milne’s farrago of faint praise points the way for how this story would develop should Gillard take the leadership – the knives are already being sharpened.

Let’s be very clear about what’s happening here. We’re going to read about this ‘narrative’ all week, and the same people writing it will bemoan that the government lacks ‘oxygen’ for its ‘message’, in the hope that having ensured that’s true, they can further shape reality by influencing the Labor caucus, and by necessity, Julia Gillard. If the ‘deadline’ passes and nothing happens, some other set of facts will be invented, and I’m sure that will occur, as Gillard’s far too smart to dance to the News Limited tune.

Meanwhile, Tony Abbott’s suitability for high office and the Coalition’s policy stance continue to go completely without scrutiny from the so-called ‘fourth estate’, and the implicit threat is that will continue, along with the relentless drumbeat of ‘Rudd in trouble’ stories, unless and until the ALP caves in.

Welcome to media politics, 2010 style.

Glenn Milne boned from News? The automated email response from News Limited gallery hack Glenn Milne delivered the news: “Please be advised that as of the 13/03/2010 I no longer work for News Limited Sunday Papers, I still work for The Australian.” Milne is directing correspondents to a Gmail account, presumably because his role at News is now as Australian column contributor only.

So what’s happened? The veteran Canberra reporter had been dishing the political dirt for the Sunday tabloids — including The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Herald Sun and The Sunday Mail (Brisbane and Adelaide) — catching Kevin Rudd at a New York strip club, and swearing at MPs, exposing Greg Combet’s love life, uncovering Jan McLucas’ travel rorts and other salacious scoops prowling the halls of parliament house on Saturdays. It seems all that digging got too tiresome for the man Paul Keating dubbed the ‘The Poison Dwarf’ (and that was before his celebrated run-in with Crikey founder Stephen Mayne at the 2006 Walkley Awards). Milne couldn’t be reached for comment.

Crikey understands his replacement has already started work. Shaun Carney has defected from Fairfax — after almost 25 years at The Age — and last week announced to a shocked News Limited press suite he would now be filing for the Sunday titles. Fairfax didn’t respond to questions before deadline.

Carney was an associate editor and senior columnist with the Melbourne newspaper. He’s written two books, including a biography on federal Treasurer Peter Costello — ironic given Milne was seen as Costello’s biggest supporter in the press gallery.

Update: Correction from Crikey – Simon Kearney not Shaun Carney.

Glenn Milne’s latest intervention, talking up a line from Liberal MP Scott Morrison, has to be one of the lamest ever political attack lines. [For those who don't want to wade through a farrago of fallacies expounded at excessive length, his core point is echoed by Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy, though without attribution to Milne. Rendered in short form, the basic logical fallacy is starkly evident.]

So, there’s going to be an “emissions financial crisis” and the Reserve Bank wasn’t consulted by the Government before climate change legislation was prepared? A non sequitur built on speculative and incoherent fantasy does not make for an effective political attack. ‘OMG! Governor didn’t read legislation! Rudd FAIL!’…

The political syntax of this claim, of course, is that Rudd and co successfully berated the Liberals for ‘ignoring 20 (or whatever it was) successive Reserve Bank warnings’ in the lead up to the 2007 election. Now, we have the Liberals, and their echo chamber, arguing that the Reserve Bank should have been given a chance to warn. Somehow a hypothetical and unlikely warning was pre-empted by the Government deliberately choosing not to do what it doesn’t have to do. Try to make any sense of that.

What would be far more interesting to examine would be the politics of invoking the Reserve Bank (and for that matter, Treasury and its ubiquitous Secretary, Dr Ken Henry). There are significant questions about the independence of Treasury – or perhaps around the degree to which it is closely intermeshed with Rudd, Swan and Tanner’s agenda. And it’s clear that both Ken Henry and Glenn Stevens’ presumed authority is used by the Government regularly to legitimate its economic management credentials.

