Gillard’s abandonment of pokies reform means, as far as I can see, that she has reached the end of the set of reforms she promised as the price of independent support after the 2010 election. Most of the agenda she inherited from Rudd has similarly been either implement, or put on the road to implementation, (typically in a watered-down form) or else abandoned. A visit to the ALP website seems to me to confirm this impression. There are plenty of glossy pictures, but the ideas seem mostly to be taken from Rudd, though drastically watered down in most cases, for example, “School Reform” in place of “Education Revolution”. The only thing that sounds more like Gillard than Rudd is “Trade Cadetships” which reads like a rebadging of Howard’s “New Apprenticeships”.

Can anyone point to any genuinely new initiatives taken by this government (that is, not forced on it, or inherited)? It would be nice to think that there is something more on offer than “Not Abbott”.