Who won the news cycle? Kev does it again

Kevin expands, it seems, to fill a vacuum. The Prime Minister and the Opposition leader go to a funeral and the former Prime Minister thinks of adding a United Nations job to his future CV and dominates the media for the second day in a row. Then to round off the night, the Ruddster features on the new ABC news channel treating national security discussions as a plaything for a staff member. The Coalition should be thankful to him for delivering them another winning campaign day while bemoaning the fact that he now is only playing the spoiler role and not that of leader. They can but dream of how different things would be if it was still Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister.

Not that I want to overstate the negative Rudd contribution to the Labor Party campaign. There are surely some this week who are learning of his antics, as Prime Minister and afterwards, and thinking what a relief that he was replaced by Julia Gillard. The inappropriateness of treating his fellow ministerial members of, and senior public servant advisers to, Cabinet’s National Security Committee to hours of waiting around was downright rudeness by an arrogant man. And then, on occasions, to have a comparative office boy sent along to take charge of meetings was to treat the proceedings with contempt.

While the Coalition might have won more campaign days than Labor so far this week — three to two with one draw by my reckoning — the week overall is probably narrowly in the government’s favour. The yellow line on our Daily Winner Graph indicates the cumulative lead to date with the first big test of the campaign to come with Sunday night’s debate.

Not much movement on the Crikey Election Indicator either with Labor assessed today as a 78% chance of winning.