Getting roused enough to blog about the election has been difficult. Amidst sterile speeches and predictable press conferences and those delightfully dodgy dowries, summoning creative juices has been hard. Hard, but not impossible. Something keeping me buoyant, something making the whole thing strangely bearable are the characters. The sharp-tongued, the psycho, the strange. When so many seem straight from central casting, there are those few pollies who, fabulously, are in a complete league of their own.

Truth be told, loony Latham lost me long ago. There was the incident with the taxi driver and the temper and the broken arm. And the one with the photographer and the temper and the fast food restaurant. I’ve fallen for alcoholics, I’ve fallen for drug addicts, but thugs are just… thugs. And yet, while Latham’s talents are likely better suited to the vowing-vengeance Chaouk family than federal politics, by no means am I lamenting his return.

With no qualifications in psychology, dubbing someone insane is out of my skill set. Signs however, are clearly there. From his strange stroking allegations against the PM to his Nelson Muntz-interview technique, he’s a delightful plot twist. And that twist was beautifully described by yet another favourite election nutjob, Barnaby Joyce.

My preferred Sunday morning TV fare involves Rage when the playlist is good or NBC’s Dateline when the case is gory. Last Sunday however, I gave ABC24 a go. And was duly rewarded. There, the reliably ridiculous Barnaby asked the host whether he watched Days of Our Lives. And the host, in perfectly ABC-style, looked incredulous. And batty Barnaby, in the style of every man unable to own his perverse penchants, stammered through an explanation of watching DOOL in his crazy hazy uni youth. And then he charmed me. Barnaby offered the perfect Salem/Election 2010 connection: Stefano DiMera.

Known also as Phoenix, the thoroughly Transylvanian Stefano has survived plane crashes and car bombings and drownings and heart attacks. And he’s organised kidnappings and surgery follies, secret doors and baby swaps. And Barnaby, in that wonderful Barnabian way, likened the resurrections of DiMera to the reappearances of Rudd and Latham; ghosts of Labor past.

Ridiculous and hyperbolic but so thoroughly apt, Barnaby had me at hello. I like loose cannons. I like unvetted comments. I like failed attempts at humour. And I love the crackpots. No, I wouldn’t vote for them and I don’t want them next to me on a tram or in a lift, but my do they bring a certain special something to the table.

Guy Beres sums it up:

The latest gem to emerge from Iron Mark, television journaliste extraordinaire, is that voters should leave their ballot papers blank “as a protest” when they vote in this Saturday’s election. This is a shameful contribution to the public debate that lays bare the depths to which 60 Minutes and indeed Channel Nine has sunk during the last year or two. An informal vote is a wasted vote; a vote for ignorance, disengagement and ultimately, recklessness. In order to perform its function as the “least worst” system of government available. a democracy needs to embody the will of the people. In a regulated, ordinated democratic environment like Australia’s, mass delinquency at the ballot box fundamentally undermines this principle.

Elsewhere: Tim Dunlop on the Lathamisation of political journalism.

I’m boycotting Channel Nine tonight, because I fear that the Mark Latham “controversy”/60 Minutes cross-promotion will “overshadow” everything else, given that the marauding cub reporter gate crashed Tony Abbott’s veterans affairs announcement at the Penrith RSL this morning. [Video here if you are interested.]

Channel Seven’s not giving all that much prominence to the campaign either, leading with the gaoling of a Brisbane cat killer, a cancer-stricken pensioner’s house burning down in Inala, and more wild weather in Queensland – “an icy burst of Southern air”. Yep, folks, the Ekka winds have come with a vengeance this year. And then we had the beached barge at the Gold Coast. And continuing the nautical theme, 17 sailor folk (“the mates”) have been rescued and are back in town safely.

So on a rather unseasonably cold Brisneytown night, for which we blame “Southern states”, we heard that Julia Gillard’s “message” on Broadband was overshadowed by Mark Latham. Even though Latho gate crashed Mr Rabbit’s event. Seven took a side swipe at Nine, and suggested that the veterans “told him where to go”.

Then we got Mr Rabbit “down with the people” at Rooty Hill and he “spoke their language”, swearing about his mortgage. The opposition leader was said to be “buoyed by his victory”, and Seven borrowed LP’s line about Latham being an equal opportunity pest.

