A shot in the arm for conservatives

IF you could just stop looking at the YouTube footage of the Mac Bank bloke checking out pictures of a naked Miranda Kerr on his desktop for a second? Thank you.

There is another image going around the country and it's worth a moment of your time. The image appeared on the front of this newspaper yesterday - and of The Tele and The Fin, to name two other newspapers that know a game-change photograph when they see one - and, unlike the pictures of Kerr, it is completely safe for work.

It is a photograph of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott. Okay, okay, on the face of it, not as nakedly lovely as the comely Kerr but in its way, just as revealing.

Abbott has one arm over the back of his chair, and his gaze - his cold, steady gaze - is fixed on a nervously jabbering Kevin Rudd. Any body-language expert could tell you that pose is passive aggression, and it spurts forth from just one source: confidence.

Now, this may be difficult to believe but, for conservatives, seeing that photograph of Abbott was surely just as thrilling as opening an email attachment titled "Asset stripping" and finding a near-naked Aussie beauty.

Before Abbott, and post-Howard, the idea that the nation's leading conservative party should be led by an actual conservative had become, well, weirdly exotic.

In Brendan Nelson, the Liberals had a leader who was a former member of the Labor Party. In Malcolm Turnbull, they had a leader who once said there was nothing left for him but to join the Labor Party. Now, they've finally got it: the Liberal Party is a conservative party so it ought to have a conservative leader. And it's working. This week's Newspoll suggests that with Abbott, the conservatives, finally, have a dog in this fight. He is doing pretty well against Rudd in all categories of voters, except one. Young women aren't sure about him, and that's probably because of what Abbott has recently had to say about sex. Queue here for one more joke about his budgie smugglers. They are his "gift"-wrapping! Get it? No. Okay, then, back to work.

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