Trevor Cook

Gillard gets poll bounce after Rinehart deal

Interpreting opinion polls is a murky business.

Everytime a government goes up or down in the polls, commentators race in to offer a, hopefully, plausible explanation.

The usual logical method is post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this therefore because of this). 

It is one of the most common, if not the most common, fallacies that we humans are prone to.

Most monthly opinion poll movements are within the margin of error, so no further explanation maybe necessary. Such an approach is not good material for attention grabbing headlines.

Poll movements might also be the net result of a myriad of causes - again not too interesting in a headline.

Instead commentators like to pick some recent event and suggest that it has caused the poll movement - post hoc ergo propter hoc.

This week's newspoll was good for Gillard and the ALP - so which event to pick?

The Government's compensation package might be one cause - but those goodies hadn't really begun to flow in earnest when this poll was taken last weekend.

Most commentators seemed to have settled on the idea that the public is growing tired of Abbott's relenntless pursuit of Craig Thomson. There is anecdotal evidence that some in the public are unhappy with the bullying of Thomson. But there is still overwhelming disgust at the HSU saga, and it has tarnished the ALP and will continue to do so while it remains unresolved.

But maybe the rise in support is because the EMA deal struck with Rinehart to bring in some foreign workers actually worked for the Government by suggesting that its class war wasn't serious and the Government was still capable of taking good economic decisions in the national interest.

The TV news bulletins carried plenty of coverage of outraged and exasperated union officials, which might also have helped the Government's standing in the community.

Of course, the popular media is dominated with misinformed xenophobia on the foreign mineworker issue. Nevertheless, we are talking about small poll movements. It might just be possible that some voters who switched to the LNP this year because of the Government's class war frolic have been tempted back. The Opposition is hardly strong on front-bench economic credentials.

I'm only guessing but I doubt that an interpretation of the polls that suggested Gillard was trumping Abbott on economic policy would get much consideration in the News Ltd editorial conferences.

Bob Carr for PM?

This should be a joke. Perhaps it is. But things are so crazy that seasoned journos are saying they've seen nothing like it since 1975 or 1983. It's febrile. The ALP caucus is in a state of despair and panic. So they should be - anyone in the ALP who thinks their seat in the House of Representatives is safe is an idiot. They could lose to the Libs, they could lose to the Greens. They know it. This is a Hunter S. Thompson weird time. It's febrile down there in Parliament House, and when they get back from their electorates for the Budget session it's going to get intense and combustible. And the PM is playing with flame throwers not matches. So I guess anything could happen and probably will. Stand by folks this is a time when it gets real exciting. It's a once in a generation game-changer.

Is Abbott's nanny payment really new?

The fairfax media today reports that Abbott intends to create a payment to help meet the costs of of "flexible, responsive in-home care". Nearly 20 years ago I was a beneficiary  of a Keating Government program, which came into effect from 1 July 1994:

a nonincome-tested Child Care Cash Rebate has been available. The rebate is provided in respect of 30 per cent of childcare expenses for children up to 12 years of age (see p25)

Our nanny gave us receipts and we used these to collect our rebate at the Medicare office.

I don't recall the fate of this program.

Perhaps everything old is new again.

Queensland election: Labor must end the insider game

The 2012 Queensland election follows a similar rout of the ALP in NSW, and the lessons are pretty much the same. It boils down to opening up ALP pre-selections and attracting a broader gene pool. 

These two election outcomes are much bigger than a natural swing of the election cycle. The Australian electorate is sending a real message to Australia's oldest political party: it's time to change.

I believe the electorate wants political candidates that have a broader range of backgrounds than backroom politics and blue collar unionism. They don't want devotees of ideological positions (witness the Greens failure at recent state elections), they want people with a track record outside of politics (in business or community organisations), who are middle of the road, and who are good representatives and competent administrators.

That means pre-selections and even leadership recruitment needs to be opened up and become inclusive. It can't be the preserve of the officials of affiliated unions and a few hundred active party members.

A big lesson from these two state elections is that the electorate has tired of broken promises, lies dressed as clever spin and all the rest of the Carr-inspired media cycle politics. If the ALP doesn't move quickly to show it's listening, the federal election next year is going to be awful. Probably the die is already cast. 

The ALP has always been very bad at internal reform, how many more record defeats will it take before it realises something big has to be done?

