My View On “Australia’s Rudd Quits, Gillard Prime Minister”
Gillard is, if anything, more left wing than Rudd, and she is backed by the unions, which is why she has a strong chance of winning.
I suspect that if he is defeated, Rudd will not go quietly. He will feel massively betrayed and there is no doubt he was the leader who won office for Labor, since they had unsuccessfully tried with a number of other leaders before him. Gillard will be having to fight Rudd in public all the way to the election (and he will know all the skeletons in her closet), while fighting the opposition politically.
It is even conceivable that if Rudd loses to Gillard that he will immediately advise the Governor-General to call an election now, since one is coming due anyway (under the Australian system terms are not fixed but are for a maximum of 3 years) and the Governor-General is constitutionally expected to follow the expert advice of the PM, which Rudd remains until he resigns his commission or is defeated in a vote in Parliament (not his Party’s caucus). If the GG declines such advice, we could have a constitutional crisis as well.
