While Kevin Rudd was making his way to Yarralumla last Sunday, Tony Abbott was in Sydney’s Chinatown with Julie Bishop rehearsing the speech to launch his election campaign later that day. It was in the Marigold Chinese Restaurant at a packed meeting of the Liberal Party Chinese Council, followed by a media conference. His pitch was the economy, productivity, and the abolition of new taxes. He will not negotiate a minority government. From Day 1 ‘the Navy will have new orders’ to turn back the people smugglers. In a street-walk along Dixon Street, past buskers, beggars and boozers, the Chinese crowd mobbed and cheered him and jostled to take his picture. Abbott was in high good spirits. If the occasional Aussie outside the pub chiacked him, he laughed and shook hands. ‘I’ve been called worse than that,’ he said. Then it was off to Canberra.

A day or two earlier, around the corner, at the Fair Trading Centre in Haymarket, there had been another media conference on the election — with Barry O’Farrell, the NSW Premier and Minister for Western Sydney. It was about the great Labor scandals as documented by Commissioner David Ipp QC in his ICAC investigation into two former Labor ministers, Eddy Obeid and Ian Macdonald and their corrupt dealings over coal mining licenses. Typically the Premier had merged this dramatic media event with the barely newsworthy opening of a government office. He arrived alone, without fuss and on time. Before fronting reporters, he toured the facilities and congratulated the staff. He then spoke briefly about these ‘incredibly exciting’ one-stop service centres that would replace hundreds of separate shopfronts dealing with anything from birth certificates to fishing licences. Fishing licences! one reporter piped up. What about mining licences?

The subject immediately switched to Obeid and Macdonald. The ICAC Investigation, the Premier said, has detailed the ‘rotten culture’ of the Labor party, no matter what wallpaper it sticks on its walls. Yes, Labor’s state leader, John Robertson, is ‘hysterically’ trying to distance himself from the scandals but he owes almost everything to Obeid, from his seat in parliament, appointment to the ministry, and party leadership.

The reporters pushed on. Will there be prosecutions? Maybe, but wait for the brief of evidence. Will the government provide the funds for prosecutions? Yes. Are there likely to be prison sentences? The NSW Crime Commission is ‘not loathe to use its powers’. Will the government cancel the relevant mining leases? We are waiting on a special ICAC report due soon. As the conference wound up television sets around the room screened Obeid denouncing the ‘lynch mob’ chasing him. It included, he said, several federal politicians such as foreign minister Carr. They had once worn out the carpet in his office seeking his patronage. Former Labor premier Nathan Rees thinks the stench from NSW could bring down the Rudd government. O’Farrell then returned to his office to sack his finance minister over a conflict of interests. He likes to boast that he leads a dull government. Is this what he means?

The Fairfax newspapers announced during the week that they are collaborating in a new kind of pre-election poll. Their idea is that while most polls tell us who is winning the horse-race in the lead up to 7 September, they do not fathom the cross-bench mind, that is, the voters who are not rusted-on party loyalists. The new poll will seek to identify a non-party ‘collective wisdom’ or consensus. (Details at www.YourView.org.au) Organisers know they must involve liberals and conservatives and not just your run-of-the-mill lefties. One problem is the Fairfax connection.

Some liberals and conservatives will not participate in the proposed new forum because they do not trust Fairfax. They say it has leant too far to the left. The Sydney Morning Herald avoided this issue last week in an extraordinary anti-Packer, anti-Murdoch editorial headed ‘A proudly Australian voice will go on’. Published first on Saturday 27 July, it was republished the following Monday on page 2 and signed by the chief executive and managing director of Fairfax Media. It was Fairfax’s answer to contemptuous comments attributed to James Packer in reports of the launching of Pamela Williams’s book Killing Fairfax. Packer was quoted as summing up his attitude to Fairfax: ‘hatred, hatred, hatred, hatred’. No doubt he absorbed this attitude at birth, but it has been his public position at least since his passionate speech at the memorial service in 2006 honouring his late father who had been callously defamed in the Fairfax papers (the ‘Goanna’ allegations). The editorial ignored Packer’s grievance and claimed that Fairfax has always conducted itself with ‘candour, honesty and honour’. Everyone hopes that Fairfax survives its current crises. But it will not survive on sanctimony. Its critics today are not only the Packers and Murdochs but its lost readers — the disenchanted liberal conservatives who believe it has abandoned its traditions.

A sign of the times? The Bible Society has just published a book about politics. It is In God They Trust? by Roy Williams, lawyer and theologian. Williams examines the religious or anti-religious creeds of 23 Australian prime ministers from Edmund Barton (an unbeliever) through to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd. He has already written the chapter on Tony Abbott — ready for a new edition in the near future!