The tiny turn-around in the preferred prime minister poll is...

The tiny turn-around in the preferred prime minister poll is less insignificant than you might think. With two and a half years to go, the number of those polled who would prefer Brendan Nelson to be prime minister has gone up from a derisory 12 per cent to a nearly as derisory 17 per cent, and the number of those who still believe it should be Kevin Rudd has gone down from 70 to 66.

You can't read more into that than a blip, surely.

Well surely you can, because the polls are a lagging political indicator, and because the hitherto hagiographic media mood has begun to change. The most egregious members of the Canberra Press Gallery are finding excuses. Others have begun looking at Rudd's performance, which is not a pretty sight.

For starters, there is the basic strategy, that John Howard went out of office with Australia in a state of economic ruin, and that when anything goes wrong, it stems from the bad old days.

Not so, says the head of the Reserve Bank, Glenn Stevens. Inflation is not out of control.

Indeed, when you think about it, with fuel prices heading up towards $2 a litre and impacting on every aspect of economic life, and after six years of drought in a land of cheap, fresh good quality food, it's remarkable that inflation is barely above four per cent, a level from which, says Stevens, it will in due course fall. Healthy economic growth is another problem for the government in its determination to depict our most successful government as our worst.

Then there are all the wage claims. We haven't had headlines about wage claims, strikes and threatened strikes for a dozen years. During those dozen years, the real value of wages went up 22 per cent. What's it all about?

Denouncing an art-photographer for taking pictures Kevin Rudd has never seen, police bearing off the offending works from a Sydney art gallery, dark noises that charges may follow: does Rudd really think there are votes in wowserism?

I also wonder if really thinks there are votes in bringing our boys home from Iraq. Sure, our boys are discontented, but according to the only reports to emerge about their mood, it's not because they are frightened, but because they aren't being used.

They want to fight alongside the Americans, not skulk in the far south and then run home, it would seem. They were not allowed to attack, to pursue or to engage in offensive operations. One phrase to emerge was "ashamed to wear the Australian uniform."

We would have a tough budget, we were told. In fact, we had a directionless budget.

Then there are the enemies: oil companies, supermarkets and now people running child-care centres, who are to be watched and punished if they transgress some regulation that we don't know about yet.

Nothing is quite as bizarre as Fuelwatch, which can only put petrol prices up. Five government departments advised the Rudd government not to do it. He decided he would set up a scheme anyway, and the advice from each of the departments appeared in the media.

The public servants who leaked that advice were retaliating because they were overworked, Rudd said. Yet to suggest that senior public servants are engaging in low grade industrial action against a recently elected government is both outrageous and fanciful.

It is not difficult to understand why Kevin Rudd should say so. The real explanation is too difficult for him to contemplate. Senior public servants work very, very hard indeed. One head of Prime Minister and Cabinet died in harness while Malcolm Fraser was prime minister and another soon after. One head of Treasury died while Paul Keating was Treasurer.

They are dedicated men who do not spare themselves in arduous and responsible positions. They put loyalty to their country first.

The public service does leak, not as part of some despicable go-slow industrial action as Kevin Rudd is alleging, but when the departments lose confidence in a government. Towards the end that happened to Gough Whitlam's government and then to the Hawke-Keating government. It's not a plot, but a dawning consensus that a government has run out of steam and has to go.

The leaks that have prompted Rudd to accuse the public service of being work-shy are not haphazard, spread over time after three years, or six, or nine. All five leaks deal with one mad idea: Fuelwatch.

The five departments trying to stop Fuelwatch are Resources, Treasury, Industry, Finance and Rudd's own Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

How can you fix your prices ahead of events except by choosing a level at which you can be reasonably confident that you won't be selling at a loss? So you work in a safety margin.

Fuelwatch is inflationary, and it is insulting. It is being introduced on the basis that Australians are too stupid to understand that there is a free world market for crude, and that the price fluctuates all the time.

There is no doubt at all that Rudd is a very busy man. He goes to kindergartens. He gives interviews to the media even more often than getting his picture taken with moppets in sandpits.

He just never stops, but none of it is work. None of it is actually running Australia, which is the most onerous job we have.

It's been obvious from the beginning that he couldn't distinguish frantic futile activity from effectiveness. Why are you offending Japan, they wanted to know at the White House on his busy-busy world tour. That's our greatest ally and your greatest trading partner.

And India? It seems to have dawned on him that it wasn't a good idea to repudiate the previous government's undertaking to sell uranium to India, a country with two nuclear powers on its borders, both of which have gone to war with the country.

He has had six appointments secretaries in six months. He can be heard in the corridor shouting at his staff. He seems overwhelmed. He does not look like a leader for the long term, and that is the perception that is now seeping into the public domain.

by David Barnett, of the ABC, their own giving it to him