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.

On the substance, such as it is, Peter Martin has it covered.

This morning Fran Kelly is at it again, reciting “Godwin Grech” like a mantra while she talks on radio with the Treasurer.

This obsessive focus on leaks and leakers is one of the less instructive aspects of the press gallery’s hivemind, and O’Brien and Kelly’s efforts to somehow ping Swan on it are only allowing the much more serious issue of the Coalition’s wilful avoidance of scrutiny on its costings to go through to the keeper. Not to mention the complete absence of discussion of some of the big and real economic issues we confront – housing affordability, a two speed economy, an over-reliance on resources being some inter-related ones that need to be aired, but are not being.

Hockey and Andrew Robb have now managed to completely avoid any rigorous scrutiny of the Coalition’s promises, as Hockey has been told that Treasury and Finance require 5 working days to cost pledges. That’s now impossible, because their juvenile demand for a leaks investigation hasn’t been met.

And then there’s the fact that there’s a clear smear on Swan, with Coalition figures ranting about the federal police, trying to misleadingly give the impression they want to convey of a “government in crisis”.

Update: Well, that was most unenlightening.

Joe Hockey has seemed to be in a very grumpy mood all campaign, and he was allowed to get away with his usual bizarre contradictions. Swan’s lines on infrastructure and human capital could have been recycled from 2007. Meanwhile, Kerry O’Brien appears stuck in a time warp – the template being the 1987 election campaign where Paul Keating skewered John Howard on a costings black hole. Very poor performance by O’Brien, allowing both to get away with just reciting their talking points. The emphasis on leaks really was a waste of time, with the only salient point – that the Coalition is evading scrutiny, being lost in a morass of counterpoint which seemed to occupy about half the time allocated.

None of the very serious problems we have in this country even really got an airing.

The disunity in the Labor Party cannot simply be written off as “something that happens in every government.” What the Gillard Government is faced with is a systematic attempt to significantly undermine the government during an election campaign that by all accounts is going to be a close one.

It goes to the heart of effective governance. The Cabinet system that was so woefully ignored by Rudd, which undoubtedly contributed to his demise, is paramount to effective governance. Confidentiality during Cabinet deliberations is one of the most important aspects of government that one can imagine – if Ministers cannot speak openly and frankly about policies that come before them, how are we supposed to get effective policy?

It is for this reason that the steady flow of leaks coming from the Gillard Government should be a strong indication that there is something seriously wrong at the most senior levels of government. If this level of disunity is present during an election campaign – when political parties are arguably most unified – what is going to happen if Labor wins the election? Will the Cabinet system work effectively? How will Julia Gillard seek to ensure that confidentiality is maintained?

The motivation of the person or persons involved is not strictly relevant. We can postulate, analyse, and critique his or her motives all we like – what matters is the integrity of the Cabinet system, and the continued unity of the government of the day. Without this we cannot possibly have effective governance, and so I urge Julia Gillard to stop insulting our intelligence with her excuses – “it happens” – and work to fix the disunity within her own ranks.

The latest opinion polls have Labor in dire trouble. The election is going to come down to a knife-edge. Concern about government unity is surely hurting the government, and while Julia Gillard continues to be the preferred Prime Minister, the approval ratings of the government are at the level where Gillard and those who supported her deemed it necessary to roll a first term Prime Minister in order to maintain their electability.

I hope they give the same amount of attention to the leaks as they gave the issues that Kevin Rudd ostensibly mismanaged (never mind the fact that Julia Gillard in fact made many of the decisions that led to the downfall of Rudd.) The current wave of excuses – “it happens,” for the most part – are simply not good enough and until we can be sure that a re-elected Gillard Government would be unified with a credible Cabinet system, I can understand why many would be switching their vote from Labor to other parties.

I write this as a person who has not yet decided who to vote for. I will be watching how Julia Gillard tackles this problem in deciding who my first preference in the House of Representatives will go to. I have a feeling that many others are in the same position, or unfortunately for Gillard and co, have already decided to vote non-Labor based on the events that have transpired recently.

