The voice of reason pitches to fair folk

JULIA Gillard's first major speech as PM reveals the tone and tenor of an intuitive, new leader striving to show she is essentially one of us.

JULIA Gillard's first major speech as PM reveals the tone and tenor of an intuitive, new leader striving to show she is essentially one of us.

Mainstream, tolerant, fair, driven to action by the facts.

Neither a high-voltage Aussie Obama nor a Kev-heavy toxic bore, she is aiming to be the appealing, sweet voice of reason before an imminent election.

Whether her new policy on border protection can work is almost beside the point in this eerie period of faux regime change. There's no way of assessing results before a poll or knowing where a policy in flux will settle.

Just like the mining tax, and before then on Labor's wayward first term, Gillard is straining to press the reset button on asylum-seekers.

It is ludicrous to claim that, slowly but surely, people-smugglers will be driven out of business. Or the "East Timor solution" is anything other than a pragmatic, opportune shift back to John Howard's "Pacific Solution".

Again, she has absorbed the lessons of a decisive Liberal predecessor and, like her partisan kin Bob Hawke, Gillard will try to reach a consensus among fair-minded folk. A temporary stay in the rancour and a light massage of anxious suburban voters will suit Gillard's re-election plans. It puts Tony Abbott under immense pressure to offer more than he did yesterday.

Her speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney attracted the greyed and shiny tops of the fo-po establishment. How fitting to display her humane credentials in the talk shop founded by Frank Lowy, probably Australia's most successful refugee.

But even in this rarefied chamber of policy talk and pointy heads, Gillard's pitch was to middle Australia.

She is plonking herself in the centre of the couch: to her left is human rights advocate Julian Burnside; to her right is the tough-talking Opposition Leader.

These guys are extremists, in their own ways, she argued. One uses incendiary labels such as "redneck"; the other serves up hollow slogans such as "turn the boats around". They are both to blame for the impasse, "with nobody asking how we can move the nation forward".

Except her, of course, the Prime Mover herself. "If you are hard-headed, you're dismissed as hard-hearted. If you are open-hearted, you are marginalised as supporting open borders," she said.

"I say to those engaged in this type of rhetoric: stop selling our national character short. We are better than this. We are so much better than this."

In making her case for the new organising principles of border protection, Gillard drew on her own family's experience: "People like my parents, who have worked hard all their lives, can't abide the idea that others might get an inside track to special privileges."

She has a nose for the middle ground: no women and children behind razor wire, people-smuggling is "evil", the rule of law rules and orderly migration.

This is the bedrock of Australian decency. In this post-Rudd interregnum, before she seeks "our people's endorsement", Gillard's motif is always "moving forward". She has no alternative because she trumpeted that Kevin Rudd had lost his way. Moving on means drawing a line under his reign and taking out Labor's garbage. Observers expected little more from Gillard yesterday than a polished, pre-election policy speech. The delivery was lawyerly: an advocate building an argument through facts, with flourishes as befits a political candidate. But there is restraint in her approach, too, a calm before the lectern and a natural feel for the audience. She is the communicator the nation has long been denied.