Thursday 25th August 2011 | 12:05

Gillard's a goner?

It seems increasingly likely that Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Welsh-born Julia Gillard, will be one of the more short-lived. Having stabbed Kevin Rudd in the back over mining taxes to claim the Labor Party leadership, she turned Rudd’s considerable House of Representatives majority into a dead heat with right-wing Tony Abbott’s Liberal/National Coalition at the ensuing general election last August.

On 72 seats a piece (the first hung parliament in the AV-using nation since 1940), Gillard needed the support of four of the remaining 6 MPs to have a parliamentary majority and install a speaker who would vote with her in the event of a tie. This is exactly what she got: the first ever Green MP, Melbourne’s Adam Bandt, agreed to support her, as did Tasmania’s Independent MP and former Green Andrew Wilkie, and more impressively, she won over two Independents widely seen as conservatives, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, a former Coalition MP.

There was however no wiggle room in this strategy, and perhaps it was doomed from the start. A year on, Gillard sits in the electoral doldrums. She has revived the mining tax, the opposition to which brought her to power, and moved to introduce a carbon levy, condemned by conservative opponents as “Great Big New Tax On Everything”.

Mr Abbott’s Liberal-National coalition enjoyed a 58%-42% lead in a Nielsen poll ten days ago. But as all party leaders will say, the only poll that matters is on election day – and if Gillard was able to keep her messy alliances together long enough, she might be able to weather the storm.

Ms Gillard has, it seems, run out of luck. One of her MPs, Craig Thomson, landed himself in spot of bother in 2009, after allegations surfaced that he used his trade union issued corporate Mastercard to pay for prostitution and escort services. He chose to sue the newspaper printing the claims for defamation, but dropped the case earlier this year. The Labor Party kindly paid $90,000 towards his legal bills – and he now claims that another man, known to him, forged his signature and stole his ID in order to make the escort payments. Two days ago, Thomson resigned as Chair of the House of Representatives’ Standing Committee on Economics, just as the police announced he was under investigation.

Personal scandals of this nature, baseless or otherwise, tend to form a mood music of a government on the rocks – just as ‘sleaze’ shaped the climate ahead of 1997 and ‘expenses’ in the 18 months leading up to 2010. But rarely are they crucial in the particular. But for Gillard, with her majority of one, all particulars or anything affecting any MP supportive of her government, are potentially devastating.

To make matters worse for Mr Gillard, Mr Thomson's electoral divison of Dobell in New South Wales is a classic marginal – not quite a bellwether, being very slightly more Labor than the nation. It very narrowly returned a Labor member in John Howard’s first two election wins in 1996 (by 107) and 1998, before being gained by Liberal Ken Ticehurst in 2001 by just 560 votes. Ticehurst narrowly lost to Thomson in Kevin Rudd’s 2007 landslide, and the rookie Labor MP was actually able to increase his majority to a 55%-45% split, at a time when his party was getting hammered in marginals, in part because the former Liberal member wasn’t on the ballot.

If a by-election happens, both parties must be pretty certain of a Liberal-National gain in the division. This would deny Gillard her majority and, saving the unlikely event of her managing to persuade another member to defect, another general election. An election which, on current projections, the Labor Party seem bound to lose.

Julia Gillard’s statement at Question Time that “I look forward to him continuing to do that job for a very long, long, long time to come” rings true. Her political life, and that of her government, no doubt depends on it.