Credibility is draining away from Julia Gillard as if from an open wound. The effect of a year of mounting mistrust in the nation over the carbon tax, along with the recent porkies over pokies and controversy over the Australia Day security scare, is destroying the Prime Minister's authority.
More than a few Labor partisans think she is politically finished. Even those who rule out a change in leadership rally around Gillard with no hope. Theirs is a contemporary charge of the Light Brigade.
Gillard's problem stems not, as many people suggest, from her stabbing a prime minister in mid-2010, which sparked a cycle of revenge knifings in the form of malicious cabinet leaks. It has more to do with the fact the Prime Minister has no core convictions.
The flip-flops are staggering: carbon tax, uranium sales, problem gambling, offshore processing, cash for clunkers, even the US alliance. (Contrast her cringing, forelock-tugging to the Americans — choking up before Congress, fawning over the President, marching in lockstep with US forces in the depressing and endless war in Afghanistan — with her call in 2005 for an ''independent foreign policy'', which is left-speak for snubbing Uncle Sam at every opportunity.)
The dramatic turnarounds merely breed more doubts in people who wonder where she is coming from. Even the Labor Left cannot be sure she is one of them.
Now, one could argue that a volte face, like bias or beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It can reflect an alert mind, one that adjusts to changing circumstances, or it can reflect ruthless ambition without any principles. The latter all too often defines Gillard's leadership.
It's difficult to abide the policy and philosophical U-turns. But when style and soul are accounted for, it's even more difficult to say how she is substantively different from the man she assassinated and for whom a few people pine.
Several commentators seem to suggest Labor's troubles would disappear if only Kevin Rudd replaced Gillard. But although it may initially lead to a poll boost, it would ultimately fail to revive the party's electoral fortunes.
Why? Because Rudd shares with Gillard a credibility problem: they lack deep conviction, gut instinct and will power.
That is why they lead no movement, are spokespeople for no cause and have no cheer squad.
Rudd at least won office in his own right but his evident belief that he could be all things to all people cost him power and should disqualify him any right to get a second chance.
In 2007, he seduced the voters — particularly the battlers in Queensland's sun-belt seats and Sydney's western suburbs — with his wonderful alternative of Howard-lite: fiscal prudence and tough border protection, both packaged with evangelical talk about saving the planet.
From the outset, however, his leadership was an exercise in bad faith.
This was a man who campaigned as an ''economic conservative'', committed to low public debt and free-market reform, but who, in government, pushed a big-spending and interventionist agenda that would have made Whitlam proud.
A man who pledged to ''turn the boats back'' in 2007 but who disbanded the Pacific Solution in 2008, before preaching a ''hardline'' policy against ''evil'' and ''vile'' people-smugglers in 2009, then warning Labor not to ''lurch to the right'' on illegal immigrants in 2010.
A man who claimed global warming was ''the great moral challenge'' but who, in a changing climate — the rise of Abbott, collapse of Copenhagen, defeat of US carbon legislation — scrapped the unpopular emissions-trading scheme.
Meanwhile, the experiment was frankly weird. When the bloke sitting next to you at the pub starts talking about ''fair shake of the sauce bottle'' and ''detailed programmatic specificities'', you excuse yourself and leave quickly.
The contrast with John Howard is striking. Even in his darkest days when, according to polls, so many voters said they did not approve of the job he was doing, about as many people nevertheless said they respected the man himself.
Howard was, of course, authentic and, as the distinguished journalist Michelle Grattan put it, represented the ''awesome ordinariness'' of middle Australia.
Just as important, the public had faith in the broad consistency of his conservative principles, agree or not (and I disagreed with him over Iraq).
He recognised that, if one had thought through one's policies and had argued them with sound logic and deep conviction, there was a chance they would prevail in the battle of ideas.
This was the Howard phenomenon and it helped make him the greatest prime minister since Menzies. It is also a standard against which political leaders should be judged.
What the nation needs is someone who can lead. This does not mean someone who can read the opinion polls and focus groups and flip-flop when the moment of truth arrives. Real leadership means standing for something.
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