Greg Ansley: Voters to choose macho or makeover

Style matters as much as substance as politicians compete for Australian Ballots. Photo / Supplied

So much for vision and the big picture. If Australians tick their ballot papers according to the weight of media coverage of this campaign so far, the outcome of the August 21 election will rest as much on hairdos, macho men and dirty deeds as on policy.

With both sides preaching parsimony - albeit with billions still being thrown about to wherever it seems likely to do each party best - style is struggling with substance for ascendancy.

That means some decent low punching and, as the second of the campaign's five weeks draws to a close, former boxer Tony Abbott and the Opposition he leads are looking good.

After struggling through a tough first round, Abbott has since been driving Prime Minister Julia Gillard into the corner.

While he has been able to focus on pledges and policy with one arm and straight-arming Labor with the other, Gillard now faces a real struggle to regain traction.

But the campaign so far has proved former British prime minister Harold Wilson's maxim: a week is a long time in politics, and there are three to go. Despite serious slippage in the opinion polls, Labor remains favoured to win.

Next week Gillard should be able to regain momentum, with possibly the best news of the campaign so far waiting for her. Inflation is down, the price of food is down and the Reserve Bank board is now expected to keep interest rates at their present level when it meets on Tuesday.

Provided there are no further damaging distractions, the Government should also be able to target some of Abbott's vulnerabilities, including conflicting directions in company tax policies and problems with the Coalition's paid parental leave scheme.

Almost half the country's voters have yet to be convinced of who they want to elect, so local MPs' ability to judge and manage the mood of their turf will be crucial.

Family, home and hearth remain paramount.

Across the nation, Newspoll has identified the most important issues, in order of priority, as health, education, the economy, leadership, national security, asylum seekers, interest rates, inflation, climate change and industrial relations.

Labor rates highest in health, education, climate change and industrial relations but trails the Coalition in the rest.

But Morgan polling shows a more complex landscape. Morgan says that since late June, when Gillard ousted former prime minister Kevin Rudd, economic issues have soared to become the nation's prime concern.

Pollster Gary Morgan said men were most concerned about economy and taxation, women about health.

The economy was the biggest issue in New South Wales and Victoria; in the mining states of Queensland and Western Australia it was taxation; and South Australians and Tasmanians worry most about social welfare.

Policies and promises have been rolling out, from population and child care to tax and health, but the great body of reportage has been on the theatre of politics.

The headlines have been dominated by leaks from within senior Government ranks alleging Gillard opposed Labor's paid parental leave scheme and higher pensions - the latter, according to Channel Nine political editor Laurie Oakes, because "old people don't vote Labor".

The Daily Telegraph ran Gillard on its front page as a computer-aged pensioner, with the banner: Spend a day in our shoes.

This bombshell, paradoxically, produced one of Gillard's finest moments of the campaign to date.

She shrugged off a carefully managed airbrushed image and showed real steel, blunting the impact by admitting she had robustly questioned whether the moves - involving more than A$50 billion ($59.5 billion) - were affordable and agreeing to them when the case was proved.

Gillard's argument was that this was exactly the role of a leader and that she would make hard choices in the best interest of the nation: if voters wanted a soft option they should look somewhere else.

But Gillard's problem is not so much debate within Cabinet. It is instead the image of a Government driven by such bitterness and division that someone at its highest levels is threatening its survival by feeding damaging secrets to the media.

Labor's fear is that something else may be about to drop, completely throwing its campaign and further supporting the Opposition's claims that the Government has become a "chaotic shambles".

Such was the impact this week that three-quarters of readers responding to a News.com.au poll said the leaks were derailing Labor.

Noted one commentator: "Tony Abbott only had to show up to win."

Gillard won big with a 13-page cover spread in the widely-read Women's Weekly, a highly sympathetic piece that penetrated well to an audience well beyond the headlines that were otherwise plaguing her.

Illustrated by full-page makeovers, readers learned that yes, she had smoked marijuana and probably drank too much as a student, but that she was now a woman of real substance, intellect and power.

Elsewhere she has been subjected to endless media discussions about her accent, her evolving image, the size of her earlobes and her fashion sense. Noted The Australian's fashion editor: "There is still a long way to go."

She has grown snappy at repeated questions about her de facto relationship with partner Tim Mathieson, has come under fire from the Christian right for atheism and lack of children, and was warned by Perth's Catholic Archbishop Barry Hickey that she may lose votes among followers worried that she might undermine the Church's special privileges.

Abbot, meanwhile, has been pictured everywhere with his wife or daughters in tow, riding his bike or clambering over real men's machines in outback mines.

To date, macho has been besting makeover.

Polls at the beginning of the week showing a dramatic narrowing of Labor's lead and in Gillard's status as preferred prime minister were repeated yesterday in a new Morgan poll.

Made in the wake of Sunday's debate that put Abbott in a much brighter light, the poll said Labor's lead over the Coalition had slipped to six points in the two-party preferred vote that decides Australian elections, running now at 53 per cent to 47 per cent.

Morgan also found that since the debate Gillard and Abbott were on equal footing on job approval - although Gillard maintains a narrower lead as preferred prime minister - and that Abbott was gaining ground with female voters.

* Next week - round three. Watch this space.