Abbott win would rewrite the rules

ANY Tony Abbott election victory will herald a rewriting of the laws of Australian politics.

Abbott's significance is almost totally denied, ignored or misunderstood. He has re-positioned the conservative side of politics, bringing an energy, momentum, authenticity and ideological thrust absent since John Howard at his best.

If he wins this poll it will represent the greatest political recovery Australia has seen and there must, therefore, be doubt about such an outcome.

Assuming a tight result, there is one certainty: for most of the past nine months Labor has badly underestimated Abbott. If the worst happens, defeat will expose the most serious misjudgments by the Labor Party in decades along with condemning its contemporary culture. For a long time many ALP figures have been convinced that Abbott, far from making the Liberals competitive, was actually making them unelectable.

Abbott's revival of the conservative forces during the past nine months, converting them into a genuine competitor, reveals a fracture in Australia's public, media and political life: the vast gulf between the progressive opinion-making elites in Sydney and Melbourne and the sentiment of much of the Australian public spread across the rest of this big country, notably in the growing areas of Queensland, western Sydney and Western Australia.The election will test how far this discontinuity has spread.

The unerring message from Labor since its 2007 victory is that Canberra governance knows best; witness the flawed design of the economic stimulus, the complex scheme to price carbon, the government control of the National Broadband Network and the Canberra-crafted mining tax. On each issue the key element was the Canberra power structure dictating to the people.

Abbott's political revolt is against this hubris on behalf of the common man, taxpayer and worker. For much of his leadership the conventional progressive wisdom offered serial explanations for his unelectability: women wouldn't vote for him; his social conservatism was unacceptable; his scepticism towards climate change science and action rendered him obsolete; and he lacked Labor's wisdom on the economy. For such advocates an Abbott victory is incomprehensible.

It means, in effect, Australia has become a foreign place for them.

For most of the past three years the Coalition has been in a state of disarray, confusion and disunity. Indeed, its lack of preparation has been obvious in this campaign.

When Abbott was elected leader by one vote over Malcolm Turnbull last last year, Newspoll showed a 57-43 per cent Labor lead. It was no contest. During the previous two years Labor enjoyed an average lead of 56-44, a 3 per cent-plus pro-Labor swing on top of the 2007 result. For most of this term Kevin Rudd had been heading towards a bigger majority.

Abbott won the leadership from Turnbull by pitching to the Right, yet as 2010 advanced he moved decisively to the centre. Abbott has evolved and, in this campaign for the first time in his life, he has been prime ministerial. Labor insisted on fighting old Tony only to find it was facing new Tony, prudent on the economy, denying industrial relations reform, shunning his old lines on sex and abortion.

It may not be enough.

If Abbott loses this election he should remain Opposition Leader but the Coalition will run the risk in defeat of opening up its repressed divisions.

The final polls are in conflict, yet Julia Gillard remains favourite to win based on history. The idea of rejecting a first-term national government violates our conservative, cautious electoral tradition. Australians do not lightly dismiss a one-term government.

Voters are reluctant to admit their 2007 election of Rudd Labor was a mistake and Gillard's entire campaign is a plea to give Labor "a second chance". Abbott's counter is to ask voters to be as ruthless with Labor as Labor was with Rudd. He knows the mood ranges from hostility to scepticism about Labor and fears the better angels of Australian character will grudgingly gift Gillard's request.

At the end of his policy launch Abbott told people they had to be brave enough because "make no mistake, to change this government you have to throw out your local Labor MP".

This election is complex because Gillard and Abbott are two new leaders, neither an established incumbent, heading parties whose fortunes have been comprehensively reversed in recent months. Gillard's task is elemental: to save the modern Labor Party from its most ignominious defeat since the Scullin government of the 1930s, a defeat that will condemn Labor's substance, tactics, culture and leadership. Labor, in truth, has far more at stake in this election than the Coalition.

The notion at the time of Rudd's 2007 triumph that Labor might be kept to a "oncer" government by a demoralised Coalition was inconceivable. But so was the idea that Rudd would be deposed before the re-election, yet such an "inconceivable" event has occurred.

Labor has now had four different leaders at the past four elections: Kim Beazley in 2001; Mark Latham in 2004; Rudd in 2007; and Gillard in 2010. And this list overlooks Simon Crean's brief stay in the top job.

It coincides with the revolving door that has become the NSW Premier's office. Witness, since Bob Carr's 2005 retirement, Morris Iemma, Natham Rees and now Kristina Keneally. Labor has materially shaped the more ruthless and impatient political culture emerging in this country. If Gillard loses it will reveal a public ready to apply the new rules it has learned from Labor itself.

The bizarre optic of this campaign was Gillard haunted by Rudd and Latham, in succession, a reminder of Labor's prolonged leadership dysfunction.

Gillard's self-chosen inheritance was diabolical: she became leader of a government sufficiently desperate to assassinate Rudd.

This saddled Gillard with a terrible contradiction: having condemned Rudd Labor's record, she had to justify that record for her own election. Yet Rudd's policies were Gillard's. And her election agenda is largely Rudd's planned election agenda. Her single vaunted departure was the Julia flag for a sustainable, not a big, Australia.

During this campaign Gillard has done everything and more Labor could have expected from her. She has been a warrior, fluent, relentless and combative. No other Labor figure could have performed as well. Yet Gillard has her limitations. She is neither an inspirational figure nor a policy innovator. She leads a party whose credit with voters is near bankrupt. There is no new Gillard agenda for the next term. Because Gillard is an incrementalist that takes time and she had no time.

Did Labor fully realise the burden it was placing on Gillard? No, is the answer. The party misjudged the risks in the Rudd coup. It fooled itself into thinking that image -- the Gillard personality -- would suffice to purge the stains on Labor's brand. So Gillard, the universally agreed successor, was thrust into the leadership at the worst possible time. This leads to Labor's nightmare: that Abbott, the opponent it never rated, might achieve the eclipse of both Rudd and Gillard, Labor's jewels, within the same period of two months.

It would be too bad to believe, another inconceivable event.

Gillard has to save Labor in the election and then rehabilitate the government. She offers a different, more competent style, but it is the same Labor agenda. It is true Labor's success in negotiating Australia through the global financial crisis without recession is a persuasive case for re-election. Yet, outside this achievement, Labor's record is weak and by removing Rudd the party affirmed the magnitude of its own failures.

In one sense Labor seems formidable. It dominates the spectrum of the centre-left, backed by trade union financial power, enjoying a preference deal with the Greens and natural beneficiary of the media values represented by the ABC. Yet the Labor brand is contaminated, plagued by its NSW and Queensland governments, its loss of conviction and the flaws in Rudd Labor that triggered the coup.

Labor also faces a structural problem. It fights on two fronts, facing a populist surge from the Right and alarming seepage to the Greens on the Left. Witness how it lost votes over climate change to the Coalition and the Greens.

Labor's primary vote in election 2010 is under attack from both sides. This will be fundamental to the result. Labor may survive now, but victory will not solve the problem. Labor needs a strategy to resurrect its primary vote from this dual challenge.

If Gillard wins much of the reason will lie in Labor's highly effective negative campaign. It has ruthlessly targeted Abbott as a risk and the entire campaign testifies to the power of the negative.

But a re-elected Labor should beware: it would be operating on its second and final chance, and Gillard's tall order would be to rehabilitate the Labor brand.