So just who is Julia Gillard?

 The inside story of the woman who became PM | The Daily Telegraph

WHEN Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan walked side by side into the caucus room to destroy Kevin Rudd's prime ministership, they looked like a happy bride and groom being carried along on a hydrofoil of love to the altar.

But we know what newlyweds do. They celebrate, consumate and then get down to the business of slowly destroying each other.

Will the marriage last?

For Swan, the new Deputy Prime Minister, the end of Rudd is sweet indeed.

They managed to maintain a reasonable working relationship but there was a deep, underlying resentment, particularly for Swan.

Back when they were both moving from Queensland to Canberra, the two had an arrangement that Swan would go first, if and when it came to contesting the leadership.

Rudd didn't keep his promise and worked behind Swan's back.

Queensland backroom powerbroker Vic Ludwig had to negotiate an uneasy truce.

Swan's smile reflected his delight in seeing Rudd's fall, and his belief Labor could now win.

Gillard's smile was different. It reflected everything she has worked for.

As Rudd broke down and finally, too late, showed us the real Rudd we have always wanted to see (and finally, as well, gave us some more gripping television viewing than MasterChef), Gillard then took the stage and gave a controlled exposition of who she is, and how she wants to be seen: calm, concerned and involved.

It was almost frightening to see not only how easily Gillard had assumed the prime ministership, but had become the Prime Minister.

She is clearly a natural, unfrightened of power or challenge. She bluntly asked the people for a short window of time to clean up the mess Rudd had left for her, and the Australian people.

Her quick announcement that she would immediately suspend all Government mining super-tax advertising was smart.

The message to the public was that a long period of being force-fed fastidiously fashioned bulls. .t was now, hopefully, coming to an

end. It spoke of a leader prepared to deal with the substance and to take the time to explain policy.

Julia Eileen Gillard, 48, claims a deep connection to the people of Australia.

Her parents John and Moira were 10 pound poms, strangers in a new land who appeared not to use their arrival to strike out for riches but worked in humble jobs helping the elderly and mentally unwell.

Immigrants need courage and creativity; they need open minds and sturdy hearts, Gillard said in her maiden speech to Parliament.

Yesterday morning, John and Moira let the cameras film them through the morning. They talked proudly about their bright daughter, whom they always knew would become someone special.

An immigrant girl with parents of slender means who grew up to become not only Prime Minister, but the first female prime minister. Gillard's is a remarkable Australian story.

BUT Gillard's tokenistic claims that she was accepting the job with humility, while standard rhetoric for an incoming PM, are not to be believed. There was nothing humble about the speed with which she dispatched Rudd. She revealed a level of controlled ruthlessness that many suspected existed but doubted they'd see until after the 2010 election, when it was expected she would move.

Gillard used her first appearance as PM to talk about defending the rights of struggling Australians.

"I believe in a government that rewards those who work the hardest, not those who complain the loudest; the people who play by rules, set their alarms early, stand by their neighbours and love their country," she said.

She could have been talking about Rudd, the man whose heart she has broken.

Gillard, the woman who appears not to have bad hair days but a bad hair life, will return the Labor Party to Labor people after 2 1/2 years in the hands of Rudd.

Victorian Labor backbencher and Gillard supporter Kelvin Thomson could barely control his anger as he walked into the caucus vote to dispense with Rudd.

He blamed the adolescents in Rudd's immediate staff who, with Rudd, have run the country as a junta, to the complete exclusion of the Labor caucus.

"Time and time again we've been sent out to defend decisions in which we had no say and which had been damaging to our personal standing," Thomson said.

As Gillard left Rudd stunned and in physical pain, politicians went to the House of Reps for Question Time.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott gave Gillard and Swan a deeply ungracious welcome as Rudd sat on the back benches looking deeply stricken, and tiny.

"He should have been allowed to face the judgment of the Australian people," said Abbott. "A midnight knock on the door, followed by political execution, is no way that the Australian prime minister should be treated."

Gillard, totally in control, utterly confident, smiled at Abbott. She'd only been PM for moments but it already seemed she'd buried Rudd weeks ago. Abbott's reaction to Gillard was uncharacteristically terse. He actually looked worried.