Labor's 'gordian knot' and the myth of leadership

The ALP is beset by long-term problems that it scarcely knows how to deal with. Instead, the party focuses on 'leadership' in some bizarre form of the 'great man' theory of history. Yet, there is hardly any ideological and policy distinctions between any of the candidates for ALP leadership at federal and state levels. These leadership candidates rely on messaging, narratives, news cycles and all the other branding / PR nonsense that infected both the Rudd and Gillard leaderships, and dates back to the Carr premiership in NSW when the ALP finally abandoned ideological purpose for advertising slogans. 

For starters, what is the relevance of a 'labour' party dominated by blue-collar unions (and the catholic controlled SDA) in a post-industrial world? The 'typical' union member these days is female, university-educated and works in the health, community services and education sectors. Second, the ALP branch structure has been declining (or collapsing) at a faster rate than unionisation. Third, the internal structures of the ALP are archaic and profoundly undemocratic. Efforts to reform the ALP national structure have been on-going since the 1960s or longer (Whitlam was a passionate advocate of a genuinely national, rather than federal, structure). Efforts to ensure that union affiliation to the party reflected changing patterns in the union movement also date back to the 1960s and can be found as late as the 2002 national review (by Wran and Hawke) but have been largely abandoned in the 2010 review. 

Everyone knows about these problems, they are just too hard. They raise the question of whether political parties can really change their character or whether they are doomed to die and be replaced by new parties. In this context, a primary vote around 30 per cent is a a disturbing phenomenon for the ALP. Can the ALP really retain its historic links to unions (as representative organisations of the working class, whatever that might mean these days) and reach out to new social groupings, the 'tradies' (typically self-employed, or employed in micro-businesses) on the right and the inner-city green groupings on the left?

In last year's NSW election, voters deserted the ALP for the Coalition rather than head off to the Green left. Despite this the ALP has tended to see its problem as being one of winning back the green vote. This seems the only plausible reason for Gillard's decision to abandon an election promise and introduce a carbon tax (which I think is good policy but bad politics having specifically ruled it out in an election campaign just a few months previously), handing the political initiative to the Abbott-led Oppposition and ensuring that she is unelectable (what value would her 2013 election promises have?). Perhaps, Gillard will describe the carbon tax in her memoir as a politically costly decision but one worth taking in the national interest. Solace in rationalisation.

If Gillard is unelectable then should the ALP revert to Rudd? In a world where ideology and policy differences matter little, the voters must look to competence. Most of the front bench of the ALP seem to have publicly endorsed the idea that the Rudd Government was chaotic and characterised by administrative incompetence. I don't think Gillard has done much to change this public perception of incompetence (episodes like the Australia Day fiasco only serve to undercut her efforts). If it reverts to Rudd, does that mean more pink batts and exorbitant scholl dunnies? Does it mean another thousand reviews and then reviews of the reviews and lurching between policy paralysis (why did the Henry review take so long to be released?) and policy surprises (a mining tax?)

The damage has been done. They got rid of Beazley and saddled themselves with Crean and then Latham and then Beazley again and finally turned to Rudd in search of the great leader who would deliver them from the political wilderness. Rudd won a great victory and then turned out to be a bit light on when it came to policy (20/20 summits and reviews, reviews), they turned to Gillard (supposedly a great negotiator and hard-working policy wonk) who immediately blathered her way through meaningless messages to a not-quite defeat and then negotiated away everything to the cross-benches in desperation. And then the carbon tax decision and then everything else. And a primary vote that rarely rises above 30 per cent. And now some think that Rudd is the solution. With any luck he might be less bad than he was before, but its unlikely he will have changed much - and his policies will be the same as Gillard's. 

It's not as though the ALP has become an ideologically right-wing party; it's more that it is a mish mash of neo-liberalism and protectionism; anti-middle class welfare on some issues but not others. Best of all - why is an atheist living in a long-term de facto relationship opposed to marriage equality? What's the messaging in that one, dude?

In NSW, we've seen it all before. Changing leaders doesn't change much because the leaders are not the principal problem; the party is the problem. The ALP's policies are not that different to the Coalition's; it just hopes that their leader (whoever it might be) will be considered less worse than Abbott by the swinging voters. 

Federal Labor needs more than a leadership change

Sure, Gillard is a hopeless prime minister. Everything she does seems to go pear shape. And quickly.

It may not be her fault, not in the sense that she is a bad leader, a horrible person, a twit.

Though she does have some form when it comes to plain, straight out stupidity.

Gillard came up with the 2004 election clanger - Medicare Gold - a true shocker.

She devised the ALP's infamous immigration policy as Opposition spokesperson - it's ironic that she is wearing the blowback from this crazy tougher but kinder approach.

