Something odd has happened to the federal election campaign. After being in the ascendancy for two weeks, Liberal leader Tony Abbott and his party seem to be losing their grip on the election.

Labor leader Julia Gillard, meanwhile, has regained her poise and is starting to look and sound prime ministerial again. With a week to go, the polls – and the bookies – are detecting a swing back to the government.

It should be remembered that polls detecting a swing back to the government – whether it be Coalition or Labor – in the latter stages of the campaign are the norm, even in those instances where the election results in a change of government.

It should also be remembered that the polls are still indicating a significant regional variation to the swing. Labor appears to be polling very well in south-eastern Australia.

It is not polling anywhere near as well in Queensland, however, and this is a problem for Ms Gillard given the number of marginal seats to be found in the northern state.

A similar prognosis can be made about New South Wales.

Notwithstanding this, there was a sense last week of the Liberal campaign that had been going so well in the first two weeks had somehow lost its way.

The reason for this occurred as a product of a tactical error on the part of the Mr Abbott. As part of his official campaign launch in Brisbane, and again at a well-publicised dinner hosted by the Chinese community in Sydney, Mr Abbott went out of his way to embrace former prime minister, John Howard.
The problem with doing this is twofold: first, it sends a message to the electorate that the Liberal party does not accept the outcome of the last election where Mr Howard not only lost government, he also lost his seat.

The other problem is that it contradicts one of Mr Abbott’s early strategies of denying ‘Workchoices’ – the Howard government’s industrial relations policy that was probably the reason why the coalition was defeated in 2007.

Abbott’s problem with the past didn’t stop there. In Melbourne, former opposition leader Andrew Peacock hit the hustings and caused a furore with some ill-chosen comments while former treasurer Peter Costello was out and about again on the very day the ALP ran an election advertisement highlighting a speech he made in which he derided Tony Abbott’s interest in economic policy.

Suddenly it was Tony Abbott rather than Julia Gillard who was being haunted by the past.

There was little he could do about either Mr Peacock or Mr Costello, but his decision to embrace John Howard was his responsibility. It might have been a tactic that derails what has hitherto been a pretty strong campaign.

Dr Economou is a senior lecturer in Politics at Monash University.