For those of us who struggle to understand the opinion polls and the relatively high polling scored by Julia Gillard, this article may provide some insight.   The author clearly believes that Miss Gillard is doing a great job.   I've put it up here in full to encourage some discussion - often it's easy to lose sight of potential positives when your overwhelming view is negative about a person.   That said it's very hard to read this piece without thinking of the smashed small businesses, the skyrocketing power prices, the Illegal Centrelink Seekers flooding in, $2BN per week in borrowing and that horrible feeling that soon the music will stop and there just aren't enough chairs!   Love to hear your considered comments.   Also please commentary on Tony Abbott and whether he's right or not to leave the Gillard AWU matter alone in Question Time.

FORGET the polls, those short-term numbers unlikely ever to grace a history  book. Forget, too, the personal sacrifice, professional brilliance and sheer  guts it took to get into Parliament in the first place. And the years of  patience required in opposition. Forget all that.

Instead, concentrate on what Julia Gillard has achieved for workers,  education and women since entering government in 2007. In the first Rudd  ministry, Gillard was minister for education, minister for industrial and  workplace relations and minister for social inclusion. As a Labor politician,  are there any jobs (other than health), left to do? Gillard managed them all.  Simultaneously.

It was she who did the heavy lifting to end WorkChoices. It wasn't Kevin Rudd  who legislated and prosecuted the case in Parliament and the press; it was the  partisan former industrial lawyer from Slater & Gordon.

Reregulating the industrial umpire, when the Coalition and Business Council  of Australia are in ideological lockstep against it, required bravery and a  little compromise. When the CFMEU rallied against parliamentary Labor colleagues  who maintained the Australian Building and Construction Commission, Gillard  became the public face of an unpopular policy among her comrades.

Gillard also supports ideas. She commissioned David Gonski to review school  funding, discovering gross under-investment in education. Workers' rights and a  good education system have something in common - an Australia with care as the  central organising principle.

Care has potential to envelop all the successes of the Gillard term -  plain-packaging tobacco, a carbon price and the National Disability Insurance  Scheme  - and it is a gendered narrative. Until the marathon misogyny press  conference, gender has been off limits. This was not always so. In 2005,  unfettered by the pressures of leading the nation, Gillard taunted Tony Abbott,  asking him to imagine being born ''Antoinette''.

''Ask yourself the question, could you be the mother of three and have led  the same life? Would you have married? Had children? And would you have had the  same number of children if doing so meant the difference between having a shot  at being PM and not ever having that shot? If it meant the difference between  the career you wanted or holding a lower-status, lower-paid, lower-profile, less  interesting and less fulfilling job.''

Gillard has achieved much for women, overseeing an astounding take-up of paid  parental leave, mass support for pay equity for community workers,  lifting  the  tax-free threshold to $18,000, 50 per cent childcare rebates and  establishing   an NDIS - each of these extraordinary policies bringing the hidden costs of care  into the open. And lest anyone thinks it's only women affected, the Diversity  Council Australia released a report saying men also want more time to care for  loved ones.

Meanwhile, gender remains Abbott's glass jaw. Long before David Marr  discovered him swinging punches at university, Abbott was swearing at Nicola  Roxon, telling housewives to iron, and girls to save their precious gift for the  right fellow. This is why, within weeks of coming to power as Opposition Leader,  he backflipped on maternity leave. Can she do it? Wrest victory from a man who  the public is convinced has a problem with women?

Gillard's rise to power is a much more complex story than a few hours before  the leadership coup. It encompasses a long march through the boysy culture of  law, unions and politics; the non-choices between children and career; and  institutionalised, denigrating chauvinism.

In the past few weeks, she has reminded us why Labor entrusted her with  leadership. She is a fighter; a woman who rises against the odds; can lose her  much-loved father and turn up for work ready for the battle of her life. She's a  Labor success story, with a plot twist or two yet to tell.

Tanja Kovac is a writer, lawyer and research fellow at EMILY's List  Australia. EMILY's List was established to help promote Labor  women.

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