By Tony Wright
In Canberra, a tipping round is heating up as political punters juggle footy grand finals, winter blues, and state elections to predict an election date.
AS THE end of each week of the season draws near, experts across the nation examine the entrails of the gods of the playing field, weigh up coaching tactics, consult astrology charts, take wild guesses and frantically scribble predictions.
It is, of course, the footy tipping go-round. By weekend's completion, most of us curse cruel fortune and bawl our frustration at having chosen the wrong combination even though we KNEW various choices should have been reversed.
The perfect round is rare, for judgment relies on such a vast array of variables.
In Canberra, another tipping round is well under way. It is the guessing game about when Kevin Rudd might motor out to Government House and petition Governor-General Quentin Bryce to declare an election date.
Rudd himself did his bit this week to fire up the imagination. Why, he said, straight-faced on The 7.30 Report, an election is due in March or April next year.
This is technically correct. If you were to take seriously the idea that the federal election won't be called until next year, but you would need also to believe that extraterrestrial beings regularly kidnap the unsuspecting and take them off to Uranus for a spot of rewiring.
Apart from the esoteric problems of setting terms for senators elected as late as April - and we shall skip this convoluted subject here - Rudd and his colleagues wouldn't dream of risking an election in March or April. The reason is as simple as three words: New South Wales.
Unlike the Federal Parliament, NSW has a fixed four-year term, requiring its state election to occur on the fourth Saturday in March. That's March 26.
The NSW state Labor government is in such dreadful odour with the voters that no other Labor administration would want to get within sniffing distance of its baleful attempt to be re-elected.
There are more federal seats in NSW than in any other state, and voters there have been honing their razors and setting spikes into their baseball bats in preparation for laying waste to their local Labor MPs after years of mismanagement, corruption and a sidewalk of ministers queuing up for forced resignations.
Whatever else Kevin Rudd might be, he's not suicidal, so he's not going to get himself entangled in the NSW apocalypse, which rules out March and April.
He'd hardly go in January or February, either, because that would require the electors to focus on the political circus when they are otherwise engaged enjoying their summer holidays and listening to the cricket.
So Rudd is stuck with the second half of this year, which is already upon him.
The end of the year is most unlikely because of another embroilment with a state election. Victoria, which also has a four-year fixed term, will go to the polls on November 27. The state campaign, then, will begin in late October and cover almost all November, and Rudd would be unwilling to get his federal campaign confused in Victoria with state issues. And in the event of John Brumby's Labor government getting itself into serious strife, he would hardly be keen on holding a federal poll afterwards. By then, it would be December, and electors would be concentrating on Christmas shopping and looking forward to the summer break.
Suddenly, the time frame is getting constricted. September? Much of the nation will be consumed by the footy finals season - the AFL grand final is on Saturday, September 25, and the National Rugby League's grand final is the following Saturday, October 2. What politician wants to try to compete with those events and their lead-up?
There are those around the Prime Minister enthused about the idea of plunging into an election sooner rather than later. The thinking is that such a move would shift the focus from Rudd's current travails with the mining industry and force voters to confront the inevitable question about who is better equipped to handle the nation's economy over the next three years. Rudd and his team, or Abbott and his?
Rudd would be able to hammer the point that his administration, alone in the world, guided Australia through the global economic crisis without the burden of a recession and is now overseeing a recovery. It would be a potent campaign message combined with a blitzkrieg designed to undermine confidence in the ability of Abbott - who once said economics was boring - and his shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey.
Hockey is widely perceived as a nice fellow, but there are broad doubts about his capacity to punch a targeted economic message through to the punters.
Abbott has a harsh choice here: languishing on the backbench is Malcolm Turnbull, who is tough, articulate, economically literate and has the sort of national profile that could lend the coalition much-needed credibility in a job such as shadow treasurer. Now that Rudd has consigned the emissions trading scheme to limbo, there is no particular reason why the ETS-wedded Turnbull couldn't return to the frontbench.
Abbott, however, is reluctant to consign his friend Hockey to humiliation, and even more reluctant to elevate Turnbull to a job from which he could mount a counteroffensive on the leadership he lost to Abbott only six months ago.
Promoting Turnbull would also likely infuriate other integral colleagues, not least in the National Party. But if Abbott is serious about using all the tactics available to try to win the election, the Turnbull option hovers as a serious test of his daring.
Either way, Rudd seems unlikely to be about to embrace the idea of trooping off to Government House any time soon. Alarming newspaper polls and internal party testing of the public mood leave him and Labor in a fix. Besides, governments tend to shy away from winter elections, when electors are said to be huddled against the cold and grumpy with the flu, even though the only federal winter election in Australia ended with an increased majority in 1987 for the Hawke Labor government.
Most likely, we suspect, is that Rudd - like John Howard before him - will wait in the hope that something comes up that puts him in a better fighting position. Your correspondent's tip, taking all the above into consideration? October 16.
But then, your correspondent's footy tips last round reaped a meagre four. Tricky business, predicting the future.
Tony Wright is national affairs editor.