How so?

100% realzies. And they probably have my first preference.

The Coalition is heading to federal election victory according to a new poll that shows support for Labor dwindling again.

A week away from the federal election, the Roy Morgan Poll shows the coalition is increasing its lead and there has been rising support for the Greens and independents.

The poll was conducted after Wednesday night's third leaders' debate at the Rooty Hill RSL in Sydney's west.

It shows the ALP primary vote is 30.5 per cent (down 4 per cent since the last Morgan poll), behind the coalition which has a primary vote at 44 per cent (down one per cent). On a two-party preferred basis, the coalition was up 1.5 per cent at 53 per cent and Labor was down 1.5 per cent at 47 per cent.

Australian Greens support was 12 per cent (up one per cent) and support for Independents/Others was 13.5 per cent (up 4 per cent).

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2013/08/30/coalition-set-victory-poll?

If the Sex Party weren't named something stupid (I know why they did it, but it was still stupid and I think they should transition to a new name in the future), they'd be the only minor party that could become the 'new democrats' as a centrist left party that avoids being called socialist hippies like the Greens are.

Newspoll: Nine-point swing against Labor in western Sydney heartland

Swing since 2010 suggests a Labor rout across electorates of Greenway, Lindsay, Banks, Reid and Parramatta

Australian Associated Press
theguardian.com, Friday 30 August 2013 10.07 AEST

The swing against Labor in western Sydney marginal seats is three times worse than the swing against the party across the rest of the country, a new poll has suggested.

The Newspoll of five western Sydney marginal Labor electorates put the ALP's primary vote in the region at 34%, down nine points since the 2010 election, while the Coalition was up nine points to 52% over the same period.

On a two-party-preferred basis there was a nine-point swing away from Labor to 43% across the electorates of Greenway, Lindsay, Banks, Reid and Parramatta, all of which are held on margins of less than 5%.

The survey of 800 voters in the five electorates was conducted from last Friday to Wednesday. It was taken before the third leaders' debate between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott at the Rooty Hill RSL in Sydney's west.

Rudd leads Abbott as preferred prime minister nationally by 44% to 40%, but trails the opposition leader on this measure in western Sydney, 40% to 46%.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/30/newspoll-swing-against-labor

If you believed newspoll then by now there isn't a single Labor supporter left in the country.

Will be interesting to see how quickly it swings back once Abbott wins, fucks up the NBN, causes interest rates to raise, increases the GST and puts it onto everything, increases regular income tax in the low brackets to pay for his ridiculous direct action policy, bring back work choices, cuts lower and middle class welfare, starts chopping services, can't stop electricity price rising, can't stop the big two grocery companies from hiking fuel and grocery prices and finally is unable to deliver a surplus like he promised and starts backtracking and blaming labor for it all.

But hey, he'll turn back the boats, stop gays 'ruining' marriage, cut a mining tax that wasn't making money anyway, allow rich people to rort the FBT again, and give the wives of millionaires $75,000 to pop out kids.

Are there any policies that actually help the bogans who are about to elect his party to power?

It's all aspirational bullshit, rich people don't get rich helping those from the underclass get rich. Cutting taxes on companies doesn't lead to the lower and middle classes suddenly getting rich, it results to rich people getting richer.

Here's how the polls are rigged btw:
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/politics/bob-ellis-inside-newspoll/

So no policies that actually help the people set to launch Tony into power?

That's actually not what he said, he has said repeatedly whilst he does not plan to raise the GST, due to the emergency nature of he budget everything is on the table....indeed he has said he will keep in place every tax increase announced by Labor except for the FBT on cars.

He has said they will be looking at IR, he said yes Work choices as it was is dead, but he said they will reforming industrial relation policy.


You need to listen to what he actually says and not what you are being told in the press he is saying....

Abbott says many different things about many different topics. Telling people to take off their 'Anti-Abbott because he's not Labor' shades while cherry picking his statements is both hypocritical and disingenuous.

One Nation is a dark horse for the Senate.

Some serious backyard deals going on their with other minor parties and their preference votes.

-PB

No, Labor policies will help launch Tony into power.

