Kevin Rudd is a man with a plan. Tony Abbott has none. And so the worm turned, the pundits pounced, and the Great Debate was declared an emphatic KO. Labor owns health policy. Stop the fight.

But Rudd should never have emerged with such a smug grin. If Abbott can’t provide an alternative, the lunching hacks needed to land a punch. None did. Despite the fact that Labor’s policy statement on fixing the health system stands as a shell of what’s needed.

Health journalist Melissa Sweet — moderator of the substantive Croakey forum — was asking much more probing questions during Crikey‘s live blog of the National Press Club moot yesterday. As she writes today, Labor’s platform is entirely rickety: nothing for mental health or aged care, nothing on primary care initiatives (“his statements yesterday suggested he has a shaky grasp on this”), nothing on indigenous health (“one of the top recommendations from the National Health and Hospitals Reform Commission”).

Rudd has delivered a funding plan for hospitals. Fundamental reform, certainly — a popular ploy in the minds of voters, a media obsessed with the issue, and um, the worm — but merely a start. If Rudd was as committed to positive initiatives as he says, he’d worry less about what the other mob is up to and more about filling the gaping holes in his own strategy.