Rudd skates home with sweet reason

KEVIN Rudd won the Great Health Debate with a reminder that he is a smooth, persuasive and formidable Prime Minister who skates over his weaknesses and projects as a constructive leader.

Tony Abbott performed capably with a bad hand. The Opposition Leader had no hospitals policy and this proved a crippling defect. Trapped by his inevitable resort to negative tactics, Abbott was ambushed by Rudd who depicted him as the recalcitrant on health reform.

This debate was a throwback to the confident Rudd of the 2007 campaign. It should delight Labor strategists. It should help to deliver the premiers behind Rudd's hospitals package in April and the public behind his policy in the election campaign.

It affirms Rudd's strategy of moving the political focus to hospitals policy and his tactic of a snap debate with Abbott. The warning for the Coalition is to avoid at all costs an election dominated by health policy.

This debate revealed the power of incumbency: Rudd dictated the timing, the issue and the terms of combat. He presented himself as a unifying Prime Minister and Abbott as a negative polarising Opposition Leader. The irony is that Rudd's negatives even seemed more adept than Abbott's.

Having spent weeks slamming Abbott's reputation with highly dubious arguments, Rudd materialised on national television, singing the song of sweet reason and inclusion. The Liberals fumed at Rudd's elusive hypocrisy as he called for an end to the blame game and finger-pointing over health.

This is Rudd's reply to the charge he is "all talk and no action". It also saw his counter-charge against Abbott as "an ocean of negativity". Abbott needs to watch this. In the end, Rudd looked prime ministerial and Abbott looked too negative.

It is virtually impossible for an opposition leader to undermine a first-term PM on the incumbent's policy strength. This was Abbott's dilemma yesterday.

He will be better for the outing in a long campaign of fluctuating fortunes.

The key to Rudd's success lies in over-selling his policy. Aware that the public backs the idea of more national government responsibility for health, Rudd has gone to a 60-40 cost share but pretends he has done far more.

He talks in a loud voice but he carries a small stick. Rudd proclaims "the buck stops with me" but it doesn't. His policy with its 60-40 split cannot, by definition, end the blame game. Abbott mentioned this but failed to ram home the point.

Abbott threw lots of punches but he still let Rudd off too lightly.