LEIGH SALES: Okay, on asylum seekers, particularly those who come by boat, what’s your view on offshore processing?

ROB OAKESHOTT: I’ve been very loud in my electorate that we are the moat people. The very fact people have to come here by boat says we’ve got a huge strategic advantage in dealing with this.

They’ve normally come through three or four countries where those countries don’t even know that people have passed through their borders. So I think we can manage this and manage it in a strategic sense. Our offshore processing is about $470 million a year of taxpayers’ money.

I’m not fussed about Nauru, Christmas Island, East Timor but I would ask that at least we consider onshore processing under UN conventions and 90 day rules. I’m sure we could find a mayor or a council in the North or Northwest of Australia who would be very interested in the 350 jobs that we’re currently exporting to Christmas Island because we are driven by some sort of fear of dealing with this issue on the mainland.

And they’re 350 well paying jobs. They’re Defence. They’re ASIO. They’re Customs.

So you know, I think we need to put fear in the back pocket, deal with it strategically, deal with it on a regional basis, stick to UNHCR guidelines and targets and really step up and deal with the issue on the mainland as much as trying to farm the problem out to some regional neighbour.

LEIGH SALES: And very briefly, climate change. You want an ETS back on the agenda?

ROB OAKESHOTT: Yeah. Look, I think if we are serious about the job we do, there were people who dedicated their lives to the science who said there’s a problem. The response was to get eminent economist Ross Garnaut to write up a report about how we turn the science into an economic model and the whole thing went to mush after that.

I’d ask this Parliament to at least consider going back to the Garnaut Report, and see whether we can lay a platform for delivering on and fulfilling our duty of finishing the process that’s gone from the science to the economics. Let’s get it through the politics and let’s deliver something for this nation.

Peter Hartcher on Lateline makes the point that there have been eleven (!) phone polls in ten days, and that all bar Newspoll have had Labor somewhere between 51 and 53%.

So, he rightly says that the only warrant for believing that there will be a Coalition win is placing one’s faith in Newspoll against all the other evidence.

If the final result is a Labor win, as I think it will be, the flagship poll of the Murdoch papers might need to be dethroned as the only one the press gallery takes seriously.

But – it’s going to be close. The likelihood is that this thing is still up for grabs, but I feel relatively confident the ALP will get over the line.

Rosen argues that the media owe a duty to the public to provide reporting which they think is in the best interests of citizens. His argument is that if you report elections and politics as if they mattered to people’s daily lives, then that also creates a greater degree of civic capacity, as well as enlivening the public sphere.

There was a bit of irony in two comments he made to Leigh Sales:

JAY ROSEN: Horse race journalism is a reusable model for how to do campaign coverage in which you focus on who’s going to win rather than what the country needs to settle by electing a prime minister.

And it’s easy to do because you can kind of reuse it sort of like a Christmas tree every year and it requires almost no knowledge either.

And it kind of imagines the campaign as a sporting event, right? And everything that happens in the campaign can potentially affect the outcome.

And so you can look at it as ‘How is it going to affect the horse race?’ And every day you can ask, ‘Who is ahead and what is their strategy?’

And I think this perspective appeals to political reporters because it kind of puts them on the inside, looking at the campaign the way the operatives do.

By the way, I’m told that you actually have a program here on Sunday morning called the Insiders.

LEIGH SALES: We do.

JAY ROSEN: Is that true?

LEIGH SALES: We do.

JAY ROSEN: And the “insiders” are the journalists.

LEIGH SALES: That is right.

JAY ROSEN: That’s remarkable.

Sales’ response? “Hmm”.

And then there’s this:

LEIGH SALES: But do you not need both? Because, of course, you do need the stories that give context and explain what’s going on and is this true or not true, how does this all fit? But then how do you ignore – say for example today when we have a former opposition leader showing up at a particular event, you can’t very well just ignore that?

JAY ROSEN: No, you can’t. But what you could do is say ‘Well politics is also theatre, politics is also entertainment’, so in that segment of our coverage, we’ll cover Latham – is that his name?