No, Gillard's real problem is desperation.

A smart (i.e.in the Machiavelllian, Mario Puzo sense) politician would have insisted on Kevin leading the party to the 2010 election. 

She should have told the conspirators that it was too late for a change so close to the election.

If Kevin won (almost certainly with a reduced majority) the party could have told him to move on sometime in 2011. Presumably, the colleagues would still have despised him just as much.

If Kevin lost, well she would have been Opposition leader and had to do what every great PM has done and that is win from Opposition (except Curtin who became PM after a vote of no-confidence).

I think coming from Opposition would have given her much greater authority with the electorate - it always seems to.

But she couldn't wait.

And then when the election result was inconclusive, she couldn't say no either.

The Greens got a carbon tax, Wilkie got pokie reform, Oakeshott got a tax forum.

And the ALP got back into the Lodge with enough saddle bag lead to defeat Black Caviar.

Where's Labor's issue, what's happening with Education. Crean seems to have put that particular revolution to sleep - or was Gillard's performance in that portfolio so bad that the ALP has decided that the less said in that area the better.

Desperation for office is a poor substitute for cold, hard political calculation.

Kevin is probably desperate too. Desperate for a second chance to prove the detractors wrong.

But, if Kevin comes back, he'll inherit Julia's leaden deals. Pretty soon he'll be looking as dopey as she does at the moment.

If the ALP is going to win in 2013 (yes I realise how stupid that sounds) it will have to come up with an issue that can turn the election into a referendum. 

Something that makes the mob want to vote ALP. Something about which Abbott can't say 'me too'. Something that can unite the ALP's blue collar and green-leaning constituencies. 

A Labor version of Howard's "who do you trust on interest rates".

They hope that Abbott himself could be that issue, but the electorate seems to be getting used to the idea of Abbott PM.

In any event, the Abbott bogey isn't good enough to turn this doomed ship around.

If Kevin's got that issue in his knapsack, then he might succeed.

God knows what it would be.

If he hasn't got the silver bullet issue, it will be a sad reprise to his roman candle like political career.

One year on - the Rudd assassination revisited

A year ago I wrote this post, see below, which I think pretty much stands up. At the time, I thought Abbott would probably win the 2010 election, which he almost did, now I think he will win the next one in a canter. Gillard has turned out to be much worse than anyone could have imagined or feared. Nothing she does works. She stands for nothing. The Australian electorate has pretty much given up on her completely. Her prime ministership just shows that the ALP's problems, federally as in NSW, go far deeper than who happens to hold the top position at any particular time:

I was not a big fan of Kevin Rudd. He had many flaws, many of which (ill-treatment of staff) I find abhorrent. He made many stupid mistakes, like relying on inexperienced staff and failing to build strong support bases in the ALP. His media strategy was often ludicrous. He didn't delegate and he excluded the Cabinet and the caucus too often. Some of these failings were the flipside of his political strengths - bright, driven with policy ambition and above the murky world of internal ALP politics .

But he did do many great things. He got the ALP elected for a start. He won the leadership because the caucus believed Howard would win again. If Labor had lost in 2007, WorkChoices would be established law and the union movement would be stuffed. Paradoxically, his image of being above unions and factions was just the persona the labour movement needed to turn the YR@W campaign into a political winner. And he said sorry to the stolen generations - as great a day as Canberra is ever likely to see.

And he deserved to go to the next election as PM. When I was growing up, so long ago now, the ALP was the party of ideas and soul. It lost more than it won - but its failings were endearing. The ALP had soul. It loved its leaders. It was motivated by ideas, as well as the pursuit of power. It was ever-likely to tear itself apart about some principle or policy. It was infuriating, but it was also something that deserved the lifelong loyalty of many Australians through thick and thin. A leader under fire from mining billionaires and the Murdoch media would have become a Labor legend not a pariah. I know those days are gone, but I think we have lost a lot with their passing. 

Rudd was also scapegoated. The narrative is that it is all about Rudd, without him the story goes the ALP will romp in. I'm not convinced. Rudd's popularity collapse was prompted by policy changes notably the ETS background and the mining tax which were Gillard's and Swan's as much as they were Rudd's. In addition, the ALP's TPP vote improved in the last of the 4 Newspolls. Some secret polls conducted by the NSW ALP and / or the AWU apparently show a disaster not evident in the published polls.