It's crazy and I just can't believe that NSW is about to make Pauline Hanson a Senator for 6 years.

http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/hanson-poses-a-real-threat-to-sinodinos-cabinet-hopes-20130828-2squo.html

You clearly haven't done any research. Australia has some of the most educated women in the world yet one of the lowest in terms of participation in the workforce. It's empirically proven when PPL is pegged to income it boosts the workforce participation of women and raises national productivity as a whole. Rather than provisioning PPL as welfare payment under the Coalitions policy it becomes a workplace entitlement, meaning women can more closely integrate their families and careers rather than feeling like they have to choose one or the other. We get long term workforce participation from women rather than just a short term stint losing forever their skills and experience to the vacuum of "non placement". it's a cracking policy, driven mostly by big business and requiring no further taxpayer contribution, but we all benefit from increased productivity and skills circulating in the economy.



If you want to raise tariffs to protect our farmers our import partners will do the same, raising the cost of living for everyone and making Australia less competitive regionally. Agri is a only a little piece of our economy, we get far more traction in the export and mining business, we should be sticking to our strengths rather than risking our export business to help out farmers. We need to a wholesale policy of helping everyone rather than just a subset of individuals to protect their business interests.

Cars are already expensive in Australia, if you want to raise tariffs on cars those costs will get palmed off onto consumer, who rather than opting to buy new energy efficient cars will choosr cheaper second hand carbon thirsty models, polluting the environment. Again the costs of locally produced cars will increase anyway as our import partners will charge more for supplies to offset the loss of increased export costs. The automotive industry just isn't sustainable here, the cost of labour is too high and you have policy being driven by government subsidy rather than the entrepreneurial skill of its managers. Holden know they don't have to make a profit as the government will cough up any money it needs to keep its operations going and unions will always be hovering around cap in hand waiting for their payrise.



This is all fantastic, but where are the incentives for job seekers? A cash payment isnt solve unemployment but it will get some people off the taxpayers books and contributing to society. I think it's more directed at the active job seekers who have constantly changing jobs due to boredom or lack of incentive to stay with their current employer.



I agree, lets help our disabled and needy, but lets not put all our eggs into one basket and realise there are other critically underfunded areas as well, like aged care.



Most businesses don't think the NBN will help their business, if businesses don't rate it what hope do consumers have? I think the benefits of the NBN are overstated and exaggerated. Nothing will get "produced over the speed of light" it is simply just a medium for transporting information very quickly. It will be great to have nonetheless, critical to the economy, but listening to NBN fanboys you would think the fate of existence rests on it. I can understand why the NBn will appeal to gamers and porn addicts but to the common everyday consumer and business owner there are far more important things in life than high bandwidth. This thing will only ever have value IF it gets built and whether applications that require 1gpps or high are developed. I can't think of an application, now or in the future, that will require 1gbps or more and require every country in the world to upgrade its internet network to fibre. I think this is the critical issue which separated NBN fanboys and skeptics, fanboys don't know what that future application will be they just "know" it will happen, whereas skeptics aren't convinced.

Regarding your final point merely saying you will return to surplus isn't good enough. Labor said it would return to surplus multiple times and then it didn't. Clearly there is a disconnect between saying you will return to surplus and actually delivering on that promise. That's because there are always areas of government that require funding , funding never slows down, and the only way you can return to surplus when revenues aren't high enough are to make cuts. Merely just burying your head in the sand and "oh well its costs money now but one everything will be rosy one day la la la" is why many countries went under during the GFC. Given the current global economy is still a bit raw it seems foolish to predict everything will be sunshine and rainbows. One of the reasons we survived the GFC was due to the fiscal prudence of the Howard/Costello government, we were perfectly placed to tackle the GFC all the other debt ridden countries around us went to pieces. The rule we should've learned is need constant surpluses to protect the nations finances in times of crisis, Labor are pinning their hopes on the "light at the end of the tunnel" but what happens if the light turns off?

Edited by rusty: 31/8/2013 04:08:52 PM

If they don't think it will help their business they will get left behind by those who will use it to help their business. This is like saying the telegraph won't help business, because we have messenger boys and horses.



Because transporting information quickly is bad?



Yeah, we shouldn't try to improve this vital piece of the economy, we should just ignore it and keep digging shit out of the ground forever... or at least as long as it lasts.



Regurgitating the porn fallacy just shows how little you really know about the NBN and the potential benefits.



