We need more than promises to judge Julia

SHORTLY after Julia Gillard replaced Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister she pleaded with voters to "judge me on how I do the job".

The problem is that with an election only months away, judging her on how she does the job involves a good amount of guesswork.

The big-ticket items Gillard identified as in need of fixing were the mining tax, asylum-seekers policy and Labor's battered reputation on climate change.

Steps being taken in each of these areas won't deliver results until after the next election. That leaves guesswork as the only way of deciding whether or not she deserves to win the election. Judgment on promises made, not results. The new mining tax compromise was achieved between Gillard and only the three largest companies - the many hundreds of other miners weren't included in the deal and we don't know if they will go along with it. We also can't be sure if the newly structured tax will generate the revenue promised (unlikely). It won't come in for years, so we have to wait to find out. On asylum-seekers, Gillard committed to a regional processing centre - a good idea but not much more than that. She implied it would be located in East Timor and had a conversation with its ceremonial President, but not its Prime Minister who heads the government (time to advertise for a new foreign affairs adviser).

Any such centre - and she was backing away from the Timor solution yesterday - would be functional many years from now and only then can we judge the policy. Gillard has already said that she stands by Rudd's decision to delay the introduction of the emissions trading scheme and she wants to try to get a consensus on how to address climate change only after the election.

It isn't just the big three issues that make it hard to judge Gillard on results. Rudd's health takeover, which morphed into a 60 per cent funding commitment, sees the overwhelming majority of initiatives starting to be implemented only after the election. A policy area we can judge her on is the job she did as education minister. The BER hasn't exactly been rolled out with cost savings as a top priority.

The new PM communicates better than Rudd, but, with the exception of Sylvester Stallone, don't we all? If she wants to be judged on how she does her job she'll need to do more than just make promises. Otherwise all she'll be judged on is that at least she isn't Tony Abbott.