A dog's life: Aussie Blue Heeler might chase Labor's Ground Hog away

• The leadership question is determined, forget about challenges this side of next election. Crean has personal negatives, and they need to be turned into positives. When critiquing Crean's style some of our respondents offered Bob Carr as a model. This has got merit. Carr isn't liked, but he is respected. Crean can't hope to be liked in the short-term, but he's got a chance of being respected.
• Concentrate on domestic policies. Of all the arguments put by Crean and Beazley in the contest, the one that resonated most with our respondents was Crean's claim that he had the agenda. A significant number of participants mentioned his speech in reply to the budget in general and medicare and education specifically. By policies I don't mean rolling out detailed policies - that's not what voters mean by policies. I mean issues-based attacks on the government, expressed in some ways in positive terms.
• Stop talking about foreign policy. To follow-up their incompetence during the election on children overboard, the ALP then instituted a senate inquiry into the matter. It should have been left alone. Likewise, inquiring now into the intelligence available to the government before the Iraq war is a diversion. Sure, the left will get up in arms if the opposition does not make a fuss. The correct response to them is that this is Howard's agenda and is a diversion from his real aim of dismantling all the advances in Australia since Whitlam. They'll believe that, the part of the left that would worry about this is into conspiracy theories.
• Stop talking as though you are going to win the next election. Electors find this irritating. They don't really care who wins the next election as long as there is something in it for them; and they regard the winning of elections as being in their gift, not politicians'. Not only that, but they collectively think Howard is going to win the next election (this is where expectations really are important). Tell them that you will win and they think that you are simultaneously presumptuous and wrong. Besides, they are more likely to back you if they think you are the under-dog.

Our research also gives clues as to how the Liberal Party can keep winning elections at a Federal level - keep John Howard there. Again, this is not because he is personally that much more popular than Peter Costello, although he is undoubtedly more popular. It is because he has earned the respect of most Australians over his 29 years in Parliament. They mightn't agree with what he stands for, but they are confident he will deliver. This is what former Liberal Party Federal Director Linton Crosby meant when he said he was a "conviction" politician.

It is also because the refugee and national security issues drive a wedge into the ALP constituency and split off enough of the blue-collar conservatives to give the Coalition a majority. Many of these voted for One Nation and now vote enthusiastically for Howard because of his foreign-affairs stance. They wouldn't vote for Costello, meaning that for Costello to win he would need to carve out a wider constituency for the Liberal Party in the centre to make up for losses on the fringe. He is unlikely to be able to do this against the Labor Party without Howard's reputation, Howard's edge on foreign affairs and with the domestic agenda running against him.

Francis Fukuyama thought that history had come to an end, by which he meant that the world was caught up in a liberal democratic stasis. Time will tell if he is correct. It feels like it in Australia. That, or Ground Hog Day. When asked whether he will challenge for the Liberal Party leadership, Peter Costello ironically chooses words used by John Howard more than a decade before. In similar circumstances Kim Beazley quotes Paul Keating. Everything old is new again. In 1983 Malcolm Fraser rushed to an election because he was worried that Labor would replace beige Bill Hayden with popular tyro parliamentarian and long-time ACTU president, Bob Hawke. Hawke wins the election, but Hayden retorts that even the "drover's dog" could have won.

Participants in this survey suggest that Crean needs to be more like Bob Carr. When we ask focus-group participants to compare Carr to a breed of dog it is inevitably an Australian working dog. If Crean can turn himself into a drover's dog with the right attitude, he might not win a popularity contest but he could just win an election. An aussie blue heeler might be just what is needed to chase Labor's groundhog away.