I will not be voting for anyone in the ALP for many years to come.

Not because of their recent change in leader, but because they have not fully explained to the public why there was a change in leader.

If a political party wants to keep me in the dark, I don’t vote for them.

It's the way it's been done for decades. If you don't like it suck it up.

The majority party can choose a different PM every week if it so desires.

No, Shadow Minister, we don't actually have to "suck it up" if we don't like it.

We can do exactly what we're doing, which is letting the ALP know we don't like being treated like children, and we can deny them our vote.

And we can do exactly the same if the opposition win government and start chucking out PMs every day if they feel like it and without any explanation.

It seems like the ALP is acting out your "suck it up" prescription. "We chucked out the PM, you lot suck it up, we don't have to tell you what went down."

Not exactly a vote winner, treating the punters like pond scum.

Interesting variations in the comments, but why does Leigh ignore the history of hatchet jobs on sitting prime ministers carried out by the Liberal party in the period after Gorton took over following the disappearance of Harold Holt? I get the feeling that Leigh must be at least my vintage - do you remember the Petty cartoon in which McMahon scoops up the prize whilst everyone else is in furious warfare?

Under a Westminster system it is always the party members who decide who will lead them, whether in opposition or government. I guess it just shows how much the politicians "respect" us poor punters who voted them in. (Sigh)

All this rubbish about whether Gillard should tell us about the internal workings of the Labor Party drives me mad.

The real issue is: do we want the Mad Monk to be the Prime Minister? Do we want Work Choices to be reinstated? Do we want to have the Party which mainly looks after the interests of the rich to gain power again? Do we want kids behind razor wire again?

No, no, no!

I share the views on Julia Gillard's mindless slogan. However, it is simply both wrong and misguided to complain about what happened to Kevin Rudd.

It's wrong for reasons that others have mentioned: we don't elect a president - the governing party elects its leader.

It's misguided because Kevin Rudd had clearly failed. He is very intelligent and good with policy, but he simply can't/won't consult and he's hopeless at relating to people. The result is that he would make a very good bureaucrat (and was a good media campaigner in the last election), but when it came to leading a government he couldn't do it.

He lost just about every major debate he entered, not because he wasn't smart, but because he couldn't gather support from the public, which is the most important test of a politician. Finally he lost the support of his colleagues. If I was an MP facing the polls that he was getting, and given his refusal to listen to anything I had to say, I'd change horses as well.

The suggestion that Kevin Rudd was done over by some faceless back room union hacks doesn't square with the report from the party room that he couldn't muster more than 20% of his parliamentary colleagues to support him.

Whatever Gillard's future is, it shouldn't be weighed down by any fantasies that Rudd deserved to stay.