Of hanging chads and PMs "not there"...

The desperation is everywhere. Like the humidity thick in the air prior to a summer thunderstorm, it pervades the the government's final week of the campaign. Days out and with the polls hugely unmoved, nothing the government has done has altered the view of an electorate looking for something different.

On the 7:30 Report the PM, looking all of his years and stridently trying to keep to his one message, presented himself and his campaign as the ultimate contradiction. He wants to look to the future - that's what matters. All the while he examined Labor's past - the Keating past. Any examination of the government's past was, well, just that - the past. It was of no consequence: only Labor has past; the government is the future.

Just to make it clear, the Labor party's past is a malleable thing too. Howard, terribly serious and full of gravitas, demonstrated this by rewriting that history in front of the ABC audience and a clearly stunned O'Brien when he bald faced claimed that Labor under Keating had not legislated to introduce Enterprise Bargaining at all; no, not in 1993 and certainly not before Howard changed the IR world in 1996. Never mind the statistics (4,500 registered agreements, federally, by 1995), Labor did not introduce enterprise bargaining. No. Full stop.

I'd suggest that's news to the rest of the country; certainly to those who struck those non-existant agreements.

Why would the PM mangle the truth? Why would he lie and rewrite history? To suit the claim that Labor would return to its past (that only it has in this campaign) and to centralised wage fixing. The fiddling with history and the truth is blatant.

Howard, the scare campaign - "union fanatics", "they'll stuff the economy", "we're commin' back", "wharf strikes, rail strikes..." - having achieved little and with little left to say has resorted to the ploy of his hated predecessor, Keating. "If you change the government you change the country". The former member for Blaxland must love the irony.

Elsewhere Howard promises that if you elect him he won't be there and even gives an example of how it is he won't be there. He'll call a party meeting and resign. Annabel Crabb of the Herald says it better:

Oh voters; if you really care

Elect a man who won't be there!

Vote for him on Saturday

It's guaranteed he'll go
away

Alexander Downer, in a huff over the fact he may lose his job on Saturday, declares that nothing but cliche's fall from the Opposition Leader's lips. Worse, those lips often adopt a smirk. He would know, I suppose, sharing the front bench with the smirk of Australian politics and being well familiar with the meaningless platitude and cliche over the his time in office. Given his performance at the AWB enquiry, its nice to know he can recall who the opposition leader is and what a smirk looks like.

The prize in the desperation stakes though goes to Andrew Robb and his cohort of dirt diggers. This crew have waited until the final week to discover the Florida hanging chads of the 2007 election. You can't vote for this crew or we'll challenge the results. Truly desperate stuff. As if this "fact" was not known earlier. Eleven of the twelve have dismissed it for what it is: a desperate smear. You can bet that the only challenge might be to - an as yet unelected - Newhouse. If there are any challenges at all.

Penny Wong (ALP SA) said it best yesterday: "They have nothing left to say to the Australian people".

Absolutely spot on: nothing whatsoever. It defines the government campaign nicely.