Gillard's government seems to be running out of oil, and petrol, and slowing down much the same way as Rudd's 20 months ago, writes Jack Waterford. Chat with Jack from 12.30pm.

She's trying, with difficulty, to persuade people she can win the next election. But she's still bogged down establishing that she won the last one. And in proving that she was entitled, then or now, to have been in the race at all. A legitimacy problem. An authority problem. And, increasingly, a dignity problem.

Meanwhile, time is ebbing away, old supporters are in despair about her capacity to take charge, and no one is paying much attention to what her government is doing.

The most frustrating thing about it, some of Julia Gillard's supporters might think, is that most of the distractions are of her own making. Kevin Rudd, and his professional and paid team, may be stalking her, but they are behind, not in front. Her stumbles are not on their hurdles.

They are not yet, in the Graham Richardson phrase, ''playing with her head'' - as someone was during the last election. Instead they are simply standing by, murmuring - perhaps a little too loudly, to be sure - with amazement at her capacity for own goals, errors of judgment, bad luck, and instinct for a pratfall which completely deprives any achievement of publicity, credit or place in the grand jigsaw puzzle.

In recent weeks I have seen a busy and - at short range, personable and thoughtful - politician working crowds, making speeches and moving easily among ordinary Australians. On Australia Day, for example, she comfortably talked and chatted with hundreds of people at events in Commonwealth Park, and, in the evening, at a function for diplomats and Canberra citizens at the Lodge. She was relaxed, friendly and quite approachable - and encountered general good will. But the enduring memory of the day is of a tense confrontation with Aborigines brought on by the bad judgment of someone in organising a function nearby, by stumbling and losing her shoe, and by the misjudgment of a staffer who had been unable to miss a chance to deliver bad publicity to Tony Abbott.

(Rudd enjoys the same hero status with crowds - and seems to enjoy it more - but Gillard is better at pretending to listen.)

Yesterday, she was at the National Library launching a program designed to encourage people to read. The sort of event she likes, can handle with ease and at which she can strike some rapport with an audience. Many journalists were present, along with several hundred adults and children, but not for the purpose of providing her, or the cause, some cheap good publicity. They were there, rather, because she had earned herself yet another round of damaging publicity, this time by her appearance on Four Corners the night before. During that appearance, a voter might think she dissimulated, dissembled, avoided answering questions - and, much more fatally - ''looked'' guilty about her coup against Rudd.

The transcript has her insisting that she did not decide to move on Rudd until the day of the coup itself. Yet it showed clearly enough that a plot to install her began weeks before, and, indeed, that a senior Gillard staffer was drafting post-coup remarks for Gillard two weeks before she ''suddenly'' became Prime Minister.

The innuendo is that Gillard is not the calm, sane competent person who stepped in to save Labor from Rudd chaos - the goody goody image she has promoted, without great success - but a sneaking assassin plotting to stab her leader in the back. Many members of the public have suspected this all along; closer observers somewhat more ready to acquit her of malice aforethought.

If I were a Liberal strategist, I would replay the guilty look over and over. It's more effective than the ''no carbon tax under a government I lead'' tape - and all the more so because it's a body language thing.

People worried about actual good government will think that such day-to-day political theatrics are not really very important, and that commentators should, instead, focus on policy, and the things that really matter. The public is said to be bored with constant leadership speculation, and existential talk of narrative, authority, legitimacy, mood, momentum and tiny movements in opinion polls.

But when a leader is fighting to get, or to maintain traction, there is not much else happening. Events quickly become viewed through the leadership prism. Long and medium terms telescope. Good policy suffers; ordinary processes of government slow; public servants and advisers find it harder to get ministers and decision makers to concentrate.

This is just like the situation with Rudd's leadership when Gillard decided to act 20 months ago.

The machinery of government has not completely seized. Routine government goes on, because it doesn't need close political control. The business of parliament goes on, with a fairly solid record of putting legislation on the books.

But it is also easy to see how ministers and prime ministers are distracted, and struggling to put matters on the agenda. A theme of government monologues this week in Parliament, for example, was about the radical transformation of the Australian economy in only the past two years, and government success in managing it.

According to the government, it is only against this background, and the rising dollar, that heavy weather for a few businesses, and recent job losses, can be understood. By contrast, the opposition suggests that current problems are a result of Labor's blowing surpluses, acquiring mountains of debt and imposing carbon taxes.

Who is right is neither here nor there. No one is even listening to be persuaded. Instead they are wondering what damaging information will leak out next, if or when Rudd will strike, and what mistake Gillard will make next. Or how bad the Queensland election result will be, first for Labor, and second for Gillard versus Rudd.

Another way by which Gillard seeks to change the conversation is by a continuous line of chatter suggesting that she is too busy doing the hard things to be distracted by such trivial matters as opinion polls, or leadership speculation.

But here she has two particular problems. First there is a big disconnect between some of the hard things the government is trying to do, and the ordinary affairs and concerns of citizens. Reforming health care, for example, might be hard, but it takes decades before citizens see whether any changes make much difference to their lives. (One reason Rudd and Gillard miss out on credit for escaping the GFC is because there has been, as a consequence, so little pain.)

Voters, in short, do not score achievements by the practical difficulty but by the immediate impact on their lives. And the Gillard government is in this sense a bit short on readily quantifiable dinky di ''hard'' achievements. Anyone who doubts this should look at the ALP website boasting of the Gillard government's ''achievements''. What a yawn for the typical punter.

But just as significantly, a good many policy wonks know that this is not actually a government addicted to making hard policy decisions. Not now, if ever it was. Whether because she is distracted, because money is tight next budget, or because she has jettisoned surplus baggage in desperation, Gillard seems to have walked away from reform of federalism, from serious refugee policy, indigenous and welfare reform and, probably from systemic national hospital reform.

The efficiency of the public service - and of the political decision-making process - has been considerably reduced by her inept reshuffle. Business, and a good many of the lobbies, seem to have given up on evidence-based approaches, since bludgeoning and blackmail is so much simpler and easier and capable of getting as much attention and respect.

Who knows how it will end? But it cannot go on too much longer.

Gillard Finding The Going Hard