What excitement there was this morning when Julia Gillard called a press conference. Climate policy, maybe? An election announcement even? We were rather crestfallen to find out it was about school uniforms.

It was the sort of announcement that would in normal circumstances be made by Gillard’s replacement as Education Minister, Simon Crean, or Jenny Macklin, who presides over the welfare system. But there was the prime minister announcing the education rebate available to recipients of Family Tax Benefit A would be extended to cover half the cost of school uniforms.

But if you unpack this otherwise-anodyne piece of pre-election bribery, you’ll discover some key election issues.

The recipients of this handout, Family Tax Benefit A recipients, are a key constituency for Labor. My colleague Possum has explained this in detail previously, in the context of Labor’s introduction of a $150,000 threshold for means-testing Family Tax Benefits A and B and the private health insurance rebate.

Essential Research’s raw numbers suggest low and middle-income earners swung away from Labor in big numbers in May (raw numbers are prone to volatility, so it’s best not to make too much of them, unless there’s a clear trend). While a lot of us were focused on the switch of progressive voters to the Greens, voters earning between $31,200 and $83,200 appeared to shift to the Coalition, occasionally in sufficient numbers that the Coalition was actually outpolling Labor, which was previously very strong with those voters. They shifted to the Greens as well, but not as consistently as they shifted to the Coalition.

Their subsequent return to the Labor column has partly driven the recovery in the Labor vote in June and July, so that it now once again has a primary vote lead. Today’s announcement is prime pork-barrelling aimed at keeping these voters with Labor — although it’s testament to how comprehensively middle-class welfare is entrenched in Australia that the government had to conjure a ‘school uniform allowance’ as the rationale for it.

But the government is also keenly aware of cost-of-living issues for low and middle-income earners. Like ‘mortgage stress’, so-called ‘cost of living’ pressures are mainly self-inflicted and reflect household consumption and lifestyle choices. But voters don’t want to be told that. They want to be told governments will subsidise their high-consumption lifestyles and efforts to keep up with their neighbours.

Labor adeptly exploited this at the last election, painting the Howard government as out-of-touch with the cost-of-living pressures and offering a suite of vague commitments to address them. Now in the aftermath of the GFC, low and middle-income households are again seeing rising costs, particularly mortgage costs. It’s an issue Labor in government now has to make more than positive noises on, though it can never be seen to declare the battle won — that’s why this financial year’s tax cuts were portrayed as a small contribution to offset against rising costs, and why Gillard was stressing today’s announcement as similarly limited, but helpful. It’s also why Gillard last week announced the child care rebate would be paid fortnightly, “making it easier to manage the out-of-pocket cost of child care”.

A similar nuance informs Labor efforts to make sure voters understand just what an important role the government played in propping up the economy through the GFC — without striking any kind of triumphalist tone. Telling a middle-income family that Labor saved the economy is likely to be met with the response that if things are so great why are interest rates high and petrol so expensive, even if the counter-factual is that both income earners might have been out of a job. Thus the line, near the top of today’s announcement: “Not everyone is seeing the benefits of a strong economy.”

Expect to hear more of that.

But linking the handout to school uniforms also enabled Gillard to discuss her favourite topic of education and yet again engage in what is clearly a key strategy of emphasising how in-touch she is with Australian values. Gillard likes school uniforms, thinks they help kids — and ‘kids’ is the operative word in today’s announcement, not ‘child’ — learn how to present themselves properly, thinks they stop kids engaging in expensive attempts to out-do each other.

Gillard seems almost obsessed at this point with reflecting mainstream values back at the community. It started right from the beginning of her first media conference as prime minister, where she spoke of people “who set their alarms early” and has continued right through to yesterday’s ‘Moving Forward’ speech in Adelaide, which was an extended homily on the fairly conservative values Gillard claims to have acquired from her parents.

But there was another reason, a more practical one, why Gillard made today’s announcement. For all the constant allegations of spin, the Rudd government communicated poorly. One pollster told Crikey that he was surprised to discover in focus groups that ordinary voters had virtually no idea that the government had suspended the processing of Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers. That was a key announcement in Labor’s attempt to toughen its image up on the issue, and one that had cost it votes among more progressive-minded, politically-informed voters — and one that had been communicated so poorly that average punters weren’t even aware of it.

Today’s piece of pork-barrelling — at a cost of $220 million over four years, according to the government’s estimates — was too important to be put at risk of slipping through the news cycle cracks. Thus the prime minister herself launched it.