LEIGH SALES: Latham.

JAY ROSEN: Latham – because clearly this is the entertainment portion of the campaign.

Spot on.

Elsewhere: Public Opinion.

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.

In her response to Oakes, Gillard batted the question away, reiterating that she never intends to discuss the events which led to her election to the leadership.

The audio of the interchange has been posted here.

One perhaps unforeseen result of the Labor leadership switch is that it increasingly appears that questions about the manner of its execution will continue to be aired in the press. A host of stories in the media this week speculate on whether Kevin Rudd is under pressure from Labor MPs to stand down from Parliament altogether, and question his future intentions and the significance of his attendance at the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue in Washington.

The media, as is their wont, find this sort of thing more interesting to write about than policy questions. And no doubt it will lead the tv news bulletins tonight.

Early signs are that it will be accompanied by a lot of moralising about “trading the Prime Minister-ship”, riffing off the Hawke-Keating deal. No doubt we’ll hear that echoed by the opposition in short order.

It’s already all over Twitter.

Talk of the contest of wills between Bob Hawke and Paul Keating is, of course, in the air at the moment, for a variety of reasons.

The danger, for Labor, is that the Coalition is promoting a narrative of instability, which reinforces their previous themes of government incompetence and backflipping. On cue, opinionistas talk up this narrative.

Joe Hockey’s appearance on Lateline on Tuesday night signalled an opposition sewing seeds of doubt about the stability of a re-elected government, and articulating this to a belief that Australians were better off under the Howard government. It’s an attempt to turn around the ‘risk’ factor that normally favours incumbents, and to negate the advantage the government has of providing reassurance and stability in a turbulent time.

Of course, the Liberal party has had four leaders in three years. But, perhaps, memories are short. Labor’s ability to remind voters of the fact that both Brendan Nelson and Malcolm Turnbull were fatally undermined, and that the spectre of a Peter Costello challenge haunted the Coalition through and beyond John Howard’s Prime Ministerial tenure, is somewhat nullified by their own leadership shift.

How does Labor counter this theme?

But he cautions:

The first thing to mention about these polls is what they don’t measure. As a result of them being in the field on Thursday night in the case of Galaxy and both Thursday and Friday nights in the case of Nielsen – they wont be measuring a proper voting intention, but instead measuring an initial public reaction. We’ll have to wait for a week or so for the phrase “Prime Minister Gillard” to sink into the public brainspace before we can start to get a confident grip on the voting intention fallout.

As a result, don’t be surprised to see quite a large variation in polling results over the next polling cycle.

Of great interest also is the fact that a majority of Galaxy respondents believe that the ALP made a bad decision forced by panic, with a larger majority believing that Julia Gillard shared responsibility with Kevin Rudd for decisions of the Government.

I still don’t think that the ALP has made a persuasive case for the manner and speed with which Kevin Rudd was removed as PM. Interviews with Nicola Roxon and Chris Bowen on successive nights on Lateline show this. People can recite the verities of the Westminster system all they like, but the reality of presidential campaigns in modern Australian politics is that electors feel they are choosing between candidates for PM as well as parties. There’s a lot of evidence that there is real hurt and shock at the way in which Kevin Rudd met his political Waterloo in the electorate, a sentiment acknowledged by Julia Gillard herself.

Retrospectively validating the decision through the evidence of two polls must be tempting for Labor figures, but I’d return to my earlier point about polls representing a snapshot of static public opinion. And my argument about the dangers of staking everything, including the weighty matter of who should lead our country, on the next poll.

The leadership change may have brought those voters Possum characterises as “skeptical partisans and ordinarily soft voters back into the fold”. But the underlying reasons why those voters left Labor haven’t gone away. The rhetoric from Gillard and others in the ALP holds out inconsistent hopes – for a ‘tougher’ or a more humane line on asylum seekers and “border security”, for an end to a divisive tax debate and for mining companies paying a fair share of taxation, for action on climate change and for a deferral on an ETS until there is “consensus”.

