TENS of millions of dollars in Australian government aviation contracts have been awarded to companies that secured their bids with inside information about tenders provided by senior public servants.

Confidential emails obtained by The Age reveal two Defence Department officers working in the unit responsible for a $30-million-a-year contract to fly Australian troops to the Middle East were providing information during the tender process to the company later declared the winner.

The two Defence officials, Army Reserve captain and aviation consultant David Charlton and army warrant officer John Davies, were then given senior management jobs by the 2005 contract winner, Strategic Aviation, which has provided the troop flights to Kuwait since then.

Of course, all of this happened from 2005-2007 - during the Howard years.

Liberal deputy leader Julie Bishop says Prime Minister Julia Gillard has lost her mandate to form government after Labor has lost its lead in the two-party preferred vote.

Labor is now back in the lead as far as the Two Party Preferred Vote goes. I';m sure Julie Bishop will now do the honourable and decent thing and correct her statement.

THE Liberals have refused to say whether they will release an industrial relations policy before the election - prompting the ACTU to compare its absence from the debate to the silence that preceded the 2004 introduction of WorkChoices.

Tony Abbott says what he won't change, but not what he will.

To play the devil's advocate on my own point, if polls can't predict the future, neither can history. To descend to the level of sports metaphor, records are made to be broken, and you would have to give Labor a chance of at least outpolling Bob Hawke's record vote from 1983. With redistributions and the retirement of long serving marginal seat holders such as Peter Lindsay in Herbert and Fran Bailey in McEwen, the odds are that the Coalition will go backwards at the 2010 election. The polls might be wrong in their magnitude, but I'm not sure if they are wrong in their direction.

The shorter Green: "Labor will probably win the next election, and probably with an increased majority; but don't quote me on it, because I could be wrong."