It is not about singular applications using an entire 1gbps link as the sole justification, it's about enabling constant access across a variety of high load applications throughout an entire household or business. It's also about replacing obsolete copper, rotting in the ground, killing connections when it rains, giving speeds of massive variability and costing billions a year to maintain.

And you forget that the NBN isn't paid for out of the budget like say, defence spending, it's paid for by the users who choose to take up the service, and even better, the prices at the low end are subsidised by the people paying for high end. Under FTTN there is no high end, except for ultra expensive ad-hoc fibre additions (of which turnbull hasn't actually released a policy for) which will cost thousands of dollars and require hundreds in line rental in addition.

The last final piece is that the opposition FTTN is going to cost more! They have to buy Telstras copper ($10 billion being the sum experts believe as appropriate), and then figure out who pays for the maintenance of their newly acquired copper network. Their BS figures of "zomg $100 billion" might as well be "100 trillion" for how accurate they are, while understanding the cost to build their own FTTN network (along with ignoring maintenance and paying to buy the copper in the first place).

If you hate the current NBN you should despise the massively inferior Liberal fraudband because it costs as much for a massively decreased service, a idiotic, moronic hugely wastful policy made to protect the interests of News Corporation and Foxtel by destroying a world class infrastructure project.

Pauline only needs like 2% of votes :lol:

-PB

Well I think, as a general rule, business owners have better understanding of their needs, than say, someone who has never run a business before. Isn't it ironic NBN Co which is already connected to "lightning fast" fibre, is executing its business plan at snails pace.



It's not bad, it's just not worth $90+ billion. There are better ways to spend taxpayers money.



We are improving it, we're just keen on not digging the shit out of taxpayers pockets.



The porn and gamer applications for the NBN are the most sound I've heard. The best I've hesard from your side is "well one day there's gonna be this big massive new internet application and it's gonna require 1gbps, we don't what is it yet, or where' it's gonna come from, but we're visionaries and stuff and so we'll need it and stuff to cope with the future and stuff".



Rather than nonsensical waffle, can you give me a realtime example of what the "variety of high load applications" to a household are and what economic, business and social benefits it will deliver? Can you be specific about the benefits rather than just using glib terms to make your case.



Copper doesn't cost billions a year to maintain, it's costing the NBN Co billions a year to build, or not to build.. Copper isn't yet obsolete, that's like saying fibre is obsolete because it isn't mobile or wirless is obsolete because it cant stream 10HD videos simultanously.



Of course its funded by taxpayers. Just because it isn't included in the budget, doesn't mean it's not paid for by the budget. This thing is funded by debt and eventually you have to repay the principal plus interest and these costs will be passed onto consumers in the form of higher access costs. As it's taxpayers who will eventually own it it is therefore taxpayers who must pay for it, no mystery here. Further NBN Co says it will produce a return of 7% pending all its assumptions are correct and it is completed on time and budget. But if it's assumptions are wrong and investors fail to stump up the required capital and it takes longer and costs more to build than expected then it will be end up costing taxpayers BILLIONS directly taken from consolidated revenue that you cant hide in off budget balance sheets. Given the current billions spent and massive failure by NBN co to deliver anywere near its targets do you seriously think its on track to deliver a return? I know you do because the NBN and Labor say they are but think for a moment to compare the actual in field progress with the actual targets within corporate plan, and perhaps why Labor and NBN might feel compelled not to be fully transparent on the eve of an election.



It won't cost 10 billion to acquire. It has little economical value to Telstra and Telstea will know they will get their compensation quicker under FTTN than FTTH which is of substantial value to the shareholders. Turnbull has publicly stated he doenst expect to have to pay any more money to Telstra. Another thing with FTTN is the majority of the deteriorating copper is closes to the exchange in trunks rather than what lies in the street, most of the deterioration copper will be replaced thus decreasing maintenance costs to managable levels. A further 7% of expensive to maintain regional copper network will be shut off and 22% greenfields and brownfield with deteriorating copper networks will be upgraded to fibre, further reducing costs. The coalition model will reuse copper in the areas where it's fit for purpose and cheaper to install and maintain than installed fibre in every single household that costs thousands of dollars.



Seriously if UK, Germany, US and stacks of other countries are doing it it can't be that bad can it. Even our little brother NZ is doing FTTH, it's not like we're leading the global broadband cavalry anymore. It was cool in 2007 when Ruddy pledged to build it but six years later less than 2% of homes connected they've lost the game. I'll concede I'll support FTTH if they can complete it on time and budget and deliver the promised return, but they won't.