At this stage, disillusioned voters can take their pick as to whether they believe Gillard will move government policy on the great issues of the day in their preferred direction. But not everyone can have what they want, and these circles simply can’t be squared so as to render disparate voting groups simultaneously happy for very long. The government must act, and must decide, and which way those decisions go will be the true test of Julia Gillard as Prime Minister in the lead up to an imminent election.

NB: Previous discussion of the Labor leadership challenge on LP is here.

Elsewhere: Mumble, What The People Want.

Elsewhere: Guy Rundle:

Gillard’s wave of support derived from becoming the first female PM, and Labor at that, will not long survive a rightward turn on asylum seekers, and other ‘necessary’ manouevres.

Update: Newspoll is out, showing a small increase in the 2PP to 53-48, but a rise of 7 points in the Labor primary vote, largely at the expense of The Greens.

Dennis Shanahan proclaims that only he and “hard heads” know how to interpret polls, but Peter Brent thinks not.

Elsewhere, Graham Young details the latest National Forum qualitative polling on Julia Gillard.

Update: [by Kim] Essential Research has Labor on 54-46 2PP. Bernard Keane points out that the sample is a rolling one, so it shows that Kevin Rudd was already pulling Labor’s primary vote up and attracting voters back from The Greens.

It’s not an insignificant thing to tear down a Prime Minister in his first term, a Labor leader who’s the first to win a federal election since 1993.

The problem with the poll obsessed apparatchiks is that their horizon is always the next poll. And they tend always to have a static assessment of the political situation.

In a situation like we face today, where it would seem a number of marginal seat polls have given unexpected momentum to a putsch dreamed up by so-called ‘hard heads’ in the ALP right, and talked up through the ‘media narrative’, I wonder whether any thought has been given to the need to persuade the public of the need to destroy a Prime Minister. Any thought that is, beyond simplistic reasoning that hardly goes beyond ‘Rudd’s the problem, so if he’s removed, there will be less of a problem’.

Paul Howes’ appearance on Lateline tonight indicates there isn’t much of a communications strategy within the Gillard camp (where his, and the AWU’s, tent is firmly pitched). The plotters will need to articulate something much more persuasive than ‘the polls made us do it’ and ‘Alister Jordan’s calling MPs offended Gillard’. The stupidity of the ‘Rudd disloyal to Gillard’ theme was apparent, and apparently Howes only belatedly realised that announcements that unions such as his and the HSU had swung their support to Gillard opened the way to the Kristina Keneally attack – a leader installed by faceless union bosses and party apparatchiks.

Indeed, that’s a theme Kevin Rudd astutely exploited in his press conference tonight [full text here].

Howes made nothing of any policy differences between Gillard and Rudd, and continually claimed that the Rudd government was a good government.

I don’t imagine that ‘we were goaded by Dennis Shanahan and Peter Van Onselen’s columns’ would be persuasive either. Unless this really is a “coup by commentariat”. Or Howes’ other line, which equated to a feeling of panic that Tony Abbott and the Coalition would defeat Labor.

Anyone who imagines that, if Julia Gillard is Prime Minister tomorrow, she will have no need to explain why she is, and Rudd no longer is, lives in a fool’s paradise.

It also won’t be long before Gillard’s reported reluctance to challenge is questioned. Did she really first become aware of moves which have obviously been in train for some time earlier this afternoon?

The story follows a report in today’s Fairfax papers that Kevin Rudd’s chief of staff, Alister Jordan, had been asked to take soundings among MPs on the Prime Minister’s behalf, and claims from The Australian that Julia Gillard had done herself and her party a dis-service by not initiating the challenge the paper had been talking up at yesterday’s caucus.

Update: There’s now a report on the ABC News website.

Update: The Twitter hashtag #spill is being revived… though #ruddroll also has its admirers.

Update: Kerry O’Brien says there’ll be more later on in the 7.30 Report. Meanwhile, the most astute summary on Twitter comes from RachWelsh who points out that some tweeting journos with sources are saying something is happening, and others are not.

