The last couple of polls have seen the Coalition’s primary vote climb to a weighted average of slightly more than 44%, according to analyst Andrew Catsaras in today’s Financial Review.

Catsaras points out that the Coalition have had great difficulty lifting their primary above 42% since the introduction of WorkChoices after the 2004 election, and for most of the current term, its been stuck in the 30s. Abbott’s ascension led to a lift and a stabilisation around 38%, but throughout Rudd’s travails in May and June, the opposition didn’t reach the same level of support it had in losing the 2007 federal election – 42.1%.

Catsaras writes:

For Abbott to win the 2010 election he needs to win back the people who supported Howard in 2004 but abandoned him from mid-2005.

The question is whether he’s been able to do that. In other words, have the voters who were still inclined to give Labor a chance finally decided to go over to the other side? Such movements in the vote often take a long time to build, but once they move, they’re hard to shake. So, it could be the campaign itself which has reinforced a primary swing towards the Coalition which had been in the offing since much earlier this year. If that’s so, then this thing is pretty much over.

The alternative scenario is that there’s still considerable volatility in voting intentions.

The next round of polls may decide between those two scenarios.

Watch for Labor to ramp up its attack on the Liberals’ paid parental leave tax. Gillard’s most effective line last night was to talk about that tax driving up grocery prices. Labor will set out to “great big new tax” Abbott, but connect it directly to the issue both sides acknowledge as a key one.

It’s quite a neat play – and allows the PM to appeal to small business at the same time (and small business owners dissatisfied with the Fair Work Act might, bizarrely, be inclined to vote against the Coalition who say they won’t change it rather than its author).

This move also plays into the “lived economy” theme – Labor is in touch with pressure on costs of living, etc, and reinforces the attempt to claim the right side of the security/fear dichotomy both majors are wrestling over.

Tony Abbott was clearly trying to appeal to women last night with his constant talk of the parental leave plan (and it’s also one of his few positive, if ill thought out, policies). But whoever advised him to effectively claim in his closing remarks that it’s sexist to vote for Julia just because she’s a woman (and that’s not why she’s ahead among women) is very ill-advised. It may, of course, have been Abbott himself. I wasn’t the only one on Twitter last night who thought his opening statement about being a family man was something of a dog whistle.

In any event, Newspoll has Labor’s vote among women falling back towards where it is among men, though there’s plenty of other polling evidence around that female electors are more inclined to back the ALP than the Coalition – a reversal of the usual pattern.

Elsewhere: Still Life With Cat.

Elsewhere: In A Strange Land.

Tony Abbott won’t have been helped by signing a ‘contract’ not to reintroduce WorkChoices during an interrogation by Neil Mitchell. Not only is it a reminder of Mark Latham, but it’s also playing right into the trap he set for himself – only commitments he gives in writing can be trusted. Then there’s the fact that he’s talking about a toxic policy he’d tried to neutralise. Oh, and the ghost of Peter Costello mocking Julia Gillard’s accent is hardly a good look.

Spare a thought for Abbott. He was one of only a small number of Ministers to oppose WorkChoices in the Howard Cabinet. Whether that’s his Santamarian heritage, or whether he actually has a political antenna is moot. Nor would a Senate with The Greens in the balance of power contemplate a package of WorkChoices nasties. And the government does have to take a position on cases before Fair Work Australia, the legislation does require ministerial determinations and instructions, and it’s the second most heavily amended act after the Taxation Act. But Eric Abetz, the wrong person for the job if ever there was one, was very unwise to be talking about ‘tweaking’.

There’s something else going on here. Abbott has annoyed business by raising taxes to pay for his parental leave thoughtbubble, and non-mining business (most of it) by opposing a tax cut along with the RSPT and MRRT. The WorkChoices pledge will also gnaw at the Liberal base. Abbott’s strategy was to consolidate that first, then move to the centre. Whether a Liberal party led by him, and obsessed with its defeat on this issue by the ACTU, can ever do that is another question entirely.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Of course, that’s the famous quatrain from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám.

Kim has written with penetrating insight about Kevin Rudd. Before the waters of history close over this period in our national life and we are totally distracted by the colour and movement of an election campaign I thought we should pause to consider the achievements of the Rudd government.

Where better to start than the list he told us he was proud of in his last press conference as PM?

For your convenience I’ve listed them below.

He introduced the list this way:

I was elected by the Australian people as prime minister of this country to bring back a fair go for all Australians and I have given my absolute best to do that, I’ve given it my absolute all.

In that spirit I am proud of the achievements that we have delivered to make this country fairer.

Here, paraphrased a little, is the list:

1. We kept Australia out of recession. Had we not, half a million people would have been out of work.

2 We got rid of WorkChoices and restored decency to the work place.

3. We stared to build the nation’s infrastructure including the National Broadband Network, which will transform the economy in ways we have yet to conceive.

