Influencing the Influencers

Here we are at the end of another week of campaigning, just three more to go until polling day.  That’s twenty-one days for all you predictors out there to get with our program and test your voting hunches with our election predictor;  http://electionpredictor.com.au/.  We know that some candidates and even a few heavies at both campaign headquarters have been playing with it, though they haven’t revealed to us their predictions.  Sadly.

The media has been spending a lot of time with the usual griping about a boring campaign.   (Perhaps they should cool off with the Election Predictor) Candidates are too scripted, they say.  Where is the colour?  And then they got some with targetted leaks about the mutterings of the Labor Cabinet that were supposed to harm Prime Minister Gillard and make her appear hard and calculating, lacking heart.  She fought back.  In doing so we were told, she finally exposed the real Julia; tough, determined, passionate.  It all  looked very much like the old Julia Gillard to me.

Coalition leader, Tony Abbott has been frustrating the same scribes by doing his job equally as well as Ms Gillard is doing hers.  That means always being   ’on message’.  Where is the passionate mad monk of old?, they chorus.  The one who put his foot in it and embarrassed his colleagues with some ill chosen words.  They are recalling his infamous comments that global warming was bunkum (I think he said, ‘crap’) and that he found his then role as Opposition spokesman for Aboriginal Affairs lacked excitement, amongst other gaffs.  He is not saying any of that now, and it is supposed to be a negative. 

It seems very obvious to me why.  Like the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott is a professional politician who has acheived his wildest dream to lead the Liberal Party.  Afterall, he was the most unlikely choice, after two very different leaders and some better-favoured candidates.  He now has his determined heart and mind set on another wild dream; to be Prime Minister  – in the footsteps, bar a couple of skips, of his hero, former Liberal Prime Minister, John Howard.  Why would he leave that to chance and let slip a few ill chosen words?  Besides, my hunch is that Tony was a little bored and directionless when he made those earlier gaffs.  His period after the election loss in 2007 was a very public time of career grief.  It is not surprising he lacked direction and went into a fug, exciting though it was for political junkies.  Not now though.  His eye is on a prize.

So we should not be surprised that Mr Abbott is as determined to follow the script as the equally ambitious, and on message,  Julia Gillard.  He is an Oxford educated scholar.  He trained for the priesthood (enough said about personal discipline). He is a serious athelete who competes in marathons and bike rides that last for days.  He knows what has to be done to win.  So does the Prime Minister.  And to do that they have to get to the swinging voters, not the rusted on, politically connected, voters who read the daily reports covering every aspect of the campaign.   So not surprisingly, both camps are aiming their messages at the ‘non political junkies’.  That is the large army of voters who have busy lives, inhabit the outer suburbs, don’t read opinion pages, don’t watch political debates and do not want anything but  straightforward, ‘on message’ campaigns that they can dip into and out of at their will. 

Political campaigns are not for the initiated.  If you want excitement, wait for question time.  Or watch Australia play New Zealand in the Bledisloe Cup on Saturday night.  Now, that is a contest.