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Date: August 11 2012
Julia Gillard will go into next week's spring parliamentary session confident the worst of the carbon nightmare is behind her and that she can turn the debate towards Labor's positive agenda.
With Newspoll showing the ALP's primary vote improving five points to 33 per cent and Kevin Rudd apparently well short of the numbers to replace her, Ms Gillard declares, against all odds, that she ''absolutely'' thinks she can come back from the abysmal polls to win next year's election.
''I will be fighting the 2013 election to win and what the 2013 election will be about is who has got the best plan … for the nation's future. To keep our economy strong and to do the big things that make us a nation of opportunity and a nation of fairness,'' she said in an interview with Fairfax, in which she cast forward to the rest of the year.
She will use the initial parliamentary week to turn up the heat on Tony Abbott on issues ranging from boats to electricity prices.
On the first, she'll be armed with the report from the panel headed by former defence chief Angus Houston (expected to go to cabinet on Monday).
On the second, she will use quotes from senior Liberals at odds with Abbott's simplistic argument that higher power costs are all about the carbon tax.
But the tax's first six weeks have encouraged her. ''There are already some early indications that people are starting to see through the incredible wild scare campaign that has been run about carbon pricing''.
She senses a change in community mood as she moves around, in ''the community forums, the blogging, the feedback we get to the government directly in letters and emails''.
So was July 1 the game changer she and Wayne Swan predicted?
''In the sense that it was from the first of July that we move from the politicians' claims to the facts, and the facts are there for people to judge.
''Now it will take time for people to judge it. I've always said it would take some months'', but she declines to say how many.
So the focus is changing. With carbon pricing in place, ''there is the time and space now for us to publicly pursue a set of very important issues for the community and to get change that the community wants and needs''.
These include disability insurance, on which she stared down Victoria and NSW over the trials; electricity pricing, where she has given premiers an ultimatum to produce solutions to price hikes; and the coming government response to the Gonski report on school funding. These are ''big reforms - Labor reforms that people value''. But they cost big dollars: ''we're only able to do reforms like improving schools and the National Disability Insurance Scheme by also keeping the economy strong. So we're still determined to bring the budget to surplus and we will''. Ms Gillard insists she's always had a three-year strategy, initially addressing ''a number of very difficult issues which have consumed the nation's attention for a long period … and carbon pricing is one of them'', followed by moving on to other areas.
Ms Gillard is banking on Mr Abbott's negativity, so successful with the deeply unpopular carbon tax, not working when the debate turns strongly to politically easier parts of Labor's agenda; emphasis on education, disability reform and the like will make it much harder for him to get up his anti-carbon mantra day after day. But Labor's positive agenda is currently hostage to that intractable boat issue, which will dominate Parliament's opening week.
Mr Abbott won't relent on his opposition to the Malaysia solution; the Greens stay hostile to offshore processing. Ms Gillard uses Mr Abbott's stance on boats as the basis of her attempt to discredit him more broadly. ''On some of these big public policy questions [Mr Abbott] really finds himself not at war with the government so much as war with the facts and at war with the experts.
''That's been true of carbon; I think that is certainly true of the power pricing debate where he leaves the week at war with Liberal premiers, at war with Liberal ministers, at war with the energy regulator and energy experts on the facts. Already in the asylum seeker area he is at war with experts on the facts [such as former defence chief] Chris Barrie on the dangers of towing boats back.
''I think it would very much disappoint the Australian people, who are looking for compromise and action, if the only response from the opposition is to once again be at war with the experts and at war with the facts. Now I think that is true of every parliamentarian. People want to see change here, they want to see the issue addressed, they want it off the table, they want it dealt with and they want to see compromise to get it done''.
As she battles with the states over electricity, Ms Gillard dismisses the suggestion she should have raised the problems earlier. ''Now's the right time to go there'', she said - because the technical work was coming in and because early next year the price determinations for the next five years will be made.
As always, in whatever adversity, Ms Gillard is disciplined, never publicly betraying a hint of weakness or self doubt. The talk ends on the Olympics. She pointed to Sarah Tait, who with Kate Hornsey won silver in the women's coxless pairs. Tait, mother of a toddler, put in a herculean effort to get back into racing form. Ms Gillard sees it as a story of ''absolute drive and determination''.
It's the sort of tale she likes.
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