4. We began the education revolution – 300,000 extra computers in classrooms.

5. We now have trade centres built to service every one of the nation’s secondary schools.

6. New school libraries are springing up across the country, often in schools that have never had one.

7. We now have nationwide early childhood education.

8. We now have a national curriculum.

9. We now have 50,000 more university places and have invested so much more in our universities, in our research.

10. We have reformed the health system; a national health and hospitals network. He said that the new funding arrangements will be seen as a “very, very deep reform.”

11. We are building 20 regional cancer centres right across our country.

12. We now have a National Organ Transplant Authority.

13. We have restored decency to the aged pension. The $100 extra is the biggest increase ever.

14. We now have paid parental leave.

15. We are on track to halve homelessness in the country.

16. We are adding 20,000 additional units of social housing.

17. We signed the Kyoto Protocol.

18. We boosted the renewable energy target to 20%.

19. We tried three times to get an emissions trading system through parliament.

20. We now have a Murray Basin Authority and for the first time in our history have a basin-wide plan and a basin-wide cap on water.

21. On the global stage Australia is now at the table of the G20. We lobbied hard and long for that. It is a good achievement for Australia for the future.

22. We are closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

23. We greeted the Stolen Generations.

He was “most proud” of that last one one, saying:

The apology was unfinished business for our nation. It is the beginning of new business for our nation.

That was the list of achievements Rudd identified, with a little more elaboration, in his press conference. He said it had been a very busy two and a half years.

We have thrown our absolute all at this and I believe when we look back at this, these reforms will endure into the future and make Australia, I believe, a fairer and better place than it would otherwise have been.

Were you aware of all the items on the list? I hadn’t heard of the regional cancer centres or the National Organ Transplant Authority. It’s noteworthy, I think, that his composure first faltered when he reached these two health initiatives. He pointed out that out in regional areas people are three times more likely to die of cancer in their first year of diagnosis. On transplants Rudd himself has someone else’s aortic valve inside his heart. “We chose to make a difference,” he said.

The other points of high emotion were when he spoke of homelessness, of the Stolen Generations representatives being frightened as they came in “over there” and of his family.

This was the first time I played the vision. I heard his speech on my pocket radio, plugged in walking down Queen Street. The speech was indeed very moving, as others have mentioned. Rudd came across as a man of very deep compassion, aware of the fragility of life and concerned about people on the margins.

But I digress. In this post I’m concerned about the achievements of the Rudd government.

He missed a few significant ones. He could have mentioned matching Howard’s tax cuts. He could have mentioned building a string of superclinics to deliver medical services, which I think is quite important. Then there was getting our troops out of Iraq. He could have mentioned getting rid of Howard’s Pacific Solution and replacing it with a more humane approach to asylum seekers, though he was almost certainly not proud of the recent alterations to the policy. Finally, he commissioned the Henry review of taxation, which could spawn more than the RSPT if we so choose.

Any others?

Each one of the above is worth a separate post or three and we might not all agree on their individual worth. Nevertheless, I think the Rudd government’s achievements will be considerably more than a footnote in history.

Yes, it’s dodgy, but I’m not sure I can find the energy to get too outraged about it. Regardless, it’s interesting to see the accompanying website, Abbott Facts. It may only grudgingly admit that it’s ALP handiwork, but I’ll bet a considerable sum of money that its key theme forms a major part of Labor’s election campaign.

In one sentence: “Mr Abbott supports bringing back the worst elements of WorkChoices.”

I’d expect to hear variations on this theme, accompanied by unflattering black and white photos of Abbott, at least 20 times a day during the campaign.

Will it shift votes? The conventional wisdom is that negative advertising “works” a whole lot better than positive advertising. A bit of reading suggests that the evidence for this proposition, as a hard and fast rule, is equivocal. But negative advertising, when it’s got material to work with, can be very effective.

In any case, Labor has been mostly keeping its powder dry on Abbott. That is hardly likely to be the case during the campaign, and the dynamics are likely to be completely different becaus of it.

Abbott’s been addressing some business functions of late, no doubt because he has to build some bridges and mend some fences on economic issues, and raise some campaign dosh. It’s had nowhere near as prominent a part in reporting as his remarks on virginity and ironing, but I did notice that he’d been preaching the virtues of “flexibility” in industrial relations. No detail, but it’s not hard to deconstruct the message he’s sending.

Update: Via Andrew Reynolds in comments, a link to the poll.

Update: Abbott wants to scrap penalty rates and bring back statutory individual employment agreements.

