Tony Abbott is coasting to The Lodge on a dream run, first class up the pointy end. No federal opposition leader has had it so easy since 1941, when Labor's John Curtin gained government after the collapse of the Menzies-Fadden wartime minority Tories. And no opposition leader has so little deserved such good fortune.

There are three reasons for this. The first is the government's matchless genius for shooting itself in the foot. The superannuation shambles is this week's example. It's actually Abbott who plans to gouge super savers by clawing back $500 each from some 3 million people earning less than $37,000 a year. But it's the government that was in policy chaos again and seen to be so, with a gale of opaque but conflicting statements from ministers and ex-ministers, and heaven knows who else, fanning the flames.

The second reason for Abbott's rails run is a cynical political and media strategy that rolls him into a tight little ball, the smallest possible target. Every night on the TV news there is Tony in his shirtsleeves and pale blue tie, inspecting a tray of meat or waving a widget, with the obligatory seven-second soundbite about this ''bad gummint'', as he pronounces it. No questions asked, none answered.

This bleeds into the third reason, which is that large slabs of the media have disgracefully abandoned a duty to their readers, viewers and listeners: to bring Abbott to account. It's so much easier to report Labor's mortal strife than it is to demand policy content or some number crunching from the Warringah Wannabe.

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Abbott has given up risking serious interviews since his humiliating debacle with Leigh Sales on the ABC's 7.30 last year, when he tied himself in knots over BHP Billiton and the carbon tax. Now he appears only with the likes of Alan Jones or Ray Hadley, where he knows he'll be schmoozed.

There was a delicious example of this on Sky News last Sunday on a show hosted - if that's the word - by one Chris Kenny, a News Ltd columnist, former spear-carrier for Lord Downer, and failed Liberal preselection hopeful.

''We are entering a very unique and unusual political period,'' Kenny droned by way of introducing the great man. I'll spare you the details of what followed, except to say that it was indeed very unique and unusual. Kenny didn't so much butter him up as smother him in meringue, chocolate fudge and whipped cream, topped with chopped nuts, kiwi fruit and maraschino cherries. Nothing of any news value emerged.

After this travesty squelched to a halt there was ''comment from the panel'', which - surprise! - turned out to be those uber-right News Ltd nutters Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine. Hands neatly folded on the desk, fiercely bespectacled, they filled a head-mistressey 10 minutes agreeing with Kenny that a Coalition government could not come soon enough.

In essence, Abbott is a policy-free zone and gutless with it. And as Labor's lemmings stampede for the cliff with the media in hot pursuit, he gets away with it scot-free.

Mike Carlton