The Libs have occasionally made attacks in similar form as the essential structure of the Milne claim (leaving aside for the moment, that it rests on non-events) – that the Government has ignored advice. Of course, such attacks are irreconcilable with claims that the Government’s policies – when effectively ticked off by Henry and Stevens – are wildly irresponsible.

None of this makes a lot of sense. The Opposition, and its buddies in the right wing media and academic commentariat, might be better served by exploring the real issues around how economic policy is made, and defended through the aura of institutions which are perceived as independent. Don’t hold your breath, though.

Update: Sinclair Davidson responds.

The widespread practice of simply ignoring women in male-dominated discussions does not make the fact that we make up 51% of voters go away.

Indeed. Women are nigh on invisible, or at least very radically under-represented in most public discussions of electoral politics. But, as Pavlov’s Cat points out, we constitute more than a majority of the electorate… and that’s reflected in the composition of samples taken for polls. So as Possum reveals (with one of his spiffy graphs), the Coalition trails much further behind where they were at the last election with women voters than with male:

The Coalition is pulling a fairly stable average of 37-39 among male voters, which isn’t crash hot, but it’s not exactly terrible either. The thing about election campaigns is that it’s pretty easy to win or lose a few points with any demographic, so if the Coalition went into the next campaign only 3 or 4 points down among males, it’s a doable proposition for them.

With the female vote however, they’re pulling an average 34-37, which is a staggering 7 to 10 point decline on their result from the last election. Turning around a gap that large simply isn’t a doable proposition over the short time frame of an election campaign. For the Coalition to not go backwards at the next election (let alone win), they have to substantially improve their female voter base before the next election campaign starts, simply to give them some realistic base to launch a final assault on Labor from during the campaign itself.

[By the way, Possum also reveals with customary wonkiness and style, that the puzzle of why the PM is popular - so unintelligible to the press gallery and the Libs - might be explained by the fact that the PM is liked. Circular, I know, but there you have it...]

So, why, exactly, are the Libs so on the nose with women voters? Speculate away…

There’s a bit of a problem with this meme.

In a (now) rare piece of relatively sensible and reality based political commentary, Lenore Taylor, formerly of the Australian Financial Review, wrote in The Australian on the weekend that the “personal destruction of Rudd” thing failed dismally for the serried ranks of Howardistas in government and – were she writing completely honestly she might have added – in News Limited in 2007.

She also neglected to observe that Dennis Shanahan was the most enthusiastic participant in this collective delusion. While Glenn Milne, one might conjecture, did the mud slinging antecedent to the putative glorious Howard re-election that never was.

I don’t think Taylor – or any other commentators – noted that Rudd made himself a small target as Opposition Leader (… yes, they said so at the time, but two years is apparently a thousand weeks in politics in the collective memory of the press gallery). Malcolm Turnbull, by contrast, is a very big one.

He’s hoist on his own petard, and Rudd, Gillard and Tanner only need to stoke the fires now. The Libs – and their false friends in News Limited – will now do the job for them… while the PM again sails up into the non-political nation building good bloke etc. stratosphere, not dented in the slighted by increasingly frenzied rants about “spin” in bizarre articles in The Australian, which in the case of Imre Salusinzky’s latest, consisted mostly of on the record quotes from one John Howard.

[Incidentally, anyone else wondering who the source for the "Howard never would have acted like Turnbull did" meme is? I suspect John Winston himself. His cold dead hand appears to have been all over the News Limited coverage recently, overtly and covertly, and I suspect he's taking the chance to destroy Turnbull, whom he's never loved, and reward his buddy Tone, who made such a big deal of continuing to visit the former Dear Leader's humble North Shore digs to extend the hand of friendship in his time of trial...]

The madness of touting Tony Abbott’s leadership chances just points to how inward looking and utterly disconnected from political reality all this nonsense has become.