It is disappointing if this is now the politics of Rudd’s prime ministership. Despite Rudd’s tendency to conflate issues as moral challenges, he appears to view every political decision through one prism: inflict no pain and it’s all gain for him. … Here, in a nutshell, is Rudd’s political nirvana. He can continue a prime ministership based on rhetorical flourishes and symbolism without inflicting any pain on voters.

Much of Albrechtsen’s analysis is inflected with the spleen one would expect (and the illusion that to introduce WorkChoices is to do good), but I suspect she has something of a point. I’ve been critical myself of Rudd’s ‘big tent’ strategy – the accumulation of political capital for its own sake. As I’ve also commented, the Labor Party, in the face of Abbott’s leadership, is likely to downplay climate change as an issue. In an election year, the theme will move to an accentuation of the argument that Abbott and his frontbench waxworks represent a return to Howardism; but a nastier, more brutish version. And don’t be misled, they’ve hardly even begun to fight on this front. In many respects, the smart political move is to let Abbott prepare his own noose, as his negatives are already very much defined in the public mind.

But any election theme that Abbott represents the past requires painting Rudd as representing a brighter future. I’m not so certain Labor can just run on its record – a la the first term Hawke government, which got a nasty surprise in the 1984 election.

The issue of health might be a straw in the wind, indicating which way it may blow. Health still plays as one of the biggest issues in Queensland at state level, and I’d be surprised if that’s not the case in other states. Whether or not a commonwealth takeover would lead to a more efficient system I’ll leave to the policy wonks to ponder. But there’s no doubt that health, and “the administration of things” generally, is a potential minefield for governments. It’s one area, and some talk back programmes in Queensland more or less specialise in this, where human stories of woe can be endlessly sheeted home to political causes.

Richard Farmer has been arguing for a long time that health is an issue on which the government is vulnerable, and rightly decrying the useless performance of Peter Dutton as shadow minister. But Abbott seems to have finally taken his advice, and raised the temperature of the health debate – seeking to hold Rudd to his promise of a federal takeover if hospitals aren’t fixed. It’s absolutely no coincidence that the Prime Minister’s first public appearance after returning from Copenhagen was the opening of a cancer care facility, duly popping up on the news.

But there’s a seeming gap between “the buck stops here” and a review that reported ages ago, an apparently interminable round of consultations, and a fractured COAG process. Rudd might be doing the bureaucratic tango, and erecting his big tent, but the politics of health reform are problematic, insofar as the opposition can actually begin to politicise this question.

I don’t expect that Tony Abbott and the Coalition will go close to winning the 2011 election, but I do think that there’s some truth in the argument that the government’s dropped the political ball to some degree. In that context, it was interesting to look at the numbers in the latest Essential Research poll on the government’s performance, compared to expectations. It’s not impacting on primaries or the two party preferred, but there’s at least an indication here of some vulnerability.

In short, the Rudd government will need to articulate a positive vision for its second term. It won’t be too hard to argue that the GFC delayed the reform agenda, but it might be difficult to excite people with reviews and administrative caution. I’ve no doubt that the political hardheads in Labor know that, and it will be fascinating to see whether Rudd adopts a somewhat less apolitical political persona, and whether there are some big surprises in store on the policy front. His style, so far, has worked to preserve a big poll lead, but it may need to change to harden part of that lead into a smaller election winning majority.

In comments on another thread, Sir Henry Casingbroke has a great summation of the new Liberal leader’s appearance on Lateline tonight, and his political tactics. The ‘base’ he appears to be aiming at is the ‘battlers’ – it’s a defensive strategy to stop further Labor gains in outer suburban and regional seats. How that will be squared with the resurrection rebadging of WorkChoices remains to be seen.

But there’s another aspect to Abbott’s strategy – one I alluded to in my Overland post (also discussed here). Ironically, opposing market solutions (albeit with something completely illusory) might, in Abbott’s mind, work wonders for the parties of the right. The denialist dog whistling and the claims that ‘warming has stopped’ are just the ideological icing on the cake:

So business as usual is popular, with the odd twist that it’s now the political right who oppose market solutions. But Tony Abbott may be onto something; he’s playing to the politics of a vague desire that ‘something be done’. Install a solar panel, and forget about it – the state will sort it out. It won’t happen, but it has an appeal above and beyond market solutions which by necessity create winners and losers, and precisely the uncertainty and fear that most would rather wish away.

The federal Liberals are sounding and thinking a lot more like the Nats than a week ago…

John Howard has obviously been having a word in a few journos’ ears. Tony Wright penned this piece for The Age yesterday, portraying the Ghost of Wollstonecraft as pulling the strings. It seems Little Johnny couldn’t stand Nick Minchin and the Minchkins getting all the credit for tearing Turnbull down.

I think Hockey’s pilgrimage to Howard on Saturday was staged to suggest that he’s the true heir to the throne, and to imply that Turnbull was an unfortunate interloper. None of those ‘progressive’ hymns in Howard’s broad church! Had they wanted to meet covertly, it wouldn’t have been too hard.

