By Mungo MacCallum Mon 26 Aug 2013

Photo: These days the campaign launch is just another painfully staged event on the way to the polls. (AAP: Alan Porritt)

There was little of substance to be found in Tony Abbott feel-good election campaign launch, but in this era of risk aversion, that was rather the point, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Campaign launches aren't what they used to be.

In the old days, the leaders launched their campaigns, as the word suggests, at the beginning, and they held big public meetings open to one and all in which interjections were welcomed, even encouraged. If there wasn't a lot of movement, colour and noise and even the occasional punch-up, the occasion was adjudged a failure.

And the launches were about something: the politicians were expected - nay, compelled - to reveal a detailed policy covering all the important points they would take to the election. Such policies were often hard to cost accurately, and in any case, in the times before deficits became anathema and surpluses sacrosanct, precise numbers were not considered vital: in all his years as prime minister Sir Robert Menzies never delivered a surplus and you don't hear Tony Abbott excoriating the founder of his party for this appalling dereliction.

Nowadays, of course, all the important policies were declared long ago, and, in Abbott's case at least, the costings have been fudged or concealed and are likely to stay that way.

The major launches used to take place within a day or so of each other, giving the voters and the commentators a chance to dissect and compare them before the real argy-bargy of the campaign got underway. And they were big news: all the radio and later the television stations covered them as a matter of course. But how the times have changed.

These days the campaign launch is just another painfully staged event on the way to the polls - something of an inconvenience, actually, as it keeps the leaders away from more telegenic venues and they are not allowed wear funny hats or molest babies for the hour or two that it takes.

Any form of spontaneity is of course a no-no - the whole thing takes place in a hermetically sealed bubble, under the kind of security you would expect at a high-tech weapons laboratory. The exact time and place of Tony Abbott's launch last Sunday was a closely guarded secret until the end: I could find no reference to it on television, or even Google, until Saturday night, and even then all we were told was that it would be somewhere in Brisbane.

Presumably the stringently vetted invited guests, the ones to be patted down by a goon squad after passing through the metal detectors, were given a little more notice, but alas, my own invitation must have got lost in the mail; so I sat down in front of the TV to make what I could out of this pseudo-happening. Frankly, I would have rather been at the beach, or even at the dentist; but political journalism can be a cruel game.

And it turned out to be all a bit déjà vu - much like Abbott's launch in 2010. First we had Campbell Newman to tell us how wonderful he is and how Tony Abbott isn't bad either; then Julie Bishop, who was actually quite funny about Rudd (she even told a mildly blue joke) before waxing lyrical about Abbott; then Warren Truss, proving once again why Barnaby Joyce reckons he will have no trouble taking over the leadership of the National Party.

And then a surprise, albeit one stolen from a previous campaign: just as Mark Latham's wholesome wife Janine was trotted out in 2004 to assure us that her man was really nice and kind after all, Abbott's wholesome daughters Bridget and Frances wafted on stage to go all mawkish about their dad. Well, it was a relief after Warren Truss.

And then, finally, the main event: the royal couple, Tony and Margie, smooched their way through the cheering crowds to deposit the dear leader on stage, where he spent just over half an hour telling us very little about anything.

There is a story that the veteran radio commentator Eric Baume once concluded one of his diatribes by asking his producer what he thought. Well, replied the candid functionary, it was all bullshit. "Ah, yes," replied Baume, no whit abashed, "but it was good bullshit." And the same could be said for Abbott's feel-good harangue, up to a point.

That point was reached when, after the usual condemnation of debt, deficit, budget crisis and reckless spending, he still did not have a word to say about his own gaping accounting hole, despite having added a lazy half billion or so to it in the course of his speech. At the time this did not matter much; he was among friends. The Channel Seven worm also showed general adulation, as did the station's vox pops, which gave him seven out of ten. But on reflection, they would want to: surely no one except supporters and masochists would have been watching.

Even at this late stage, Abbott was still asking the voters to take him purely on trust - to give him a go, to try something different, to change for the sake of change. The only real reason he was giving for the election of a Coalition government was that it couldn't be worse than the last lot.

And the polls show that while this will almost certainly be enough, there are still lingering doubts; the next day's Newspoll showed a slight but perceptible swing back to Labor. An aberration, probably. But on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's great "I have a dream" speech, surely we were entitled to more than just another wafflethon.

Kevin Rudd, we are told (well, actually, I happened to overhear it), is not planning his own launch until next weekend - with just a week to polling and, if history is anything to go by, the election well and truly won and lost. It is likely to be more like a wake than a call to battle.

But perhaps that's how politics is in 2013: lamentations for what might have been are to be preferred to the risks involved in vision and spontaneity. One of Abbott's own themes was not to expect miracles. We don't and we won't. Like I say, it's not like the old days.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum will be writing weekly for The Drum throughout the campaign. He is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.

Safety first: the mantra for the modern campaigner - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)