Nevertheless, few prime ministers have endured quite the same unrelenting campaign of belittlement as Gillard. The News Ltd press has led the spear-throwing at Australia's first female prime minister, both in The Australian and the organisation's stable of tabloids. The anti-Gillard diatribes are almost invariably greeted by a rush of online comments by readers, who mostly bay for her head and furiously agree that she is Australia's worst ever national leader (Billy McMahon would be relieved to find he is no longer the dunce of prime ministers) and that the country has descended into ruins and disrepute during her (little more than 12-month) reign.

But the denigration of Gillard has also infected sober sections of the media. Recently, for instance, Jon Faine, the veteran host of the ABC Melbourne morning radio program, taunted Gillard throughout an interview by suggesting she was not the sole occupant of the prime ministerial office (her doppelganger was, of course, Bob Brown). When listeners chided Faine about the disrespect he had shown Gillard, he excused his treatment of her as mere ''theatre'', which was not quite as bad as Alan Jones, who had to admit that perhaps, yes, he did go over the top when he suggested the Prime Minister should be dumped at sea in a chaff bag.

None of this is to deny that the Prime Minister and the Labor government have been guilty of serial and significant misjudgments, most spectacularly so in the bungling over asylum seeker policy. Yet so much of the carping at Gillard seems to take no account of the degree of difficulty of her prime ministership: the millstone she has worn because of the way she gained the office (yes, maybe in retrospect she would have been wise to resist the sirens of ambition when the Labor caucus revolted against Kevin Rudd, but did she really have a choice?); the intractable nature of some of the policy problems that have confronted the government, including asylum seekers and climate change; and the difficult (and unfamiliar) context of minority government.

The hand prime ministers are dealt is never the same and the scale of the challenges they face sometimes only comes into sharp relief in hindsight. For example, while some columnists are still prone to point to the Whitlam and Fraser governments as epitomes of economic recklessness and cowardice respectively, any reasonable interpretation would concede that the 1970s was a decade in which advanced industrial democracies worldwide were beset with economic problems that largely overwhelmed office-holders. It was an interregnum between the collapse of the postwar Keynesian-welfarist regime and the emergence of the neo-liberal regime in the 1980s. In short, it was a period of flux and uncertainty, when the way forward for policymakers seemed unclear.

I suspect when we look back at the current era we may come to view it as another such interregnum, as the neo-liberal regime decays and its replacement is yet only dimly grasped. Former Labor PM Paul Keating has reproached the Gillard government for lacking an overarching narrative, but perhaps such a unifying story is more elusive than it has been at some earlier junctures. And even if this is not the case, there is a disjunction between the most extravagant criticisms of this government and Australia's relative economic prosperity and stability, especially when viewed in the context of the financial woes and political dysfunction in much of the rest of the world (look no further than the euro zone).