A good start

Their response to boat arrivals was one example.

The carbon tax and ETS are another. Of course ordinary Australians are worried about global warming – if they weren't it would prove that propaganda never works.

But the problem for propagandists is that propaganda generally wilts when confronted with reality. And the reality is that the tax was raising household energy bills and destroying Australian industries at the same time it was having no measurable effect on global temperatures.

Abbott was on the side of middle Australia when he opposed it. And Kevin Rudd and Julie Gillard had both repudiated it, then to embrace it, making Abbott look steady.

Then there was Gillard's rhetorical perfection of the undergraduate rant. Labelling Abbott a misogynist was a huge mistake, and it wasn't Gillard's alone.

Labor has been traducing Abbott for decades using phrases like the "mad monk". The politics of smear is ingrained in Labor psychology, but as we've seen at recent state elections, and now this federal election, most of the public, apart from the Twitterati and the fringe dwellers of fringe comedy festivals, literary festivals, universities and some back alleys of the mainstream media, don't like baseless personal vilification.

In fact you could see Abbott occasionally bate the chatterers to provoke another rush of outrage. It worked a treat.

It also demonstrated that modern Labor doesn't stand for anything. If the basis of your attack is a juvenile barrage of personal denigration, then you don't have any feathers to fly with.

As many people old enough to remember the 70s frequently remarked to me – Gough Whitlam might have led a bad government, but at least he stood for something.

This standing for nothing was demonstrated throughout the course of the campaign by the frenetic, narcissistic campaigning of Kevin Rudd, which ended on a few bum notes with average voters, including his denigration of a Christian Pastor for holding a view that 4 months ago he held himself.

Contrast that to Abbott's laconic media conferences (the derided "three word slogans") and his continuing dedication to a punishing morning exercise regimen.

So, if this government was so bad, why did Abbott achieve a good, but not record breaking result? Why, for example, does Labor still hold seats in Queensland, like Liley, Griffith and Moreton that it lost in 1996?