Halfway through the first week and no positive policy yet from the Coalition, just detail about what they’re against, including, apparently, regional infrastructure (where did they think that $400 million infrastructure funding to the states was going to end up?). Labor has eked out two policies, including yesterday’s national apprenticeship announcement, so they’re slightly less negative.

Labor’s decision to have only one debate is, on the face of it, strange. Julia Gillard can confidently expect to keep doing what she’s been doing on Today for months — giving Tony Abbott a drubbing. If even Kevin Rudd could clean Abbott’s clock in a debate, Gillard would be expected to run rings around him. But that’s the risk — if everyone expects that, anything less than a demolition will be a positive for Abbott. And given Labor’s polling lead, minimising the opportunities for an error, and for leadership comparisons between Abbott and Gillard, is the percentage play. Labor are behaving like frontrunners. And not all frontrunners last the distance.

The Coalition is getting reluctant to use one of its more absurd conceits, that it came up with $47 billion worth of savings. While the covering press release referred to “$45.8 billion” in savings, the final total for its savings announced yesterday was, according to its detailed documentation, $23.8 billion. In fact despite yesterday’s new $1.2 billion in savings, the opposition is now proposing less savings than back in May.

Why? The changes to the mining tax in the transition to the MRRT slashed a couple of billion out of related expenditure. In May, in order to pad the figures, they put all the expenditure associated with the tax in as genuine ‘savings’. They should never have been in there in the first place, and Andrew Robb had a terrible time justifying why they had them in back in May.

Listening to big business whinge about the lack of genuine reform vision from both parties is rich indeed. Yes, this current generation of politicians are a risk-averse lot, but business itself is partly to blame. The defeat of the RSPT and the destruction of Rudd is a lesson that every politician in this country — every single one — will have noted and memorised.

Who among big business — which says that lower corporate taxes is one of its key ‘reform’ goals — raised their voice in support of the government while it was under attack from the mining companies? Where was the WorkChoices-style business-funded ad campaign in favour of the 2% tax cut that would have been funded by the RSPT? The cause of reform isn’t helped by fair weather friends in the business community.

The nanny state continues its long march this morning with the Greens proposing a fast food advertising levy. That’s a tax on both freedom of speech and freedom of choice. Then again, at least someone’s proposing something faintly visionary…