Neither party convinced Australians that it alone should shape the nation’s course over the next three years.

The consequence is that if we are to have stable and effective government, our political process must now change.

Of course the focus now is on how the six MPs on the cross benches will determine which party to support in the days ahead.

And some of the focus is also on alleged punch ups at airports, a Liberal Senator thinking he is the devil, and a National Party Senator announcing the Nationals are also in a balance of power position.

But looking beyond that colour and movement, the critical question confronting us all is this:

How we can achieve stable and effective government in Australia with no party enjoying majority control of the Lower House.

Australia’s new political landscape requires a government that can find new ways to develop policy and establish consensus around the major issues that come before the next parliament.

Because if the new government doesn’t find new ways to establish consensus and parliamentary support, then we will have gridlock – and we will quickly look more like Washington than Westminster.

Much of the rest of Gillard’s address focuses on her arguments about why Labor should form the next government. But probably of most interest, given the current negotiations with the cross-bench members, are the remarks she made about parliamentary reform. She held up the Fair Work Act as an exemplar of wide consultation, including with stakeholders outside parliament. What remains unclear, and no doubt will be revealed soon, is the precise nature of the reforms to process she plans to place on the table.

Today, we’ve seen one of the other standard tropes of campaigning – the claim that “leaked party polling shows…” or “senior party sources say their internal polling shows”…

Party polling isn’t automatically more accurate than published polls, although some tracking polls do have a level of sophistication in data analysis which enables some judgements to be made about which issues or events are moving votes, and how strongly.

But, to my recollection, this sort of tracking poll has only ever been published once – the Crosby Textor Oztrack 33, leaked to the media in September 2007.

The distribution list of internal party polling is tiny. Normally, no more than ten or so people would see it. That’s what made its use in leadership challenges to Kim Beazley and Kevin Rudd so controversial.

A good rule of thumb is to disbelieve any claims that party polling has actually leaked, unless there are firm numbers reported. An instance is polling in a couple of Bayside Labor seats in the 2006 Queensland election – where actual numbers were stated, and which I was able to confirm was accurate. However, the impression given by the Labor strategists was that this polling demonstrated a surprise late swing against Peter Beattie’s government.

In fact, it only meant that for purely local factors, Labor was doing badly in one or two seats despite being poised to win a host of others by huge margins.

So the poll numbers were truthful, but the spin was not not.

It’s a pretty standard last minute ploy – “impressions management”. It helps in focusing voters’ minds on the choice, and depressing the likelihood of a protest vote.

That’s what we’re seeing tonight, when there’s lots of reporting that Labor polling shows the party in more trouble in New South Wales than anticipated.

No details have been given.

But Julia Gillard duly talked about the unpopularity of the NSW government in questions after her closing National Press Club address, and that made it onto the tv news.

There’s every likelihood that Labor research does show the Keneally government is a drag on their federal vote.

But this is not a disinterested psephological observation, but a political intervention to try to improve Labor’s vote.

We also don’t know when this polling was done, or whether it shows movement towards or away from the ALP. Unlike the  published polls, we can’t place it in the context of a time series and compare it to other surveys carried out by the same pollster using the same methodology.

That’s worth remembering before people get too excited about poring over these latest entrails in an attempt to divine what might occur on Saturday.

Update: The details of the Labor internal polling have now been revealed by Channel Seven.

Elsewhere: Graham Young on why taking internal party polling stories seriously is for mugs.

Cross-posted at The Drumroll.

The man may have degrees from Sydney and Oxford, but intellectual laziness appears to define him.

Even half an hour’s briefing on broadband would have seen him avoid clangers like “high fibre” and understand basic concepts like peak speed. A basic level of curiosity would have told him that the fact that the people who are using Blackberrys, iPhones and Android phones – apparently he’s noticed this in cafes – are not an advertisement for wifi but more than often a source of frustration, as download speeds are slow and coverage patchy.

But perhaps he’s invoking a Catholic saint whose name I can’t remember from high school – a very useful one for passing exams who imparts “infused grace” when you haven’t actually studied.

