Why Julia deserves a second chance

THIS election campaign has played out on a surreal stage. The entire first term of the government has bordered on the surreal.

Julia Gillard went from being the loyal deputy to prime minister Kevin Rudd a few short months ago to being typecast as an evil villain for stealing his job. Rudd went from being a popular PM to toxic with voters.

As unusual as toppling a first-term PM might be, before voters go swallowing the opposition's line that it is a betrayal of common decency, they should remember Tony Abbott had been calling for Rudd's resignation in parliament for months before Gillard acted. And Abbott did the same thing to Malcolm Turnbull late last year, the only difference being that his party was split down the middle about whether the challenge was a good idea (he won by one vote).

I can remember the same conservative commentators who now express their disgust at what Gillard did to Rudd previously begging her to replace him, pronto. That said, I predicted Labor would increase its majority the day after Gillard became PM. That's one prediction this campaign appears to have ensured won't happen.

In Queensland the prevailing narrative is that anger at what was done to Rudd is now driving Labor's poor polling. That ignores that Queensland was the problem state for Labor when Rudd was still running the show. More likely, Queenslanders are simply annoyed Labor's caucus got to do to Rudd what they had hoped to have the pleasure of doing this Saturday; the very reason the internal move against Rudd gathered the momentum that it did.

Towards the end of his reign, Rudd's personal approval ratings were sliding badly, as was Labor's primary vote, the main reasons Labor decided he had to go (along with a good dose of not listening to advice, so we were told). Yet the single issue that most stung Rudd was his capitulation on introducing an emissions trading scheme. Who was a key figure advising him to dump the ETS for months before he finally listened? None other than the biggest beneficiary of his poll-shattering capitulation: Julia Gillard.

But there is one final irony in this saga. Perhaps besting Gillard as the biggest beneficiary of Rudd's capitulation on climate change was Abbott, a man who backed the emissions trading system, then said climate change was "absolute crap", then used Turnbull's support of the ETS to bludgeon him to death and seize the Liberal leadership.

Of course the reason that bizarre formula worked for Abbott is because most voters aren't taken by the science of climate change, but they thought Rudd was and they respected him for his passion. That's why Rudd's backdown hurt him so badly but Abbott was able to get away with his backflips, which were mostly about political positioning.

Abbott leads a party with a supreme track record for economic management built when it was last in government. Yet at this election he refused to debate Gillard on the economy. And the Coalition refused to have its policies costed by Treasury after complaining for three years that Labor did so too late for proper scrutiny in 2007.

The argument that "Labor was negligent three years ago, so why can't we also be negligent?" is emblematic of the negative campaign both sides have run at this poll.

For its obstinacy the Coalition has gone backwards on which party is better able to manage the economy: from a 47 to 35 per cent lead at the start of the campaign to even ratings now, according to Newspoll. This could be the fatal difference between victory and defeat for the Coalition.

How surreal it was that Labor, not the Coalition, used economic management as the dominant feature of its advertising campaign. I guess when you have the former treasurer Peter Costello questioning Abbott's economic skills, the ads write themselves.

Now the Coalition is running the argument that the government must be removed because of its incompetence. Yet the opposition has failed to use the three years it has been in opposition to adequately renew its team, calibrate the senior members to take advantage of talent and remove deadwood. And nor has it created a gender balance in its line-up that would suggest the Liberals are a 21st-century political force (barely a quarter of its parliamentary team are women).

How ironic that the nation's first female prime minister might be embarrassingly turfed out of office after just a couple of months in the job by a man who has caused more public policy controversy when it comes to women's rights than any of his parliamentary contemporaries, and by a team he leads in which women are badly under-represented. That's not something I'll be proudly telling my two daughters about when they get older.

There is no denying that Abbott has campaigned well and has gone a long way towards proving that he is prime ministerial material, but in my opinion not just yet. If he can stay disciplined for a sustained period in opposition and improve his economic skills, he should be capable of returning to win the nation's top job in the future.

John Howard managed to make himself more prime ministerial after he lost the 1987 election and the Liberal leadership two years later. Had Howard won in 1987, he would have been a poor prime minister and the nation would have missed out on his very good time in power in the years that followed. If Abbott wins this election, the same unfortunate scenario could unfold.

It is no longer clear whether Labor remains the favourite to win today's election. Newspoll puts its primary vote fatally low and the gaffe by Labor's MP in Longman may have cost it a crucial seat. That Labor has lurched to the Right to try to retain key outer metropolitan marginal seats -- at the expense of philosophical positions on refugees, the environment and social justice -- should not matter electorally courtesy of our preferential voting system that will see Green preferences overwhelmingly return to the Labor Party because they have nowhere else to go. But it should matter for a party seeking philosophical purity.

Labor won't win if its primary vote stays in the mid-30s.

Usually governments win the close elections (nine of the 10 tightest elections since 1945) and they also usually secure the majority of the late deciding vote. But this is an unusual election.

For all of the present government's incompetence, I just don't believe it deserves to be a oncer. And despite the good campaign Abbott has had, I don't believe the Liberals have learned the lessons of their defeat three years ago. For that reason I believe Gillard should become an elected prime minister and be judged critically on the job she does after that, with no more second chances.

But as a political observer, nothing could make for a more interesting three years ahead than watching the Coalition try to deliver what it has promised at this election, and watching Labor tear itself apart when examining how everything went horribly wrong.

Watch Peter van Onselen host the Sky News tally-room election night coverage on Channel 602 from 6pm this evening.