By Josh Gordon
THE only way to get noticed when in first-term opposition, Tony Abbott told colleagues during a private meeting last week, is to present yourself as a ''moving target''.
In other words, you dance around, you knock your opponent's hat off, you slap 'em on the back of the head, you pull their pants down and you just might be in with a fighting chance. Cue canned applause, it's the Tony Show, starring the inimitable Abbott as Opposition Leader.
Never a dull moment. Remember the episode when Abbott was parading around in red budgie smugglers? Priceless. Or the time he got lost in the outback and ate witchetty grubs? Riotous. His views on the gift of virginity? Mesmerising. All we need now is the action figurine, miniature Lycra cycling outfit and monk's habit sold separately.
There have even been some policies. Abbott's plan last week to pay mothers up to $75,000 for six months' maternity leave through a 1.7 per cent tax on companies with taxable incomes above $5 million seemed to surprise just about everyone, including most of his colleagues.
Abbott's strategy, according to one Liberal, is to be bold, to keep the cameras focused on him, to keep the public talking, and to keep the government guessing. Call it the Oscar Wilde doctrine. That is, ''the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about''.
The alternative is the ''gripe-of-the-day'' approach associated with Victorian Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu and former federal opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull. ''Abbott's doing a fair bit of griping, but he's also throwing some fairly bold things out there to try to get people's attention and it seems to be working,'' the aforementioned Liberal says. ''Unless it's big, people just don't notice when you are in opposition.''
The Abbott Show is certainly rating well compared to the axed Turnbull Show, which was too dull and highbrow for most viewers. The latest Age/Nielsen poll, for example, puts Abbott's approval rating at 50 per cent, compared with 37 per cent in November last year for Turnbull just before he was ousted. In two-party preferred terms, the Coalition has also gained ground, trailing Labor 47 per cent to 53 per cent, compared with 44 per cent to 56 per cent in Turnbull's last days.
These sort of results are giving Coalition MPs some heart. For the first time in two years they are daring to dream that they could win.
Abbott is good at the politics of opposition. People like him for holding Rudd to account, for making politics interesting and for providing a contest. But could Abbott's strengths as an opposition leader be regarded as potential weaknesses as prime minister?
A looming danger is that Abbott becomes entrenched as Australia's critic in chief, with little hope of becoming its commander in chief. Instructive on this point are figures compiled by Essential Research based on an online survey of 1009 randomly selected people who were asked late last month about various attributes of the two leaders. The results suggest the public sees Abbott as significantly less trustworthy, less intelligent, less capable, less hard-working, less honest and more narrow-minded than Rudd.
For example, 81 per cent of people said they believed Rudd is intelligent, compared with 71 per cent for Abbott. Just 38 per cent said Abbott is trustworthy, compared with 51 per cent for Rudd.
Essential Media director Tony Douglas says the results show Abbott ''still has a long way to go''.
''He obviously makes politics more interesting and he's not bad at telling a story in the media,'' he says. ''But as you head into an election you find things change and people start to really think about opposition leaders as the alternative government. So some of these findings would be a bit of a worry for him.''
Above all, Australians like their leaders to be skilful. Pretty soon, attention will shift back to the question of economic management. On this score, the Coalition is squandering the clear advantage it once had, while Labor holds its traditional lead on health and hospitals, education, the environment and industrial relations.
According to the latest Age/Nielsen poll, the Coalition is viewed as the best economic manger by 51 per cent, down 8 points since October 2007, while 42 per cent say Labor is better on the economy, a rise of 12 points.
This is hardly a good result for the party supposed to epitomise economic austerity, and no amount of clowning on the Abbott Show is going to fix that. As Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner says, perhaps it is now time Abbott started paying some attention to his day job.
Josh Gordon is The Sunday Age federal politics reporter.