Is it the message or the messenger? Wait until the people see the detail. Then everything will be okay. That’s been the mantra of the Labor leadership over the last few months as the public opinion polls show support plummeting.

The Opposition’s fear campaign against the carbon tax that is to morph into an emissions trading scheme will lose impact once the truth is known. And so there is great expectation within the small ministerial group involved in developing the climate change proposal that Sunday night’s Prime Ministerial television announcement will mark the start of the great revival.

Maybe that will prove to be right but maybe, instead, Labor’s popularity problem is not really the message but the messenger herself. There is certainly anecdotal evidence from my acquaintances that the more people see — and especially hear — from Julia Gillard the less they respect and like her.

Perhaps the last thing the Government should be doing is persuading as many networks as possible to give her peak hour viewing on the most watched television night of the week.

A need to keep their nerve. However well thought out the carbon tax plan is there will be plenty of opportunities within it for the Opposition to attack. With something so inherently complex there are bound to be anomalies that can be exploited and Liberal Leader Tony Abbott has shown himself to be adept at capitalising on such things. He has become an expert in the black political art of negative campaigning.

My guess is that there will be no significant improvement in Labor’s standing over the next couple of months and that by the time the Parliament meets again in August there will be even more worried Labor members from marginal seats than there are now. Leadership speculation will be all the rage.

Animal welfare to keep growing as a political issue. The slaughtering methods of Indonesian abattoirs will not be the last problem an Australian Government has over ethical questions around animal welfare. The live sheep export trade is bound to again be revived as an issue as well.

Trying to find some good news. With so many things going politically wrong it was understandable that Prime Minister Gillard waxed quite lyrically about the growth in full time employment revealed in the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures for June.

The 59,000 surge in full-time workers, the biggest rise since mid-2008, was, she told the House of Representatives, “fantastic.”

Which was really something of an exagerration. These monthly employment figures are really quite volatile and quite capable of making the use of extravagant language a problem further down the track. The truth is that employment is barely increasing fast enough to cope with the growth in working age population.