Who won the news cycle? A Sunday Labor win

It’s quite difficult to turn a policy launch into a losing campaign day but the Coalition managed that on Sunday. Tony Abbott was just too glib and too negative to win the support of anyone but the converted. With fiscal frugality as a major theme, spending promises clearly were not possible to put on the agenda but the absence of what we can call the vision thing made the free television time given to his speech near enough to a complete waste.

Friday had seemed almost like an old-fashioned election campaign day. The leaders of the two parties getting about their business in the orthodox campaigning way and even talking about an issue or two against the backdrop of their made for television photo opportunity. Not a Kevin Rudd or John Howard in sight.

And then came Saturday and election 2010 took on the aspect of a Punch and Judy show with Julia Gillard as Judy and Kevin Rudd as Punch until Mark Latham came along to show Kevin how to really play the part of the bully boy. Current affairs television in this country has come to a pretty pass when bitter and twisted men are given prime time to vent their years old spleen. Even more distressing is that the story of the Latham intervention for 60 Minutes quickly became the most read story on the internet news sites. That’s almost the first time that has happened in the 23 days of this campaign proper.

It was all quite enough to more than eclipse Friday’s Labor Party campaign win. Fortunate it is for the Government that what happens on the election trail rarely accounts for much when the proper votes finally get counted but probably more than enough to move the next round of opinion polls in favour of the Coalition.