AFTER months of building a campaign against billionaires and silvertails, Julia Gillard yesterday faced a public denigration by the workers' representatives for planning to import millionaires and handing an early Christmas gift to the world's richest woman.
The union reaction was so devastating, and the Prime Minister's message to them that she'd been ambushed by her cabinet colleagues so furious, that some Labor MPs believe the decision to grant Gina Rinehart the right to import foreign workers "will have leadership implications".
There are clear signs now of another split between Gillard and Chris Bowen - the first cabinet minister to declare publicly for Kevin Rudd - over cabinet process and immigration policy.
Gillard told fuming union leaders she'd been kept out of the loop on the decision to grant 1700 foreign work places in Rinehart's new $9 billion iron ore project and couldn't do anything about it.
But at the same time the Immigration Minister, Resources Minister Martin Ferguson and the Special Minister of State Gary Gray were all defending the decision and telling the unions to cop it.
Gillard and Wayne Swan have been scathing of Rinehart and mining boss Clive Palmer in recent weeks as they attacked Tony Abbott as the friend of billionaires and promoted a "battlers' budget".
Bowen's decision, without reference to cabinet but apparently with reference to the Prime Minister's Office, sent union leaders ballistic. The Australian Workers Union's Paul Howes was indignant at the lunacy of announcing such a move when hundreds of jobs had been lost this week in the airline and aluminium industries.
"I thought we were fighting these guys," Howes fumed.
Fighting to cut through the fog of scandalous findings of her own Fair Work Australia against an increasingly entrapped Craig Thomson - and Abbott's over-zealous manoeuvres to cripple the minority government - Gillard was hoping to use a Canberra forum to convince manufacturers and the unions she was hoping to spread the benefits of the mining boom. Her hopes were dashed in scenes similar to the cabinet leaks last year of splits over the Malaysia solution, which started the campaign to undermine her and finished with the leadership ballot on February 29.
The same process could well have started yesterday.
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