WorkChoices won’t cost the Liberal Party the 2010 election in the way it did the 2007 election, but it won’t help their decreasing chances of pulling off an improbable victory.

A strange recalcitrance seems to grip Liberals when it comes to industrial relations, as if they can’t quite let go of WorkChoices. They twisted themselves into the most remarkable knots over the issue in 2008, trying to work out exactly what stance they should adopt in relation to Labor’s proclaimed mandate to extirpate WorkChoices from the statute books and Australian politics. In 2009 they underwent similar contortions over Labor’s replacement IR system, Fair Work.

Now Tony Abbott is valiantly trying to maintain his commitment that WorkChoices is “dead, buried, cremated” (yes, we know you can’t do both) despite his refusal to commit that there will be no Coalition changes to the non-statutory IR regulatory framework.

Spare a thought for Abbott, if you can — he’s one of very few Howard Cabinet members who knew WorkChoices was poison right from the get-go. His colleagues overruled his sound political judgement and all lived to regret it. It’s still killing them five years later.

Abbott could end what has already been two days of media focus on the issue, by saying the current regulatory framework in its entirety is set in stone for the term of the next parliament. But he can’t, partly because the Liberals have already soured relations with the business community enough by retreating from substantive reform; to indicate that a Liberal government wouldn’t even permit greater flexibility via regulation and ministerial direction would be to incur the wrath of business already unhappy with Abbott’s paid parental leave tax.

There’s also the problem that Abbott must know that whatever he says, many voters will never give him the benefit of the doubt on the issue anyway; the best he can hope for is for the issue to play out and give him some clear air to get his own messages across.

For the time being, however, he’ll simply have to endure. All three commercial networks hammered him in their evening bulletins. Trapped into signing a commitment on the issue by Neil Mitchell, Abbott may not have recalled the hapless Mark Latham signing his interest rates contract in 2004, but journalists immediately did, and one network seized on it, running footage of Latham.

It has been a bad start by the Liberals. The ALP campaign media centre was up and running by the end of Julia Gillard’s Saturday press conference. Ministers’ press appearances and media alerts have flowed smoothly to the press ever since. Apart from transcripts, there has been radio silence from the Liberals, with only the media entourage travelling with Abbott knowing his whereabouts. It makes little difference to the vision the public sees on the evening news, but the impression at the moment is that the Liberals are poorly-resourced and poorly-organised — remarkable given Brian Loughnane’s many years of experience.

Julia Gillard, meanwhile, has spent two days in Queensland pounding the theme of sustainable population, having used yesterday’s media event — there will only ever be one key event a day — to visit the seat of Herbert and spruik the new Better Regional Cities fund she launched on Sunday. The only thing that got in the way of her delivering her message (which, in short, is Labor thinks Australia is full) were questions about how big the ALP’s Newspoll lead was.

The Liberals can console themselves that things won’t get much worse than this. The polls will inevitably start contracting as we get closer to the election — no one ever wins a Federal election 55-45. Those questions to Gillard will soon be about why her lead is shrinking, and WorkChoices will fade. But the momentum is all Labor’s at the moment.