Labor's personal campaign against Tony Abbott is working.

Labor's negativity pays off in the short run

Dennis Shanahan, Political Editor
The Australian
November 13, 2012 12:00AM 

LABOR'S personal campaign against Tony Abbott is working.

In one of the true ironies of modern political campaigning, a relentlessly negative and obsessive campaign is being run to portray an opponent as relentlessly negative and obsessive.

In an unprecedented concentration on a leader of the opposition, the Gillard government has determinedly sought to make Abbott the centre of the story, the man in the middle, and has talked more about him than its own achievements or record.

Abbott's obsession with forcing an early election and prosecuting the highly negative case against the carbon tax the Prime Minister promised not to introduce has contributed to his highly negative profile with voters. His satisfaction rating among voters is now the worst it has been.

Yet Abbott's character hasn't changed - he's no more sexist or old-fashioned than he was in December 2009 and he has not unveiled any controversial policies of late. Indeed, he's hardly unveiled any policy at all.

Hence, Labor's strategy of declaring a gender war with Abbott as the main target has worked on his personal support and fitted neatly with Labor's recent rise from its doldrums of despair.

Heading into an election year, it's a dangerous and trying time for Abbott as Opposition Leader, but he still has the advantage of being able to point to a primary vote giving the Coalition an election-winning lead. And he still has positive policy announcements ahead of him.

For an opposition leader, that remains a powerful claim despite the clear success of Labor's personal campaign against him.

Australian Federal Election: Don’t Let Her off the Hook.

Part 1.

Pt.2

Pt.3

Don't let her off the hook

The Australian
July 21, 2010 12:00AM

The Prime Minister needs far greater media scrutiny

WEEK one of the campaign and Julia Gillard is getting away scot-free in some sections of the press. The Labor leader is doing everything by the book. She's the perfect candidate, produced to within an inch of her life with an apparently endless capacity for platitudes and recycled promises. She is, as we report today, " the girl in the bubble" created by her party machine. Many in the Fairfax media and the ABC seem mesmerised by the performance. That may be good news for Labor but it's bad for democracy, bad for the country and bad for the free press.

In March, editor-at-large Paul Kelly wrote about the progressive media's problems in reporting on Tony Abbott, whose "muscular, conservative Christianity" they found offensive. Rather than look at his policies, a Four Corners profile screened at that time focused on the Opposition Leader's religion, reflecting the ABC's dominant ideological mindset that Christianity is a "negative, repressive factor".

One might have thought, given her atheism, that these same journalists would have found it easier to focus on the things that really matter about Ms Gillard. One might have expected that, given she has been in the job for less than four weeks, the Prime Minister would have been under close scrutiny, her policies dissected along with her makeup. Not so. From day one when The Sun-Herald virtually endorsed Ms Gillard on its front page, they have failed to apply the basic rules of reporting to Labor's campaign.

There is no disputing that Mr Abbott has made it easy with his gaffe over industrial relations and his lacklustre start to the campaign. But the problem runs deeper, with the assumption that the conservative side of politics is fair game, while Labor needs not to be challenged too hard.This is not a new phenomenon. Throughout Kevin Rudd's ascendancy and his government, the ABC and Fairfax papers failed to nail his true character or understand what a mess he was in -- inside the party and in the electorate. They ignored the debacles over pink batts and the Building the Education Revolution. They swallowed the idiocy of alcopops, Grocery Choice and Fuel Watch. In short, they had no idea there was trouble at mill.

Now Ms Gillard is positioned as the new broom sweeping away the Rudd detritus. Except that since 2007 she was deputy prime minister and a member of the Kitchen Cabinet, as responsible as Mr Rudd for government decisions. Indeed, it was Ms Gillard who urged the backflip on the emissions trading scheme that helped undo Mr Rudd.

Yet her beliefs, political vision and policies are not being tested by many in the media.

Letting the Prime Minister off the hook does the nation a great disservice. We need to know what she -- and her government -- really stand for. We need to get behind Ms Gillard's carapace of genial certainty and start asking the tough questions about her policies and record. The past few days have shown both leaders are happy to focus on the diminishing horizon of reform. As Alan Mitchell wrote in The Financial Review this week, the Prime Minister is under pressure to mimic the example of former NSW premier Bob Carr and do "as little as possible for as long as possible". It is not good enough, but without more scrutiny, the Prime Minister might just get away with it. Mark Scott at the ABC and Brian McCarthy at Fairfax need to pick up the phone and tell their editors to muscle up and scrutinise both sides of politics.

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Australia: One year on, Rudd blows the budget, spend spend spend

Government blows the budget on its anniversary Tony Abbott
News.com.au
Thursday, November 20, 2008
How quickly can Kevin Rudd blow Peter Costello’s economic legacy? This week’s headline-grabbing splurge was $300 million for local government.
Most councils should be able to find good uses for individual grants averaging just over $500,000. But this is the same Labor Party which attacked the Howard Government’s local grant scheme as “regional rorts” and declared during the election campaign that the irresponsible spending spree must stop.

In the past few weeks the Government has spent half the current year’s surplus in Christmas bonuses, committed an extra $3 billion to the car industry and promised an unlimited free guarantee for interbank loans and bank deposits. None of these measures were accompanied by rigorous costing or ongoing reform. Already this year’s surplus is down 75 per cent on the budget night figure to about $5 billion. As well, the Government is planning to commit $20 billion of Costello’s $70 billion in accumulated surpluses towards infrastructure projects that the states are too broke to pay for.

It took Premier Carr about a decade (helped by some creative accounting) finally to run NSW into deficit. Mr Rudd looks like managing this feat in his first year. Government spending makes sense if it helps Australia to avoid a recession but we could easily end up losing a decade’s accumulated reserves with very little to show for it.

Whilst I agree with the points made by Tony Abbott, It must be noted that Australians voted for a return to the days of high interest rates (high of 18% average 12.5% home loans 22.5% investment property loans) high unemployment 12%, Australian Council Of Trade Unions (ACTU) controlled work places, awards and conditions for those lucky enough to have a job, and to run the economy down back into a 96 billion dollar deficit as per the Hawke Keating lagacy of the last Labor federal government to run Australia.

Someone said "great civilisations are not destroyed they simply commit suicide", Australians have simply decided that life under Howard was simply too good and perhaps Kevin 07 could make it even "more gooder" still, or suicide.

According to the latest surveys by those who constantly told us how bad the Howard government was these last 12 years, Australians have never been worse off than they have been these last twelve months under Kevin 07 running his time for change agenda , unfortunately I believe that things will have to get a lot worse before those who voted for "time for change", Kevin 07 and the ACTU aka suicide will realise what they have brought upon themselves and their fellow Australians, we should all hope that when this time arrives that there is indeed a chance to reverse the damage inflicted by Kevin 07 and the "time for change" agents of the UN's cabal of International Socialists.