Events of the past week have solidified the suspicion that neither Gillard nor Abbott is a true leader of real stature.

The past eight days laid bare the greatest fears of the leaders of both Australia's main political parties.

For people who spend every moment striving to win and hold power, their greatest fear is powerlessness. We have just seen Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott panic at the prospect of powerlessness, but it loomed for each in a very different way.

For the Prime Minister, it was when she was confronted in her office by a pair of angry union leaders.

The union bosses were in Canberra for a meeting of the Prime Minister's manufacturing taskforce on Friday last week.

Their first appointment, though, was to see the Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen. He briefed them on the announcement he was to make later that day - the government was to grant an enterprise migration agreement to Gina Rinehart's Hancock Prospecting to allow it to bring 1715 foreign workers to start up the giant new Roy Hill iron ore mine in Western Australia's vast Pilbara.

When [Paul] Howes and [Dave] Oliver told Bowen that they opposed the decision, he replied that they'd known it was coming, and told them that it was necessary for the project to go ahead. Bowen was unmoved.

But when they took the same complaint to the Prime Minister, she discovered the limits of her nerve. Unable to defy the unions, Gillard was reduced to the sort of schoolyard excuses that kids use when confronted by authority - "I didn't know anything about it," she told them.

This was nonsense. Bowen's office had told Gillard's office early in the week that the decision had been made and was to be announced later in the week.

Gillard was in the US at a NATO summit. But her staff briefed her on the Roy Hill deal when she returned to her office on Wednesday. She raised no objections. If she had chosen to, she could have had the decision reviewed or delayed, even at that late stage. But she did not.

Why not? For the same reasons she should have explained to the union leaders.

Because the policy of creating enterprise migration agreements is a sensible one for managing the mining boom. Because the government had been developing it for years, and much of the work had been done by a committee that included the unions.

Because the decision to introduce the agreements had been announced in the federal budget in May.

Because the Roy Hill project would bring $9 billion in new investment and a total of about 8000 new jobs during the construction phase - including 6000 new jobs for Australian workers.

Because the project would only be allowed to bring in foreign workers if locals could not be found to do the work.

Imagine the obverse. Imagine that the government refused permission for a $9 billion new project that would create 6000 new jobs for Australian workers, just because it would also require 1715 foreign workers.

So Gillard supported the decision because it was good policy. It was simply that she was unable to defend it in the face of union anger. Much sound and fury followed as she tried to recover from this moment, and the Opposition tried to use it to advantage, but none of it is relevant to the core insight.

"She freaked when the AWU walked into her office," was how one participant in the process described it. "She just lost it," said another.

This moment illuminated the real "Real Julia". It showed up two realities which are not customarily on public display. First, it showed that she feels herself to be dependent on the unions for her leadership, and on the AWU in particular, whose affiliated MPs supplied at least 20 of the 71 votes she won in her leadership ballot against Rudd in February.

Second, Gillard's acute anxiety suggests that she feels her leadership to be under a live threat.

This is not entirely irrational, of course. Her performance has been poor and she is, on the settled trajectory of the last year, leading her party to annihilation at the next election. Kevin Rudd challenged her for the leadership once and could again. But to act out of this fear is not, of course, the stuff of a true leader.

Tony Abbott's moment of panic came when he was confronted with the prospect of sitting on the same side of the House of Representatives as Craig Thomson.

Thomson, much reviled by Abbott recently, was voting with the opposition against a government motion to gag the Liberals' treasury spokesman, Joe Hockey.

When the manager of Opposition business in the House, Christopher Pyne, pointed this out to his leader, the two of them made an undignified scramble for the door of the chamber in a moment of unalloyed terror, as if they'd been told they would instantly contract advanced leprosy and spontaneously start losing limbs if they stayed in the room a moment longer.

The Deputy Speaker had to point out to their retreating backs that it was against the rules to leave the chamber once a vote had been called.

Pyne managed to escape regardless.

Abbott claimed that it was a Labor stunt. He'd spent weeks thundering that the government should not accept the tainted vote of Thomson. Now the opposition would be seen to be accepting that very same vote.

OK, so let's accept Abbott's claim. Let's assume, despite Labor denials, that it was a Labor stunt. So what?

There are other ways the opposition could have dealt with this. Any of them would have been better. For instance, the opposition could have calmly sent one of its members to sit with the government to offset the Thomson vote.

Abbott could have then given a press conference to denounce the government and explain how he had cleverly confounded it.

But instead of any rational response, Abbott panicked. Not so much because he was concerned with rejecting Thomson's vote but because he was afraid of being photographed sitting on the same side of the House with him. Abbott feared an image that might be used against him to portray him as a hypocrite in the Thomson matter.

He was running, as if for his life, in fear of a picture. That's all. Instead, he now lives with a picture of himself behaving like an adolescent. This is the man who campaigns on a promise to bringing Australia a "grown-up government".

This is a revealing moment of truth about two aspects of Tony Abbott's state of mind. First, it tells us that he lives in terror of being caught out by a Labor stunt. Can you imagine any prime minister, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, or even Gillard making a panicked run for the exit of the Parliament in fear of a stunt? Or even an alternative prime minister?

Abbott lives in fear of stunts because, we have to conclude, he has built his own political success on stunts. He goes from factory to factory, day after day, declaring imminent bankruptcy as he spreads a fear campaign. He is the leader who called for a "people's revolt" against a carbon tax.

Even the attack that Abbott's treasury spokesman was mounting when the government tried to gag him was a stunt.

Hockey was arguing that the government's move to increase its debt limit was part of its outrageous profligacy that will drive Australia to national bankruptcy.

Yet the debt limit is not the deficit. It's a matter of housekeeping that allows the Office of Financial Management to smoothly manage federal liabilities in the financial markets.

Hockey blathered about Australia's growing "sovereign risk" under Labor. He and the Coalition should be embarrassed that, in the very week they are trying to run this fearmongering nonsense, international investors actually confirmed that Australia is not a sovereign risk but a sovereign safe haven.

The interest rate that investors demand on Australian Treasury bonds this week fell to the lowest in history as investors, fleeing the real sovereign risk of Spain and Italy, put tens of billions of dollars into German, Japanese, British, US and Australian government bonds for safekeeping.

Abbott's fear of falling prey to stunts suggests that a man who lives by the stunt is worried he might die by a stunt. If his leadership were better founded on good policy, he might not be so fearful of something as shallow as a stunt.

Second, his panic suggests that he feels insecure about his ability to carry his current crushing advantage in the polls all the way to an electoral victory.

Taken together, the revealed fears and insecurities of our national leaders this week vindicates what the Australian people have been signalling since the indecisive election of 2010.

"In the 40 years of our data, there have only been three periods where both leaders have had sustained unpopularity," says the Herald's pollster, Nielsen's John Stirton.

"Two of them included Paul Keating, who never had a particularly high approval." One was when Keating was prime minister and John Hewson opposition leader. Next was when Keating faced Alexander Downer.

And the third, of course, is now, Gillard and Abbott. The combined average approval ratings of the pair is as low or lower than in the previous two episodes. In other words, this is as low as it goes. The Australian electorate has long suspected that neither was a true leader of real stature. This past eight days has added new weight to an old suspicion.

All leaders fear losing power. It's how they deal with those fears that sorts the real leaders from the stand-ins.

Panic On The House Floor