So the ALP panicked. The official reason was that the government had lost its way. That's what happens when you've got no soul. It hopes the assassination of Kevin Rudd will boost its chances. I doubt it. They will have to gut the mining tax and toughen the asylum seekers policy. If that doesn't work - then what? The ALP has handed Tony Abbott a huge win. Opposition leaders don't often provoke Governments to dump incumbent PMs, because its an obvious sign of weakness and panic. The ALP has mired itself again in factionalism, faceless men and external union influence. Very big negatives with swinging voters.

Who is Julia Gillard? No doubt we will be deluged with the usual media honeymoon frenzy. But I'm so far been unable to get a fix on who she is and what she believes in. Where does she differ from Rudd. More consultative? Yawn. She is a woman. Great, but won't win anymore votes than it loses. She is a good debater. Is she a good campaigner? Don't know.Does she have much to say? Not so far. I suspect the appeal of Gillard will fizzle. After all, we know a lot more about who Abbott is then we do about Gillard.

And will she be there for a full-term? After the Rudd assassination, you might vote for Gillard but that's no guarantee that the ALP factions won't assassinate her if she hits a bit of whitewater.

I think Rudd would have won this year's election. Especially if the shadowy figures had got behind the government and promoted its cause rather than leaking leadership stories to News Ltd for weeks and months. Rudd was in a better position than most prime ministers six months out from an election. 

I suspect that Abbott will now win. Gillard doesn't have long enough to establish a real connection with voters and I think that the criticisms of the Government are a product issue not just Rudd's style. If they get rid of those product issues there won't be much reason left for swinging Liberals and blue collar workers (Howard battlers) not to go back to the coalition after a brief flirtation with Rudd Labor. 

Radical change to the ALP is required. In my piece (tear down that wall), reacting to Senator Faulkner's Wran memorial lecture, I argue that the time for tinkering at the edges is over, only a major opening up of the ALP's pre-selection processes can reverse the decline Faulkner so accurately depicts.

I have also written some other pieces recently on this general theme:

- Paul Howes and the mysterious membership figures

- Howes and the carbon tax ultimatum

- Nowhere to go: Unions and the ALP

- Gillard's Whitlam Oration: unions, greens, equality and opportunity

- Comeback: What NSW Labor needs to do now

- Rodney Cavalier: "Power Crisis"

You can also download my paper to the Australian Political Science Association at the end of last year on the unions-ALP, based on interviews with ALP MPs and union officials done for my PhD thesis.

Set box dramas

Genuine welfare reform: 3 essential steps

That old chestnut the welfare cheat has returned to distract the gullible. Welfare is an area where big structural changes are needed not mickey mouse, tough love measures.

1. Benefit structure. Two problems. First, differences in payment levels encourage people to opt for disability and aged pensions. Everyone knows it. But the only way of dealing with the problem is to increase the level of unemployment benefits - expensive and it doesn't fit the tough on welfare cheats narrative that pollies love. Second, the rate of benefit withdrawal (what you lose when you start to earn) results in ludicrously high, and inequitous, Effective Marginal Tax Rates: "High income families receive a greater percentage of an extra dollar earned than low income families, with middle income families suffering very high EMTRs."

2. Job Network. Like its predecessor, the Commonwealth Employment Service, it is biased towards finding jobs for people who would probably find them on their own even if it took a little longer. The hard to place clients get by-passed. It looks good on the performance stats and its more profitable. But it doesn't help get people into jobs who really need help.

3. Public transport. Welfare dependency, for want of a better term, is concentrated in places like south-west Sydney that lack effective, cheap transport. It is a tragedy that the former NSW Government did so little during its 16 years in office. But if Gillard or Abbott want to get people into jobs they need to deal with the very real physical and financial barriers to participation.

Put together these three problems and you can explain much of the 'why won't people get off welfare' issue that pollies and shock jocks love. But will the Federal Government's May Budget do much to address them? Not if the last decade of welfare reform is anything to go by.

Bolt gets a program as Beck gets cancelled

Currently facing racial discrimination charges, climate-change denier and resident News Ltd wing nut, Andrew Bolt has been given a Sunday morning TV show on the same day that Fox in America has had to cancel Glen Beck's program after plummeting ratings and consumer boycotts of the show's advertisers. Beck's decision to label President Obama as a racist was a key step towards his demise.