Channel Nine led today with a local protest by fisherfolk “venting their fury” about Labor’s plans for marine protection (and Bob Brown got a brief grab with his plans). Nine’s “fishing expert” said “no one is happy, all round this country of ours”, and we heard a lot about “protecting our Australian way of life”. National Party Senator Ron Boswell was there, but there was no attempt to give anyone from the government a chance to respond.

Anyway, that was the lead item on Channel Nine Brisbane. Story #2 was about a mix up where some old folks had been wrongly charged for using the Clem7 tunnel, because their motorised wheelchairs ‘pinged’ the system.

Then story #3 led with “the shadow of Kevin Rudd continued to dog the Labor campaign”, though at least Julia got a 3 second grab on MySuper. The rest of the story was almost entirely about Dolly Downer’s disputed allegations against Kevin Rudd, and it was noted that Rudd denied them and was considering legal action. Tony Abbott got to cuddle pensioners. We then got an update on Kevin Rudd’s health. Oh, and a claim from Nine’s reporter Karen Azzopardi that there was continuing uncertainty about whether Julia Gillard would “campaign alongside him”.

That was it, folks.

A couple of other excellent pieces on the performance of the political media, and its interconnection with pollies and political strategists, have come to light over the couple of two days. The first is an excellent piece by Laura Tingle on the misreporting of the RSPT stoush, and how much of the media swallowed the mining industry’s line whole.

Yesterday, Grog’s Gamut posted a passionate piece on his blog, critiquing the performance of the media pack in this election campaign specifically. You can read it here. Interestingly, the post sparked quite a debate on Twitter, with notable contributors being journalism academic and blogger Jason Wilson, Tim Dunlop, Greens web coordinator David Paris, and journalists James Massola, Samantha Maiden, Tony Wright and Latika Bourke.

Unfortunately, the debate is difficult to archive in the absence of a unifying hashtag. But the journos’ defence was partly that questions about policy were being put to the leaders, and, interestingly, that editors encouraged questions about the narrative. There’s a lot more to it than that, and I hope Jason Wilson follows up with a promised piece on it, which would better summarise a quite complex interchange than I am doing here. [The questions raised deserve some analysis and reflection, and all I'm really writing here is a very quickly composed set of night thinking observations!]

In the @GrogsGamut debate, then, there was a view being put that critics of the media didn’t understand the media as process.

On that point, one of the fascinating things about ABC News 24 is that you can see the raw material, if you like, as the entirety of both major party leaders’ press conferences are broadcast. We highlighted one grab from Julia Gillard’s presser in Perth here earlier, but my overall impression is that her fight back really didn’t flow through to the nightly news in any real way.

So, Labor Outsider’s point on a previous post about the real difficulty that politicians have in communicating messages holds true. Had you been watching 24 hour news, or reading blogs or the Twitter conversation, you’d have perceived the story moving on from the now stale talking points about leaks and polls, but that doesn’t translate (at least not immediately) into what most voters see.

The speeds at which the media cycle moves, then, are not unidirectional. And the mass communication aspect, the distillation of raw reporting into a product packaged up for most voters to see, is highly selective – not just via highlighting the narrative, but also by selecting particular policy announcements to report, and particular ones to ignore.

Talking about the nightly tv news, one other observation I’ve made is that ABC and SBS, in particular, are very meta. It’s not so much about reporting what’s being said, but about “analysing” its significance. That can be quite egregious, and for what it’s worth, I think SBS tv news is the worst offender. It’s very difficult to see Karen Middleton as ever being even handed as between Labor and the Coalition, and that bleeds into the ‘straight’ news.

All that’s by way of introduction to a roundtable thread were you can discuss any aspect of the media’s coverage of the campaign, and its role in the contest, you wish.

Elsewhere: An Onymous Lefty.