By Peter Hartcher
The Julia Gillard experiment is failing. The Gillard government has received its first political death threat. For the first time since she took the prime ministership 37 days ago, a credible national poll has Labor losing power.
Labor's share of the vote in today's Herald/Nielsen poll is almost as bad as the party's result in the worst poll of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership.
On these numbers, Tony Abbott would be prime minister if an election had been held in the past three days. This is a political emergency for Labor.
When the Herald published a Nielsen poll on June 7 that showed Labor would have lost an election, securing 47 per cent of the vote to the Coalition's 53, it was the catalyst for Labor's Right faction powerbrokers to begin plotting the coup against Rudd.
Now, after everything that has happened, we have a Nielsen poll showing Labor would lose an election with only 48 per cent of the vote to the Coalition's 52. The difference is 1 percentage point, a difference without a distinction.
The voters have listened to Gillard for 36 days since she assassinated Rudd. Initially, they gave her the benefit of the doubt. But the more they have learnt, the more they asked the question - what is the point of Labor?
The answer they are reaching is, nothing much. With three weeks to polling day, this is Labor's worst nightmare.
On this trajectory, Labor will have burnt through two prime ministers and ended up with a one-term government, leaving behind a public impression of treachery, incompetence, and a heart so hollow that an autopsy could find nothing in it but tumbleweed, dust and some yellowing opinion polls.
Labor had a four-part plan: kill off a struggling prime minister to lift its poll numbers; elect a new leader to generate a honeymoon; allow the new leader time to execute three rapid movements to excise troubled policies; then call an early election to cruise to victory on the surge of honeymoon goodwill.
The reality: the first three parts went exactly to plan, yet somehow the final phase is running into the grit and gravel of imminent crash.
What is going so dreadfully wrong for Labor? The first words that will fall from many lips are ''Kevin Rudd''. And it is certainly true that although Rudd physically has kept himself confined to his Brisbane hermitage of Griffith, his ghost has stalked Gillard's every moment on the campaign.
This theme of the campaign reached a climax on Wednesday when Gillard was forced to suspend her campaign plan to confront a damaging leak.
The Herald and Channel Nine reported a leak from within the government that as deputy prime minister, Gillard had argued against the generosity of two of the Rudd government's key welfare reforms.
In the Rudd government's inner sanctum, Gillard tried to cut the size of the rise in the age pension in last year's budget and wanted to kill the idea of paid parental leave altogether.
Worse, she had argued against these measures for political reasons, arguing that there was little or no political mileage for Labor in improving assistance for age pensioners or for working mothers. She was overruled.
Worse still, she had been happy to share credit publicly for both measures. In the televised leaders' debate on Sunday, for instance, she boasted that "we did a major increase in the pension, to help older Australians particularly, with the pressures that are on them".
This story was a problem for several reasons. First, it suggested hard-heartedness towards two key constituencies - age pensioners and working mothers. Second, it undermined her claim to represent the party dedicated to helping with the cost of living. Third, it contributed to an impression of her as a flint-hearted, ruthless political operator.
And finally, it was now undeniable - Labor had a rat in its ranks.
Suspicion immediately fell on Rudd. The former Labor leader Mark Latham rejoiced in the opportunity to renew his campaign against his one-time colleague. Here's how Latham approached the subject in his interview on Thursday night with the Sky News presenter Paul Murray:
Murray: Let's get where everyone wants to go here. The leaks.
Mark Latham: Kevin Rudd!
Latham didn't have any evidence, but he said he didn't need any.
"He's the logical suspect. I always say to people who ask me, how do you know it's Kevin Rudd? I say, when you're lying in bed at night and your hear the pitter-patter sound on the roof, you don't actually have to see the drops to know that it's raining."
He called Rudd a "snake behind the scenes". And he really enjoyed himself: "I think it's unmanly and beneath a decent Aussie bloke to act this way, let alone an ex-prime minister."
This from the author of the most vicious piece of political filth and sociopathic slander ever written in Australia, The Latham Diaries.
Others were more circumspect. Wayne Swan publicly counselled everyone not to jump to conclusions. Bob McMullan offered the cautionary observation that there were always more people with inside knowledge of such events than was commonly supposed.
Julia Gillard defended Rudd as "an honourable man". She reaffirmed that he would be offered a senior cabinet post in a re-elected government.
And in a completely unscientific poll at smh.com.au of about 15,000 voters yesterday, 53 per cent said they did not think Rudd was the source of the leak.
Whatever the reality, the perception was enough. It dominated the news, blotted out Gillard's campaign messages and armed Tony Abbott with a powerful accusation that Labor was in disarray and could not be trusted to form a stable government.
Three key points about the perception of Rudd as saboteur. First, it was a campaign disaster. Second, it is now over. And third, the Herald reported yesterday that Labor had asked Rudd about two weeks ago to help by campaigning in Queensland seats other than his own, but he had asked for time to consider his campaign plans.
That disclosure forced events yesterday to the point where, after disclosing Rudd was undergoing surgery to have his gall bladder removed, his office issued this statement:
"Mr Rudd's doctors advise he is likely to be in hospital for a couple of days before returning home. Mr Rudd looks forward to resuming campaign activities next week - both in his own electorate, elsewhere in Queensland and the rest of the country as appropriate - in support of the re-election of the government and Prime Minister Gillard."
So Rudd will now join the wider Labor campaign effort. This will put an end to the sub-plot of Rudd the rat, and allow Gillard to get back on message. Will the leaks continue regardless? We will see. But Rudd must be praying that they will not. Because at the current rate, Rudd could end up being blamed, fairly or not, for costing Labor the election.
Latham said it was too late for Rudd to rejoin the unified campaign effort, that this "train has left the station".
But the story of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton suggests otherwise. Clinton despised Obama as they competed for the Democratic nomination for the presidency. She thought him a total phoney. She told her staff at one point that "we have to make people understand he's not real".
She was privately convinced that he won some Democratic caucuses by cheating, according to the campaign account by the journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Clinton had feverishly hoped that a damaging videotape of Obama's wife would surface.
Yet when the moment came for her to acknowledge defeat and give her votes to the Obama effort for the good of the party, she made an extraordinarily gracious endorsement of her rival, and now serves as his Secretary of State. Gillard has read the book; she knows that it can work.
But the leaks were not the reason that Labor's poll numbers began their precipitous decline in the past week. The first evidence of a marked fall in Labor's support came after Gillard announced her climate change policy, or more accurately, her non-policy, of a citizens' assembly. This was picked up in last weekend's Newspoll and has continued this week.
Why? Because Gillard had repeated Rudd's biggest mistake. His poll decline, too, started when he shelved his promised emissions trading scheme. Even now, today's Nielsen poll shows that no fewer than 60 per cent of voters want an emissions trading scheme.
The abandonment of the emissions trading scheme is the specific policy, but it's also powerfully symbolic. Voters, especially Labor voters, see the surrender on the scheme as evidence of a Labor Party that doesn't believe in anything, a self-perpetuating patronage machine no longer willing to fight for any cause. Labor voters are despairing at Gillard.
The Rudd distraction seems to be solving itself. Now, if Gillard wants to have any hope of winning, she needs to nail Abbott, and strongly argue why she believes in Labor. If she can find a few good reasons in her own heart, she might yet be able to persuade the voters. She has three weeks, and counting.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor.