News

Gillard's Labor leadership 'heads for showdown'

Sun February 5, 2012 7:03pm

OPPOSITION Leader Tony Abbott is privately preparing for a Government leadership showdown "in a couple of days" after a newspaper poll is released tomorrow.

The Opposition Leader believes many Labor MPs listed in newspapers as supporting Prime Minister Julia Gillard will switch to her predecessor Kevin Rudd.

But Mr Abbott, who last week said instincts told him a challenge would come in the next few weeks, today conceded to a friend he didn't know for sure what would happen.

The Opposition Leader outlined his private forecast as Labor MPs arrived in Canberra for a start-of-year Caucus meeting and barbie at The Lodge. The gathering isn't itself unusual but in current leadership discussions has been given the flavour of crisis talks and a desperate survival bid by Ms Gillard.

Senior Labor figures dismissed expectations of drama and laughed off the pro and anti Gillard newspaper lists as inaccurate, one calling them "political graffiti".

An MP involved in Ms Gillard's elevation as Prime Minister said she still had the numbers.

Cabinet ministers today endorsed the Prime Minister with Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten saying he whole leadership debate had been "overcooked".

"The nearest analogy I use to explain this latest outburst of media reporting is it reminds me of the millennium bug in the lead–up to 2000," Mr Shorten told Channel Ten's Meet the Press.

"Remember, in the lead–up to the millennium, we thought every computer in the world would crash. We woke up the next morning - perhaps some with a hangover - and the computers were still working. This is well overcooked, this issue."

Tony Abbott has become the keenest non-Labor spectator of the leadership question because of the possibility that a change could lead to an early election.

He today told a close ally he expected opinion polling to be published tomorrow by Fairfax newspapers could detonate that change if Labor's primary vote crashes further.

Mr Abbott believes some MPs put in the Gillard side of the ledger would quickly jump to Mr Rudd. The Opposition Leader conceded he did not know precisely what would happen but clearly thought the matter would come to a head this week with the return of Parliament.