By ABC's Annabel Crabb
Photo: Who do you trust? (ABC News)
Kevin Rudd has at last announced a federal election date: Australians will go to the polls on September 7. Yet before Rudd or Tony Abbott can step forward as Australia's next Prime Minister both must convince the electorate that they are changed men, writes Annabel Crabb.
It is often observed that in Australia's rather conservative federal electoral history, genuine "change elections" are quite rare.
In this country, we tend to give incumbents the benefit of the doubt, and in most cases we leave it a little bit too long, just to make entirely sure that we're actually as finished with the incumbent as we suspected we were.
What confronts us this time is something quite different, however. This is not a "change election". It's more of a "Have Either Of These Men Changed?" election.
This time, we don't actually have an incumbent and a challenger as such.
We have two opposition leaders, in effect; both mad as hell about the mess we're in and both determined to do something about it.
Both men are - in addition - banking on us believing they've changed.
Kevin Rudd first.
With the breathtaking effrontery that seems to have been his special birth gift from the black fairy of Nambour, the Prime Minister is asking us to accept that the Good Samaritan of 2007, who wanted Australians to extend a hand to the stranger in need, has triple-flipped into the staring-eyed border guard of 2013 without so much as pulling a spiritual hammie.
That the fellow who five years ago assured us that climate change was the great moral challenge of our time seeks now to append the caveat "unless, of course, you're feeling the pinch with the grocery bills, in which case let's cool it".
The Prime Minister also hopes for our implicit acceptance of a few other intimate reforms - that he is no longer the strung-out, hypermanic frequent flyer, serial project-commencer and personal relations nutbar his colleagues marched to the door so concertedly just three short years ago, for example.
Rudd feels he has changed. And perhaps we should take his word for it. He has - after all - had ample time in recent weeks to reflect on the matter, zipping through the depressurised cool of the stratosphere between Brisbane and Jakarta, Port Moresby and Hobart, Darwin and Kabul.
Tony Abbott is also - he hopes to convince us - a changed man.
No longer the exuberantly loose-tongued sceptic who in 2009 assessed climate change theory as "crap", the Opposition Leader now devoutly markets himself as the sort of chap who believes so deeply in global warming that he's prepared to spend 10 billion or so of our dollars paying people to bury carbon pellets in the ground and suchlike so as to make an effort toward containing it.
No longer the campus jock who chortled in 2002 that paid maternity leave would happen "over this Government's dead body, frankly", Abbott 2.0 is now so committed to the concept that he will get a small handful of very large businesses to pay for it, despite the fact that this approach makes most of his colleagues feel distinctly stabby.
But most of all, Tony Abbott wants us to believe this: that the demolition expert of Australian politics - who has destroyed not just one prime minister but two in his short but potent period as Opposition Leader, and whose chief tactical genius has been to find a way of opposing even in circumstances where the most basic human logic suggested strongly otherwise - could, given the faith of just over 50 per cent of the continent's population, put away his wrecking ball and become a builder of fine things.
"Who do you trust?" asked John Howard, another cheeky fellow, so memorably in 2004.
Nearly a decade down the track, are we even - as a people - capable of taking anything on trust any more?
In five weeks, we'll know.
Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer. View her full profile here.
Can Australians learn to trust these men? - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
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