If Tony Abbott’s physicality and demeanour bespeaks a determination to never back down from a fight, Julia Gillard’s political persona too conveys deadly intent. But words are Gillard’s weapons. Throughout the Rudd years, she sat behind her leader in Question Time, always with the same posture.  She didn’t slouch, like other frontbenchers, or turn and chat with colleagues. Instead she usually sat slightly poised, watching the Opposition intently, frequently sniping at them, always ready to attack.

While she lacks Paul Keating’s ability to condense complex issues to a cut-through phrase, she was Labor’s deadliest weapon in Parliament, regularly humiliating the Opposition in a manner that inevitably brought comparisons to her Labor predecessor and Peter Costello. Even when under pressure over allegations — almost invariably disproven — about the BER program, she could effortlessly turn an Opposition attack back onto her opponents.

Unlike Abbott, or Kevin Rudd, Gillard is an almost perfect embodiment of her party, particularly in its modern form.  Her immediate gravitation as Prime Minister to Bob Hawke, and his famous emphasis on consensus, is hugely symbolic. Like Hawke, Gillard hails from Victoria and the Left, but both belied their ideological backgrounds and moved to the political centre. Gillard’s first high-profile accommodation of a more centrist political trajectory was her toughening-up of the ALP’s asylum seeker policy after the 2001 election.  But as Jacqueline Kent showed in her 2009 biography of Gillard, such a trajectory was hardly new for Gillard, who had concluded her maiden speech in 1998 by contrasting her generation with the veterans of previous ideological clashes in student politics, marked by “a radicalism fashioned by a desire to be practical”.

Gillard’s agenda as deputy Prime Minister with control of education, training and IR has involved serial run-ins with the perceived forces of the Left, most particularly the CFMEU, over the continuation of the Howard government’s hard-line regulation of the construction industry, and teachers’ unions over performance pay and league tables. In retrospect, the Howard government’s attempts to paint Gillard as a hard-left hold-out look eccentric, particularly given the anger directed at her by the CFMEU, who dubbed the ABCC “Gillard’s Gestapo”, and the fury of teachers over an agenda, encapsulated in the MySchool website, that seemed to deliver in spades on exactly the educational policy rhetoric of the Howard years.

Nevertheless, education has been the abiding and passionate theme of Gillard’s time in federal politics, from her maiden speech onwards, and it now forms a central component — in fact the core, really — of the mainstream values she has been at pains to commit herself to since becoming Prime Minister. In speech after speech, she has emphasised how her family background has instilled in her an understanding not only of the value of hard work, but also of education. And while once she linked education with skills and the economic importance to individuals and the labour market of training to ensure workers developed marketable skills, now she seems to stress the innate value of what she calls the “transformative power of education”.

In pursuing education and IR policies in government, Gillard distinguished herself by being able to deal effectively with the Senate, a characteristic that Rudd and some other ministers seemed entirely to lack.  Gillard was able to force through controversial reforms either by crafting deals with the cross-benches — she negotiated passage of her Fair Work bills with both Independents and the Greens — or staring down Coalition threats to block legislation, such as her use of senior private school representatives to force the Opposition into unblocking school funding in December 2008. In contrast, the performance of other ministers such as Penny Wong in navigating mission-critical legislation through the Senate was poor.  A Gillard government will, almost certainly, have a better fortune in the Senate, even before the new and probably Green-dominated Senate starts from July 1 2011.

Gillard’s willingness to move to the political centre has been accelerated in the hothouse pre-election atmosphere following her removal of Rudd.  She has abandoned one of the two hard reforms attempted by Rudd, the RSPT, and as her predecessor predicted, tacked to the right on asylum seekers, reviving offshore processing and encouraging extremist elements to express themselves in a manner reminiscent of the Howard indulgence of One Nation. And she has joined Tony Abbott in turning her back on high immigration, a critical component of Australia’s economic performance for generations; indeed, she has gone beyond the Coalition, which opportunistically sought to conflate high immigration and border protection in the minds of voters, and is actively campaigning against immigration, despite her own background.

While it’s hard to now picture Rudd as a bold reformer, and after a mere three weeks it is unfair to judge Gillard just yet, there is a strong sense that the NSW brand of Labor — managerialist, risk-averse, unwilling to embrace difficult reform — has found its federal champion in Julia Gillard. Rudd might have briefly looked the goods in that role, especially after he dumped the CPRS on the advice of key NSW advisers such as Mark Arbib (and Gillard herself). But the RSPT, the unspoken logic that some froth needed to be taken out of the inflationary, pro-cyclical mining boom and used to help make the rest of the economy more competitive, was a reform too far for many in the party, especially when Rudd’s failing communication skills saw the government taking a beating, week after week.

Such habits are hard to break.  Being a reformer is an acquired skill.  Few — Paul Keating, perhaps — are born with it. The rest have to learn through trial and error.  And modern politics – 21st century politics, with a 24/7 media cycle that concertinas what used to take weeks into hours — is tremendously unforgiving of error. Much easier to play it safe, to only take on the battles you know you can win.

Putting the CPRS debacle aside, Kevin Rudd began 2010 with a relatively limited election year reform agenda — productivity, participation and health reforms to enable Australia to be better placed to meet the challenge of an ageing population. It wasn’t ambitious — certainly not compared to the big reforms of the Hawke and Keating and Howard-Costello years — but it was reasonable enough, and Rudd set about prosecuting it. He lost some paint on health, but managed to put in place some sensible steps forward in that area — though as ever with Rudd, he oversold them as historic achievements.

Nevertheless, as we close in on the 2010 election, neither Labor under its new leader nor the Coalition have offered anything as remotely complex as a policy agenda as Rudd put forward in February.

For all their differences, Gillard has this in common with Tony Abbott.  She offers no vision, no bold reform, no explanation for what she believes are Australia’s key challenges, and how they can be addressed.  Both sides are clearer about what they are opposed to than what they want to do.  From different political origins, Gillard and Abbott have arrived at a very similar destination.