Not sure a double dissolution would work as there is double the amount of senators to elect so the quota is much smaller. Maybe other parties would not give her preferences so she would not get in again but there would be even more candidates so it would be a nightmare to work out who would get elected.

There is talk that No Carbon Tax Climate Sceptics could be elected in SA with less than 0.5% of the primary vote ahead of the Greens who will probably get around 20 times their primary vote. I doubt it will happen but certainly not impossible.

6 years is nuts.

Also, Sex Party is another possibility. Although I like a few things they support.

Tony Abbott stands by MP in burqa row

JESSICA MARSZALEK NEWS LIMITED NETWORK AUGUST 31, 2013 1:56PM

BURQAS are confronting and should never be widespread on the streets of Australia, Tony Abbott says.

The Opposition Leader was responding to comments reportedly made by McMahon Liberal candidate Ray King that burqas are a "sign of oppression" and can be linked to criminality.

Mr Abbott described Mr Ray as a decorated police officer and "outstanding" candidate.

He said he understood Mr King's comments to be more about identifying people in policing situations, given their attire.

"I've been asked about the burqa on lots of occasions and whenever I've been asked about the burqa I've said that I find it a very confronting form of attire," he said.

"Frankly it's not the sort of attire that I'd like to see widespread in our streets.

"But this is a free country.

"Everyone's entitled to make their choice and if people want to wear a burqa, it's ultimately their business."

Earlier, Mr Abbott said he expects Labor to ramp up a "smear campaign" against the Coalition in the next week.

And it comes as a Newspoll published today in The Weekend Australian predicts a wipe-out for Labor.

But Mr Abbott, who momentarily forgot he was in the north Queensland city of Townsville this morning and referred instead to Darwin at a press conference, is still predicting a close result on September 7.

He said polls would tighten sharply in the final week as politics got ugly.

"Mr Rudd is a very clever politician and the Labor Party are ruthless politicians ... and we're going to see plenty of low politics in the last week,'' Mr Abbott said this morning.

Mr Ray - former Liverpool police commander - is standing against Treasurer Chris Bowen who has called for him to answer questions, including explaining his links with disgraced detective Roger Rogerson, who reportedly attended the launch.

Mr Abbott said Mr King was an "outstanding" candidate.

"We've already seen a nasty smear campaign against all sorts of our members and candidates including that outstanding policeman Ray King in Sydney," he said.

"It's just contemptible the way the Treasurer of this country, who is constantly demanding honesty and integrity when it comes to budget figures, is making unsubstantiated smears against a great servant of the people of NSW."

The latest Newspoll shows swings are expected against the Labor Government in its strongholds of western Sydney, coastal NSW and Melbourne.

The Rudd government looks set for defeat on September 7, with the marginal Victorian seats of La Trobe, Deakin and Corangamite expected to be claimed by the Coalition with a two-party preferred vote of 53 per cent to Labor's 47 per cent.

The Newspoll shows the same voting percentages in the coastal NSW seats of Dobell, Robertson, Kingsford Smith, Page and Eden-Monaro.

A six per cent swing to the Coalition would leave Labor represented mostly only around Wollongong and Newcastle in coastal NSW.

The Coalition only needs to pick up six seats for a clear majority in Parliament, but the Newspoll suggests it could gain 20 seats just in NSW and Victoria.

Mr Rudd will tomorrow begin the final week of the election campaign with his official launch in Brisbane, where he will promise to build new industries to create jobs and claim the Opposition has a secret plan to cut jobs, education and health.

He begins his campaign in Darwin today.

Yesterday, Mr Rudd had a difficult day in Perth, where the visibly sweating Prime Minister struggled through a campaign event.

A young girl fainted as she stood with a group of supporters lined up behind Mr Rudd at a union office for a press conference and required first aid treatment.

The lights went out when a staff member leaned on a light switch as Mr Rudd continued to insist there was a $10 billion hole in the Opposition's costings, despite Treasury, the Department of Finance and the Parliamentary Budget Office undermining his attack by saying they had not costed those policies as Labor suggested.

Mr Rudd demanded the Opposition release its documents to settle the row.

Mr Abbott said the top public servants had delivered the government a "slap in the face" but is not releasing his full costings until late next week.

