Julia Gillard fights for second chance

Thank you Kevin

JULIA Gillard is neither a visionary nor an orator - but she is a fighter.

Leading a Labor Party with its brand name tainted, the leader she deposed, Kevin Rudd, sitting before her and legions of Queenslanders ready to vote against her, the purpose of this launch was elemental: it was for Madam Julia to save Labor and save herself.

Julia as saviour is now the Labor narrative. But Gillard hails from an old-fashioned, practical school of modest Laborism, not the leader as epic hero cast in the Whitlam-Hawke-Keating mould. Never has a modern Labor launch been so austere and passionless as this Brisbane event.

On display under Gillard was a formidable yet diminished Labor Party. Its great battles have been won, the true believers have decamped, the reformist banners have disappeared. It is now about saving the furniture and keeping power.

Introduced by Bob Hawke, an icon of fading passion, Gillard promised to speak "from my heart" but this speech came from her political head. It was cautious, targeted and cognisant of Labor's vulnerability.

Gillard's purpose was deceptively simple: to purchase Labor a second chance. She presents as sensible, reliable and capable as Labor limps towards its hoped-for victory. She leads a strange beast: a Labor Party hungry to stay in office and seeking vindication, yet burdened by its first-term near-fatal blunders and slowly losing its faith.

In her policy speech, Gillard offered hope, practical aspirations and a dose of idealism that flowed from her own life. The architect of Rudd's assassination put her own more modest stamp on Labor while taking credit for Rudd's legacy: she scaled back expectations, shunned big ideas, focused on incremental progress in jobs, education and health but insisted that Labor had saved Australia from recession.

Her policy content was cautious yet her tone was aggressive - established Gillard traits. Her campaign mission is to seize the mantle of economic policy responsibility from the Tony Abbott-led Coalition. The launch banner read "Stronger economy - better hospitals and schools".

Gillard painted Abbott as a figure of fear and negativity and the real threat to the surplus. She was unwavering on her fiscal credentials. She tied her policies to her own life - the belief in hard work, the transformative power of education, the need to care for others. The moral she drew from her parents migrating to Australia was they shunned the "free ride" but sought the "fair go". These are the values Gillard brings to politics.

The new measures she offered were limited. But in health delivery via broadband, Gillard fused two of Labor's strengths - health policy and its National Broadband Network.

Since Abbott faltered last week on broadband, Gillard has hammered broadband policy as part of the core economic debate.

With her decision to execute Rudd politically, Gillard accepted responsibility for Labor's fate. The crushing burden that she carries is to secure Labor's re-election and then its rehabilitation as a government. It is a daunting task.