Or perhaps, in more inclusive new agey fashion, he’s channelling.

Yesterday, he told us at the National Press Club that he channels both Peter Costello and Noel Pearson.

The latter in reference to the latest carrot/stick unemployment and workforce participation measure, which is not particularly Pearsonesque, I’d have thought, because similar stuff has been on the books since Paul Keating’s Working Nation.

But Pearson’s name works like a mantra apparently, sprinkling the stardust on Paul Kelly, who’s in raptures this morning.

Let’s not worry that – as with one of the bipartisan areas identified on Q&A – welfare quarantining, there’s only shoddy evaluation evidence that it has the intended effect, and rigorous research in the Medical Journal of Australia that it’s worse than useless.

Beating up on the unemployed isn’t “evidence based policy”.

And the elephant in the room, since we’re talking workforce participation, is immigration policy, where a “sustainable Australia” has implications for skills and labour market supply. I’m not taking a position on that in this post, but I’m just sayin’…

But, in this election, “the battle of ideas” is apparently a faith based one.

Yesterday, in his address to the National Press Club, when he could wean himself off talking about talking to “real Australians” at Rooty Hill and similar places, and after he spent half his speech attacking the government, Tony Abbott intimated that there might also be some sort of reason to vote for the Coalition other than relentless negativism.

On cue, a policy popped out on infrastructure – a confused mishmash of PPPs and savings measures – involving Infrastructure Partnership bonds, which would be issued by private infrastructure partners to raise capital, and investment in which would attract tax rebates and tax concessions for Super funds. It’s confusing, unwieldy and as usual, just meant to make a political point – which if you can cut through the morass, appears to be something along the lines of “there is an alternative to public debt”.

Robert Merkel discussed this announcement in a previous post at LP. There’s also a good deconstruction of this thing at Grog’s Gamut.

Leaving aside whatever can be made of the policy “detail”, I think what’s significant about this plan is that the Coalition really have done next to no genuine policy development, and any putative agenda for a Coalition government is just a product of whatever they think it will take them to win the election.

You can see why Tony Abbott doesn’t want to debate the economy.

Update: The debate is being live streamed here.

Update: Roxon is very impressive, across the detail. The thing is that health is a very complex policy area, and Labor *does* have an integrated approach. But that means not everything can be done at once. The Coalition’s approach is to cherry pick bits of health for headlines, and in response to the pressure of particular interest groups. The question is whether this trumps a very well thought out policy framework which seeks to get the settings right first, while putting in place the building blocks for a holistic approach to patient care.

There is, imho, a lot more difference on health than the “parties are the same” narrative would have us believe.

Update: You should be able to get a good sense of what was debated through looking at the Tweets using the #npc hashtag. It was actually a useful policy encounter, with Dutton performing somewhat better than may have been anticipated, but with Roxon demonstrating her great command of policy detail and the ALP’s integrated plan for health. To some degree, the interchange would have been improved by sharper questioning from the journos in the audience – for instance, there are many unanswered questions on how the Coalition’s local hospital boards would actually work, but he wasn’t pressed on this, or on the very reactionary move to cut funding for e health.

Elsewhere: Mark at The Drumroll on the Ministers’ debates.

There are three areas I think Swan should challenge Hockey on:

(a) The claimed $24 billion of savings – which somehow dropped from $40 billion odd early in the campaign with few people noticing. Most of it is smoke and mirrors, with cuts coming from not factoring in Labor spending which disappears from the forward estimates if the mining tax doesn’t go ahead. As I suggested last week, I think the reality of the Coalition’s position is to introduce swinging cuts not foreshadowed in the campaign, which will no doubt be the task of the ‘deficit and debt reduction’ taskforce Abbott previewed in his agenda for office at the campaign launch yesterday;

(b) The stimulus. The Coalition are now running the line that it was irrelevant to Australia’s performance – something contested by almost every economist, and which makes it unclear why the Coalition voted for the first tranche of stimulus under Malcolm Turnbull. Hopefully both Swan and Hockey will both be challenged on what they would do if there is a double-dip recession or further contagion from global financial kerfuffles – something so far only mentioned by Kevin Rudd;

(c) The fact that the latest economic assessment from the Reserve Bank shows the remaining stimulus spending is still important in propping up growth, given that private demand is still weak, and business investment as well in some states – particularly in Queensland where its growth is very sluggish.

