You can find this same video at Andrew Bolt and Tim Blair because it truly is incredible. An honest piece of reporting, at The Guardian yet, unimaginable in The Age, The SMH or at the ABC. The reporter went to find out what working class Australians really think of Rudd, they told her all kinds of negative things about the PM and the ALP, and then she reported what they said.

I keep trying to think of some positive piece of good government we have had from six years of Labor and I cannot think of a thing. Others may wish to help me out, but aside from spending oceans of money on stuff that is entirely directed at the charity end of the specturm of social expenditure, there is nothing there. Most of what they have done has been directed towards making it harder to earn a profit in business, from the Fair Work Act to the mining tax.

I get the Coalition point that they will pay for their programs through the increased tax revenue that will be generated by a return to stronger private sector growth while a serious proportion of the waste we now find in place is wound back. That’s the sort of thing that tends to work. It’s gotta be better than now.

My worry is that after six years of the present government the fear will remain that even if we elect the Coaltion, in six years time this same mob might be back again, to pick up where they left off. There will, by then, be a better bottom line on our fiscal position which they can once more begin to lay waste.

The folks over at The Age and I suppose it’s the same at the SMH are impervious to common sense. But for me, the best Coalition ads are the ALP ads that feature Kevin Rudd. Three more like the last six ought to scare anyone. Seeing him there in the flesh is Night of the Living Dead. I just wonder what the features of the record he is running on he would like to highlight. A more miserable looking lot than the campaign workers standing behind the PM it would be very hard to find.

Reading the AFR with its decideldly pro-Labor tilt is a quite irritating moment in a day. The front page lead today is “Treasury warns of budget blowouts” which is not about the past and Labor but about the future and “a warning to Australia’s politicians and voters” in general and the Coaltion in particular. Thanks for the warning but where were you guys at Treasury when you were designing the last six budgets and then covering up for the Government.

But just in case we were worried about irresponsible actions by politicians, the front page helpfully points its finger in its story across the top of the page: “Hockey rejects surplus date”. And as an aid to making sure the point is understood, there is in smaller print, “Labor demands Coalition costings”. Did they indeed? Well we’ve already seen Labor’s costings as noted in the smaller print as well which reads “$30bn budget deficit confirmed”. And who, might it be asked, is responsible for that? Doesn’t say, but it does warn that if the Coalition doesn’t implement Labor’s tobacco tax then the budget hole will be their fault.

There is then another story, “all at sea over the future of the GST” which tells the AFR’s readers that OK, maybe the Coaltion has promised not to raise the GST this time, but Arthur Sinodinos had said ten days ago that this promise is for the first term only. I take it a tobacco tax immediately is better than a very improbable GST rise in three years time since Abbott has made it clear it will not happen. Does the AFR perhaps think it is still dealing with Julia “there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead” Gillard?

And it would be derelict for me not to mention the article splashed across what is described as a news page on page 4 in which the ever reliable Laura Tingle has written, according to the headline, “Abbott has a fiscal gap left to explain”. Whether there is anything for Rudd to explain is left unexplained.

There is, however, one story that does shift the other way, this on page 2, and which really is an actual news story. Its headline: “Business conditions worst in four years”. What that has to do with the election no one at the AFR is prepared to say.

My wife spoke to me this morning about picking up a copy of the AFR while having coffee somewhere because it was the only paper and she remarked, in quite some astonishment, that it seemed to be anti-Abbott. So I have had a look and sure enough the front page is filled with the latest Labor meme, how is the Coalition going to pay for all of its promises? From a party which last ran a surplus in 1988, and only for a single year, that is about as ridiculous as it gets. If getting a surplus is the issue, come on, who would you really back?

But what also caught my eye was the story above the main story across the top of the page which ought to be more to the point about where this economy is heading. The first para:

Labour market experts say a dramatic three-year wage freeze at car maker GM Holden could trigger pay pauses elsewhere as rising job insecurity and low inflation press down on Australia’s high cost structure. [My bolding]

Some economic management we’ve had! I listened to the debate and there was nothing offered by Kevin Rudd that made me think he even understood there is a problem never mind that he had solutions for what ails us. In fact, my impression was that he had no idea what do to about any of the things that need fixing.

The Coalition is infinitely more likely to reduce wasteful spending, improve our employment prospects and assist in the raising of living standards. Why is it the Coalition, then, that is being asked to show its creds on restoring the budget to surplus?

There are large elements in the ALP who are all but begging the community to give it a spell in opposition so that it can do a bit of renewal. They do not want Rudd returned as Prime Minister and I am talking about former members of the cabinet and even about former leaders. What does Julia really think? She’s not saying but how hard is it to guess. But there in the AFR this weekend we find Mark Latham who is being as explicit as he could possibly be. He is here discussing how unfit to govern members of the Parliamentary members of the ALP are. This is what he wrote:

They saw issues as an exercise in ideological dogma, instead of problem-solving. Learning and adapting were foreign concepts.

And as much as it’s true about the Parliamentary party so much more is it true about those who will vote them back no matter what. The rustidons as one comment had it. What to they care about, jobs, education, health, border security or our future prosperity. Their self identity would disintegrate if they put a number n-1 against the name of a Coalition candidate with a Labor candidate at n. But to go back to Mark Latham again in his column, this is, I think, exactly right not just about many in the ALP’s Parliamentary party but about many of their supporters as well:

When the world fails to comply with its ideological template, it uses ignorance as a way of keeping its beliefs intact.

There are queues of disaffected Labor Party people who want supporters to walk away this time but these people won’t do it. They just won’t do it and they make up near on half the voters in the country.

The real question is who are these 49% that the polls say still intend to vote for Labor? Unimaginable really. But I do have an article at Quadrant Online that looks at the election as we enter into our first full day. And what I discuss is the nature of the ballot with the natural constituency of a Labor party made up of those who live by the words they use rather than the goods they produce, those who work for governments at every level (including those crony capitalists) and those who live off the plundering of incomes by the state. It’s a pretty big coalition and it is getting harder to beat every year as their numbers keep growing by political design.

The QoL article is mainly about an article I did just after the American election in Quadrant itself. And here is the point:

The Left’s incompetence and bad government are never enough to ensure its defeat. And the more that outdated notions of personal freedom and independence are moved downwards in the scale of collective values the more difficult a party of the Left will be to dislodge. The ALP has not yet lost the next election. Barack Obama, with hardly a success to his name, is still the president. Polls or no polls, who the Australian prime minister will be a year from today is yet to be determined.

This will be a tough election. Why that is, however, I cannot tell since the allure of the ALP is invisible. But there are plenty on the other side who see it exactly the other way round.