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A Campaign Kind Of Day

Wednesday, 5th July, 2006

Journalists are suckers for internal party polling. Press gallery members just love to think they know what's happening on the inside. So it should surprise no one that Liberal and Labor apparatchiks alike regularly exploit the vanity.

Yesterday it was Labor's turn for a little bit of manipulation with Steve Lewis and Cath Hart of The Australian the compliant victims.

Forget about that Newspoll earlier in the week where real people were actually surveyed. The good oil, according to Lewis and Hart in this morning's paper, was in the Opposition's secret polling.

Labor national secretary Tim Gartrell clearly knows that gullible journalists especially like revealing secrets and what a wonderful secret his briefing paper to state branches had to reveal: Labor's secret polling showed John Howard's popularity has taken a “considerable hit”.

Wow! There were even direct quotes from actual people interviewed by Labor! “He [Prime Minister John Howard] doesn't care about ordinary people anymore. These [industrial] laws are causing trouble all over the country.”

But wait. We can reveal more. One person actually told the Labor researchers that “the new industrial regulations are horrifying because they disempower employees.”

Disempower indeed. Now there's a word that must be resonating through every marginal electorate.

It's probably something said often in the aspirational McMansions that Labor's NSW state secretary Mark Abib refers to in the book Reconnecting Labor that Julia Gillard launched yesterday.

Over in the Liberal Party, meanwhile, they were not briefing journalists about internal polling but simply using their's to try and get something other than industrial relations on the political agenda. Education Minister Julie Bishop chose yesterday to push for a return of traditional Australian history to the nation's school rooms with a threat to withhold funds from any naughty state Labor Government that refused to do so.