High-stakes gambit sets course for 2013

'RESTING' Tony Abbott from the AWU attack could pay off in the poll year.

Abbott Bishop

EVERY day this week the opposition has used parliamentary question time to grill Julia Gillard over her dealings 17 years ago in helping to incorporate an association, which the Prime Minister herself has described as a "slush fund", for her then boyfriend, former Australian Workers Union official Bruce Wilson.

With the government facing many contemporary policy challenges, not least the internal divisions this week over the UN vote on Palestine, which led Gillard to change her position to avoid being rolled by her party room, it is risky for the Coalition to devote so much of question time to dredging through ancient history when there is potential mileage to be had on other topics.

"Every day this smear continues is confirmation that Tony Abbott is a policy weakling," Trade Minister Craig Emerson told The Australian yesterday. On Monday he told parliament that the carbon price is now more popular than Abbott, according to the polls.

The government believes that the amount of time the opposition is devoting to the AWU saga is a sign it is getting desperate.

"The strategy has exposed that the opposition is a policy-free zone", Leader of the House of Representatives Anthony Albanese claimed yesterday. "When the carbon price fear campaign failed, they shifted to smear."

However, despite some reservations within Coalition ranks, the leadership team appears convinced that drawing further attention to the unanswered questions regarding the PM's conduct as a lawyer all those years ago will add to community doubts about her judgment on other matters.

"The Prime Minister being evasive on this issue reveals the truth of her character," argues shadow treasurer Joe Hockey. "Her deliberate avoidance of the details and her selective release of information just makes her look shifty."

It will be the same today, on the final sitting day of the parliamentary year. Deputy Leader of the Opposition Julie Bishop, herself a former law partner at a leading national firm, has led the attacks in question time, while Abbott continues to sit largely silent.

It is a deliberate strategy to keep the Leader of the Opposition out of the limelight on this issue.

"He can't lead up on this one and nor should he," a Liberal frontbencher notes. "It's an attack-dog role and Julie wanted to take up this issue months ago anyway, so she owns it."

In the past week the saga has turned into a soap opera, with self-confessed former AWU bagman Ralph Blewitt returning to the country to talk to Victoria Police as well as doing a series of media interviews, and Wilson breaking his silence, first by answering the questions of newspaper reporters on Sunday and then via a television interview with ABC1's 7.30 program on Tuesday. Claims and counter-claims by both men that the other had engaged in wrongdoing are at the very least unhelpful for a PM who once dated one of them and was a close associate of the other, irrespective of whether Gillard had any knowledge of wrongdoing.

It's a messy business, made worse by the PM's need to pit her word against that of Blewitt, and in doing so outlining his dodgy past. And in seeking to draw the PM out on this matter, senior figures in the Coalition have themselves interacted with Blewitt, a risky association if ever there were one.

Yesterday Abbott's first question-time intervention this week related not to the AWU matter but to the internal Labor dispute over Palestine. Every Coalition question that followed was on the AWU saga, and each was asked by Bishop. The PM delighted in mocking Abbott and his question, especially as it concerned the portfolio preserve of the deputy leader.

"Our tactics team should have thought that through a bit better," one Liberal MP lamented.

But despite Labor's attempts to ridicule Bishop as "desperate" and "embarrassing" for continuing to push her line of questioning, doing so has helped ensure that the AWU issue has dogged the government in the media. With the opposition taking up the cudgels ahead of the end of the parliamentary year, media interest in the saga has widened and fresh revelations continue to surface.

But as far as political tactics go, the Coalition needs to be careful that the issues being debated continue to relate to Gillard's judgment during her lawyering days and not its own in relentlessly pursuing this matter.

On Tuesday, Bishop misstepped in a press conference outside parliament when she implied Gillard had been directly involved in wrongdoing, something the mainstream media and the opposition have been careful to avoid alleging.

Bishop hastily retreated from the implication by clarifying her comments.

It has also been revealed that Bishop met Blewitt, as well as took a phone call from him, and that a number of senior Coalition frontbenchers have been in close correspondence with former radio broadcaster Mike Smith, who has been peddling this story online for many months.

Labor has worked hard to paint a picture of Abbott as a bully and misogynist in the second half of this year, in part because of his aggressive parliamentary conduct. This has helped to drive down Abbott's personal ratings and narrowed the margin of the primary and two-party polling results.

Consequently, Coalition strategists believed Abbott needed to keep his distance from the AWU attacks, which he has duly done.

