This was not your average election policy launch. Working in tandem: Malcolm Turnbull, left, and Tony Abbott. This was a Tony Abbott media event minus the fluorescent vest and safety glasses but with a little bit of Steve Jobs-type salesmanship. You could almost hear the sighs of relief from businesses in Queanbeyan that the Coalition had found Fox Sport studios, Sydney. But the big question all the studio lighting and make-up artists in the world couldn't obscure was: were Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull overcompensating for something?

After all, the Opposition Leader and the man he christened his future ''Mr Broadband'' were there to talk about copper - not gold. Copper wires - which, they insist, will deliver broadband speeds that future Aussies will expect at a third of the price of Labor's gold-plated National Broadband Network. ''Fast, affordable, sooner,'' the luminous backdrop reassured. Abbott, who is the pre-eminent practitioner of the simple, chewable message, promised internet speeds 10 times faster than today by 2019 and ''two-thirds'' cheaper than Labor's whole-hog fibre-to-the-premises project. Abbott and Turnbull claim they will do it for $60 billion less than the $90 billion-odd they say the current NBN will end up costing.

It's quite a feat that team Abbott could present as the tech-savvy combination when it was the Communications Minister who was putting futuristic cable into the ground. "Rubbish!" yelled Stephen Conroy, who had a strong point but was left looking like yesterday's man as he fed NBN cable into a Telstra-owned hole in suburban Canberra. Conroy was wearing a fluoro vest and had to make do with natural lighting. It's quite a feat that team Abbott could present as the tech-savvy combination when it was the Communications Minister who was putting futuristic cable into the ground. Fibre that would turn Australia into one of the leading nations on earth for internet infrastructure - something the Coalition is not offering. It's just the latest example of the government having something to sell but getting T-boned by the opposition's PR juggernaut.

Abbott is well aware that "Mr Broadband" is more popular than himself, but he seemed content to let Turnbull take centre stage most of the time on Tuesday. He had little choice but to take a back seat once the Q&A with the tech sector journalists turned to topics like ''VDSL2+, with vectoring''. But Abbott and Turnbull largely got away with it despite hawking an inferior product. Loading Imagine Julia Gillard trying to do an election event with Kevin Rudd.

Or Simon Crean, or Chris Bowen, or Martin Ferguson, or Kim Carr.