Of course, it's just a coincidence, and Bolt is no Beck. Bolt will struggle to be entertaining and interesting every week, especially to anyone not a politics tragic. Beck made conspiracy an art-form, his faux academic lecture style would have been hilarious had its content not been so ugly. Beck's brand of manic right wing lunacy is in a category all it's own. He achieved a cult status. But Beck's demise does show that even in Tea Party America there are limits to how far you can go. I wonder whether Beck's demise indicates that this is another trend that has run its course. Perhaps, the formula of chasing audiences with ever more incendiary commentary has had its moment. Certainly, the odium that Abbott attracted for appearing in front of bitch and witch signs at the recent Canberra rally suggests that even stronger boundaries apply in Australia.

In Sydney, the commercial radio stations are trying to out do each other in being more Alan Jones than Alan Jones. They both have presenter lineups which are comprised almost entirely of white, anglo, middle class, male jocks who with very few exceptions are borderline hysterics. Like Beck, they have taken to organising and speaking at political rallies. Despite their enthusiasm for right-wing nonsense, commercial talk radio continues its slide into obscurity. Other areas of the Australian media have not yet gone full throttle on using right-wing political campaigns to try and build audiences, but News Ltd is pretty close. 

We can only hope that today's announcements suggest nothing more than that Australia has jumped on a bandwagon that has already started to stumble.

As the blame game begins ...

My two bobs worth. I have little to add to the post I wrote when Rudd was deposed (where I pointed to an Abbott win) and to my Gillard's five rookie errors post two weeks into this ill-conceived campaign. In recent weeks, I felt more buoyant about Gillard's chances. Gillard's persistence and resilience in the last few weeks were impressive and I thought that this determination, and Abbott's failure to do anything but oppose, would see her win the election, even win it by a comfortable margin (at the height of my optimism last weekend I thought Labor might get 80 or 82 seats). It was not to be. Abbott out-campaigned Gillard in the last week and in the end Julia could not overcome the fatal flaws on which her leadership was built. And the failings of the Government in which she was Deputy PM, and which she trashed with that dopey "lost its way' message which simply endorsed and validated every complaint by every disaffected voter and commentator in the country. Positive messages about the Government on the GFC and so on just never got out from under that 'lost its way' nonsense.

Now Abbott is promising that the Coalition will deliver stable and predictable government, given that he will face a hostile Senate and rely in the House on the vote of Bob Katter the future in Canberra looks like being the very opposite of stable and predictable. Add to this, Abbott and his team are committed to delivering big surpluses in the next few years (which will require deep cuts in expenditure) and you have a recipe for some pretty turbulent times. Weak governments do not deliver stability. 

Never have so many commentated so much about so little

The 2010 federal election must be the 'signifying nothing' election. An election in which most voters must be struggling to find anything by way of a significant policy or ideology difference between the two sides. To top it off two uninspiring, indeed insipid, political leaders running dull campaigns crowned with vacuous slogans (moving forward versus real action).

Despite a lack of need for it, we are being flooded with commentary from all the usual outlets plus 24 news TV news channels, bloggers, twitterers and all the rest of it. Much of this stuff is obvious, repetitive and conformist. Each and every poll is analysed to within an inch of its sorry little life. There is a stark paucity of policy analysis. 

Abbott squanders Coalition's advantage on economic management

In last week's Newspoll, Labor recorded its highest approval rating as an economic manager, outscoring the Coalition on this measure for the first time since 1990; 44 per cent of respondents nominated the ALP as the best party to handle the economy, over 39 per cent for the Coalition.

The significance of the result is that it erodes the Coalition's most valuable strategic advantage over Labor, its economic credibility. Education, health and the economy are the real vote-shifters in Australian federal politics and Labor owns the box set. How has this come to pass?

via www.theaustralian.com.au

A remarkable achievement given that Abbott has been leader for just a few months.

With Howard, Costello, Minchin and now Turnbull lost to the Coalition its credibility on economic management is sinking like a stone. Abbott's decision to install Barnaby Joyce as finance minister was a complete disaster. Andrew Robb will be better, because he'll say a lot less. But Abbott would have done better to show confidence in his own leadership and bring Turnbull back inside the tent by giving him a senior front bench position.

Worse still was Abbott's economic headland speech, delivered in a halting, uncertain monotone before a small audience last week, which had everything except a clear understanding and vision for economic policy. It was a stump political speech, not a coherent piece of policy work. It had all the trademark Abbott oneliners and smears and self-justifications. Abbott did not allay any of the growing concerns that he just doesn't get economics. It is clear that Abbott and his policy team are either clueless, lazy or both when it comes to economic policy. 

Losing Turnbull will only serve to underscore the lack of economic talent on the Opposition frontbench.