Update: Heather Ewart on the 7.30 Report claimed that meetings were taking place between elements of the NSW and Victorian Right, and Mark Arbib is said to have defected from Rudd. She reported that Gillard is meeting with Rudd, but of course, Gillard may be meeting with Rudd to quash the unchallenge. Or not.

Update: Fairfax reports (at 7.39pm) that Gillard’s office has said “nothing has changed”.

Update: There’s very little news among all the noise. Bill Shorten is said to be one of those orchestrating the unchallenge, and the AWU has reportedly withdrawn its support for Rudd.

Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Anthony Albanese and John Faulkner are reported to be in Kevin Rudd’s office.

Gillard is reported to be not intending to challenge.

This micro-event, it would seem, has been brought to you by the genius “strategists” who talked Rudd into dropping the ETS in the first place, setting in train his plunge in the polls. The NSW Right, as I’ve said before, knows no other response to bad focus groups than to bring on a leadership challenge. Political courage and leadership is unknown among the apparatchiks and Sussex Street types.

And we’ve also had an unprecedented campaign against the PM from the media and the mining industry. While I’d like to see Gillard become PM, the Labor Party would be insane to dump Rudd now, and nor should they.

This will be highly damaging, coming as it does just at the point when it appeared that things could be turned around for the government. If I were Julia Gillard, I’d urge Rudd to convene a caucus meeting tomorrow morning, and personally move a confidence motion in his leadership. And heads should roll in the ALP. Soon.

Update: The Punch, which is live blogging what is still the unchallenge, reports that John Faulkner between Gillard and Rudd.

I’ll repeat what I said before: if the ALP dumps Rudd now, it will be the height of stupidity, and be a demonstration of nothing but craven cowardice in the face of a media/mining industry orchestrated campaign, at a time when the polls indicate, despite a low primary vote, the ALP is still odds on to win the election.

Update: Paul Howes has just Tweeted that he’ll be on Lateline to explain the AWU’s position.

Update: Rachel Hills says it all on Twitter:

I feel like much of the anti-Rudd sentiment recently is more journalists getting bored with him than a newfound excess of crapness. #spill

Update: The Drum editor Jonathan Green on Twitter:

a certain smugness in the media at this coup by commentariat

Update: Sky News is reporting Kevin Rudd will be giving a press conference in the next 5 to 10 minutes.

Update: Lots of Tweets claiming that Rudd is about to quit.

Update: Rudd’s press conference will be televised live on ABC1 very soon.

Update: Rudd has convened caucus to meet at 9am. Gillard will be challenging. He is not standing down.

Update: Rudd indicates he will be running against faction and union domination. He is also running against the NSW Right, indicating that if he wins he will not be retreating from the RSPT, or giving in to calls for a hardline on asylum seekers. He suggested forward movement on climate change.

Update: New thread here.

For those who don’t want to wade through all of it, Bernard Keane has analysed Abbott’s address at Crikey:

Yesterday’s economics speech by Tony Abbott was a major disappointment, confirming rather than reversing the impression that the Opposition leader and economics don’t have much more than a nodding acquaintance.

Keane’s on the money in suggesting that it’s thin gruel, when you strip away the decontextualised Keynes quote and the statistics. Its sole take away message appears to have been contained in the twin claims that the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis was a bigger threat to the Australian economy than the Global Financial Crisis (demonstrably untrue, but in the Abbott style of “our crisis was bigger than your crisis”) and that Tony is not actually the ghost of B.A. Santamaria but rather imbued with the values of Peter Costello and John Howard. (It would be interesting, of course, to discuss precisely what constituted the values of Peter Costello and John Howard.) So, it’s really an attempt to reassure the business horses who were stampeded by Abbott’s recent thought bubbledom.

