The new political year in Australia has begun rather like the way the old one ended, with the Julia Gillard-led Labor party trailing the Liberal-National coalition in the polls, with electors expressing their ambivalence towards both Gillard and opposition leader Tony Abbott, and some polls suggesting that former Labor leader Kevin Rudd is still the most preferred person to be prime minister.

The new parliamentary year commenced with speculation about the likelihood of a leadership challenge to Julia Gillard by Mr Rudd, although by the time the Caucus met to discuss tactics for the year ahead, the speculation had come to nothing. Julia Gillard remains the leader of the Labor party and thus retains the prime ministership. The failure of a leadership challenge to materialise partly reflects the reality that the touted alternative, Kevin Rudd, just does not have the numbers in the Caucus to succeed.

Some estimates have Rudd’s support at about 20 votes – well short of the 51 votes he would need to topple Ms Gillard. Just to be sure that this point was reinforced, another former Labor leader, Simon Crean, took time out to lecture his colleagues on the need for unity and discipline and to declare that Rudd would never succeed in a vote.

That Crean felt the need to say all of this on a public broadcast via radio station 3AW was significant and might well have been a sign that the Caucus was on the verge of panicking about Ms Gillard’s leadership. For all these outward signs of a leadership change, it was always unlikely that Gillard was going to be toppled. Quite apart from the lack of numbers for Mr Rudd, nervous back-bench MPs would also be cognisant of the deleterious impact leadership changes have on the political prospects of the major parties.

The way in which Kevin Rudd lost the leadership is an example: after the brief honey-moon after Gillard’s ascendancy to the leadership, support for Labor in the polls began to slide and the party was really lucky to scrape up enough seats to form a minority government after the 2010 election. The voters began to lose their faith with Labor from that moment, and nothing Gillard has done since has done anything to restore it. Indeed, Gillard seems to have gone out of her way to reinforce the voter disillusionment with some of her decisions, such as aligning her government with the Greens on the matter of instituting a carbon tax, and, more lately, cutting Tasmanian independent and anti-pokie campaigner Andrew Wilke adrift after nearly a year of implying that she would honour promises made to him about gaming reform in a bid to secure his vote on the floor of the lower house.

One of the interesting things about the Gillard government has been its willingness to tackle hard policy issues such as climate change despite its minority position in the lower house. The problem for the government, however, is that voters tend to respond to clever politics rather than good policy-making. Legislating for a complex climate change policy where others had failed, was a significant achievement, but the chances are the voters will respond more to the fact that Gillard had promised not institute a carbon tax during the election campaign and then appeared to do go back on her word and, in the process, appear to be doing the political bidding of the Greens.

So, embedded in the clever politics of getting your legislative program through a parliament you don’t control, is the sense that you have somehow gone back on your word. Being seen to be untrue to your word or beholden to minority interests is not the way to re-establish a positive relationship with an electorate that appeared to resent that it had not been given the chance to cast its verdict on the Rudd prime ministership.

It seems very unlikely that Labor can win the next election with Julia Gillard as leader. Her political successes have not moved the electorate, who appear to be sullen and resentful about the minority government she has put together, the carbon tax she has foisted upon the community as a consequence of doing a deal with the Greens, and the hubris over leadership that affects the party she leads. Labor’s only real hope appears to be a view that Liberal leader Tony Abbott is so unpalatable that voters turn back to Labor simply to prevent his ascendancy to the prime ministership.

This is a weak strategy that has failed in state politics. Under Gillard, Labor is on track for a land-slide defeat in 2013 that will sit alongside those suffered by Evatt in 1955, Whitlam in 1975 and 1977, and Keating in 1996.

* Dr Nick Economou is an Australian political scientist and commentator. He is a senior lecturer in Politics at Monash University.