Most observers believe the election result will be closer than the polls suggest. Newspoll finds there is “a slight chance” that 3 voters in 10, and “just as much a chance” that 1 in 10 will vote for “someone else.” There is not much difference between Coalition or Labor voters.

The Morgan poll uses a different method. They assume that those who say Australia is “heading in the right direction,” but vote Labor, are “soft” voters, and vice versa. In its latest national poll, Morgan finds one in nine Coalition voters is “soft”, which is not much different from Newspoll’s finding. It is when we come to Labor voters that there is a startling difference. One in three Labor voters are deemed “soft”. Morgan may well have found the key to the extraordinary majorities recorded for Labor over the last few months. This would justify the government in both calling an election later than earlier, and in believing a good campaign could persuade sufficient soft Labor voters to move to the Coalition.

Morgan’s Bennelong poll finds that John Howard would be defeated 46.5% to 53.5%. While the proportion of “soft” Coalition voters is about the national rate, 1:9, an unusually high number of Labor voters think Australia is going in the right direction, 42% with 15% undecided. Using Morgan’s methodology, about one in two Labor voters in Bennelong are “soft”. That is extraordinarily high. This is reflected in the answer to the question who they think will win: 53% say John Howard and 30% Maxine Mc Kew. So provided he runs a good campaign, John Howard will probably not face the fate of Stanley Bruce, savagely described by Paul Keating as “that dreadful old fop who used to wear spats”. (Keating was careless with the facts – Bruce was a young prime minister, and a war hero.)

With the latest Newspoll showing they will only lose in a landslide rather than a tsunami, the Coalition has been on the front foot in Question Time this week. On Tuesday the Treasurer slowly teased a clearly embarrassed Peter Garrett about Labor’s curious plan to mitigate the taxation problems of artists on the dole, the opposition’s only announced tax policy.

And when ministers thank Coalition members for questions, they point out when the endorsed Labor candidate against the member is a union official, which is often. The Prime Minister tabled the lists of the 67 new bureaucracies and 96 reviews a Rudd government would establish and pointed out the Coalition would spend about $100 million more on its dental plan.

On Tuesday, Kevin Rudd listened attentively to answers to his questions, no doubt realizing that his practice of turning his back demonstrates the hubris he counselled against in the Caucus. But on Wednesday, he returned to the practice of showing his back when the Treasurer recounted in excruciating detail the Leader’s demonstration of ignorance on the ABC about the tax scales and when the PM demonstrated that the OECD figures on education were both dated and wrong.

In these emotional days, the House could easily fall into anarchy, as it did in the dying days of the Whitlam government. The Speaker, David Hawker, has the requisite gravitas and has risen magnificently to the challenge. Completely impartial, he takes no insolence from either side. So on Wednesday, when Anthony Albanese moved dissent from a perfectly proper direction suspending a member, it raised questions about the opposition’s tactics. After all, this fate befell a minister the day before. It looked suspiciously like a rather transparent device to distract the gallery and end a Question Time which was clearly not working as hoped.