There was a celebratory air at the Brisbane Performing Arts Centre yesterday, which was as much coronation as campaign launch for the Liberals. After all, it doesn’t get better than this. It’s not every election your opponents fall into complete disarray and gift you government.

Abbott’s launch was that of a frontrunner, risk-free, safe, heavy on criticism of Labor and light on policy detail, one seemingly designed to not distract voters from the ongoing dramas in the ALP. And for all the criticism about how lightweight it was, it was the politically-smart play. Abbott had no need to present a compelling vision or offer scintillating rhetoric or policies that can be picked apart; instead, it was more of the same that we’ve had throughout the campaign, an offering upon which Labor has been unable to muster any sort of effective attack.

The Liberal faithful – judging by the attendees yesterday, four parts geriatric, one part under 25 and strangely lacking in chins – felt jubilant. This is a turnabout few would have even dared to dream of six months ago. Not even the presence of Mark Latham, whom Crikey understands applied for and was readily given accreditation late Saturday night, could spoil things.

Abbott’s warm-up acts hardly upstaged him. There was a standing ovation for John Howard, who took pride of place in the middle of the front row (Peter Costello, curiously, wasn’t present). Brisbane Mayor Campbell Newman kicked off and managed to strike a decidedly provincial note, talking about bus shelters, green electricity and other features of what he called, mysteriously, Australia’s “New World City”.

He was followed by Colin Barnett, who bored even the faithful rigid for ten minutes, except for a brief slip when he talked about how the mining tax “wasn’t just about billionaires”, and attacked centralism, which might rather jar with Tony Abbott’s strong views about the states.

Warren Truss threatened briefly to be interesting by kicking off with a joke about Julia Gillard having to “text her ex” to find a partner for the ball – have we mentioned that Gillard isn‘t married, per chance? – before introducing a woman whose own marital and parental status curiously hasn’t featured in the campaign. Julie Bishop was a big hit with the faithful, although she had that thing going where a comic acknowledges a laugh after every joke with a wink or nod, which got progressively more distracting after every wisecrack at Labor’s expense.

Then, finally, Tony Abbott — restrained, on-message, negative, as he’s been all campaign. The big policy announcement was a tightening of laws for people smuggling, and that his first phone call as Prime Minister would be to Nauru to ask them to re-open a detention centre.

It was a pithy summary of this election.

Let’s not pretend for a moment that Labor’s launch will be the slightest bit better. Two low-rent campaigns, by parties the shadow of their former selves, doing their very best to cultivate xenophobia on a confected issue that has no impact on the lives of Australians. One wonders what John Howard sat there thinking as Tony Abbott boasted of his commitment to slash migrant numbers. Howard might have been the most melodic of dogwhistlers, but he understood the economic importance of high immigration.

The only slightly awkward moment in an otherwise polished performance was the amount of time Abbott devoted to paid parental leave. In a speech in which the Coalition’s major policy commitments were only touched on briefly, he dwelt at length on the PPL scheme, going on about it for over 200 words.

“These days, most families need more than one income to survive and because 62 per cent of mothers are in the workforce just prior to having a baby,” said Abbott. “Paid parental leave reinforces the most conservative instinct of all: the instinct to have a family.”  It was a curious argument to making this late in the piece, and the applause from the faithful was noticeably less enthusiastic than for everything else. Abbott’s PPL scheme, foisted on the party by its leader, is evidently not a hit with the grassroots.

The closest we got to major policy substance was a commitment to spell out within twelve months what Henry Review recommendations an Abbott Government will adopt. If there’s a commitment to, and knowledge of how to implement, tax reform in the Liberals’ DNA, we might yet see some good flow from the work of Ken Henry and his review group. But the most effective and efficient recommendations from the review, like congestion pricing, a mining super-profits tax, a more seamless and coherent interaction of the tax and transfer systems and a greater reliance on immobile sources of revenue like residential property, have already been rejected by the Liberals, as they have been by Labor.

A constant criticism of Tony Abbott from the unions and Labor is that, like John Howard on Workchoices, he can’t be trusted. He’ll say one thing before an election, they allege, but then go much further once he’s in office.

The scarier thought is that that won’t be the case at all, that what we were offered yesterday is all we can look forward to, dashing hopes that the pause in big-ticket economic reform we’ve had for the last five years will end.

“What you see with Tony Abbott is what you get,” we’re told. And yesterday we saw very little.