"Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean. Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink. (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner)

Gillard is clearly in trouble and there appears to be no room for her to chart a future for Labor. Will Rudd the albatross take over the leaking ship? I very much doubt this will occur. A snap election seems imminent. But who will be the leader

Rainier, what a terribly depressing thought….that Rudd could yet become Labor leader and PM again!

Hey, what about Bob Carr?

Oh come on Ludwig old mate, don't get desperate.

Poor old NSW is still trying to recover from the damage she suffered with that blithering idiot in power. Please don't wish him on the whole country.

We would be better off with old CRuddy back, though not much, than that fool.

Haaaa haa haa haaaaa Hasbeeen.

I’m too pissed to respond sensibly so here’s my enieb…enebb…enebriated replly…

Bob didunt do anything bad to Newsouthwhales that other drongoes didunt do to other states just as badly!!

Or anything werse than his predecessors or postdecessors! His tenure was just the same old same old as the rest!

But he had the right ideas, whichwere rooted by the manic pro growth big bizzness stranglehold over guvment, as they always are, in evry state intha cvnt…er cuntry…d’er country!

He still has the right ideas! He’s a million times better than that Ruddiculous failure of a PM.

Get your head around it Haz. You hate Rudd and rightly so. But whoo’s gunna lead this nation out of the current woeful mess?? Who is there out there better then Carr?

To go again with Rudd would suggest that Labor has no logic, unless of course potential candidates would rather see him take Labor's certain demise at next election. Gillard or Rudd, Labor looks certain to be smashed.

Carr, doubt it. Shorten is ambitious but i don't think he offers much.

Perhaps Combet may be the one. Has few scars, besides his unfortaunte association with the dumbest of all policies (the carbon tax).

If Labor really wants to minimise its upcoming election disaster, ditch the carbon tax, accept the party will look stupid for a while, try to sell what Labor is good at, and pick a new leader.

What a glutton for punishment Mr Rudd would be. He has already been knocked out once by Abbott.Labours only hope is to drop the idiotic tax but to many puffed up egos who can't admit they are wrong. Even Keneally has shown more integrity than Gillard and Rudd.

If Labor really wants to minimise its upcoming election disaster, they should keep the carbon tax and sell it as a vital part of a sustainability strategy.

Drop anything to do with climate change from their spiel. Afterall, we need to do just the same sort of thing to get us off of our addiction to fossil fuels and onto a largely renewable energy platform, regardless of the reality or otherwise of anthropogenic climate change.

For goodness sake, they need to get a total sustainability agenda together, which would include greatly reducing immigration, and fixing the disgusting favour-buying big-business donations regime, amongst many other things.

And who’s the man to lead it??

Bob Carr is the ONLY choice….with Kelvin Thomson as his deputy.

Labor needs to reinvent itself. And this is the way to do it. This will gel with the ordinary voter and it is what the country desperately needs.

NOTHING ELSE WILL WORK FOR THEM!!

Abbott’s got it in the bag if they don’t do this!!

No amount of tinkering around the edges, or piss-farting along with the same old baseline policies or changing leaders who keep up same crazy maximised-growth-at-all-costs philosophy is going to work!

They need to forget KRudd, Snorten, Combet, etc and take a good hard look at their only two MPs who have the right fundamental philosophy.

Ludwig, mate, there is no renewable energy that can service a modern city, if you don't have the terrain & rainfall to produce hydro.

There is nuclear which is the only intelligent fuel, other than coal for a modern society, requiring masses of electricity.

You might be able to power a house, rather poorly, or even a village, but even for a moderate town, it's not possible to use wind & solar. Sure lots of academics want to believe it's possible, & lots of get rich quick merchants will take all the subsidises, but it has not worked. Nor will it in my life time.

<< …there is no renewable energy that can service a modern city >>

Right Hasbeen. At least it is right for life as we now know it. So for starters we should be using renewable energy wherever possible and saving fossil fuels for stuff that can’t operate with alternative energy types.

And of course we should stop selling off all our gas and start preserving a fair chunk of it for our future. Likewise with coal.

We can still use these far into the future as part of a mix with renewable energy sources.

Hey, the bottom line is a sustainability strategy for the country.

As it relates to this thread; not Rudd nor any other leader will make more than a tiny and temporary difference if Labor just blunders on with the same old totally out-dated and grossly unsustainable way of doing things.

Labor has got all the reason in the world to make the change to the vital, essential, critical and absolutely necessary sustainability charter. And it’s got two excellent MPs who know all about it.

Sorry chaps but there will not be any leadership change, and the carbon tax is here to stay.
Labor has always made the decisions that may not be popular, but necessary.
A lot of bs is all it takes to popularize or demonize something that is new.
Liberal make decisions that are not popular too, but there's amount to unemployment.
The 6 or 800,000 the libs would put out of work would not be enough to swing a vote against them. That makes unemployment an easy target.
Bailue is working on that in vic and newman is doing that in qld.
Bailue is cutting mega millions from Tafe training schools.
Duno what's happening in NSW. No doubt it won't be good.
Abbott agrees more money for WA at the expense of the east

Some comic relief from the dispiriting tug-of-war
By ABC's Annabel Crabb

"The point of the HSU affair – and its most galling scandal – is that a large number of poorly paid workers have systematically been fleeced, over a period of time, by people who were supposed to look after them.

That a Labor Government could not – even over four years – adequately address this situation, let alone redress it, given all the legislative, regulatory and moral authority at its command, is a deeply significant element to this story."

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-04-30/crabb-some-comic-relief-from-the-dispiriting-tug-of-war/3980736

Well 579' you've done it again, you've shocked me.

How on earth anyone can sit there and support these fools defies logic.

You're not Julias mother, by chance?

That's about the only person would could see no wrong in her at the moment.

Now I invite you all to google this

if I wanted Amerca to fail, then, while watching this four minute u tube presentation, replace the word America with Australia.

579 wrote: "Labor has always made the decisions that may not be popular, but necessary."

Puleeze, not in front of the kids! Name one decision that was not made without Gillard's Labor measuring it up for political gain?

This is not just a poll driven party, it is unashamedly a poll driven party, and not very good at it either.

579 - you sir, are a rare species, one of the last of the true believers, blinded by the light emanating from the crack between those two lofty hills that are the PM's bottom.

Ms Gillard suffers from the worst case of sensory perception delay in matters of public propriety of any PM in history. Its time she stopped pretending to be PM! For Labor's sake and for the sake of us all. I for one cannot bare to look at Gillard on TV, it’s just too awful.

Australians of all political persuasions have had enough of this poorly written and directed soap opera from Canberra. A Rudd government with a front bench full of hypocrites and backstabbers looks eminently more attractive than this circus oz. At least we’ll know who hates who proper!

Ummmmm children, I have some amazing information for you. I can understand why many of you don't know about it though, because you need to be able to either read, or open your ears, to know about it.

Here it is, prepare yourselves. Just recently, Julia Gillard was challenged for the labor leadership by Kevin Rudd. The result? Julia Gillard won by a ..... wait for it ...... record majority. The biggest majority in the entire history of Labor leadership ballots.

I'm so glad I could educate you guys.