Prime Minister Julia Gillard has taken aim at what she says is the "Americanisation" of Australia's rancorous political debate.

Recent anti-carbon tax rallies in Canberra and Sydney have featured coffins, "Ditch the Witch" signs, and "JuLiar" chants, in an echo of similar angry scenes at right-wing Tea Party rallies in the US.

Ms Gillard was asked at a community forum in Sydney last night whether those kinds of attacks demeaned her office and Australia's democracy.

The Prime Minister at first was a little hesitant to respond, saying her critics would target her for being thin-skinned.

"I don't like it when I get a sense of a kind of - with all apologies to our American friends - a kind of Americanisation of our debate," she said.

"It's not in us generally, I don't think, to talk about 'people's revolt' and very, very harsh words of the nature that we've seen in the public debate.

"It is in us to have a robust public debate.

"We have politicians come from overseas and look at our Question Time and go 'it's a robust go', and that is an Australian way of doing it," she said.

"I don't think it helps us as a nation deal with some complicated questions.

"I think there's a temper and tone question which, you know, we want to be uniquely our own and uniquely Australian, and I'm not sure we're seeing that on display now."

But Federal Opposition leader Tony Abbott has rejected suggestions politics is more brutal, telling Fairfax Radio the public and the Opposition are simply fed up with the current Government.

"The role of Opposition leader involves a lot of criticism and I think sometimes you pay the price of having to be the nation's official critic-in-chief," he said.

"But the party's doing extremely well. The Government is monumentally in difficulties."

Last night on 7.30, former prime minister John Howard rejected the notion that politics was more brutal now than it has ever been.

"I was there in 1975. It was pretty brutal then," Mr Howard said.

"And it was fairly brutal at various stages of the Hawke government so ... I don't think it's any more brutal; I think we have to preserve a sense of perspective."