By Shaun Carney
THIS is not a golden age for deputy leaders. A key reason behind the Gillard government's reduced status is Wayne Swan's lack of political weight. As Treasurer, he has not carried Labor's economic argument effectively, nor is he, as the government's second-in-command, an imposing presence in the Parliament or the media.
On the other side, Julie Bishop, after more than three years as Liberal deputy, is a diminished presence when compared with her role as education minister late in the life of the Howard government.
Neither Swan nor Bishop strikes much fear into political opponents. When Swan goes centre stage in the House, Coalition MPs generally let him have his say and wait for him to finish.
Similarly, Bishop is not taken seriously by the government. Julia Gillard in particular is disdainful and it often has a personal edge. A few weeks ago, after Bishop threw an especially glacial glare across the despatch box, Gillard remarked that Australians should check their cutlery drawers to see if their spoons had been bent.
Bishop does not always help herself. This week she contributed an opinion piece to Fairfax's National Times website that laid bare what will eventually be a serious credibility problem for the Coalition on climate change. Setting out to attack Gillard for attempting to apply the ''climate change denier'' tag to the Liberals, she declared that Gillard ''shamelessly ignores the fact that the Coalition released a direct action policy to tackle climate change over 12 months ago''.
Bishop went on to devote the remainder of the article to quote, with approval, scientists who either dismiss climate change theory outright, or do not believe climate change is a serious problem. It was a bizarre effort.
She demands credit for a willingness to ''tackle climate change'' and then promotes - at length - the idea that it's all hokum and that, by implication, it does not warrant a policy response. Bishop, by her own description, is a believer - proud of the Coalition's $30 billion direct action policy - and a non-believer (or denier, in Gillard's parlance).
Of course, this is of a piece with what the Liberals have been doing since Tony Abbott replaced Malcolm Turnbull as leader 15 months ago. More than anything else, the driver for the Liberals' resurgence under Abbott has been his identification with Australians who reject the assessment by scientists and policymakers that man-made climate change is a serious problem.
The movement was growing before he became leader and it has grown further, with his encouragement, since. Abbott is a natural politician who knows how to hook into the most active and febrile currents within the polity.
Faced, as a new leader, with a government that was attempting a difficult, comprehensive reform and a conflicted, frustrated support base of his own, he hooked himself into the segment of the policy with the most powerful momentum.
In raw terms, it has obviously paid off. John Hewson, as leader in 1990, set out to rebuild the Liberal Party from the top down via his Fightback! package. He identified a problem within the economy, set to work designing an all-embracing policy regime to ameliorate that problem, and tried to establish a wave of public support from the non-Labor base. And it worked for quite a while.
Turnbull followed a similar model as Liberal leader in 2008-09. A believer in serious policy remedies for climate change, Turnbull committed the party to shaping a policy solution with the government. He expected that once he lashed himself to the mast, the party and the broader base would swing in behind him. He turned out to be wrong. Grassroots resentment at the existence of the Rudd government and residual disbelief in climate change theory, which had been fostered by John Howard during most of his time as prime minister, killed Turnbull's standing with the rank and file.
Chastened by Turnbull's experience, Abbott has headed in the opposite direction, choosing to rebuild the Liberal Party from the ground up.
The central feature of Abbott's approach as leader is that he is happy to be defined not by what he promotes but by what he opposes. It is, by some definitions, a purely conservative political formula: Labor fulfils its traditional role as an activist, radical party and the Liberals under Abbott exist chiefly to stand in Labor's way, to preserve the existing norms.
Abbott has had great success by pursuing this style of leadership, in which he harvests all the negativity towards the government and converts it into political fuel. This is beyond question. He positioned himself to make everything the government attempted hard going and gave Liberal supporters a purpose - even if it was to oppose policies rather than create them.
But its prospects for success are not infinite. A danger for any leader who places himself at the disposal of his followers is that he can lose control. This was the real lesson from Abbott's participation at the anti-carbon tax rally outside Parliament House this week. Having encouraged people to revolt against the government, he was asking them to vent their anger. Inevitably, he would have to join them, which is what he did this week. Abbott has been an active participant in the fomenting of the anger and the vilification of Gillard. He knows what he is doing and is not averse to exploiting her atheism for political purposes, which is what he did at Wednesday's rally.
Abbott is a substantial political figure. He is one of the best-educated political leaders Australia has seen, a Rhodes scholar with degrees in economics and law. His 2009 book Battlelines was a solid and often elegant work of polemics and political thinking.
You do not need to spend more than a short while with him to see that he has a capacity to think and to reflect. But as Liberal leader, he has rarely availed himself of those capacities. Instead, he is reflexive and predictable, and his persona as a potential prime minister is all about what he would not do, not what he would do.
For all of the massive problems the government has with its fractured relationships with the electorate and the enormous challenge of legislating for a carbon price, I believe Abbott is taking his party to an increasingly difficult place. Climate change is the definitive issue of this term. What is the Liberal Party's position? Bishop set it out, as did Abbott at Wednesday's rally: an attempt to walk both sides of the street, believing but not believing, using the issue to generate anger and resentment.
This is an unsustainable position, not because it is intellectually inconsistent but because it is politically ineffective. The worst thing about Abbott's appearance at the rally was that it did not make him look serious. Rabble-rousing can take him only so far.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.