WEEK THAT WAS: Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has faltered - pictured here during a visit to the Salvation Army "Street Level" Centre in Brisbane - but Prime Minister Julia Gillard is more prominently in the firing line. Picture: Peter Wallis Source: The Courier-Mail
TONY Abbott has had a shocking week. One of his shadow ministers was sacked by local pre-selectors despite the Opposition Leader's vociferous support and for two days there was policy confusion on the Coalition's marquee plan to scrap Labor's carbon pricing scheme.
However, such is the weight of can't-take-a-trick bad news pulling Labor heads further and further down towards the political pits, no one noticed.
A week ago Abbott was batting for Gary Humphreys, a veteran Coalition figure in Canberra, Senator and shadow parliamentary secretary for legal and defence policy. This counted for nothing when local Liberals dumped him for local assembly leader Zed Seselja.
No sooner was this embarrassment in Abbott's in-tray than details of dumping the carbon tax and unwinding the emissions trading scheme accompanying it had the Coalition leadership in knots.
The man who would be treasurer, Joe Hockey, had to correct himself when he claimed wrongly the Coalition would compensate businesses adversely impacted by Labor's carbon policy.
While he was brushing this gaffe aside, Abbott put his own foot in it by saying the Coalition carbon policy was all about incentives and had no penalties - contradicting the Direct Action plan which clearly states recidivist polluters would cop effective fines.
If one or more of these things happened to Julia Gillard and Labor, you could imagine the headlines and fallout. More chaos, dysfunction and crisis would lead the news bulletins and pundits would rush to the next talking-head-athon to declare the Government was on its last legs.
"One more day like this for Gillard and her colleagues will move against her," former Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson would write.
"You can't lose a front bencher you've championed and spend two days stuffing up your No.1 policy and expect to survive."
Source: Getty Images
While Richardson was writing something similar about Gillard and Labor for other reasons, Abbott was barely slowing down for these minor speed bumps on his so far effortless drive to the Lodge.
Australia has had an interesting first four weeks of the seven-month election campaign we're not supposed to be having, with Labor looking like an out-of-control pinball in a machine played by a late-night, inebriated chancer.
Bad polls, the best-laid plans turning to horse manure, mining tax reality arriving like a Muhammad Ali hay-maker in the seventh round and Labor's biggest - and once most successful - state branch morphing into an episode of The Sopranos.
A looming five-day visit by Gillard to Sydney's western suburbs suffered from a ham-fisted early announcement, providing an open goal for critics, doubters and opponents to take shots.
"Why wouldn't you announce your presence by just turning up," says one Gillard supporter frustrated by an often hard to follow media strategy.
"Letting it leak out makes us a sitting duck until we get there and do something. It's like there's no strategy behind these tactics."
Also not helping was the memory of Gillard's January National Press Club comment that she was announcing a September 14 election date so she could get on with governing and leave campaigning for the weeks before the poll is actually held. This was also made worse by the messy way the "Go West!" visit was revealed.
Gillard arrives in Rooty Hill, in the federal Labor electorate of Chifley held by rising star backbencher Ed Husic with a healthy margin of 12.3 per cent, this weekend, attending a sold-out dinner at the iconic RSL where she is expected to make promises and the case for these sprawling, densely populated suburbs not to give up on her Government.
Sydney's west is not just a vast electoral map (there are more seats in this region than in all of South Australia) but a vibrant economy, with two million people and the myriad social and daily problems found in any conurbation - pockets of unemployment and social disadvantage, transport choke points and infrastructure past its use-by date.
For Gillard, her Government and Labor, there is probably no more important region.
That Labor held the majority of western Sydney seats in 2010 - despite swings nudging double figures in some places - is the reason Gillard has spent the past 29 months in the Lodge.
However, the itches voters were scratching in 2010 have not gone away. There is antipathy to a number of Labor policies including carbon pricing and asylum seekers, keenly felt cost-of-living pressures and an exasperated weariness with Labor - driven by disappointment with Canberra and disgust with events closer to home in the state seat of power, Macquarie St in the Sydney CBD.
While some people talk of Labor's New South Wales problem, it is more of a western Sydney problem, according to voting history.
While the ALP vote in these suburbs dropped in 2010, elsewhere in the state Gillard's sitting members managed to increase their support.
However, the other danger for Labor in losing seats in and around Sydney is the draining of the talent pool. Experienced and capable ministers Chris Bowen, David Bradbury, Jason Clare and Tony Burke are at risk as are the next rank of leaders such as Husic and Michelle Rowland.
Losing some or most of these MPs would also significantly alter the factional balance in Canberra, with most of the NSW Right's representation - including its leadership - taken out at one poll. This would shift the centre of gravity for Labor's National Right south of the Murray River to the likes of Bill Shorten and Stephen Conroy.
The backdrop for Gillard and Labor is a glaring billboard of losing polls. After six months of hard work when the ALP's primary vote was pushed back above 30 per cent and then dragged to a "competitive" zone of 34-36 per cent, Government ministers started the year allowing themselves to feel a little positive, often against their better instincts.
Now, nine federal polls later, the power of positive thinking has been all but snuffed out, found only in a handful of grimly determined ministerial offices but not shared by a fatalistic and resigned caucus.
After the week in and around Rooty Hill, Gillard and her colleagues return to Canberra for two weeks of Parliament, expected to feature the roll out of the detailed aged care package foreshadowed by minister Mark Butler last year.
If the first two weeks of Parliament is any guide, this might not be a happy time for Gillard.
There will be another Newspoll on the day sittings resume, where the desperate hope will be that Labor's primary vote still begins with a 3.
A week later, Fairfax will publish its next Nielsen poll.
If the vote in either slips into the 20s, panic could replace despondency and nerves will be further jangled although there still seems nowhere for such a bad mood to go other than Canberra bars and liquor cabinets.
Perhaps when taking an early sharpener, some of these Labor MPs might dwell on the broader picture being painted about the current and future ALP.
When Gillard addressed the Australian Workers Union on the Gold Coast last month she went out of her way to plant Labor's flag in the trade union turf - declaring she led not a progressive or social democratic government but a Labor Government.
At a time when fewer than one in five Australian workers - just 18 per cent - belong to unions and the gravity of this movement is shifting from the blue collar to the white collar professionals, it sounded like an echo of the past.
This declaration of "labourism" was reinforced when Gillard and other party leaders cheered the departure of the Greens from what had been an uneasy alliance since the 2010 election and new Immigration Minister - and prime ministerial confidant - Brendan O'Connor announced a government crackdown on 457 visas for foreign workers.
In case you missed the message, Workplace Relations Minister Shorten flew to Perth to address the Maritime Union of Australia conference where he wished he could inspire his caucus colleagues to adopt the kind of fighting militancy on display.
Twelve months ago, Treasurer Wayne Swan rolled out his class warfare strategy with his "take on the billionaires" essay in The Monthly, a theme we are likely to see more of as the structural spending cuts needed to fund big-ticket disability and schools schemes will create a "them and us" divide.
Labor hopes a winning coalition can be built from this reclaimed base although some ALP idealists see it as a losing hand.
Dennis Glover, a Labor speechwriter who has worked for Swan in recent times, worries too many eggs are being put in too small a basket.
"Taken alone, neither organised labour nor believers in the social-democratic state nor educated progressives can deliver the Left the majority it needs to influence the direction of the country," he wrote yesterday.
"But together they can. Three out of three of these constituencies means potential government.
"Two out of three means certain opposition.
"One out of three means existential crisis."
Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail's national affairs editor.
dennis.atkins@news.com.au
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