- with AAP
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/news/special-features/tony-abbott-stands-by-mp-in-burqa-row/story-fnho52jj-1226707993524

Last time I checked it's not really a smear campaign to highlight a guy getting called up to the ICAC, and being confirmed as having very dodgy dealings with Marconi Club.



Brilliant. He's spent years claiming he's 'ready to govern' while the likes of Mal Brough conspire to bring down the government, and he's going to release his costings the day before the election.

Majority of a million swing voters are younger men, poll finds

'Abbott agnostics' say they are choosing the best of a bad lot by switching from Labor to the Coalition

Lenore Taylor, political editor
theguardian.com, Saturday 31 August 2013 08.11 AEST

A nationwide Guardian-Lonergan poll identifies the almost 1 million people intending to switch their vote from Labor to the Coalition on 7 September as "Abbott agnostics" – more likely to be younger men who say they are choosing the "least bad" option.

The poll found the Coalition attracting 53.6% of the two-party preferred vote and Labor 46.4%, in line with aggregates of other nationwide polling.

But it also sought to identify some characteristics of the 950,000 or so people saying they intend to change their vote from Labor in 2010 to the Coalition in 2013.

The analysis shows that these vote changers are more likely to be male (56%) than the average Coalition voter (53%). They are also more likely to be aged 25-34 (31%) compared with the average Coalition voter (15%) and live in New South Wales (41%) than on average for the Coalition vote (34%).

Fitting the general perception of swinging voters as being politically disengaged, they are also more likely than the average Coalition voter to be disaffected with politics.

Of those who have shifted to the Coalition since 2010, 39% agree with the statement "I don't like any party. I am voting for the best of a bad lot", well above the level of agreement among all those who intend to vote for the Coalition (29%). Only 37% say they follow politics closely, compared with 44% of Labor voters and 46% of all Coalition voters. And 14% say they wouldn't vote at all if they didn't have to, compared with 11% of Labor voters and 7% of all Coalition voters.

But those sticking with the ALP are revealed to be in some respects even more disaffected than the election-deciding group who have shifted to the Coalition – with 49% saying they were voting for the best of a bad lot.

As Kevin Rudd prepares to defend Labor's record in government and present the ALP as the best party to protect Australian jobs at his campaign launch in Brisbane on Sunday, 5% of the electorate remains genuinely undecided.

With just a week until polling day, the undecideds appear evenly split as to who would make the better prime minister (Rudd 49%, Abbott 51%), lean towards the Coalition on economic management (55% trust the Coalition most to manage the economy, 45% the ALP). Some 71% of the undecided voters are women.

They are less negative about the performance of Labor than voters as a whole. Some 54% say it has been good and 46% poor, compared with 41% of all voters who say Labor has performed well and 59% who say it has performed poorly. And the undecideds are also politically disengaged. Only 11% follow politics closely, compared with the national average of 45%, and 83% agree with the statement: "I don't like any party. I am voting for the best of a bad lot."

Rudd is expected to use his campaign launch speech to remind voters of Labor's achievements in health, school funding, the national disability scheme and the national broadband network.

The Coalition enters the final week of the campaign without having released its policy costings, but promising no overall cuts to health or education.

The voice-automated survey of 828 voters on 29 August found Labor's primary vote on 35%, the Coalition's on 47% and the Greens' on 11%.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/30/election-poll-swing-voters-younger-men

Whatever happened to the famous Kevin 07 mojo?

August 31, 2013

Michael Gordon
Political editor, The Age

When Kevin Rudd took the stage of the Performing Arts Centre in Brisbane to launch Labor's 2007 election campaign, he promised a mere fraction of what had been pledged by John Howard two days earlier, stressed his credentials as an economic conservative and spoke passionately about the need for Australia to lead the world on climate change.

''I am determined to make Australia part of the global climate change solution, not just part of the global climate change problem,'' the Labor leader told an upbeat audience that included former leaders Gough Whitlam, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke and, of course, his deputy, Julia Gillard.

Ten days out from the 2007 poll, the launch was the centrepiece of a campaign that established Rudd as a modern, if somewhat nerdy, Labor hero. The ''Kevin 07'' campaign engaged young voters, exploited disaffection with a tired Coalition government and tapped into the innate optimism of the wider electorate.