For what it’s worth, I thought Joe Hockey made a better fist of defending a very shaky brief on Lateline last night than his Leader, though Tony Jones was able to expose the contradictions in what passes for reasoning among the Coalition – the Liberals stand for low taxes, but on the other hand, we might need an awful lot of levies because of Labor’s terrible wasteful spending. What Hockey did show, as did Abbott, is that the cupboard on either substantive policy measures or the savings that would need to be identified to make the ‘debt’ line more than rhetoric is bare. It’s certainly not impossible for the Liberals to advance a fiscal policy from opposition, but they’re always waiting; waiting for Henry, waiting for the Budget. As with health, this mob don’t have much of a clue what they might do if they were elected. They just know they’d like to be.

Elsewhere: Public Opinion.

Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda.

Tingle argues that the parties’ current financial crisis (caused by a drop in corporate donations associated both with the actual Global Financial Crisis and a new reluctance of many shareholders to countenance political subventions) has left them flying blind, without the guidance of the elaborate qualitative polling they would normally enjoy in an election year. That’s worth remembering next time you hear Kevin Rudd criticised for using focus group-speak.

Tingle on The Worm:

And I think it’s also more important in a way at this period of time because both political parties are pretty financially strapped.

They can’t afford do the sort of polling that they did during the last election year in, say, 2007. So they’re flying blind a lot of the time. So something like the worm comes along, really reinforces to them what the messages are, and I think both sides of politics will walk away from this debate thinking a lot about their tactics.

Now, we all know from the more partisan elements in the commentariat today that The Worm is excitable, pro-Labor, not really representative, etc. As I said last night:

…[Remembering] that Kevin Rudd actually won the election on the back of the same lines The Worm liked in his debate against Howard, I’m not at all sure that Abbott’s fans should make a virtue of the fact that voters are turned off by his shtick.

So, let’s leave the quibbling aside.

For Tingle, the health debate was a pre-campaign test run of political messaging of great use to the parties.

Tingle is right. And [h/t tigtog] Possum has provided an interpretation of the feedback from audience measurement of yesterday’s health debate which potentially has big implications for how political tactics are shaped in the 2010 federal election. (And also a very informative explanation of how it all works.) I’ve posted an excerpt over the fold.

Firstly, if the Ekas provided sample of undecided voters to Channel Nine was a good estimate of the true nature of undecided voters around the country, Tony Abbott is in deep shit. Initial responses to Kevin Rudd were much more positive than they were for Abbott and general audience responses across time were much more positive for Rudd than they were for Abbott, regardless of what each leader happened to be talking about at the time.

Negative turning points for Abbott were also much sharper than they were for Rudd, suggesting that even with the gradualism of the button technology, when each leader said something that the audience didn’t like, they tended to give Rudd the benefit of the doubt until they heard him out (with trickles of negative button presses coming in as Rudd’s answer progressed). When Abbott said something the audience didn’t like, they all pressed their negative buttons early and en masse.

That suggests that undecided voters have a relatively positive predisposition to Rudd and a very short tolerance for Abbott.

More importantly, on the Roy Morgan Reactor results (which I think was the superior piece of technology kit for measuring political reaction), the immediacy of its responses told us a few interesting things.

* The public doesn’t like Abbott’s jokes and theatrics. Whenever he tried to crack a joke, the audience response literally fell in a ditch regardless of the level it was at before the joke.

* When Rudd talks about the boring detail of process, far from turning the public off as some journos opine, the public reaction is actually positive, and not just a little bit positive, but substantially positive.

* When Rudd went negative on Abbott, he usually wasn’t punished for it in terms of audience response. However, when Abbott went negative on Rudd, Abbott nearly always elicited a strong, negative reaction from the audience

* Rudd has much more generic goodwill from the public than does Abbott. As soon as Rudd started answering any question, the audience response started out in net positive territory. When Abbott started answering any question, the audience response started out around zero – sometimes a little positive, sometimes a little negative.

One of the most important things it demonstrated – and something that the polling has been suggesting for a while now – is that Abbott has very little political room to move and his support appears to be generally soft.

Update: tigtog at The Drum.