Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott made their best pitches for the all-important health vote in their first head-to-head election year debate at Canberra's national press club today.
In their five-minute prepared openings, both men chose the most obvious gambits from the political playbooks.
As the incumbent and still relatively fresh-faced Prime Minister only two years in office, Rudd went for the big picture and the vision thing.
But he also cleverly personalised the complex issue of hospital reform for voters, retailing stories about his own childhood and linking these tales to concerns today's parents have for the health of their children.
As the Opposition Leader installed by his Liberal colleagues to sharpen differences with the government, Abbott played the negative card as hard and as often as he could.
He attacked the Prime Minister's trustworthiness, accused him of telling lies, and branded him too incompetent to fix something as complex as the hospital system.
Rudd's first words were to remind the television audience of their anxieties if their child woke up ill at night or were injured in an accident on the sporting field and had to be rushed to the local hospital emergency room.
"The most precious people in our lives are in the hands of dedicated doctors, nurses and health professionals," Rudd said. "That is why I want to deliver fundamental reform through a national health and hospitals network.
"Those family experiences instilled deeply in within me a deep and abiding belief that a first class . . . hospital system is basic to the Australian fair go."
In response, Abbott said anyone could list a series of problems and "strike a pose", but the real question was whether they could be trusted to fix the problems.
Then he repeated the Opposition's allegations that the Rudd government had serially broken or botched its promises: FuelWatch, GroceryWatch, the home insulation scheme and allegations of waste in spending on school buildings.
"Patients deserve more medical doctors not more spin doctors. It's more important to get this right than to rush out a bad plan on election eve," Abbott said.
Rudd won on the opening statements. His five-minute vision was clear and positive and appeared to wrongfoot Abbott at the start of his response. Abbott's attack lines did not impress the worm-wielding commercial television audiences.
After the openings, as both leaders fielded questions from a panel of journalists and jousted directly with one another, they reverted to type.
Abbott was natural and fast on his feet as befits a man who has been debating professionally since his days with the Jesuits at Riverview College.
Rudd displayed his usual wonkish demeanour, completely on top of all the details of his policy plan but struggling to preserve the clarity and simplicity of his opening message.
Abbott dragged Rudd down from the Prime Ministerial pedestal and engaging him in a predominantly negative sparring match. "It's a bad plan from an ineffective Prime Minister," he goaded.
Rudd sought to land blows of his own, attacking Abbott's record as Health Minister in the Howard government, while maintaining the high ground as the man with the plan for the future.
"This rolling tidal wave of negativity is hard to understand when mums and dads out there want practical action right now," the Prime Minister observed.
The exchanges got nastier when Rudd accused Abbott of ripping a billion dollars out of hospital funding while he was health minister in the Howard government.
Abbott deployed his trademark slow machine-gun rattle of a laugh when Rudd pined for a constructive, bipartisan, positive approach to fixing hospitals.
"I tell you what: you stop telling lies about me and I'll work constructively with you," Abbott said.
Rudd used his two-minute closing statement to appeal for all players in the health debate to put aside their differences and work together on fixing the problems, a message designed to portray Abbott as the only nay-sayer in the room.
"I think the Australian public have seen through this a long time ago. They know that change needs to happen; they know it needs to happen now."
Abbott closed by portraying himself as the great blocker of hare-brained Rudd schemes, the common sense political leader who had already torpedoed Rudd's emissions trading system, had called the government for waste and mismanagement and was now determined to stare down the Prime Minister's hospitals plan.
"I hope as Opposition leader to block his great big new bureaucracy that will muck up public hospitals the way he has mucked up home insulation and school halls," Abbott said.
And then it was over.
Why does the great health debate matter? It's all in the numbers.
And not just the numbers of patients on waiting lists, medical training places, hospital beds or funding dollars but the political numbers.
In every election for the past two decades health has been a major issue on the minds of voters and Labor has almost always been seen as the party with the best health policies.
But during the past two decades the only Liberal who has been able to come close to neutralising Labor's lead over the Coalition on health has been none other than Tony Abbott.
We know this from the Australian Election Study, which surveys a large representative sample of voters after federal elections.
The study asks voters which party they preferred on health policy.
Over the seven federal elections since 1990, an average of 49 per cent nominated Labor compared with 34 per cent picking the Coalition, giving Labor an average 15-point lead on health.
When Tony Abbott was health minister, he shrank the Labor lead on health to just seven points at the 2004 election, its lowest level in two decades, with promises like his "rolled gold" guarantee to preserve the Medicare safety net.
But after the Howard government was returned, the Coalition dropped the ball on health, winding back some of its more generous initiatives.
That saw Labor's lead as the preferred party on health at the 2007 election jump to 24 points, its highest in two decades of Australian Election Study surveys.
In election 2007 industrial relations and climate change were the magic bullet issues for Labor. This time around Rudd is gearing up for health, economic management and tax reform to play the same role in his election strategy.
Abbott is torn between trying to replay his 2004 trick of outmanouevring Labor on its own health policy turf and simply doing his best to tear Rudd down.
Mark Davis is national editor.
Source: theage.com.au
