THIS is the most bizarre election campaign in memory. Anyone following it from abroad would be led to believe that the national biggest issue the Rudd Labor-Green-independent minority government wanted to highlight in the first debate, just a week ago, was homosexual marriage.
Week two, and the issue that consumed the ABC and the Fairfax media was an innocent and flattering remark Opposition Leader Tony Abbott made about the Liberal candidate for Lindsay, Fiona Scott. No doubt the extra attention will have assured Ms Scott gets a second look from swinging voters (no pun intended).
Not a word from Labor's handbag hit squad about their leader's own disgraceful record of berating a RAAF flight attendant, barely a mention of his being bounced from a New York strip joint, or the fact that earwax muncher's pronouncement on appropriate language in the workplace will doubtless spawn countless claims from slighted and misguided vexatious litigants hoping to chisel something from their bosses.
There is no sign that recycling Prime Minister Kevin Rudd or renovating former Queensland premier Peter Beattie will have any serious effect on Labor's vote in their home State. Queenslanders appear to be just as fed up with the ALP as other Australians.
This election should be about the economy but Rudd can't articulate a policy without indicting himself for his poor past performance.
Which also raises the question, where is Wayne Swan, the former treasurer? Or Julia Gillard, Australia's first woman prime minister?
Swan held the portfolio under both Rudd and Gillard but is now so shopsoiled he cannot be presented in a public forum without attracting deserved derision.
Gillard was the poster girl for progressive women, the alleged torch bearer for a generation of girls. Now she's such electoral poison the Labor Party can't mention her and so loathed is she by Rudd he can barely utter her name.
Former Coalition prime minister John Howard meanwhile is mobbed by adoring audiences wherever he goes. The crowds can't enough of the man who dragged Australia back into economic security after Labor squandered its opportunity.
It was also foolhardy of Rudd to try and attack former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett after Abbott made mention of the "golden age" Victorians enjoyed after Kennett rebuilt the economy which the successive Labor governments of John Cain and Joan Kirner had devastated.
Kennett is cheered whenever he appears in public in Melbourne, by Liberal and Labor voters alike. He took a failed state and restored it to a glory which it is still enjoying.
Kennett, like Howard, like Abbott, understands that fixing failures is no easy task. He was particularly vitriolic about Rudd's attack, calling the second-time Prime Minister a "hollow man" with a "forked tongue" who would throw Australia into recession.
"I don't see it as an attack; almost a spray of envy," said Kennett.
"The Prime Minister may slip and slide all over the place on his greasy little pole but the reality is he knows the worth or what my ministers, senior public servants and what Victorians collectively addressed and delivered."
What a contrast with Rudd, who appears to be spending an unhealthy amount of time campaigning in school yards among youngsters who won't be voting for at least 10 years and who quite obviously would squeal just as enthusiastically, if not more so, if Ronald McDonald appeared in their midst.
Rudd's biggest problem is himself. He has no policies and attempting to rebadge Coalition initiatives on everything from border protection to the development of Northern Australia just doesn't cut it.
He can't run on his past policies because most of what he stands for now is remediation of those failed policies.
The fact that a third of the last Labor Cabinet refuses to serve with him should be rude reminder of what those who know him best really think about him. His breathtaking backflips on what were supposed to be statements of faith are staggering.
Rudd's New Way of politics in which negativity was to be banished has dissolved like a salt in the sea.
The totally negative campaign that Labor is now running is proof positive that it has nothing new to offer.
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/labor8217s-got-nothing-new-to-offer/story-fni0cwl5-122...
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