Bob Hawke was wandering around, and Julia Gillard was kissed by shoppers in Perth.

And so it goes…

There mustn’t be any Oakes/Latho self-referential “news” tonight, because wild weather and record rains meant that the weather became the top story (well, top three stories) tonight on Brisbane’s Channel Nine. Then, an elderly pensioner’s house burning down at Dutton Park featured, and then we finally got to election news.

The pick of the day was Julia eating a pie, and Mr Rabbit telling us “Australians need food to eat” – that was the water policy announcement, apparently. But the big story was a selected bit of Labor’s “welfare reform” – those bits to do with punitive stuff on attending interviews and having health checks. The $6000 labour mobility grant just barely slipped by, and then we got a fair dose of the PM slamming non-tech head Tony Abbott on Broadband, before Wayne Swan’s correct description of Andrew Robb’s call for a federal police inquiry into a Treasury leak on opposition costings.

So, tonight, we did get some actual political news, and what’s significant is the slant and the selection.

… is all about Mark Latham.

The election may as well not have happened today, as far as Channel Nine news was concerned. We did see vision of Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd visiting schools, with Rudd confirming that he will be taking a part time committee role with the UN on climate change.

But absolutely nothing about policy.

Just Mark Latham attacking Julia Gillard and Laurie Oakes, and a flurry of Channel Nine bods calling for Channel Nine to sack Mark Latham.

And the newsreader interviewing Laurie Oakes saying Latho has “a screw loose”.

And so it goes…

It was interesting to watch, just now on ABC News 24, the press conference which followed the PM’s education policy announcements. I was somewhat heartened to see that all the questions focused on education policy, rather than on the usual “narrative” stuff. It was something of a rejoinder to Annabel Crabb’s claim that it was unduly difficult for journos to brief themselves sufficiently on policy, something I thought was far fetched, given that any intelligent listener who’s been following public debate can usually think up some salient lines of questioning (if they’re not too busy tweeting and texting).

Earlier, in the campaign, a post by GrogsGamut on the performance of the media stimulated an interchange between journos and bloggers on Twitter, something Mark wrote about here, and which journo James Massola reflected on in a piece published on Saturday.

There was less interchange on Twitter on Saturday, after a number of very forceful critiques were published in the blogosphere and alternative media of the appalling “body language”/Latham press conference in Brisbane (see Pavlov’s Cat’s guest post here, which entirely occluded any discussion of important announcements on seniors’ income support.

Some journos reacted defensively, but silence was largely the result.

I wonder, though, if the critique refracted by Twitter had some influence on the press pack improving its game today, and according to Bernard Keane, yesterday.

Update: Margaret Simons on the media’s coverage of policy.

I’ve been largely tuned out of the election campaign today, enjoying a friend’s visit and popping into town to buy a couple of books to read. So I’ve only seen two snippets of coverage – a journo, Nick Harmsen, on ABC News 24 proclaiming that Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard’s body language at their meeting today would be “fascinating” (oh, really?) and glimpsing at my feed reader and seeing a photo of Mark Latham at the Prime Minister’s press conference. Apparently he’s a “guest reporter” for 60 Minutes.

No doubt he will be rewarded appropriately.

Contrast Latham’s involvement in this campaign with that of Paul Keating and Malcolm Fraser.

Keating gave a thoughtful and challenging speech in Melbourne this week on the media and the right to privacy. Malcolm Fraser chose the anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb to plead for better measures to confront nuclear proliferation.

Fraser, speaking on radio, indicated very clearly that he had no wish to discuss the campaign. Pressed for an answer to the question of whether he thought the Coalition ready for government, he responded with one word: “No”.

That one word received much more coverage than everything he had to say about nuclear non-proliferation.

There is a contrast here not just between individuals, but between two ages.

Anyone seeking to understand all that’s wrong with the circus this campaign has been transformed into needs to read this post by Pavlov’s Cat, which says it all, really.

Only one politician in this campaign has been honest enough to discuss the real possibility of a double-dip recession and continuing financial contagion. His name is Kevin Rudd. Otherwise, we’re oscillating between a dangerous complacency about the problems facing our nation and a crazed soap opera which is probably being tuned out by most voters.