GILLARD was born in a town in Wales which clearly foretold that she was Australia-bound. The town was called Barry. Her father worked in the coal mines of a place called Cwmgwrach.

"It all sounds like Coal Miner's Daughter sort of stuff," Gillard told reporter Matt Price in 2003, "and I'm not trying to make it sound like that. But my father was one of seven kids in a coal-mining village and their father was injured in a mining accident, which means he could only do surface work, which was not as well paid."

Little Julia was plagued by a severe recurring pneumonia, which her mother put down to freezing Atlantic winds. Julia once spent six days in an oxygen tent and the family doctor suggested only a new, warmer climate would repair her. They moved to Adelaide when Julia was five.

Gillard was a lefty activist student who moved between the Adelaide and Melbourne Universities, took a law degree and worked for the legal firm known for its class actions, Slater & Gordon, where she handled industrial law.

She became then-Victorian Opposition leader John Brumby's chief of staff and made a failed tilt for the Senate in 1995. She has held the Victorian House of Reps seat of Lalor since 1998.

Curiously, her official biography lists her personal status as single, even though

she has a partner named Tim Mathieson, a hairdresser who appears to have been presented with too great a challenge in managing the Gillard head.

Gillard was previously in a relationship with federal Labor member Craig Emerson and, before that, with Australian Workers Union official Bruce Wilson. Gillard says not having children was a decision, not an oversight. She has said she has never felt the call.

Gillard was once seen as strongly aligned with the Victorian Left, but she knew being part of the leadership circle would require a more moderate, pragmatic reinvention. It was Labor's faceless men who colluded across states, and across factions, to install her yesterday. They chose her simply because she was the best-performing frontbencher and they no longer believed Rudd had a hope of winning.

MOIRA and John retain heavy Welsh accents but Gillard inherited none of it - hers is a tortured Strine that makes her sound more like the love child of Bob Hawke and Dame Edna. Figuring her politics is difficult. She has already paid her dues in the Left factions, but when she had the Immigration shadow during the aftermath of Tampa and Children Overboard, she did not fall back on the soft politics of compassion.

Gillard said Labor had to retain mandatory detention for offshore arrivals, angering her former Left buddies. In reality, Gillard was jockeying.

On Wednesday night, as Rudd sat on Death Row, he launched into a bitter aside in his late-night media conference as he declared the challenge on.

"If I am returned as the leader of the party and the government and as prime minister I will be very clear about one thing: this party and government will not be lurching to the right on the question of asylum seekers as some have counselled us to do."

Gillard, clearly, has no compunction about kicking some reffos around. She has done it before and she has been told, no doubt, as part of her leadership deal with the faceless men, that she has to do it again.

She said she was full of understanding for those Australians who were worried about unauthorised boat arrivals and suggested, without giving any detail, that she was about to get tough on them.

On the commitment to Afghanistan, Gillard said a thank you to the troops but left open her real thoughts, and will no doubt keep it that way until after the election.

It was extraordinary to hear the Australian media applaud both Rudd and Gillard after their respective speeches. The Australian media does not do that. It's seen as too partisan, too familiar.

Maybe the media was thanking them for the most amazing news story all year.

GILLARD freely acknowledged the Rudd Government had gone off track. "I take my fair share of responsibility for the Rudd Government's record, for our important achievements and for errors made," she said.

"I also certainly acknowledge that I have not been elected prime minister by the Australian people."

Indeed. But no prime minister is, at least in theory, elected by the people.

Rudd was. The vote across many seats was a personal endorsement for Kevin. There was no one else who could have done it. He became a president, not a prime minister, and his party did not like him for it. Rudd said in his farewell speech: "I was elected by the people of this country to bring back a fair go for all Australians and I have given my absolute best to do that." Rudd used the word "I" 79 times in his speech.

He was most emotional when recalling the day he had said "Sorry" to indigenous Australians. Gillard said, in that moment he had made wonderful history. The problem is, there was nothing hard about saying "Sorry". It may have been significant, but it was not difficult.

That's Gillard's challenge in the coming months. Talk is easy. Change is hard work.

The early on-line poll consensus is that Gillard's a rat, a traitor. People are saying they won't vote for her. It was brave politics installing her in that manner, but she already feels like the PM.

Abbott must be worried.