JULIA...in Ruins !

This week marks a year since Julia Gillard became Prime Minister after getting the elected Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd sacked. Never mind in May last year Gillard insisted Labor would definitely not replace Rudd: "There's more chance of me becoming the full-forward of the Dogs Football Club." Just a month later a shocked Rudd was packing up his office. Australians were shocked too by this betrayal.

It was in that very instant of her greatest triumph that Gillard began to destroy herself and first made promises that have crippled her and has left the Labor Party in ruins. A News Poll today shows the ALP's primary vote has plummeted to a historical low of 27 per cent. The lowest figure for any government in 40 years! Amazingly, six in ten voters said they would prefer Mr Rudd as leader again.

It's Shakespearean, how this feminist hero became the hapless joke we saw on 60 Minutes on Sunday, giggling awkwardly outside her boyfriend's shed as she meekly obeyed his ban on women entering. That cringing scene hinted at the real tragedy behind Gillard's fall. It's not just that she's been the most incompetent and weak prime minister since at least World War ll, but there's not been a single achievement to boast of in a junkyard of failure.

More devastating is that she's flunked the moral test. Gillard has failed, above all, because of her lack of character. Her continually unfulfilled broken promises such as stopping asylum-seeker boats by having an East Timor Centre, having a Citizen's Assembly on Climate Change, and stating emphatically before the election that she would not install a Carbon Dioxide Tax. Nor did Sydneysiders get their rail link or the rest of us never saw the Cash for Clunkers scheme materialise. It was policy on-the-fly to give the impression she and her government were doing something. The ban on live cattle exports showed again the knee-jerk policy making without even consulting the cabinet or the Indonesians. Now we have her presiding over the greatest gamble of public money ($40 billion) in generations with the National Broadband Network.

The Way I See It....she knew from the start of her reign that her hands were dirtied by deceit and double-dealing. Nothing could be more important to her survival and self-respect than to regain the public's trust in her word and conviction. No more trickery, political spin and false promises. The onus was on Gillard to play it straight last year...but can a political animal ever change it's "spots"? Incredibly, the past 12 months have been a shameful record of deceits that defines Julia today and I feel makes her unelectable with or without the radical Greens Party.