The 2010 campaign has kicked off with the least auspicious start we’ve seen for many elections. Neither leader offered a compelling performance in their initial outings.

Julia Gillard did give a polished but content-free opening address on Saturday, more of the same that we’ve had from her over the last three weeks, with added “moving forward” — lots of it.  “Moving forward” and “moving Australia forward” also feature heavily in Labor’s first positive ad of the campaign (the Liberals’ first online ad is here).  The Labor ad is a smart, short piece of glitz that quickly runs through the key Labor themes.  But for a ‘positive’ ad, it’s rather negative — negative toward asylum seekers in particular (couched of course in terms of border security) and negative toward “big Australia”.

Labor’s emphasis on Big Australia, or rather its purported opposite “sustainable Australia”, is remarkable. Gillard mentioned it in her speech to open the campaign, in addition to it appearing in Labor’s ad. Yesterday Gillard devoted an entire address at Eidos Institute in Brisbane to attack high immigration.

It wasn’t couched as bluntly as that, of course, but her speech was loaded with phrases intended to convey outright hostility to further population growth — bearing in mind of course that population growth of the baby kind is perfectly acceptable. Gillard spent the morning at the Eidos Institute event clutching babies.

In effect, the government has taken an opposition attack point and, rather than debate it or show leadership in rejecting it, it has embraced it with passion, essentially hoping that voters reward it for its enthusiastic conversion from Rudd’s embrace of high immigration.

Clearly the issue is showing up in Labor’s focus group research strongly. Labor appears to no longer be trying to be defensive about the issue, but to turn it into an actual positive for them.

Abbott will hope the campaign doesn’t continue in the manner of his two days. He was the victim of what looked poor planning when he fronted the media in Brisbane on Saturday with no backdrop or supporting paraphernalia except two flags, one of which barely made it into shot. It’s a minor matter, and won’t register with voters, but it looked cheap, particularly because of the unflattering lighting on Abbott. The Liberals’ first ad has a cheap’n’cheerful look about it as well.

More to the point, in his first election media event he was immediately pinned by journalists on the WorkChoices issue.

This was Eric Abetz’s fault. Yesterday morning the Tasmanian senator and IR spokesman dropped Abbott in it by undermining what he must have known was a key Abbott pre-campaign moment, his “cremation” of WorkChoices. Abetz indicated that, while the Coalition wouldn’t change the Fair Work Act, it would change regulations and ministerial directions under the Act. But Abbott compounded the problem by refusing to rule out such changes, in effect inviting Labor to assault his credibility.

This is trouble for Abbott, who famously was an opponent of the original WorkChoices (an early example of how Abbott might be something of a policy-free zone, but has acute political instincts). Polling consistently shows most voters believe the Liberals will try to bring back WorkChoices no matter what they say, and are concerned about it. The opposition knows it, which is why Abbott was using such strong language to condemn Howard for introducing it in the first place without flagging it as a pre-election policy in 2004. That his opportunity to “cremate” the issue right at the start of the campaign was spoilt (despite the usual cheerleading from the right-wing media, whose journalists heavily promoted the move as a display of tactical brilliance) probably means Abbott will be dogged by the issue till polling day.

Yesterday Abbott hit western Sydney, seeking to emphasise cost of living issues, but the outing produced a minor stumble when, in his enthusiasm to reject carbon pricing, he misrepresented the Climate Institute’s views on the positions of the parties. The Institute immediately put out a press release rebuking Abbott. Abbott is already facing criticism that his campaign is too negative.

So both sides are running away from former policies that they think were either mistakes or sold so badly as to become toxic. Tony Abbott can’t run far enough from WorkChoices or emissions trading, his party’s stance at the 2007 election. Labor too has yet to find a suitable replacement for the emissions trading scheme it abandoned. Both sides are in retreat from high immigration — a shameful development for Australian economic policy.

We have two novice leaders who are busy focussing on what both sides are not supporting, rather than what they are.

This may be a deck-clearing exercise to enable Labor and the Coalition to get on the front foot in terms of policy, but it doesn’t bode well for anyone hoping for genuine reform commitments.