The Libs should forget about leadership saviours. Their first step to being politically competitive would actually be to recognise that the Murdoch Empire has no clothes. Everyone else has. They risk going down with the ship. But don’t hold your breath. It’s difficult to breathe from a thousand leagues under the sea.

Nb: Note lack of links to the Taylor and Salusinzky pieces in the OO. I’ve noticed that they’re actually making their content harder to find online, which I suspect is preparatory to the erection of Teh Great Pay Wall of News. Should you wish to refer to the articles in question, you can probably find a copy in a library of the weekend edition. In the meantime, they’re losing advertising revenue from the links I would have otherwise inserted. Sad, isn’t it?

If the polls haven’t turned around by Christmas, etc.

This must be what John Hartigan means by high quality journalism. I’m sure readers are just lining up to pay to read Milne’s writing on the web. Pay for view Liberal leadership speculation. That’ll be a sustainable business model.

Elsewhere: John Quiggin.

Both Combet’s and Bowen’s elevations are no great surprise. But I’m disappointed to see Bob Debus go – he seemed a reasonable, measured and sensible Minister in a potentially trouble ridden portfolio. In some ways, I think he was a much better performer than Robert McLelland, his senior portfolio minister.

Even the desperate hopes of some Liberals that the improvement in parliament two weeks ago that saw Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon on the rack have proved forlorn.

When jobs are being lost, the economy is contracting and the world faces great uncertainty, voters are not about to be distracted by a bureaucratic bungle in Defence no matter how good the Liberals felt as a result.

They, and Dennis, are of course still pinning their hopes on a leadership shift. The punditariat seem to be backing $weetie now. Perhaps Glenn Milne has convinced them by the force of argument to adopt his long-held point of view about Costello’s saviour-like qualities?

Elsewhere: The Poll Bludger.

And the Queensland edition of the Newspoll (LNP 51-49) is debated at Pineapple Party Time.

Update [by Mark]: Possum.

Similarly, Hendo appeared to be reacting to a press release. Now these characters are held up as “public intellectuals” and their assemblage of titles (thinktank director, educator/consultant, etc) supposedly represent authority and expertise. Obviously, they’re just going to push the political line they run with constantly, but what’s happened to the idea that you should actually inform yourself about what you comment on?

(Hendo, I suppose, doesn’t have time, what with having to write 50 emails a day to Robert Manne about what they each thought about Indonesia in the 1960s, or monitoring the ABC all day for “bias”…)

Something very similar is operating with the reaction of Warren Mundine to the NT Intervention Review. Andrew Bartlett asks some pointed questions:

Yet almost all the attacks seem to be ignoring the evidence about what has been happening on the ground, and the views of the people that live there, instead treating policies such as universal compulsory quarantining of welfare payments and scrapping the permit system as sacred totems which cannot be touched, regardless of the evidence.

NSW based Warren Mundine, described by The Australian newspaper, as an “ALP powerbroker and indigenous leader”, provides a range of insults of the Indigenous leaders involved in the review, saying the report is “touchy-feely nonsense” and “a joke” written by “people who want to accept second-best.”

The inference that any changes to the Intervention constitutes a ‘softening’ is particularly ludicrous given the strong comments at the time of the original legislation setting up the Intervention was passed by Noel Pearson – The Australian’s main standard bearer in justifying their strident support for every original facet of the Intervention and attacking anyone who raised concerns – that the Intervention process “needs to be decisively improved” and it would be a “grave mistake” to be intransigent to any amendments.

If memory serves, I think Mundine has previously been critical of Indigenous leaders who he claims are disconnected from folks on the ground and sip lattes in Paddington or wherever all day. But I can’t for the life of me see that Mundine has made any attempt to respond to the report with anything other than his usual schtick, and a range of ad homs which probably reflect struggles within the Indigenous community more than the Welfare Wars script they get written into.

Elsewhere: Marni Cordell on the substance and politics of the report at New Matilda.