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That was then. When Rudd mounts the stage at the Brisbane Convention Centre tomorrow, just six days out from this election, the atmospherics could hardly be more different. With the polls pointing to defeat, the challenge will be to inject some life into a campaign that has struggled from day one.

How did it come to this? The truth, of course, is that Labor was always going to be the underdog in this election, weighed down by the baggage of its own divisions. But it is also plain that Rudd's campaign has fallen well short of the expectations of those who supported his return to the leadership barely nine weeks ago. ''He seems to have forgotten where he put his mojo,'' is how one sympathetic to his cause put it on Friday. Part of the problem was that the initial promise of ''a new way'' invited the Tony Abbott retort that the only way to achieve this end was to elect a new government.

Part of it is the clear disconnect between the promise of ''a new, positive politics'' and the unrelenting resort to the old negativity, compounded by Labor's failure to effectively prosecute its case on the Coalition's refusal to produce its costings. Part of it is the use of loose language, like the kind that undermined Thursday's claim of a $10 billion hole in the savings the Coalition did nominate, triggering another set of negative headlines and providing ammunition for a Coalition counter-attack. A defiant Rudd was left to bemoan what he saw as the media's failure to apply the blowtorch to the Coalition's spending plans.

But the bigger problem has been the lack of a narrative - a story and a vision as arresting as the one Rudd offered so effectively in 2007. The returned PM made a start in the short speech he delivered when he called the election on August 4, and spoke of the need for new ways of thinking, planning and acting to meet new economic challenges.

But he also injected additional uncertainty when he declared that the resources boom that had ''fuelled so much of our nation's wealth'' was over. Full stop. ''Charting a course through the choppy economic waters that lie ahead will require a steady hand and a clear-cut plan for the future,'' he said.

Paul Keating made a much better fist of it from Labor's perspective when he made a rare intervention in the campaign.

Launching Bill Shorten's campaign in St Albans last week, Keating outlined how the investment phase of the resources boom was over, but said the production phase was just about to kick in. The challenge, as he described it, was to ''re-balance'' the economy from the mines and gas fields of the north-west to the cities of the south-east. ''This is a task the government has well in hand.''

Instead of filling out a vision, and connecting it with the themes that proved so persuasive in 2007, Rudd has floated a series of unrelated, unfunded and potentially contradictory longer-term ideas that have invited criticism and diverted attention from his attack on Coalition costings - from plans for an economic zone in the north of Australia to flagging a ''more cautious approach'' to foreign investment in agricultural land.

He has also erred in questioning whether Abbott has the temperament or character to handle difficult global challenges, such as the crisis in Syria, a theme that re-emerged on Friday. As Keating demonstrated in 1996 when he said Asian leaders would not deal with Howard as PM, this is unproductive territory.

The lack of structure and the impression that things are decided on the run has invited the Coalition charge that Labor is campaigning like it governed, which is then reinforced in negative advertising.

The opportunity lost has been to focus on issues that were central to the Rudd campaign in 2007, notably climate change.

It is the case that both sides of politics say they accept the science and have the same objective - to reduce emissions by a minimum of 5 per cent by 2020. But there has been no debate about which approach is more likely to succeed (and at what cost) or the fact that the 5 per cent target will not be enough, if applied globally, to achieve the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change. No wonder younger voters, in particular, are disengaged.

Rather than defend the carbon tax as a crucial step towards an emissions trading scheme that will be more effective than Abbott's ''direct action'', Labor has been silent on the issue. One ALP flyer even cites the ''abolition'' of the carbon tax as a Labor achievement.

Rudd's patchy performance could be explained if he had been subjected to the kind of sabotage his supporters inflicted on Julia Gillard in 2010, but there has been none of that. Those who resisted him or have left the scene have followed Gillard's stoic example of dignified silence. Yes, as Graham Richardson wrote in The Australian on Friday, the News Corp papers ''have been giving him a fearful hammering'' and talkback radio ''is dominated by right-wing demagogues who bash him every second they are on air''. But none of this excuses a Labor campaign that has neither forced Abbott to deviate a centimetre from the strategy that was devised when Gillard was prime minister, nor capitalised on the government's achievements on education, aged care and disability policy.

One possible explanation is that, after expending so much energy displacing Gillard and trying to neutralise a swag of negatives after returning to the job, Rudd did not have enough left for the fight.

