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As with his Republican counterparts in the US, the Opposition Leader is waging a bitter war, but it might not end well for either.
Barack Obama's last-minute deal with the Republicans, if it sticks, looks rather more like a battlefield truce than a victory for either side. It is still hard to say who blinked, or who blinked first; just as significantly, the suggestion that Obama won because he staved off default is undermined by the fact that the Republicans have made no concessions on tax increases.
In significant respects it was Obama and the Democrats who capitulated, but they may have done so in a way that increases the chance that the Tea Party virus will turn its attention to its main enemy - the Republican Party.
The Tea Party idea gains much of its passion and impetus from the outrage of having Barack Hussein Obama as the nation's chief executive. But its real focus is on the Republican Party, and it can triumph only after it has rendered the old party impotent.
The American model of government differs substantially from Australia's. But there are parallels between the civil war of Obama and the Republicans, and the political war going on in Australia. Here as in the United States, those who were vanquished at the last election have refused to do the normal thing, of playing loyal but critical opposition between the loss and the next election.
Instead they are acting as if they are merely wounded and are determined to fight on, seeking to sabotage the program of the official victor. In the course of doing so, they have put such a focus on purity that some might wonder whether they are up to the practical task of government.
Obama has found things far more difficult since his party lost a significant number of House of Representatives seats at the mid-term elections. It is not only that the Republicans control what we would call Supply. A president facing a hostile congress is by no means unusual.
It is that the particular Republicans now in control have been captured by the populist fervour of the Tea Party movement, who behave rather more like a crusade or an army than a political party. They fight for keeps and despise any form of compromise; they have, moreover, come to see the Democrat Administration, particularly the President, as some sort of epitome of evil incarnate. No one, of course, is allowed to suggest that the fact that Obama is black adds any venom to the hatred.
In one sense the argument in Washington over the past month has been about tax, and spending, and the size of the Administration's credit card - all things that anyone is entitled to have opinions - even passionate opinions - about but not of themselves tending to cause mortal engagements.
Even the subset debate - a supposed preference by Republicans for small governments, of more limited powers, compared with the Democrats, who are more disposed to believe in government action and programs and higher spending - is normally incapable of generating the heat of recent weeks.
That's because Republicans are, in practice, as likely as Democrats to spend on their favoured projects, including on making war, and to increase the government's power over the people, when it suits. It has been unfunded expenditure in Iraq and Afghanistan, during the Bush administration, which has most blown the credit card.
Typically, anyway, the American centre has been so big - and the distance between Republican and Democrat extremes so tiny - that arguments are in small compass.
The Washington style of settlement is for intense argument, followed by compromise; because party affiliation is far more fluid in the US, settlements and deals usually have three-dimensional characteristics, whereby the ultimate winners have picked or bought off at least enough votes to win.
Successive presidents have dealt with hostile congresses by making deals, by making concessions, by buying off groups by promises of spending in their electorates; typically the results are messy - never pure. Because, usually, there has been at least some cross-party support given, as often as not at a cost which has blunted some of the sharper edges of a program. This time, it has seemed radically different. The Tea Party movement operates on the Republican Party, but is not - or not yet - of the Republican Party. Its critique is as much of mainstream Republican politicians, and their negotiation compromising style, as it is of the Democrats. Concession and negotiation have morally soiled the Republicans - a reason why any sign of willingness to allow bigger government, or more taxes, must be particularly resisted right now.
Even as experienced Republicans deride these entrants for their extremism, their naivete and impracticality, Tea Party zealots despise the dealers as much as the dealing, seeing the typical politician as intrinsically dirtied by negotiation, and the politician who deserts them as having been successfully tempted by the devil, and, as such, an apostate deserving condign punishment.
For this anti-party, the mission is not seeking the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but resistance and purity. That there has been a degree of compromise even from leading Republicans who have pandered to the Tea Party is a defeat, even as they will rejoice about how far they have gone in hobbling the President.
For Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott must seem much the same. As she complains, he simply wont accept the verdict of the umpire - the electorate - last year. He acts as if he was cheated from his rightful place at the head of government.
Instead of providing stiff, but necessarily unavailing opposition, allowing the Government to govern while warning the electorate of the weakness and deficiencies of its approach, he is instead doing his level best to make all government more difficult, to sabotage Government action, even to try to talk down the economy or to invite some sort of strike by capital, designed to make the Government fall.
At one stage his wrath about losing was focused on two independents whom he believed he had a right to own. But, if anything, Opposition abuse of these politicians stiffened their loyalty to the deals they had made, even if it made them more anxious to show to their electorates that they had achieved something as a result. He still has a good chance of winning government before a general election, through the death or resignation of a member of the Government.
He has been so successful in making a big issue of the carbon tax, and Gillard so unsuccessful in defending it, that the polls suggest that he could win a by-election in almost any seat.
He has devoted very little time either to the development of party policy - or, perhaps more importantly, even the expression of a general philosophy of liberalism designed to give voters a broad impression of his views and reflexes in particular areas. Like the Tea Party his campaigning style has been focused on the extremes and on massive oversimplification. Those who watched him as a minister in the Howard government saw a man quite willing to make little compromises and deals - and someone not in the least unhappy about increasing taxes or the size of government. It is now, however, almost impossible to form judgments about what he would be like in government, at least one based on what he has said as opposed to what he has done.
Gillard has the numbers in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Passage of the tax is not awaiting some sort of plebiscite or fresh election, as Abbott always seems to imply. He actually holds very little power over the Government. She could enact her carbon tax now without much further debate. Abbott could make as much noise as he wants, but, by the time of a general election, voters would have had some chance to see whether it is as dire and terrible as he has pretended; indeed whether it has brought Australia to general ruination, as he suggests it would.
There's a very good chance that this would expose Abbott's hollowness, his opportunism, and even some of the extremism of his remarks. Tea Parties, as with their American predecessor Know-Nothing Parties, never win.
But Gillard, at the moment, seems rather like a kangaroo on the road, dazzled by the headlights.
If she stays there, she need not bother to hope that Abbott will stop in time. He won't even try.
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