Rudd's rival bides her time

Julia Gillard is breathing down Rudd's neck in the polls. Photo / Getty Images

As Australia struggles to stay on course, its Prime Minister's political honeymoon lies in ruins, while voters warm to his skilful deputy. Greg Ansley reports

So this is the road to the election: two leaders limping on political crutches after shooting themselves in the foot, a deputy prime minister rising on spontaneous momentum to challenge her boss' popularity, and a country that is really not that impressed with anyone.

Kevin Rudd once flew with the gods, soaring on the updraft of relief from the end of John Howard's long years in power and his own apparently stainless determination as a reforming prime minister. Rudd's remarkable honeymoon with voters has now crashed under the weight of broken promises, bungled programmes and human flaws.

The party he leads has followed a similar descent from the heights. Until this election year gripping an apparently unassailable lead over the Opposition, Labor now trails the conservative Coalition in primary votes and is neck-and-neck in the two-party preferred tally that decides Australian elections.

On the other side of the House, Tony Abbott had rebuilt the walls of his crumbled Opposition after dumping wayward predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, clearly staking out defined conservative turf and marking a sharp demarcation from Labor. He was even closing the popularity gap with Rudd.

That went to pieces on ABC Television this week when Abbott was backed into a corner on a broken promise not to impose new taxes to fund the policies of a coalition government. His answer was, in effect: don't believe anything I say unless you have it in writing.

And then there is Julia Gillard, the Deputy Prime Minister who Abbott has at least twice said should become Labor leader, a view that is being shared by an increasing number of voters. While she laughs off any suggestion of a challenge, her performance and rising popularity is in marked contrast to the struggling Rudd.

Meanwhile, polls indicate Australians are not at all impressed with the present political vista. The latest Newspoll, for example, showed that while Labor has been sliding, the votes have not been going to the Opposition, which has improved its primary vote by less than 1 per cent over the level of its crushing defeat in 2007. Even with history and incumbency on its side, Labor is sweating.

All in all, it should be an interesting election, whenever Rudd decides to call it. Under electoral rules he has until April next year, but will probably go between August and November. Betting at the online gambling agency Centrebet is on a late-August election, but the date will ultimately depend on whenever seems best for victory.

The present state of play works against an early poll. Rudd's series of political disasters and backflips has ruled out the use of senate blockage of government legislation to harness voter support for a double-dissolution election, and Labor still has a lot of lost ground to recover.

So now Rudd is rebuilding. He must somehow restore his own credibility and dispel the cloud of disappointment - even betrayal - that has shrouded his leadership over the past months. His early and appealing zeal for reform has all but come to naught, with none of the pledges central to his December 2007 victory coming fully to pass.

He has failed most notably on climate change, the issue on which he defined his own leadership and which is now an albatross that even a substitute renewable energy programme has failed to lift from his neck. But he has also fallen short in health and education, and has bungled the implementation of other programmes.

Labor is now circling its wagons around economic management, leaning heavily on Australia's remarkable survival through the global financial crisis, its emergence as the developed world's wonder boy, and the praise heaped upon the policies that steered the nation through.

Last week's Budget will be used to cement this strategy in place. It was a bit like Goldilocks: not too hot, not too cold - just the right mix of give and take, a dull, unremarkable document that screams responsibility and stability. And it is working. Voters can't see too much gain, but even less pain, which in these jumpy times is how it should be.

While steering the Good Ship Australia on a steady course, Rudd is also playing a high-stakes game of Robin Hood that should appeal to many Australians: hitting miners with a new "super-tax"Labor says will ensure the wealth of the country is more equitably used for the welfare of its people, rather than the profits of multinationals.

Yet he continues to struggle. And now he has Gillard breathing down his neck, in the polls if not in the party room.

Four recent polls have reported that while not yet overtaking her boss as preferred Labor leader, she is rapidly closing the gap.

In the past Gillard has had the possibly unwelcome endorsement of Abbott, and under the urging of colleagues came within cooee of taking on ultimate winner Kim Beazley in the contest that followed the resignation of Mark Latham. Later, a Ten Network poll said she was preferred over Beazley as Opposition Leader, and had twice the support of then-Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Rudd.

Gillard is moderate Labor, untainted by factional loyalties and widely admired for her intelligence and political skills.

From a Welsh coal-mining background - her family migrated to Australia when she was 6 - Gillard cut her political teeth in student politics at Melbourne University before eventually earning a partnership in the prominent law firm Slater and Gordon.

She worked for Labor during its days in Opposition in Victoria, won a seat in federal parliament in 1998, and headed for the top: shadow portfolios of population and immigration, then health, and deputy leadership under Rudd.

In Government she holds the key portfolios of education and employment and workplace relations - plus the lower-key social inclusion - and shortly after Labor won power became the first woman to assume prime ministerial responsibility by holding the fort while Rudd was on holidays.

Gillard has laughed off her recent rising popularity, saying she is more likely to be a Sydney Bulldogs rugby league forward or to travel to Mars than to challenge Rudd as leader.

Political sense also rules out a fight, at least before the election.

Short of a truly catastrophic disaster in Rudd's leadership, Labor could not afford a self-destructive stoush in the lead-up to a poll that is already looking disturbingly close. Nor would Gillard would do herself any good at all by becoming the party's wrecking ball. Even serious speculation could be damaging, which is why she's stepping on it so hard.

And then there is Abbott.

He was doing fine until he appeared on the ABC's current affairs programme 7.30 Report, and replied under pressure to questioning over a broken tax promise: "I know politicians are going to be judged on everything they say, but sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you go a little bit further than you would if it was an absolutely calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark, which is one of the reasons why the statements that need to be taken absolutely as gospel truth is those carefully prepared scripted remarks."

In other words, read the fine print - not my lips.

Bring on the campaign.

JULIA GILLARD
* Age 48.

* MP since 1998.

* Deputy Prime Minister of Australia, the first woman and the first foreign-born person to hold this position. She is Welsh.

* Grew up in Adelaide. A lawyer before entering Parliament, Gillard has become used to curiosity about her private life through all her relationships, including those with union officials Michael O'Connor and Bruce Wilson, and Craig Emerson, the then-married federal minister who left his wife and children.

* Her partner, Tim Mathieson, is a hairdresser.

* She has no children.