There may well be a price to pay, one day, for our postmodern politics.

Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd last night gave an interview to Phillip Adams on Late Night Live.

This morning, Brisbane’s sole metropolitan newspaper characterised his successor Julia Gillard’s response as an apology to Queenslanders for hurting their feelings.

It’s a funny way to characterise the reception of the Labor leadership change.

Rudd’s interview was dignified, self-deprecating and displayed a lot of character and humanity. The initial media response that his remarks would prove a “distraction” for the Labor campaign is surely a mischaracterisation, proving only that the bizarre script that has dominated much of this election continues to write itself in the face of changed facts.

Contrary to what the Niki Savvas and Janet Albrechtsens of this world might have us believe, Rudd’s not the sort of bloke to let himself be consumed by bitterness and regret. He’s no Mark Latham.

I said last night on ABC News 24′s The Drum that I didn’t think Rudd’s deposition was the sole source of Queensland Labor’s undoubted woes.

Labor has lots of problems here — the toxicity of an ALP brand contaminated by perceptions of Anna Bligh’s reversal on privatisation combining with a feeling that federal Labor had gone the same way as the state mob, obsessed with “announcables” and machinations. Queenslanders are also preparing to reverse our record of being one of the Greens’ worst states.

However, the ALP has been able to contain the swing against it in some of its marginals, if what I’m hearing is right. Particularly in regional Queensland and on Brisbane’s northern outskirts, a formidable marginal seat campaign is under way, aided by the quality of many of the members elected in the Kevin07 surge. My best guess is that, at the moment, Labor is looking at losing more like 4-5 seats rather than 8-10 seats.

Kevin Rudd’s words won’t hurt Labor’s chances. Far from it. But it’s about more than hurt feelings.

The ALP still has to demonstrate to Queenslanders that it’s capable of transcending the sound bite politics of a state administration. It’s doing a good job of addressing parish pump issues, in a campaign that feels very much like Fred Daly’s picture of concurrent local by-elections.

As I wrote in 2007, one of Rudd’s big virtues was that he was able to appeal to cosmopolitan Queenslanders sick of being dismissed as country cousins and to the still very real state parochialism that suffuses the place.

If he can now revive some of that spirit, and infuse Julia Gillard’s campaign with it, there will be an electoral dividend in Queensland.

If it is the case that residents of Western Sydney and elsewhere are primarily concerned by a lack of infrastructure, it can’t all be plonked in there tomorrow. She’s said we need to pause and take a breath, and Tony Burke is leading a review.

But yesterday, on radio, she sought to deny any link, being confronted by a jingle that interspersed some of her remarks with very similar ones from John Howard.

On cue, the rather odious Scott Morrison popped up to attack this delinking. Keane wryly observes that we should “[b]ear in mind that the Coalition’s idea of a population debate includes graphics with red lines from Islamic countries invading Australia.” But the Coalition’s answer is also a review – by the renamed Productivity and Sustainability Commission.

So up popped Mark Latham on Sky News, calling Gillard’s policy “a “con job” and “fraud of the worst order” on the good citizens of western Sydney” and calling for an immigration cut. Incidentally, Latham has also been touting Kevin Rudd, another former Labor leader, as a loose cannon. The irony of that apparently escapes him.

So what do we have here?

Two things at least:

(a) The unravelling of policy made on the run, and made precisely to try to straddle the sorts of terms that will make people with very opposed views on why they don’t want higher immigration happy;

(b) The difference between a “debate” and a stoush which is driven by policy designed by focus group.

In truth, it’s not very enlightening.

Update: An interesting take from Peter Brent:

Qualitative research – where groups of swinging voters are gathered for drinks and nibblies and led in a discussion – is better, but even that is loaded with the researcher’s assumptions.

Something being a red hot issue doesn’t make it a vote-changer. But if the researcher believes it is, her findings will reflect this.

Prime Minister Julia “I choose my words very carefully” Gillard may insist otherwise, but everyone knows “sustainable population”, border protection and immigration are all tied together. That’s the whole idea of talking about them.

Having high levels of immigration is, like recent decades’ economic reforms such as deregulation, privatisation and lowering of tariffs, something both political parties agree on but the majority of voters don’t (at least at the time).

You might call it a technocratic consensus. It’s not a democratic one.