Complaints from commentators about the blandness of Australian election campaigns have come early this year.

What is making the 2010 campaign so particularly burdensome has been the complete lack of charisma on the part of both Abbott and Gillard.

The whingeing started almost as soon as the televised leaders’ debate ceased transmission.

The debate itself was an underwhelming affair, with both leaders responding to nearly every question with rehearsed lines.

Were it not for the antics of ‘the worm’, there would have been little to say in the aftermath of the event.

By mid-week, commentators were reduced to musing about Julia Gillard’s ear lobes and what sort of message Tony Abbott was trying to send by dragging his wife to all his political events.

The reality is that election campaigns do tend to be rather dull and boring affairs, as the leaders of the major parties concentrate on getting their messages out and try to avoid any mistakes or slip-ups.

What is making the 2010 campaign so particularly burdensome, however, has been the complete lack of charisma on the part of both Abbott and Gillard.

This has taken the political community a bit by surprise given the high profile both had in the days when they were understudies to their then leaders.

One of the reasons why Tony Abbott has been having to grapple with the problem of his appeal (or lack of) to female voters is that he is somewhat burdened by his political past as a social conservative warrior doing all the heavy lifting on behalf of his former boss, John Howard.

In this role, Abbott was at the centre of a number of issues that inevitably saw him in conflict with political women, including his opposition to abortion and his advocacy of a very conservative position on matters ranging from stem cell research through to birth control.

It is this past record that is haunting Abbott, whose response appears to have been one of putting the matter in the hands of spin-doctors and taking their advice to project himself as a modern, feminist man.

For good measure, the leader has also decided to abandon industrial relations reform as an issue – well, at least for the next three years.

As canny as Mr Abbott may think this is at neutralising the issue than might have lost the Liberals the 2007 election, his abandonment of such an important policy position rather undercuts his claim to being a ‘conviction politician’.

Julia Gillard is in the same predicament.

Her past as a member of the socialist left faction of the ALP would seem to suggest that her personal politics would see her take a progressive line on asylum seekers, immigration policy and the like.

The demands of the electoral contest, however, dictate that her job is to portray the Labor party as something the voters of western suburban Sydney and regional Queensland are prepared to embrace.

As a result, observers have been treated to the spectacle of Ms Gillard re-positioning the ALP as something of a right-conservative outfit on the very issues it attacked Mr Howard on back in 2007.

Ms Gillard also has Kevin Rudd hanging around like Banquo’s Ghost, reminding all and sundry of the rather bloody politics that expedited her ascendancy to the Labor leadership.

Try as she might, the opprobrium associated with Canberra’s night of the long knives just won’t go away.

At least the spectacle of Rudd’s enemies leaking against the former leader, and Rudd’s supporters leaking against Julia Gillard in retaliation has added some light and motion to this otherwise dull contest.

After two weeks, the election contest has all the characteristics of a dull nil-all draw between two powerful but timid football teams.

If this keeps up, Labor ought to win the election despite all the damage being caused by the internal instability and disloyalty.

Labor really is a mess, but, for some reason, the Coalition alternative is not getting traction with the voters.

Dr Nick Economou is a senior lecturer in Politics at Monash University and a regular Neos Kosmos commentat