Is this the turning point?

THE PM's turf wars tighten the race.

Julia Gillard

HAS the Gillard Labor government turned the corner? The evidence is mounting that Julia Gillard's political fortunes are improving. Whether these improvements morph into political salvation will take time to assess. There could be as long as 12 months to go before the next federal election is called, and the campaign itself can change the political climate significantly if the contest is close enough going in.

Yesterday's Newspoll put the Labor and Coalition two-party votes level on 50 per cent apiece for the second time in six weeks. Roy Morgan's latest poll showed similar results and the Nielsen poll has shown Labor narrowing the gap on the Coalition.

According to the latest Newspoll Gillard's net satisfaction rating is consistently better than Tony Abbott's, and she is the preferred prime minister by a rating of 45 per cent to 34 per cent.

(In a sign that voters are unhappy with both leaders, 21 per cent of people polled last weekend remain uncommitted.)

The most important figure in the Newspoll numbers is the primary votes of the main parties. Labor's is up to 36 per cent, still shy of its 2010 election result (38 per cent), but well up on the mid to high 20s that it stooped to earlier in the year and last year. The last time Newspoll put Labor's primary vote in the 20s was in July this year, at 28 per cent. Labor's nadir was 26 per cent, hit in September last year.

While voters have yet to show lasting signs of warming to the Gillard government, recent polling improvements indicate they clearly have doubts about the Coalition. Its primary vote is off by 2.6 per cent from what it was at the 2010 election, according to the latest figures, down from 43.6 per cent to just 41 per cent.

The Coalition has won only one election in its history with a primary vote that low: 1998 when John Howard defeated Kim Beazley with the help of One Nation preferences. But on that occasion the Coalition benefited from contesting the election as the incumbent, and even then it failed to win a majority of the two-party preferred vote nationally.

History therefore dictates that Abbott must find a way to arrest the decline in his party's primary vote, which may require pivoting from his deliberately negative style of campaigning.

Nevertheless, Labor still has its problems. The federal government continues to be burdened by controversies and policies that are half baked. The release of Maxine McKew's book, Tales from the Political Trenches, has reopened old wounds regarding the manner in which Kevin Rudd was removed in 2010. Craig Thomson's home was raided by the police last week, not a good look for someone the PM not all that long ago described as having her "full confidence". And the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the government's response to the Gonski review remain unfunded, making them more akin to aspirational goals than firm public policy commitments, despite the way Labor goes about selling the initiatives.

Throw in the news from last week's Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement that the budget surplus is even more wafer-thin than it was previously (down from $1.5 billion to $1.1bn), and news that the mining tax didn't collect any revenue in its first quarter of operation, and the fiscal argument for re-electing Labor has suffered a series of hits.

But turf wars matter in political campaigning, and Gillard successfully has moved the political focus recently on to the sexism debate and now education. One involves a hard-edged negative campaign designed to paint Abbott as unelectable. The other gives the government policy ballast in an area of traditional strength for the Labor Party, not to mention comfortable terrain for Gillard.

At more than 300 pages, Sunday's release of the Australia in the Asian Century white paper will take some time to be seriously assessed. But one of its core recommendations was for a focus on the teaching of Asian languages in schools, as well as university engagement with partner institutions in the region.

Gillard's first ministry was the education portfolio (along with that of workplace relations). The political slogan when Labor was elected in 2007 -- which perhaps resonated the most in the public sphere -- was the idea of an "education revolution". Since assuming the prime ministership Gillard has struggled to define her leadership on turf she can claim as her own, as opposed to what forms the remnants of the Rudd years.

If one of the implications of the Asian Century white paper is to recalibrate the policy debate around education, that can only benefit the Labor Party and Gillard. The Prime Minister has a long-held passion for education, and she speaks about it often.

In the most recent Newspoll examining which political party is best suited to handle education, conducted in February of this year, Labor led the Coalition by 46 per cent to 33 per cent.

While a fresh debate on education is welcome news for Labor at any time, it's the turf war in the new sexism debate that is likelier to engender strong passion.

On Australian Agenda on Sky News on Sunday former foreign minister Alexander Downer said he thought Abbott had "walked away" from accusations that he was a sexist and misogynist, and a better tactic would have been to challenge the claims more strongly.

"I think he should go straight back at it and counter it," Downer said. "And counter it really strongly, and turn the debate back on them."

Abbott may have missed that chance. On the back of Alan Jones's disgraceful remarks about the death of Gillard's father, debate about possibly sexist treatment of the PM has gained momentum. And the Opposition Leader has been caught up in it.

Most political observers in the mainstream media saw Gillard's rhetorical performance on the day the Coalition introduced a motion for Peter Slipper's removal as Speaker as powerful, but weighed down by a context of hypocrisy. She was railing against alleged sexism and misogyny (a concept that has been broadened to include strong sexism), but did so while fighting the opposition's motion to remove a Speaker who had himself used sexually offensive rhetoric.

