Labor would be able to deliver better government if re-elected in its own right, Julia Gillard has promised, but the prime minister refused to guarantee that she would continue in parliament if she loses the poll on 14 September.

In a wide-ranging interview with Guardian Australia, Gillard appealed to voters for a chance to govern with a majority, saying it would give her “an opportunity to deliver solely the Labor vision for Australia backed in by a majority Labor government”, free from the need to compromise with the Greens and independents in both houses, as she has had to since forming a minority government in September 2010.

It “would give [Labor] opportunities we haven’t had during this parliament” she claimed, saying she had never taken to the parliament anything she “didn’t believe in”, but citing the design of the carbon price and the fact that Labor was forced to abandon spending cuts to get parliamentary approval for its reconstruction levy after the Queensland floods as examples of difficult compromises her party had made.

But Gillard refused to commit to staying in parliament if Labor lost the election, which looks likely according to current opinion polls.

“I am not going to sit here wargaming what would I do if we were in government, what would I do if we were in opposition. I don’t spend my time thinking about it, so I couldn’t give you a thought through answer. That’s not what I spend my efforts doing,” she said.

“You would have to talk to me about that in the days afterwards. I don’t spend time thinking about the days beyond.”

Gillard claimed Tony Abbott’s signature policy for women, his $4.3bn paid parental leave offering mothers 26 weeks’ leave at their full wage – a benefit worth up to $75,000 – was in fact an anti-women policy, and against Australian values.

The scheme – which has been strongly backed by some feminist commentators – is to be paid for by a 1.5% levy on big business.

Gillard said the levy would be passed on to citizens and “would require the poorest women in our society to pay more for things they buy in order to benefit upper income women”. She added: “The Australian way has been either we share benefits equally like Medicare … or we give a fair go to people who need a fair go the most. This scheme upends Australian values and asks the lowest paid to pay a benefit to the most generously paid.”

She rejected the argument that the levy on business meant it was not a welfare program, but rather a worker’s entitlement, like annual leave.

“It is not funded by business … business will pay an extra tax which will go into government revenue. How do we normally pay social benefits out of government revenue? Well, we give them to everyone equally … or we share so that people at the bottom end get the biggest advantage.”

She said the Coalition’s policy to abolish Labor’s low income superannuation contribution scheme was also a policy that would hurt women because they made up most of the scheme’s 3.6 million beneficiaries.

The prime minister also contested the Coalition’s central political attack that her government could not be trusted because she had reversed policy pledges, saying there were now “broken promises littered on both sides” of politics because both she and Abbott had been forced by economic circumstances to change their minds.

“According to the leader of the opposition, if he changes his mind then it is simply that, a change of mind; if I change my mind then it is something going to character and honesty. Well we can all play this game. Is it broken promises littered on both sides or is it that people have had to respond to the facts?” she asked. She cited Abbott’s promise that there would be no “adverse changes” on superannuation before he deferred for two years an increase in compulsory employer superannuation payments from 9 to 12%, and the Coalition’s previous vehement opposition to cuts to the baby bonus for second and subsequent children, which the shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said late last year was a policy that had been “tried in China”.

“This is the same leader of the opposition,” she said, “who said we will always protect the baby bonus and there was Joe Hockey wittering on about China’s one-child policies, only now to say, ‘We’ll endorse Labor’s abolition of the baby bonus,’ and actually it looks like they will go further and take more away from people who have a new child from the family payment system.”

In 2012 the Coalition opposed Labor’s proposal to cut the baby bonus for second or subsequent children, but in the light of what it calls a “budget emergency” it is now supporting Labor’s plan to axe the payment.

Last week Hockey confirmed the Coalition was also likely to scrap Labor’s smaller replacement benefit – a means-tested family payment worth $2,000 for a first child and $1,000 for subsequent births, although that decision is opposed by some in the shadow cabinet.

Gillard also said she was disturbed that abortion law was again emerging as a political issue, with DLP senator John Madigan seeking to legislate to ban “gender selection abortions” and vowing to pursue the issue if he gained a balance of power vote in the Senate after the election.

“I think it is always possible for abortion to become a political issue and it always disturbs me when I see the start of what looks like voices once again coming out in the debate to try to create community sentiment so that women no longer have the ability to govern their own bodies and make their own choices. I don’t think as women we can ever rest easy on this, we always have to always be mindful there are forces in Australian political debate and Australian political life who would seek to impose the alternative: no choice for women,” she said.

After a term in office wracked with leadership tension and political scandals, Gillard also reflected on the challenges of political leadership and her personal feelings during the last botched challenge to her leadership, which rival Kevin Rudd did not, in the end, join.

She conceded it was difficult for leaders to meet public demands that they present themselves as “real people” when they were often judged harshly for showing any sign of the doubts or second thoughts that most people feel.

“It is hard for me … and leaders in the modern age,” she said, “it’s hard to say, ‘I’m still thinking about it, or I’m not sure yet, or it’s a very hard decision.’ I think all of those things are quite difficult to communicate because people rightly want to know that, you know, you’ve got it, you’re getting it done, you’ve got their back, they don’t have to worry about a set of things because you’re doing it for them. Sometimes that can feel hard for the individual, but mostly I feel a sense of privilege at having that responsibility, and I don’t feel frozen by it. If anything I feel energised by it.”

She said she had taken personally the decision of her long-time friend, supporter and former Labor leader Simon Crean to call the leadership spill in March in which she ended up being the only candidate.

“Yes, you do take things like that personally, absolutely, you do. How much can you take it with you … I am just not someone who feels it is a good thing or a healthy thing to take those emotions with you. But yes I mean that was a tough day … I felt very let down by what Simon did,” she said. Gillard sacked Crean from her ministry soon after he demanded the leadership ballot.

Asked what her agenda would be if she did defy the polls and win re-election, she nominated the two policies Labor sees as among its strongest achievements this term – the national disability scheme and the schools funding package – saying both would need “patient nurturing” to be fully implemented.

She said her recent tears during a debate about the disability reforms, which she has said came from thinking about some of the disabled people she had met while developing the scheme, were also a result of the way policy-making can remove emotion from a debate.

She said the process can “take the emotional connection out of it” and that at the moment she spoke in parliament, “in that moment for whatever reason I think it was the moment when I got to stand back and say after all of this, here it is and it is going to change lives in the hundreds of thousands”.

In the lead-up to the 2007 poll the then prime minister, John Howard, said he was likely to retire from politics during the following term, even if the Coalition won the election. He didn’t get to make the decision because he lost his Sydney seat of Bennelong in the election.

Parliament resumes on Monday for the final four weeks of sittings before the formal election campaign. The writs will be issued on 12 August, a week before it had been due to resume after a winter break.