Message in the madness?

John Howard and his Liberal party machine have become famous for winning elections by defining the parameters of the election, honing a negative message to not risk the opposition and a positive message to sell the government's credentials. When they have got into trouble during the electoral cycle, they have poured bucketloads of money on their problems and neutralised the threat, thus arresting their opponents' chance to capitalise on policies that serve a narrow, rather than national interest.

This year, the issue of climate change has come back to haunt Howard as his Achilles heel was cruelly exposed. The answer was clearly blowing in the wind (but Fran Bailey was too busy claiming how wind power damaged the tourist industry). Climate change is something Howard wishes would just go away: his inconvenient truth is it won't and has turned his cabinet (and the seat of Wentworth) into an unruly contest between those who can see the writing on the wall and those who consider it to be indecipherable graffiti. Workchoices stubbornly failed to die as an issue as the government's spectacular self-inflicted harm betrayed the battlers.

The Liberals have been totally clueless as to how to fight the election. They have no idea how to get to Rudd and keep vacillating between the old game plan that Rudd has neutralised and the brainstorming ideas Liberal HQ is making up on the run. Rudd has seized the high policy ground and defined the terms of the campaign. Howard has jumped around all over the place on climate change, saying simultaneously that his stands for jobs which will be lost by Rudd's dangerous policy and then that there is no difference between the two parties. I find it fairly hard to believe that Julia Gillard and Mark Vaille have the same view on climate change, nor that the fact that Howard reportedly refused cabinet proposals to adopt emissions trading in 1999 and 2003 suggests we should entrust him with setting our climate course in future.

The economic message which should be Howard's bread and butter has become so scrambled it should probably be served with a side order of hash browns. Howard has said that the economy is going really well, working families have never had it so good. Yet Tsunami Pete sees dark clouds on the horizon. Labor is an irresponsible economic manager, yet Pete acknowledged Labor deregulated the setting of rates. The Liberals are almost embarrassed by their own tax cuts, and their exploratory 'the economy is everything' ad lasted one night.

The Liberals don't seem to know why they are losing support and hence have not the slightest idea how to fix the problem.

Hockey's hamfisted union attacks that unions are both irrelevant and so dangerous that they cannot be put in a position of power demonstrates the deeper disconnect from reality held by his party.

The Liberals seem to be running two messages: growth (greed) is good and unions are the root of all evil. The growth message totally ignores the fact that Rudd has wedged them on the economy - focussing on kitchen table economics rather than macroeconomics. It actively drives voters away. The union message plants an idea in voters' minds which has no connection to the present reality. It drifts the ideological bubble the Liberals exist in out into the community, where I suspect it will receive an almighty pricking.