Yet because some female voters appear to have a problem with the Opposition Leader (internal party polling on both sides is believed to illustrate this point) and because equality in the workplace still has a long way to go to be achieved, the remarks by Gillard may have had a significant impact.

The PM's parliamentary speech may have moved the political battleground on to the turf of gender wars. And that turf is far from steady ground for the overtly masculine Abbott.

Gender debates also favour the Labor Party, more so than the Coalition, with the ALP's progressive attitude on issues such as affirmative action. The Australian has not commissioned a Newspoll about which party is better placed to handle "women's issues" since mid-2007, when Labor was campaigning against Howard. Then, voters favoured Labor at a rate of 39 per cent to just 23 per cent for the Coalition.

At that time Labor was taking a paid maternity leave scheme to the next election and Gillard was waiting in the wings to become Australia's first female deputy PM. While one of Abbott's frontline policies is a generous paid maternity leave scheme, which far outstrips the minimum wage one that Labor introduced, the Opposition Leader is every bit as conservative as Howard.

Gillard has the power of incumbency, and with that the right to determine the timing of the next election. But, just as important, the policy turf on which Abbott wants to focus voters' attention -- his plans to abolish the carbon tax and the mining tax -- seems to be fading from people's consciousness.

While anger at the carbon tax continues to exist in some quarters, the Opposition Leader has had to shift his rhetoric about what its impact might be, from the sky falling in, to a "cobra's strike", to a "python's squeeze". The shift implicitly acknowledges that while the new tax may represent a broken promise, it won't necessarily lead to a broken economy.

And with perhaps a full year to go before the next election campaign begins, that just might be enough time for Abbott's promise that the carbon tax would destroy the joint to become every bit as broken as Gillard's pre-election commitment not to introduce such a tax. This would be a serious political blow for the Coalition, and might require a change of strategy between now and the next election.

But the opposition's approach has left it little room to change tack. It must stand by its pledge to repeal the carbon tax and it can't change previous rhetoric that overstated the impact it would have on the economy.

Abbott's preparedness to let his personal numbers suffer by aggressively attacking the government to create a sizeable margin on the party vote also has led to a leadership problem. With the margin of the two-party and primary votes narrowing, the opposition appears out of ideas when more of the same may not be enough to secure victory at the next election. Speculation about a Malcolm Turnbull comeback has little basis in fact given opposition to him in the partyroom, but that doesn't mean speculation won't grow if the polls stay where they are, destabilising the opposition in the process.

For the Coalition, the strategy going forward may be a case of simply hoping that the improved fortunes for Labor are a dead cat bounce, or a few rogue polls.

As for the mining tax, while the evidence that it may not collect the revenue promised by the government gives the Coalition easy opportunities to attack Labor as incompetent, a minerals resource rent tax collecting only shallow pools of revenue is hard to justify abolishing. But, again, Abbott can hardly change gears and crawl back from his promise to repeal the tax.

When Rudd challenged Gillard for the Labor leadership in February her supporters insisted she needed more time to show the Coalition predictions about the impact of the carbon tax were overstated, before slowly rebuilding Labor's political fortunes. Yesterday's Newspoll cautiously can be seen as part of mounting evidence they were right.

One former minister from the Paul Keating era told The Australian yesterday: "I remember during my time in politics that if a government could be within the 48 to 52 percentage range at anytime inside the final year ahead of an election they were in the box seat. "Fifty-fifty is a dream, unbelievable really given all the problems this government has had."

Less than two months before the October 9, 2004, election between Howard and Mark Latham, Labor led the Coalition on two-party preferred 54 per cent to 46 per cent. On the day Howard called the election, August 29, Newspoll was still in the field for a final pre-campaign poll, which put Labor in front 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Not only did Howard go on to win the election, he increased the Coalition's majority for a second consecutive time.

For the minority Gillard government to be returned to office it would need to emulate Howard by picking up seats. Supported by rural independents in conservative electorates and a disgraced former Labor MP in the marginal seat of Dobell, Gillard must pick up seats elsewhere in the country to win Labor a third term. In 2004 Howard took at least one seat from Labor in all five states.

Labor is working hard to paint Abbott as being as erratic an opposition leader as Latham was, which is somewhat ironic now that Latham has been re-embraced by sections of the labour movement in recent months. Whether voters buy into attempts to demonise Abbott may be the deciding factor. It may be all about Tony.

The old saying is that oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them, but history shows us that oppositions, too, can lose elections. Even if Labor is regarded by most voters to have been a poor government, that may not be enough to overcome concerns about the Opposition Leader in some sections of the community, especially women. Abbott has tried to address that problem via policies (paid maternity leave) and spin (wheeling out his family), but to no avail.

In 1993 Abbott was press secretary to John Hewson, who lost what came to be dubbed as an unloseable election. If Abbott doesn't win next year's election he, too, will go down in history as having lost such a contest.

The problem for the Coalition is that polls show that the political contest is becoming closer and governments usually win tight elections, as Labor did last time. But while the political battleground may be starting to shift to more favourable turf for the government, it's early days.