OK, I have to admit it: this election campaign is not really dull at all. Depressing, maddening, infantile, an insult to the voters’ intelligence and a travesty of the democratic process, but not dull.

Just look at the cast of characters: supporting, or more often opposing, Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott we have John Howard, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and Malcolm Fraser — every living prime minister except Gough Whitlam, and surely it is only a matter of time until he issues a crushing edict from his imperial couch.

Then there are the pretenders: John Hewson, Peter Costello, Malcolm Turnbull and most absurdly of all Mark Latham, cynically presented as a journalist by 60 Minutes, with licence to make a complete dickhead of himself.

A farcical plot line. In which heroes and villains are essentially interchangeable and political certainties change scene by scene: nothing is constant or believable. And the dialogue: could the great absurdists, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco or Samuel Beckett ever have produced such a barrage of meaningless waffle?

No, it isn’t dull, but it is awful beyond parody. And it appears that the public is responding with appropriate disdain. The polls are all over the place and the swings vary wildly not only from state to state, but from seat to seat.

The consensus at the time of writing  seems to be that Labor should hold enough of its marginals to retain government, but given that last week they were gone for all money and a couple of weeks before that they were home and hosed, it would be unwise to put the rent on it.

The betting is normally a pretty reliable indicator of what is going on, and while Labor is still favourite, there has been a lot of money for the Coalition lately. The situation is, as they say, fluid, and there is still plenty of time for the kind of unexpected development that would produce a decisive swing one way or the other.

Labor, of course, is hoping it will come from Abbott, but at this stage his minders appear to have him firmly back under control. Last week’s events, up to and including his gala (or perhaps galah) lunch were so closely contained as to be positively sterile — so much for real action, a concept that was always as bizarre as real Julia. Unless Abbott can be goaded into the open by taunts of cowardice, Labor will have to rely on its own devices — which now consist mainly of hopes and prayers that the Kevin Rudd intervention does not run out of control and blow the whole campaign to smithereens.

There will, of course, be new announcements and promises before the finish, but they are unlikely to be of the kind that will capture the imagination of millions. More probably the two sides will intensify their attacks on each other — it was instructive to hear Abbott whingeing about Labor’s negativity, while at the same time asserting that his own first priority if elected would be not to do several things.

From a policy point of view, the campaign has been like a really bad game of soccer in which both teams do little more than pass the ball backwards and forwards between the defenders and the only chance of a score is if a goalie falls over and lets in an own goal. But just look at the half time entertainment, the clowns on the sidelines, and the melodramatic pratfalls and phony carry-on by the players. No, really, it hasn’t been dull.

And, of course, the media have helped. Last week brought the report on the government’s Building the Education Revolution program by the taskforce headed by Brad Orgill.

This had been eagerly awaited by the media and by The Australian in particular, which has spent the past six months in a relentless and sometimes hysterical campaign against what it claimed was the rorting and waste involved in the reckless and unnecessary expenditure off public funds.

Alas, Orgill found that BER had in fact succeeded in its primary aim of stimulating the building industry and the economy more generally at the time of the global economic recession, that the complaints against it were a mere 2.7% — far lower than would normally be expected from a program of this kind — and that while there had been some abnormally high costs involved, these amounted to no more than about 5% of the total and this could be justified by the need to get the projects moving as quickly as possible. The cost overruns had been greatest in New South Wales, but so had the speed of building commencements. All in all, a pretty good result.

This, of course, was not what The Australian wanted to hear, and it certainly was not what it wanted to tell its readers; so last Saturday it devoted most of page one, all of pages four, five and six, the front page of its Focus section and a lengthy editorial to attempting to prove than black was white. This barrage of polemic thinly disguised as journalism was relieved only by the silliness of an article by shock-jock Ray Hadley, a football commentator who has been adopted as an authority on the subject by Rupert Murdoch’s once proud flagship. It’s not only the politicians who treat us as mugs.

But even now there is some hope. Last week the High Court upheld an appeal run by the GetUp organisation and overturned the iniquitous legislation of the Howard government, which cut short the time new voters could enrol once an election was called. It appears that the law was not only undemocratic but unconstitutional.

The full ramifications of the decision will not be known until the court publishes its detailed judgement, but the immediate result is that about 100,000 people who had been deprived of their right to vote can now turn up at the polling booths. This is a huge win, not just for the new voters but for the whole country and indeed for democracy itself. Let’s hear it for GetUp.