Julia Gillard’s oft-boasted ‘steely resolve’ has been tested lately, and she has failed to show it every time.

She fled an important conference, and a meeting with Hillary Clinton, because three of her soldiers had died by gunfire in a war, and went not to the warfront but Canberra. She fled an important conference, and a meeting with Vladimir Putin, because her father had died at 83, and went home weeping to Adelaide.

Leaving a battlefield because of a dear one’s death is not what she lets our soldiers do. They must stay, and fight on till battle’s end.

Yet she thinks she is different somehow. She is allowed her tears and her time off, playing hookey from her national obligations, her duty.

The latest conference had a day to run. The funeral wouldn’t occur for about five days. There was time to get home and comfort her mum before then. Her sister was on hand, doing this already. Many Australians overseas when a parent dies don’t get to the funeral. That is the way things go sometimes.

But not for Gillard. She is what Schwarzenegger might call a ‘girly man’. She goes AWOL.

A contrast with Kim Beazley might be drawn. He heard his younger brother had died. Yet he went on in and faced the Caucus meeting in which he was rolled as Leader. And he gave the press conference, and took hard questions about the sum of his career, and his failure to be our greatest Prime Minister. And then he flew home. You do your duty first in this job, and then serve family matters, as he did, when there is time.

The doctrine of ‘Gillard Exceptionalism’ should now be abandoned. She should either do the job, or get out of it.