Update: Tim Colebatch reports that the Coalition has only submitted 1% of its spend to Treasury for costing, and has given up even indicating costings on policies being released.

In part, it was just an exercise in pushing out slogans that may have been missed over the first week of campaigning. Leaving aside the opening and closing statements, 50 minutes were taken up largely on just one issue – immigration – and a contest of symbolism and personality politics. Debates don’t have much impact on voting intention. One of ABC News 24′s commentators, former ALP Senator Stephen Loosley, gave the game away when he observed that it would set the media agenda for the second week (a comment made in the midst of indulging in the American politics obsession characteristic of a certain style of Labor pollie).

A serious question from the Financial Review‘s Laura Tingle on the possibility of a double dip recession was batted away. Both parties want to induce a sense of complacency, and play to the theme of security. But neither leader addressed the serious questions facing our nation in the next three years, let alone the next twenty. The horizon for a policy that goes beyond a soundbite is rapidly receding. Maybe it will come in the campaign launches. Perhaps not.

In truth, what we saw was the apogee of postmodern politics – politicians playing pure politics, standing symbolically on values alone, deferring any difficult questions of policy to an “independent umpire” or a commission.

All I learned from tonight’s exercise was that there’s a status update limit on Twitter. Who knew?

Cross-posted at the ABC’s Campaign Diary blog.

NB: Previous discussion at LP is here.

Update: Here’s the debate transcript.

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?

I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that the only way voters are influenced by the debate is through the commentariat and the journosphere. I’m sure Rudd’s office took some care in researching the reach and demographics of day time tv.

The figures are in, and Glenn Dyer has them in Crikey. I’ve posted an excerpt over the fold.

Television, as Dyer rightly says, is still by far the most common medium by which voters inform themselves about politics. Most of the froth and bubble in newspaper columns is just that, when it comes to electoral impact. Kevin Rudd knows that well. He demonstrated an adept touch with relatively direct political communication in 2007, and he’s just done it again.

Abbott might supposedly be the better parliamentarian, but that pugilistic style of politicking is a major turn off for electors. Rudd’s calm persona, and his dinner table talk, is precisely what does appeal.

Forget last night, the action was earlier in the day with the worm/polliegraph dominated health debate from Canberra. Nine and its worm won that comprehensively with 274,000 viewers, the wormless ABC had 183,000, the Seven “worm”, 180,000, Ten, 63,000 and Sky News, 25,000.

Including Sky, 824,000 people watched the debate in the five metro markets. 454,000 people, or over half the audience watched FTA broadcasts with a bit of visual wiggling. Compared to the same time the day before, the audience was up 10% or so.

To put the Sky News on Pay TV audience in some context, more people watched Nine’s Go and 7TWO in Sydney during the debate than watched it on Sky. And to give the Sky audience more context, 25,000 people watched the first and last session of the Test cricket from NZ on Fox Sports.

The broadcast on four of the five FTA channels and SKY news, made the debate more than what the press gallery thought it would have been last week, just for them and broadcast on the ABC. When the debates are broadcast live with worms measuring reaction, they replace the press gallery and the heavies in it as the filters of how the debate went and who won in the minds of people watching the broadcasts, hours before the gallery opinions are published.

The Networks hijacked the debate. Ten’s share was lower than Dr Phil and Oprah usually get for the network. The best part of 3.3 million people would have seen the worms on Seven and Nine News across the country last night and the message they sent into living rooms. It again proves why TV matters most in political debate this days and what happens in parliament might be great for the 150 pollies and the various members of the gallery, but it means little outside in the rest of Australia.

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.