Some Labor MPs think Julia Gillard's leadership is dead in the water. Others think she can turn it around. The solution is the same in both cases.

It was a moment rich in symbolism for a party in decline, one facing hard questions about its entire purpose for existing: the Victorian ALP conference on the weekend was unable to form a quorum to debate motions relating to gay marriage.

It may have been a procedural stunt pulled by one faction to thwart another and short-circuit an inconvenient debate, but it couldn’t have better symbolised the existential woes of a party facing a rapidly shrinking, rapidly ageing membership, hopelessly adrift in terms of its core beliefs.

Julia Gillard added her own moment of … well, it wasn’t symbolism, just stupidity. Yet again lashing out at Tony Abbott, as though the job of the prime minister is not to lead the country but offer a running commentary on her opponent, she called him “the love child of Sarah Palin and Donald Trump”. While hardly “below the belt” as one publication suggested (guess which proprietor), it yet again showed that too many Labor staff, including those at the highest levels, appear to think Australian politics is one big variant of The West Wing.

Better yet, it happened the weekend the lid yet again blew off frustrations within the Liberals over Abbott’s lack of policy substance.

It added to the despair of some Labor MPs who think Gillard’s leadership is terminal, that there’ll be no recovery in the polls because voters are tuning out from her, or never tuned in after the assassination of Kevin Rudd added a toxic edge to Gillard’s political personality. The low morale is feeding right down into the branches, they say, with long-standing members not renewing memberships, and a deep pall of despair in caucus — all summed up with “we are f-cked”. Not that they’re advocating a leadership change — on the contrary, having in their view wrecked two leaders by replacing Rudd with Gillard, they’re not keen to wreck a third by handing the poisoned chalice to someone else.

Other backbenchers aren’t quite so depressed and think that, just as other governments went through periods of terrible polling before coming good, this one will too, once the big components of the current reform agenda are put in place, thereby demonstrating Labor can get on with governing, while also demonstrating to voters its has a program it believes in.

Happily — well, that’s probably wildly overstating it — there’s only viable option regardless of which camp you’re in on the Gillard leadership: continue the reform agenda, keep passing legislation (the one thing the Gillard government has proven adept at), lock in major reforms. If Gillard is indeed dead in the water but goes to the 2013 election with a carbon pricing scheme up and running, the budget in surplus, a suite of reforms across superannuation, health and workforce participation locked in, Labor will have burnished its credentials and it will be able to front the election after that with economic credibility. Particularly given that, no matter how much Tony Abbott jumps up and down, the Liberals will never repeal the carbon price legislation.

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And if Gillard can turn the government’s performance around, she will have a strong story to tell voters in 2013 anyway. Whether she can turn it around, particularly when much of the media is campaigning against her, is in considerable doubt — Bruce Guthrie’s suggestion on the weekend that Rupert Murdoch had recently given the nod to Abbott missed the point that The Australian has been pursuing a partisan campaign against the Rudd government from the moment it was elected, and The Daily Telegraph, with its misogynist election attacks on Gillard and its hysterical defence of middle-class welfare in budget week, isn’t far behind. But no one is seriously suggesting she’d improve her chances by ditching unpopular reforms.

How politicians react to pressure — from the media, from their opponents, from their supporters — is a key determinant of electoral success. Abbott had virtually nothing to work with against Rudd, but he used what he had to go after Rudd relentlessly, exposing the latter to pressure he had never felt as prime minister. Rudd couldn’t cope — Abbott spooked him, winning a key psychological victory with his “great big new tax” campaign. And that in turn spooked some of Labor’s easily scared factional leaders, particularly those from NSW, into dumping Rudd, capitalising on his extraordinary managerial shortcomings and the resentment they created in caucus.

As the bad polls continue, don’t doubt that the same geniuses who thought it would be a good idea to ditch Rudd will start thinking it might be time to do the same to Gillard. The repeated and spectacular failures of the strategising of the NSW Labor Party won’t deter them; nor will the realisation they’d be wrecking a third leader within three years. The same phenomenon will be at work as it was last year — a mental fragility, an inability to take political pressure, the desperate search for anything that will give a temporary break from it.

The only real solution to pressure, of course, is to resist it, and turn it back onto its sources. The Liberals traditionally don’t cope with opposition well. They spent two of the three years of the last term at each others’ throats. Abbott’s failure to countenance any positive policy, and the wretched nature of what has been allowed to come out, is clearly causing deep tensions among his colleagues.

A politically adept government would be able to knock this mob out of the park. But the last thing this government is is politically adept, of course. For the moment, its ambition should be merely to be patient, and learn how to absorb pressure and in turn let it build on its opponents. That’ll stand Labor in good stead regardless of who wins in 2013.