"and perhaps most importantly there is what I refer to as the Labor Fail Factor - the historic tendency of the Coalition, for whatever reasons, to on average do a much better job of recovering from bad polling to a good or at least not so bad election result. "
I'd call that the "Murdoch Spoiler Factor". We need a Media Royal Commission so badly.
There are plenty of alternative outlets. A Royal Commission is just needed to gut the Murdoch/Costello/Seven/Ten stranglehold on the market. We need to fracture the media cologmorates so that they can't own more than 1 medium and enforce citizenship requirements for ownership.