KEY POINTS:
With less than one week to go, Labor in Australia last night launched a television equivalent to National's highly effective billboards campaign in 2005, seeking to highlight difference between the parties with simplicity.
Unlike the blue and red, it is shot in black and white and contrasts two brief statements.
Kevin Rudd's questions or statements are punctuated with a light ting of an orchestral triangle.
John Howard's questions or answers are punctuated with a game shower buzzer that denotes the tone "loser" - you're out.
It goes like this:
Words over Rudd picture: I will start an education revolution (winning ting!)
Words over Howard picture.: I won't (losing buzz)
Rudd: I will give Australia world class broadband
Howard: I won't
Rudd: I will abolish Workchoice
Howard: I won't
Howard: I will build nuclear reactors.
Rudd: I won't.
Rudd: I will stay the full term.
Howard: I won't
Colour shot with Labour logo: Vote Labour.
Fin.
Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello and heir to the leadership held a press conference in a wood-panelled room to talk up the fears of Labor bringing the mining boom to an end, the deal under the preference system between Labor and the Greens, and the possibility that Labor lefty deputy Julia Gillard might be left in charge of the country rather often with Rudd's penchant for Foreign Affairs.
The Liberals are very fond of characterising the campaign as one between substance and style. There wasn't much of the former from either side yesterday.
Nonetheless it belonged to Rudd. The Labor ad ran just before Rudd appeared last night on the hugely popular "Rove" television show - the chat show which airs on TV3 in New Zealand hosted by a young-ish man with the sort of cross-generational pull politicians dream of.
Howard, so Rove says, had never agreed to go onto the show. It was a punt for Rudd.
He will have some in his image-makers camp worrying about how "unprime-ministerial" such an appearance might be and others arguing that if it goes right, it might give him a better connection with the folk who see him as a nerdy, annaly retentive, super-controlled ex-diplomat.
It went well. Though Rove's tough questions turn out to be not what Rudd will do to lower interest rates but what that ear wax actually tasted like (old footage of Rudd in Parliament appearing to eat his own ear wax hit the screens a couple of weeks ago). He joked that he had been scratching his lip.
The most anticipated question, however, was Rove's standard to all his star guests: who would you turn gay for?
Howard was ambushed with the question earlier on the campaign trail by a Rove emissary and proved that he doesn't have an answer for every question.
Rudd had a long time to prepare an answer and it was this: not Dame Edna, as someone else had suggested, nor Kel Knight from Kath and Kim but, he said, his wife, Therese.
No, it doesn't make sense. Rove picked up on that. But this is a campaign. It doesn't have to make sense. It just has to work.
* Audrey Young is in Australia in the build-up to the Australian elections on November 24.
