Lenore Taylor December 1, 2012
After a year of scandals, carbon tax and sexist smackdowns, the scene is set for an election battle over trust and character while policy takes a back seat.
In this Parliament it always comes back to honesty and character.
All of the scandals and even the politics behind the biggest policy change of the year - the carbon tax - hinged on truth, lies and trustworthiness.
On the final bitter, angry sitting day this week, each leader made the character accusation against the other, signalling the deeply personal fight between the two will continue into next's year's election battle.
''The charge is the Prime Minister has been a dodgy and incompetent lawyer and she is an incompetent and untrustworthy PM,'' Tony Abbott said as he enunciated his case against Julia Gillard in the Australian Workers' Union/Slater & Gordon affair.
''This is not about gender. This is about character and you have failed the character test,'' he told the Prime Minister across the despatch box.
But he was unable to back his claim that she had broken the law, and after being defensive and often evasive for days, Julia Gillard was quick to switch to attack, telling Fairfax Media he was too negative, sexist and lightweight to run the country.
''I note some Liberal strategists are saying they are going to reset him or rebuild him over summer as if he was a robot you could bolt another part onto, but this kind of negativity is who he is and that will never change and that will shape the contest in 2013 between me and him, for me.
''I think I emerge from this year in the eyes of Australians as someone who has proved my mettle and someone who is driven by purpose.
''Leadership is about character and if all you can do is complain and divide and dig dirt then you are not a suitable person to run the country … it involves hard-headed policy work. If you want someone to have a House of Representatives dust-up then he is a good bloke to pick, if you want someone to design a complicated policy he'll never get that done, he is incapable of policy heavy lifting.''
In the opinion polls, 2012 ends much as 2011 did - Labor clawing back from ''wipe-out'' to ''within striking distance''.
In fact, after all the scandals, the fight-to-the-death over the carbon tax and Labor's acrimonious leadership challenge, the polls are almost exactly where they were when the year began.
That feels like an improvement for Labor because things got so much worse in between. Like last year, the Coalition finishes confident, but nervous that its support may be soft because voters are reacting to what they don't like about the government, rather than things they like about the opposition.
And they are nervous because one set of numbers is now different.
Gillard's net approval rating (the proportion of voters who think she's doing a good job minus those who think she's doing a bad job) has improved from -15 to -1, according to the Nielsen poll.
Abbott's has deteriorated almost as sharply (-13 to -24). Sixty per cent of the electorate disapprove of how the Coalition leader is doing his job. Only 36 per cent approve.
These are the numbers at the heart of the ''character wars'' - a battle of attrition between two relatively unpopular politicians to convince voters to distrust and dislike their opponent the most.
This week's all-out assault by the deputy Coalition leader, Julie Bishop, over the legal advice Gillard provided to her boyfriend 17 years ago was designed to stall the Prime Minister's approval rating recovery.
Abbott had always personally led the attack on Gillard's legitimacy as a leader - her ''knifing'' of Kevin Rudd to get there, the fact that she leads a minority government, her carbon tax ''lie'', the ongoing theme of untrustworthiness and lack of character. But his successful attack came at a personal cost, so for most of the week his deputy stepped in.
By week's end, Gillard looked like she had been evasive, but there was nothing to prove she had done anything criminally wrong.
''Involved in unethical behaviour and possible unlawful conduct,'' was as strong as Abbott could phrase his charge.
But the Coalition never needed the cliched ''smoking gun'' to achieve its real aim - to remind voters the Prime Minister hung out with what turned out to be some pretty dodgy union characters 17 years ago and to try to link that with much more recent union scandals.
''This isn't just about an old scandal … this is about the ability of this government to stamp out union corruption now,'' Abbott said.
''How can a Prime Minister be expected to stamp out union corruption when very senior members of the government have been associated with corruption themselves.''
Gillard's smackdown misogyny and sexism speech - even though genuine in its emotion - and Labor's ongoing attacks about his political shallowness and absence of policy and negativity have the same political aim - to keep doubts voters always had about the Coalition leader front of mind.
In fact, the sexism speech seems to have helped the Prime Minister in two ways - it reminded everyone of socially-conservative and possibly sexist things the Coalition leader had had to say.
But, according to the polling analyst Andrew Catsaras, it also reminded voters of something they had once liked about Gillard, something that had gone missing since she had become Prime Minister.
The ''content was important, but it was also the moment when she looked like she believed what she was saying again … before that she looked like she was arguing a brief, in that speech she looked like she was speaking from the heart, like she meant it, and people respond to that,'' he said.
But this fight comes at a cost to both sides.
Vicki Arbes,the chief executive of the polling company Hall & Partners Open Mind, said recently voters in her focus groups were so unimpressed by the spectacle of a desperate minority government clinging on against the Coalition's attempts to pull it down, they are almost past caring.
''The anger and disappointment voters felt for Labor after their high expectations in 2007 has dissipated because they have just switched off from the whole thing in disgust. They are disenchanted with politicians and bored with the whole spectacle.''
The government has been fighting to get the electorate to focus on its achievements - which Gillard listed at year's end, including the Murray-Darling Basin plan, committing to the Gonski education reforms, starting the national disability insurance scheme and winning the UN Security Council seat, due to her work and that of ''Kevin [Rudd], [Stephen] Smithy and Bob [Carr]''.
Abbott ended the year promising to unveil his ''positive agenda''. His first attempt was a book-compilation of his political speeches, accompanied by a launch speech in which he said the word ''positive'' many times. Like all oppositions, the Coalition will provide policy at the time it chooses in the lead-up to the election and has vowed that its pledges will be costed.
So 2012 turned out to be a year where the major parties have fought themselves back to the point where they started.
In early February, as Rudd and his supporters circled and Australians' summer tan lines began to fade, the first Nielsen poll showed an improvement on the truly dire situation for Labor of late 2011. Labor was on a primary vote of 33 per cent and a two-party preferred vote of 48 per cent. The numbers in the most recent Nielsen poll were almost exactly the same, although other polls are slightly closer. They dipped to unprecedented lows in the lead up to the July 1 carbon tax introduction and recovered slowly thereafter.
It was also a year of unremitting drama. It began with the Prime Minister being dragged away from a ''riot'' outside an Australia Day function also attended by the Coalition leader, and a storm over revelations that one of the Prime Minister's own media advisers may have triggered the protest by tipping off Aboriginal protesters about something Abbott had allegedly said. (Months later the AFP found the adviser had not done anything wrong.)
In February, Rudd was drawn into an earlier-than-intended leadership challenge, and lost, but only after his character and achievements had been pummeled by his frontbench colleagues who said he had presided over a shambolic and dysfunctional government and had been contemptuous of them and of the Australian people. (The voters still said they preferred him as leader.)
April and May were dominated by the dual Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson scandals (both are now sitting on the crossbenches).
By August, the scandalised headlines had been replaced by the long-running AWU affair.
And the back-to-back scandal was at least part of the reason Gillard struggled for so long to find her political stride.
As one minister (a Gillard supporter) summed it up ''we are finishing better than we started but it's still not good. That's why an early election makes no sense. We need some time to get our message out through all this trivia and bullshit''.
At that end of 2010, Abbott was cocky enough to tell journalists that ''next year'' he'd be hosting his Christmas Party at The Lodge.
Last year, he wasn't so boastful but he still thought that goal was in reach within 12 months. By next Christmas he may well be there.
But Gillard made it clear trust and character are two big issues she intends to make sure will stand in his way. And they are the same issues upon which he is relying to oust her.