Alex White wrote yesterday on Turnbull’s Cameronisation. If it’s all about following scripts, the Tories’ recent one wouldn’t be a bad one to follow. After all, turning away from the right and talking up green issues has contributed to reviving the UK Conservatives’ electoral chances.

Hockey is obviously keeping his powder dry, so that he can claim he is a unity candidate by not bringing on a spill. That’s the sort of dissimulation for which Howard is famous, but it’s unlikely he’ll be able to bring it off. It’s his second time around as a cuddly frontman for nasty things (think WorkChoices), and he made a hash of it the first time. (See also Peter Martin on his record.) All the talk of some sort of cunning Keating like strategy against the Rudd government’s CPRS forgets that Keating was a superb politician. Hockey is not.

He simply isn’t up to the task, and he probably knows it. He won’t have a lot of credibility as a puppet leader papering over the cracks of a deeply divided party, and it would be risible to think that the events of the last week won’t come back to haunt the Liberals. All talk of Sunrise aside, Rudd’s political machine will eat him for breakfast.

Whether the Liberals would be able to agree on some sort of alternative if the CPRS bills are delayed til February is moot. Certainly all their divisions over climate change will not magically disappear even if Malcolm is whisked off the scene.

It’s not over til it’s over, of course, but speculation has increasingly turned to Turnbull leaving the party and/or parliament. Whatever he decides to do, the ‘dead man walking’ of the press gallery commentary circa early last week (and haven’t some changed their tune?) will come out of all this looking pretty good in many people’s eyes.

Possum’s extremely interesting analysis of the Nielsen poll demonstrates that Turnbull has been appealling to precisely the voters that the Liberals need to be in with any chance of winning the next election – ones currently inclined to vote Labor. I’d have thought that was a lot more meaningful for a serious political party than some sort of ‘protect the furniture and play to the base’ strategy. There’s lots more in Possum’s post which should provide a reality check in terms of how all this has played in the public’s eyes. Liberal MPs and Senators might be well advised to consider that.

Stay tuned for further updates, and you can follow the thing on Twitter as well.

Elsewhere: Some interesting personal reflections on Malcolm Turnbull from Christopher Joye.

Update: New post on firming speculation that Turnbull intends to lead a new party should he lose tomorrow.

(a) It’s been intriguing to see the focus of political discussion narrow to the Parliamentary dramatics. Journalists – and one suspects, many Liberal MPs – appear to have completely lost sight of the effect that Turnbull’s stand might be having on the public. I’d be very surprised if there isn’t a lot of sympathy for him and his position. Yet those normally obsessed with Newspoll now equate politics with a bunch of lunatics gathered in Nick Minchin’s office, rather than even stopping to think about how all this might be playing with voters. I wonder whether Newspoll will be asking questions about the Liberal leadership this weekend – its owners might not like the answers;

(b) The Liberal Right have shown themselves to be completely unelectable crazies. Liberals are not Republicans and Australia is not America. This appears to be news to some, and it’s hard to know why;

(c) Conversely, text messages and phone calls and emails from Liberal party members and Andrew Bolt’s followers do not equate to a shift in public opinion. The Libs’ only chance of being an effective opposition, and gathering votes in the centre, is to go with Turnbull’s position. The much vaunted ‘base’ will not vote Labor in a pink fit, and a stack of Liberal seats would be at risk if a Leader is elected who is a reactionary on Howard era issues such as climate change denialism and industrial relations. That was clear enough from Kevin Andrews’ press conference where most questions were about the past, and his right wing stance. This is John Howard’s poisonous legacy to his party;

(d) Talk of Turnbull’s ‘management style’ is merely code for the Liberal right refusing to be led by one not of their own. ‘Consultation’ means caving in to dinosaurs. Who’s really the arrogant one in this equation? More likely to be Nick Minchin and his mates;

(e) If Turnbull is toppled tomorrow or on Monday, and leaves Parliament, who really believes an Abbott led Liberal Party would retain Wentworth in a by-election? This is the craziness – Members like Michael Johnson in Ryan calling for Turnbull’s ousting while holding a ‘leafy’ and very marginal seat which has many moderate Liberal voters. It’s not the only one. Kelly O’Dwyer in Higgins, for instance, is going to face a lot of pressure to take a stand on climate change and the ETS in the lead up to the by-election for Peter Costello’s former seat. The Liberals’ actual base is multiple and plural, and they can’t hold it by playing only to the revanchists.

Update: Turnbull’s press conference is now on YouTube.

Elsewhere: Politically Homeless.

Elsewhere: Club Troppo, The Stump.

Update: Fresh post – Abbott will stand for the leadership on Monday.