PROFILE: Deputy prime minister Julia Gillard makes Australian history

By Sid Astbury Jun 23, 2010, 17:20 GMT

Sydney - Last year, when stratospheric approval ratings made him the most popular prime minister ever, Kevin Rudd was asked by a reporter to rate Julia Gillard's chances of becoming Australia's first ever female prime minister.

'She's a fantastic deputy prime minister and she's going to make a fantastic prime minister as well, one day,' he said.

The likely dawning of that red-letter day has come sooner than either of them expected.

Gillard is challenging Rudd for the leadership and is expected to beat him handily and take the Labor Party forward to a parliamentary election later in the year.

Gillard, a Welsh-born former union lawyer, was finally goaded into trying to tear down her leader when he rashly questioned her loyalty to him.

For months, as Rudd's popularity went into freefall and the government's problems mounted, Gillard had been urged to run against him.

She resisted, believing that Australians would not reward ruthlessness in a woman - and an unmarried and childless woman at that.

Many Australians are not as enlightened as they like to think. It is instructive that the lawmaker who once chided Gillard for being 'deliberately barren' still sits in Parliament.

But Gillard has not let other considerations deflect from her ambition.

'I'm kind of full of admiration for women who can mix it together, working and having kids, but I'm not sure I could have,' she said. 'There's something in me that's focused and single-minded and if I was going to do that, I'm not sure I could have done this.'

Gillard, famously calm, never impetuous and never flustered, is Labor's best parliamentary performer. She has the respect of opposition Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott, a frequent sparring partner.

'Julia's a very tough competitor,' Abbott conceded.

It was Abbott's deputy, Julie Bishop, who warned the conservatives that Gillard would oust Rudd. She argued for a change in tactics, with Gillard being targeted as being complicit in the mistakes the Rudd government had made since it came to power in November 2007.

Bishop was ignored and, it looks likely, Gillard will come to the leadership able to put some distance between herself and her predecessor.

'The Gillard narrative so far is one of a fresh face with talent in spades: the first female prime-minister-in-waiting,' political commentator Per Van Onselen wrote.

But Gillard was in Rudd's inner circle, one of the so-called Gang of Four, that made the decisions that lost Rudd his support and damaged his party.

Rudd's biggest mistake, two months ago, was to drop plans for a carbon trading scheme. Gillard shared in making that fateful decision.

When Rudd went overseas and Gillard became acting premier, she described it as a momentous day.

'I think it's probably a moment that many Australian women will probably stop and reflect on,' she said. 'Obviously, I think, for Australian women, particularly for girls, it's just further evidence that women in our society can aspire to be anything.'

Peter Beattie, the former state government leader in Queensland, is expecting more excitement if Gillard wins the ballot.

'I think Australia will only reach its full potential as a nation when we're able to say we've had a woman as prime minister of our country,' he said.

All the polls suggest that Rudd was much more unpopular than his party and that replacing him with Gillard would be a big boost ahead of the parliamentary election later this year.

She has promised a different style of leadership. 'I think people are over the kind of really highly managed, suited, white-bread style politicians,' she remarked two years ago. 'I think people are looking for more than that and different to that and, you know, I think I'm different to that.'