Dennis Shanahan comments in the Australian:
In the last week of the campaign, Tony Abbott has deliberately returned to where he began five weeks ago – the carbon tax.
It is also where he started his first destruction of Kevin Rudd and where he achieved his final defeat of Julia Gillard.
And Labor is doing everything it can to assist the Opposition Leader make it dominate the final campaign days and sear into the national psyche that the election is a referendum on the carbon tax, which guarantees his mandate to repeal it in government.
What’s more, Labor is shaping, in Abbott’s words, to “commit political suicide twice” by pledging to use the Labor-Greens control of the Senate to keep the carbon tax and force voters back to the polls next year for a double-dissolution election on the tax.
After using a five-year campaign against “a great big new tax” to weaken two prime ministers and bring himself to the cusp of prime ministership, Abbott isn’t missing the final opportunity to stick with his most successful strategy and present Labor in opposition with an insoluble dilemma.