By Shaun Carney
IN THE five-plus months Julia Gillard has been Prime Minister, she hasn't enjoyed many good days, but this week she had a good day. Monday marked 100 days since the August 21 federal election, which the Labor government managed to lose and not lose simultaneously.
It was a good day for two reasons. One, the government put the bill that will structurally separate Telstra through the lower house - a desirable and important micro-economic reform that is long overdue. Two, Gillard hit her stride as leader in the Parliament, finding the right combination of viciousness and control in her attack on the Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott.
During his first 12 months as Liberal leader, Abbott has flummoxed the ALP. Labor's various lines of attack - that he lacks gravitas, that he runs off at the mouth, that he is nothing but a warrior for the hard political right, that he wants to bring back WorkChoices - have sometimes slowed Abbott down but none has stopped him. Abbott has been so successful in transforming the national political contest that Labor has been forced to go back to the start and ask basic questions of itself about its performance and its purpose.
His strategy, pursued with a good deal of enthusiasm by his MPs, has exposed the ALP's weaknesses and the fragility of the public's support for the government.
Abbott was justified in telling Coalition members during their last meeting for 2011 last week that they should feel a solid sense of achievement. Kevin Rudd did a lot to bring himself down, to be sure, but it couldn't have happened without Abbott's game-changing emergence as Liberal leader last summer and his unyielding oppositionism ever since.
As a result of the collapse of the Rudd prime ministership in June, Labor finds itself in the bizarre and unprecedented situation for any government of needing to establish its political authority immediately after having secured another term of office. Since Gillard succeeded Rudd on June 24, she has struggled to find the right tone, much less the right set of messages, to stabilise and re-energise Labor.
In the months since the August election, Gillard has given occasional signs that she would place a unique personal stamp on her stewardship of the government, only to pull back and dilute her message and her demeanour. The strengths she showed as deputy to Rudd in the Parliament, the capacity to swing out hard against her opponents in a concise and cutting way, were deemed to be not prime ministerial.
The problem was that this left the government further weakened. Successful governments going back to the 1980s have relied on two powerful voices to prosecute their cases: think of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, and John Howard and Peter Costello. Wayne Swan, as Gillard's deputy, simply does not have the skills as a communicator or as an advocate that she displayed as Rudd's 2IC. Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen make decent attempts to fill that gap, but are not up to Gillard's standard.
Lately, Gillard has been changing tack. During the past fortnight, her language has become much stronger, culminating in her mauling of Abbott on Monday. Her short speech ended with the following: ''The Leader of the Opposition now comes into this Parliament and his own backbench have their jaws trailing along the ground because they know in their heart of hearts that if they are to sustain support in their electorates, they need to go to their electorates with a positive plan.
''I make this prediction about the Leader of the Opposition: he may be here yelling and screaming this December, but it will be very interesting to see what is happening next December when his backbench, which is already restive, realises that you cannot sustain political support in this country based on negativity, bitterness and three-word slogans. They will realise that he is a man empty of conviction and empty of ideas. By next December he will be standing in front of the Australian people and his own backbench revealed as precisely that.''
Abbott has decried the intensity and personal nature of the attacks - Gillard also dismissed him on Monday as ''weak, weak, weak'' - which suggests they might be finding their target. God knows the government needs to inject some wit and vigour into its rhetorical approach, but even if Gillard opts to pick up the slack permanently on this front, that won't solve Labor's bigger problem.
Put simply, when it comes to economic policy, this government lacks a sense of mastery. Amid the various screw-ups, such as the flim-flam promises over grocery and fuel prices, and the more momentous failures - the home insulation scheme and climate change policy - the government's economic policy stands out as a success. And yet, on this most vital policy area, Labor has reaped no political dividend.
What's worse for the government is that the public's lack of confidence in Labor's economic stewardship acts as a drag on its capacity to be bold in other policy areas. Gillard has declared the end of 2011 as the deadline for the political system to set a price on carbon, while also predicting that Abbott's leadership will be exhausted in the same time frame.
When you watch the government at work, you get the sense that it's engaged in a constant struggle to demonstrate that it really is in charge of the nation's economic settings. That's how it can end up looking outsmarted by shadow treasurer Joe Hockey on banks that move interest rates beyond increases in the official cash rate when Swan has actually been working on developing a new banking competition policy for months.
Gillard acknowledges the problem and that's why she has adopted the word ''methodical'' as her government's mantra. She tells her ministers that the only way Labor can restore its standing is by taking the long view and demonstrating that it will always follow a proven, painstaking method, not Rudd's chaotic ''a new day, a new idea'' approach.
She can't be certain that voters will wait around to absorb the message.
Shaun Carney is associate editor.