Another is that he has relied too heavily on the advice of his travelling strategist, Bruce Hawker. Not that Rudd gives any public clue that he thinks the cause is lost.

''You know, you're a veteran,'' he told me this week. ''People often switch on to election campaigns when you get down to the last 10 days or so. There's a massive number of people who haven't decided on their votes yet. They have a massive number of questions about Mr Abbott and about his qualities for office, and it's ultimately a choice - it's a choice I'm very relaxed about.''

The example he cites is Keating coming from behind to win the ''unwinnable'' election in 1993 - and certainly the private polling on both sides suggests the 2013 contest is still tight in many of the marginals.

But some of Rudd's supporters are worried that their man is performing less like Keating in 1993 and more like John Hewson, the one who lost.

Michael Gordon is political editor of The Age.

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Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/whatever-happened-to-the-famous-kevin-07-mojo-20130830-2swb3.html#ixzz2dXU6n7oF

Maybe Dylan could make sense of our campaign
Date
August 31, 2013

Martin Flanagan

Bob Dylan believes in omens and there I was asking myself the question - what is this election really about? - when I ran across Bob.

This election is eerie. Like being in a car that's approaching an intersection too quickly. One sign of the change that is actually occurring in this country was when Brisbane's The Courier Mail ran a front-page picture of Rudd with the headline: ''Does This Guy Ever Shut Up?''.

That signalled the full-scale arrival of Fox Television news values in Australia. Fox News presents the attitude of the Republican Party, or an extremity thereof, as news. The Courier Mail was presenting the view of Liberal leader Tony Abbott as news. Within its medium in America, Fox News at least has competition. In Brisbane, The Courier Mail has none. Doors are slamming shut in the Australian mind.

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With these thoughts in my head, I came across a transcript of an interview Bob Dylan did with American journalist Bill Flanagan (no relation) in the London Telegraph, released to coincide with an exhibition of Bob's drawings and paintings in London. A lot of people reckon Bob can't paint or draw, but a lot of people used to reckon Bob couldn't sing, yet somehow he sewed a series of songs into the tapestry of the 20th century.

In recent times, Bob has become mildly co-operative with select interviewers and 10 years ago, when he was talking to filmmaker Oliver Stone, I noticed - for the first time - his eyes. For years, Bob wore dark glasses, which gave his pale face a romantic, sensual edge. His eyes are anything but sensual or romantic. They're small and rock-hard and they look straight back. But you also see the fierce intellect that lies behind them, wholly original and wholly alone.

In the '60s, at the height of the youth revolution, Bob was seen as a prophet. As he would later remark, ''Being noticed can be a burden. Jesus got himself crucified because he got himself noticed. That's why I disappear a lot.''

In the '70s, to give the posse the slip, Bob produced a shatteringly bad album called Self Portrait, the most famous review of which opened with the words: ''What is this shit?'' Bob singing well is an acquired taste, Bob singing badly would send cats running down alleyways. Pretty songs (not his own) were made grotesque in a comic way. Or was it serious? Bob being Bob, no one could say. But he pumped out some great albums thereafter, notably Blood on the Tracks.

But for a bloke who wrote a lot of lyrics that people are still trying to decipher like Egyptian hieroglyphs, Bob is remarkably clear when giving his view of the world outside himself. And these views come with the authority of one who has held his footing for half a century in the raging torrent that is global popular culture.

This is Bob musing to Bill Flanagan on another phenomenon of 20th century mass culture, Adolf Hitler: ''How do you take a failed landscape painter and turn him into a fanatical madman who controls millions? That's some trick. I mean, the powers that created him must have been awesome … [but] why him? You could see that the man's a total mutt. No Aryan characteristics whatsoever. You couldn't guess his ancestry. Brown hair, brown eyes, pasty complexion, no particular type of stature … He [Hitler] knew something. He knew that people didn't think.''

That's a hard judgment to make about people, but Bob's a hard man. I'd say we have a tendency not to think about what we don't want to think about unless driven to by need. And as far as this election is concerned, for whatever reason, we're not doing the driving.

Martin Flanagan is a senior writer at The Age.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/maybe-dylan-could-make-sense-of-our-campaign-20130830-2swch.html#ixzz2dXW7eJ1F

lol @ Abbott Darwin gaffe.

Kunt doesn't even know what day of the week it is.

-PB