Swan must go, if she is serious

IT was a positive attempt at reconciliation for Julia Gillard to use her press conference after yesterday's leadership ballot to suggest Labor must honour Kevin Rudd without reservations. But for it to be more than rhetoric, she must back up the comments by demanding Wayne Swan's resignation as Deputy Prime Minister, no questions asked.

The notion that Swan can go on serving as Gillard's deputy without retracting his spiteful hissing about Rudd - claims he is dysfunctional and lacks Labor values - is ridiculous, unless the PM's honouring of Rudd is a fraud. On Sunday, Swan said: "I stand by every word."

We know Gillard's honouring of Rudd is almost certainly a fraud. Anyone who could publicly serve the former prime minister while privately believing he was a hopeless leader is more than capable of a little misrepresentation.

And anyone capable of retaining Anthony Albanese as manager of government business in the house, even after he declared he would rather go back to Rudd than serve Gillard, is not projecting as strong an image after the leadership ballot as they would like the public to believe.

In all likelihood, Rudd's crushing defeat, by 71 votes to 31, has ended his bid for a return to the prime ministership and that's probably a good thing, given the animosity towards him in the Labor caucus. But with Rudd's legacy built on the Gillard experiment ultimately failing, don't count on unity from here.

The Newspoll yesterday showed that among voters, Rudd is preferred Labor leader over Gillard by a resounding 53 to 28 per cent. If Rudd lacks Labor values, Labor voters don't agree. They favour Rudd over Gillard by 56 to 39 per cent.

Ultimately the caucus decision to block a Rudd comeback is chiefly about the fact they just don't like him. Actually, they downright loathe him. Unfortunately for the caucus, the public does not. But the polls suggest the public does loathe Gillard. Yesterday's net satisfaction rating for the PM, which has been catapulted backwards, contrasted sharply with Labor's primary and two-party-preferred results. There are a range of explanations.

Gillard's net satisfaction rating dropped from -25 two weeks ago to -38 yesterday. That must be alarming for any Labor strategists hoping she can rebuild support. The only good news for Labor is that Tony Abbott is unpopular, too. His rating fell from -16 to -26.

It would be easy to put the drop in Gillard's personal numbers down to the preceding week's showdown, but Labor's primary vote went the other way, skipping up from 32 per cent two weeks ago to 35 per cent yesterday. The two-party vote is now 47 per cent, the highest it has been in a long while.

While Labor's spin machine wants to convince journalists the change is part of an upward trend - and yes, there has been some improvement from the all-time low primary vote results in the 20s from last year - there is a more plausible explanation for why Gillard's personal numbers collapsed while the party vote improved.

Voters who only half-heartedly engaged in Labor's leadership crisis may have thought a Rudd comeback was on the cards - enough to boost Labor's polling. This may also have been a factor in Abbott's decline.