Abbott runs out of puff

Today's Newspoll has caused consternation among Abbott urgers and all those who believed in the myth of Abbott's growing ascendancy over Rudd. Alan Jones, on 2GB, who has been giving the impression that he is besotted with the athletic new Liberal Leader, gave voters a serve for 'not doing their homework' before exclaiming 'it's beyond belief' and 'where are these polls taken in out of space, on Mars'. 

Dennis Shanahan, at the Australian, who has been portraying the poll results in the best possible light for Tony Abbott, came up with this little corker: "It's only one poll, and by no means the worst position the Coalition has been in since 2007". By no means the worst! Poor Tony, talk about damned by faint praise. The poll must also be sobering for the Australian which has been running a concerted, often shrill, campaign against the Rudd Government.

 At the end of last month, I pointed out that a comparison between Rudd's performance as opposition leader and Abbott's showed that Abbott's performance was mediocre at best.Since then, of course, it has got much worse for Abbott and the Opposition. In mid-March 2007, Rudd's net satisfaction rating (satisfaction minus dissatisfaction) was an amazing 50 points. In the latest Nespoll, Abbott's net satisfaction rating is just one point. In mid-March 2007 the ALP had a 22 point lead (61 - 39) in the two party preferred voting intention. In the latest Newspoll, the current Opposition is 12 points behind. That's a 34 point difference, that's huge. Essential media has the ALP at 54:46.

Of course, Abbott has just come off a very bad week. He got thrashed in the health debate. He lost Nick Minchin and he sort of lost Barnaby Joyce though the latter is still the alternate Deputy Prime Minister (this is wrong, inexplicably I forgot about Warren Truss). I've also pointed out that part of Abbott's problem is that no-one knows what he stands for. Today he does the first of his headland speeches, this time on the economy, it better be bloody good.

Not even close: Rudd trounces Abbott in health debate

Make no mistake, this was the most one-sided contest since Keating slaughtered Hewson in the last week of the 1993 campaign. Abbott was out of his depth on both style and substance.

It was amusing to see the press gallery trying to pretend that Tony did OK. Their disappointment with Abbott's performance was palpable. Bizarrely, Keiran Gilbert at Sky thought Abbott had won. Laurie Oakes was of the view that Rudd probably won, but Tony did pretty well. He was a bit shaken when his much-loved worm (bloody silly idea, but it's their idea) showed a thumping win for the PM (71 to 29). A little surprising given that debates are supposed to favour the challenger (that's why incumbents resist them and challengers are always challenging), but Laurie had some lame-arsed response about the worm is usually decisive. Steve Lewis at the Australian started in with the excuses (don't forget he's part of the we hate Rudd media enterprise at News) for Tony. Poor Tony, he's only been in the job for a few months, health is not his area (a bizarre point given that he was minister for 5 years), unreasonable to expect he would have a plan etc etc.

Before this debate there was a lot of mythology about Abbott's ascendancy over Rudd and about his great skills as a debater (not in evidence today). Of course, this all suits the gallery's desire for a real contest. 

The fact is that Rudd was better prepared and better disciplined. His messages were better targeted (let's fix the problem) and he never got flustered. Abbott appeared to have nothing to say, except a few lame one liners about Rudd. Rudd looked relaxed and on-song, Abbott looked like he was forcing it, working too hard for a laugh (they all back-fired) and waiting for the moment to throw his killer punch (never happened).

Abbott's so-called great debating skills amount to nothing more than a sneer and a shout from a schoolyard bully. We saw it with Nicola Roxon and Bernie Banton in the last election campaign, and he tried to do it today but it just didn't come off. Like all bullies, Abbott is just bluster.

This debate revealed, again, the main flaw of Abbott's make-up as a politician - he lacks policy substance. He has none of the grasp of Rudd, Howard, Keating or Hawke. He just hasn't spent much time wrestling with ideas and issues. Policy development can''t be done in a surf contest or a bike marathon. That's why he can come up with a crazy idea like the parental leave scheme which taxes business to pay the salaries of people on $150,000. He just doesn't 'get' what his party stands for.

Abbott needs to forget the mythology that he has Rudd's measure. And he needs to do some hard intellectual work. Abbott and his front bench team (which without Costello and Turnbull looks awful lame on the ideas front) now has to come up with a fully-fledged health plan ASAP because the voters have no tolerance for this 'we'll have one before the election line' and it's hard to see what approach Abbott can take that won't just look like some version of Rudd's plan. 

And if Abbott can't measure up on health his electoral prospects will take a big hit - and isn't that exactly where Rudd wanted him after this debate.