"We need Tony to use the summer to reset his image to some extent, but we don't want to let this issue go," a senior Liberal says. "So he can't run the attacks, but we do need to keep the pressure on. That's why Julie has to do it. Given that claims and counter claims of misogyny now pervade every bloody debate, it doesn't hurt that the person taking (on) the PM is a woman, I'll give you that."

While Bishop has certainly been the Coalition's best placed legal mind in the House of Representatives to prosecute the parliamentary case against the PM over what she knew and when regarding the incorporation of the controversially named AWU Workplace Reform Association, the political necessity of distancing Abbott from this messy business has given Labor a new line of attack on him.

On Tuesday, we saw the Prime Minister in question time accuse the Opposition Leader of being "gutless" and hiding behind Bishop. Ministers did likewise in various press conferences hastily convened on the grounds of Parliament House.

The spin Labor is using to define Abbott as unfit to be prime minister has quickly shifted from attacking him for being an aggressive bully to calling him to account as a gutless weakling, all in the space of one week. It is reminiscent of the "no ticker" claims John Howard and Peter Costello sustained against Kim Beazley.

The Australian understands that the Coalition's tactics committee is yet to decide whether Abbott will inject himself into the furore today in parliament by launching a motion condemning the PM, to round out the final question time of the year.

The planning yesterday was for him not to do so, but tactics can shift quickly in a heated environment such as the one we are witnessing, especially if Liberal strategists believe Abbott needs to be seen to be standing up personally on this issue.

For months now the lingering unanswered questions regarding Gillard's past have frustrated the PM and her inner circle. Kevin Rudd supporters have used the difficulties to nudge leadership speculation back into view, and the public performances of the PM, while rhetorically strong, have appeared somewhat shrill. The widening of media interest in the 17-year-old saga may be taking its toll on the PM. Her first marathon press conference answering questions on the issue was hailed as a master stroke. The second, on Monday, did not win wide applause, with most commentators suggesting that it raised more questions than it answered.

When reporters on this matter have made factual errors largely unrelated to the core business of what the PM did and did not know about the slush fund - such as incorrectly referring to it as a trust fund - the PM's demands for an apology and claims of defamation have been used to derail remaining unanswered questions and undermine the veracity of wider issues to do with the saga.

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has been a vehement critic of this newspaper's approach to the story, as he has been of The Age's editor-at-large Mark Baker, who has also pursued the story. But as former Liberal powerbroker Michael Kroger pointed out on Sky News on Tuesday, Latham's criticisms have focused on minor points not central to the core questions being asked of the PM.

When it was revealed Bishop had met Blewitt, Labor saw the opportunity to compare this with Malcolm Turnbull's meeting with Godwin Grech in 2009. That attempt to implicate Rudd in wrongdoings backfired, and Turnbull's personal ratings faced the largest fall in Newspoll history, ending his moral authority as Liberal leader.

Although Labor might be seeking to find parallels between those events and what the Coalition is attempting now, the fact is that it is Bishop, not Abbott, who is prosecuting the case. It is a sign that the Coalition has learned from its mistakes, whether one agrees with the tactic of pursuing the AWU issue or not.

Even some Labor MPs can see the tactical benefits of Bishop going after Gillard: "Yeah, it makes sense, I guess," one Labor MP tells The Australian. "Some mud we throw back will stick to Bishop, I'm sure, but she is only the deputy. If they can land hits of their own on the PM, that matters more than any residual damage Bishop suffers on the way through."

The political tactics behind the AWU saga have become every bit as significant as the issue, although today's fresh reporting on previously redacted sections of Gillard's statement to Slater & Gordon in 1995 will put more pressure on the PM to answer parliamentary questions.

The timing of her stonewalling of questions in parliament on whether she wrote to the relevant authorities in Western Australia, just one day ahead of evidence emerging that she did, will do nothing to restore public faith in her judgment or trustworthiness. And it may even lead to renewed disquiet on her backbench, which had started to be papered over courtesy of improvements in the polling in recent months.

When this newspaper's lead investigative reporter Hedley Thomas first began uncovering new information about a saga involving Gillard that had been picked over on the public record for so many years, the opposition stayed right out of the debate, choosing instead to see where it all went before joining in. Now that the Coalition has entered the fray, the political stakes of where this all goes have become much higher.

The summer recess might be about to start, but it's unlikely to lead to a cessation of hostilities.