She should have waited. Instead she bolted.

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This was published 13 years ago

She should have waited. Instead she bolted.

By Paul Daley

Regardless of whether Tony Abbott leads the Coalition to victory at Saturday's federal election, he will have achieved more as a Liberal leader than anybody ever expected of him.

In nine months he will have seen off one of Labor's most popular prime ministers, Kevin Rudd, while pushing the next, Julia Gillard, to the absolute brink.

If Labor loses, Gillard will be judged a costly failure. The party's dire predicament will be unfairly blamed on her ambition while, ironically, Rudd – for whom there is genuinely no love within Labor – will be remembered as a misunderstood Labor hero and a casualty of machine politics.

The truth is rather more finessed. But short-term political history is always shy on nuance.

Even if Gillard scrapes across the line on Saturday night – which the latest Herald/Nielsen poll, reflecting a more policy-focused, less turbulent week for Labor, indicates that she will – she will do so with her public credibility severely dented and her political judgment under a cloud.

The poll confirms the election will be very tight and that, a week out, it is still Gillard's to lose and Abbott's to win.

Gillard still faces an enormous challenge if she wins.

She will probably have a slender House of Representatives majority, making tenuous the very business of governing and posing serious issues regarding internal discipline. She will also have a potentially obstructive Senate; the balance of upper house power will almost certainly rest with the Greens, whose core environmental agenda is nothing like Labor's.

The Greens will demand genuine action on climate change. Labor's flimsy promise of a “people's assembly” will not be nearly enough – just as it has proved to be a laughably inadequate, cynically empty response to voters who are now acutely mindful of the deep policy malaise plaguing Labor on an issue that should be beyond such political trivialisation.

This brings us to Gillard's biggest challenge if the government is re-elected. It is, of course, the restoration of trust, both within the electorate and in the Labor Party.

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Inordinate repair work needs to be done with an electorate that has become, understandably, extremely cynical – even contemptuous – of major party government, as evidenced by the considerable growth in support for the Greens. Further significant spadework will be needed inside a bruised Labor Party that has utterly lost its way and seems incapable of distinguishing its core beliefs from its deeply flawed political strategies.

As they used to say in the trenches of Gallipoli and the Western Front, “a miss is as good as a mile”. But might not the narrowest win for Labor, resulting in a barely governable lower house majority and a bolshie Senate, give rise to internal recriminations and more bloodletting?

You bet.

A near-defeated second-term Labor government will arrive heavily weighted with leadership ambitions. If Gillard, elected with a slender majority, does not capture the public imagination in the fashion she has so far dramatically demonstrated, she won't get another election.

On the basis of both Labor's election campaign and Gillard's first seven weeks as prime minister, this government does not deserve to win. Many people – not least some of her political confidantes, her senior advisers and members of the Labor secretariat – have contributed to the political and policy fog shrouding her brief prime ministership. But Gillard alone must wear the public disapproval.

The thing that perplexes many who have watched, known and admired Gillard the politician and the person for many years is: why?

She was always renowned for her sharp political instinct, her capacity for mostly sound line-ball judgments, her independence of thought and feistiness but, most of all, for her conviction. How can it be, then, that she has done so very little right since she rolled Rudd seven weeks ago?

The errors of her first three weeks in the job and during the subsequent first four weeks of the election campaign stem, I believe, from one thing: her undue haste to run to the polls in the hope that an election would overshadow the means by which she became PM. She should have waited. Instead she bolted. It was a classic political sleight of hand – look at me now, not then. The problem is, we're all smarter than that.

She should have waited until October or November. She should have formulated a decent, credible policy on climate change. She should also have defused rather than inflamed the asylum seeker debate beforehand, and she could have won credibility by delivering other policies – such as her government's very worthy initiatives on disability and education – in a non-election context.

Gillard never gave herself an opportunity to become “Our Julia” in the way party strategists anticipated that she quickly would.

The penny dropped too late into the campaign; she promised to shun the advice of the party machinists, to go off-script and give us the Real Julia . . . then delivered more of the same.

Abbott has been a surprisingly effective campaigner. But nobody – neither him nor anyone who voted for him ahead of Malcolm Turnbull last December – ever expected he'd be in a position to beat Rudd or Gillard.

Abbott finds himself – a risky, classic oppositionist – just a breath away from the prime ministership. The mercurial political high-wire man has managed to sell himself as an earthy, sensible, centrist safe pair of hands while the hard-headed but plain-speaking Gillard has allowed herself to be cast as a cynical, obfuscating, untrustworthy policy lightweight.

But Abbott doesn't have the answers. Too many Coalition policies are flaky, ill-conceived and non-costed sound-bite responses to holes in the Gillard-Labor agenda. But hey, they never expected to get this close to government so soon.

At this point, given all of Gillard-Labor's poor calls, Abbott's Coalition should be miles in front. The fact that it is not reflects a lingering public reservation about all his ideological self-indulgences over the years.

He may yet get there. But if he doesn't, Abbott won't die wondering. And regardless of whether he gets a shot at another election, he will go down as a Liberal hero.

Right now the atmospherics are favourable for a genuine third-way party to make headway in the House of Representatives.

But instead what a choice we are faced with, thanks to compulsory voting, next Saturday.

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