Gillard's cover-up campaign

This is when Tony Abbott could start getting really worried.

Bad enough that Australia's punters are betting against their Opposition Leader, the polls have been going pear-shaped, and it has been a dreadful first week of campaigning for the August 21 election.

Now the nation's women's magazines are going Julia Gillard's way. Australia's first female Prime Minister has been splashed across their covers and picture spreads in a positive glow pollster Gary Morgan says has never before been achieved by a national leader.

Morgan's research shows that more than a quarter of voters read at least one of the major women's magazines, with readership soaring as high as 40 per cent in some electorates, and with significant penetration into key marginal seats in Queensland and New South Wales.

Added to other polls showing that women clearly prefer Gillard to Abbott, the news is not good.

Then again, Gillard is having her own problems. In her first speech as Prime Minister after deposing Kevin Rudd last month, she nominated three key issues in need of urgent repair before calling an election, and set about fixing them: Rudd's disastrous mining super-profits tax, the fraught problem of asylum seekers sailing from Indonesia, and climate change.

In the opening week of the campaign the deal she brokered for a resources rent tax with the nation's biggest miners has begun to unravel, with the prospect of a renewed anti-Government television campaign by the sector; her proposed solution to the armada of asylum seekers has become a political and diplomatic nightmare; and the signs are that a new climate change policy is going to please nobody.

And there is a Banquo hovering behind both leaders.

For Gillard it is Rudd, now back from his after-coup R&R and campaigning in his safe Brisbane seat of Griffith, refusing to talk to the media and sticking solely to local issues and pressing local flesh.

Providing all goes well and promises are kept, Rudd will be back in a senior Cabinet job if Labor is returned for a second term.

But voters were repelled by the brutality of Gillard's coup, and the media remains fixated on both his public appearances and an unfolding series of developments that have been upstaging the Prime Minister.

When he re-appeared for the first time since his ousting, at Coorparoo State School, Sky News dumped live coverage of Gillard to cross to the elegant 134-year-old primary school in Brisbane's affluent inner suburbs.

Much of Gillard's early focus has also been on the DIY job she has been doing on Rudd's mining, asylum-seeker and climate policies.

She is trying to remove the focus from her former leader's likely role in a new Gillard administration - the immediate problem of finding an appropriate job in the Cabinet, and speculation about the future of Foreign Minister Stephen Smith.

But this week came the revelation that Rudd has been offered a part-time job with the United Nations, handing the Opposition a handy cudgel with which to belabour Gillard and again distracting attention from her campaign.

And finally, the ABC's new 24-hour TV news channel reported on Thursday night that during his time as Prime Minister, Rudd had paid scant attention to Cabinet's national security committee, the body that determines whether the country goes to war, its responses to terrorism, key policies such as border control, and national crises.

Rudd was reported to have skipped meetings, and to have treated the committee with what one senior official described as "disdain".

Gillard has declined to comment in the face of a concerted attack by the Opposition, but the revelations have again hauled campaign focus back on to the former Prime Minister.

Abbott's Banquo is more spectre than flesh: John Howard, Australia's second-longest serving Prime Minister, with whom Abbott worked for more than 15 years as an MP and minister.

Since becoming Liberal Leader last December Abbott has tried to distance himself from the Howard Government.

But the association remains glued to him, manifesting in a miserable first week of the campaign.

When he promised policies to drive down interest rates, he was immediately hooted down with comparisons to Howard's similar 2004 election pledge that rates would always be lower under a Coalition Government.

The pledge was followed by six rises by an independent Reserve Bank that pays no heed to political pronouncements.

More seriously, Abbott remains mired in the morass of WorkChoices, the disastrous industrial legislation that played a crucial role in throwing Howard not only out of office, but also out of Parliament, in 2007.

No matter how hard Abbott has tried to convince voters that WorkChoices is "dead, buried and cremated", and that no real changes would be made to Labor's present laws by a Coalition Government, Howard's legacy hangs like an albatross across his campaign.

For some Liberal MPs, the association is too close to the bone. Abbott has laughed it off, but his face has vanished from a number of electorate pamphlets and other campaign material, against the usual practice of pushing the leader.

This reflects a key difference in the two campaigns: Labor is running its usual tight, disciplined and highly efficient election machinery; the Liberals are stumbling as they try to get their engine into gear.

Although it will run with increasing efficiency as the campaign progresses, the fact that the Liberals' Collins St, Melbourne, campaign headquarters was not up and fully running until Wednesday - five days after the election was called - has hit the Coalition's early days.

On the hustings, a so-far otherwise dull but worthy campaign has had some light moments: a Labor staffer confronting Abbott in bright red budgie smugglers, Gillard coo-cooing and kissing babies in Brisbane, and being hijacked by Leichhardt shopkeeper Maria Saraceno during a walk through the Sydney suburb; Abbott appearing as a judge on Hey, Hey It's Saturday's Red Faces, and being mobbed by schoolkids who knew he was famous, but not quite sure why.

But the campaign is following a grim struggle for middle Australia, playing on both the fears and aspirations of suburban voters in the marginal seats that hold the key to victory.

Both sides are pounding the drum about asylum seekers and population growth, outbidding each other on measures to choke the flow of boats and control overcrowding and congestion in the nation's big cities. Both deny a linkage between the two, but an inference still resonates among the 64 per cent of Australians a Morgan poll this week showed wanted all asylum seekers returned home and told to apply though "proper channels".

The campaign has also focused on economic management, housing and education. Both sides promise tight and disciplined spending, fully costed and funded, and no election lolly scramble, but the figures so far have still been impressive - Labor about A$8 billion ($9.4 billion), and the Coalition about A$30 billion ($35.4 billion), although promised savings identified by Abbott now total A$45.8 billion ($54 billion).

Each side, of course, rubbishes the other's figures.

By week's end, Australia continued to tilt towards Gillard.

In the five polls made since the election was announced last Saturday, Labor has in all but one opened a wide lead over the Opposition in the two-party preferred vote that decides Australian elections.

On Wednesday the latest Reuters poll trend, measuring major opinion polls, gave the Government a seven-point lead over the Coalition, sufficient, if repeated uniformly on polling day, to give Gillard an extra 10 seats in the Lower House.

Labor's chances have also been improved by its preferences deal with the Greens, under which each will advise supporters to place the other second on their ballot sheets. The Government should gain significantly from the transfer - the reason why the deal is being so bitterly attacked by the Opposition.

Abbott has other problems in the polls. He runs consistently well behind Gillard as preferred prime minister, and in a new Morgan poll also falls behind Malcolm Turnbull - the man he deposed in December - as preferred Liberal Leader.

Gillard also outpolls Abbott among women voters.

Confirming similar findings by Newspoll, a Morgan poll on Thursday said female voters preferred Gillard to Abbott by a margin of 62 per cent to 22 per cent.

One week down, four to go.

WHAT VOTERS THINK

JULIA GILLARD
* "atheist"
* "communist"
* "untrustworthy" "sneaky"
* "stabs people in the back

Source: Morgan Poll

WHAT VOTERS THINK

TONY ABBOTT
* "extreme right"
* "narrow-minded"
* "arrogant Catholic man telling women what to do"
* "bigoted"

Source: Morgan Poll