PM is damned if she does, and still damned if she doesn't JULIA Gillard has one power and only one power of significance left. The power to decide who her successor will be. Julia's choice is an ironic and for her, exquisitely unbearable one. Between two men she clearly hates with an equal passion, arguably unequalled by any previous prime minister for an opponent, far less for a supposed colleague. Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott. The colleague who has undermined and indeed crippled her leadership, all the way, if not quite from her triumphant moment of his (figurative) assassination, certainly once the disastrous 2010 election campaign got underway. And every day since. Or the opponent, as the venom she almost literally spat across the table that separates them in Parliament, in her famous "misogyny speech" - or cynically infamous "misogyny rant" - showed. She can "choose" Abbott, by staying all the way to her election on September 14, or she can choose Rudd by "doing a Gorton" and falling on her - again, figurative - sword. She can't even choose the date of the election, to at least get it over earlier. She has locked herself into three more months of 24/7 real-time - again, figurative - torture. How exquisitely ironic she now has to pay the personal price of her carbon promise. There will be no election before September 14 under a government I lead. Now, her choice is also the parliamentary Labor Party's choice. It is also in their gift to choose Abbott, by sitting collectively, mutely, on their hands. Or Rudd, by collectively crawling on broken glass - mostly figuratively, but for some, possibly literally - down the corridors of Parliament House to recall him by acclamation. As I wrote in March after the leadership non-ballot, "100 or so turkeys have voted unanimously (sic) for an early Christmas. In September. What they should understand in June, and again in July - if it all staggers that far - is that all 100 of them are still turkeys, still voting for that early Christmas; but now they are voting every day by default. While Gillard's colleagues might be turkeys aping rabbits caught in the spotlight, the Canberra Press Gallery is engaged in its usual practice of rushing as a group from one side of the boat to the other. And doing it, late. In March, it was all over. Rudd was as finished as a coalition Work Practice. His ambitions to regain the Lodge were dead, buried and cremated. Of that, the leading lights of the Gallery were unanimously agreed. Just as now, they all agree it's "back on." As I wrote repeatedly back in March: "If we get to June-July and the Gillard-led Government is still wallowing in the low-30s on the primary vote and the low-40s on the two-party preferred, are you kidding me that "it's finished," that it's "at an end?" As I also wrote then: "As for the second coming of Rudd, it remains as possible today as it was on Thursday morning (of the non-challenge)." All those declarations that 'it's over' mean nothing. What everyone else should understand is that even if we get Rudd back as prime minister, we will still have all the disastrous policies and outcomes of the Gillard and Rudd governments. Most of which were either Rudd's personally or Rudd-Gillard's in partnership. We will still have: The $40 billion going on $60 billion - or $80 billion, who knows? - National Broadband Network disaster. Thought up and committed to by prime minister Rudd, on the back of a drinks coaster on Air Force One, in one of those rare moments that his communications minister Stephen Conroy got to speak to him. An NBN that is running way, way behind schedule - as Conroy's shadow Malcolm Turnbull, correctly, said on Q&A on Monday night, will be lucky to get to 10 per cent of its target rollout by June 30. The boats, the boats and more boats. As we have completely lost control of not just our humanitarian immigration program, but face losing control of the entire program, effectively sub-contracting it to people-smugglers based in Indonesia. Since Labor tore up the Howard-era policies that worked and replaced them with "feel-good" changes explicitly committed by PM Rudd, and specifically drawn up by then deputy-PM Gillard, over 40,000 people have arrived - perhaps 1500 didn't - and we face the possibility of 35,000 or even more this year alone. Hey hey, Kevin and Julia: How many millionaires did you create today - and yesterday, and tomorrow - among people smugglers and Indonesian functionaries? We wouldn't have a Treasurer Swan - most likely it would be Bill Shorten as the price of his support. But we would still have Swan's Budget and we would still have Swan's deficit. Correction: Deficits - as far as the fiscal eye can see. And his debt. From zero at the first - and only - election of Rudd as PM in 2007, to nearly $200 billion after 2013-14; and rising. Most bitterly ironic - for us, not them - of all, we would still be about to get Rudd's Emissions Trading Scheme, as it morphs from the carbon tax we did get from his successor. The scheme that Gillard talked Rudd out of proceeding with; only to then use his abandonment of the "greatest moral challenge of our time," as the main weapon to assassinate him with. Utterly useless - it won't even change the temperature by one-hundredth of one degree. Totally dysfunctional - as we hook up to Europe's collapsed carbon price. And just waiting for somebody to have to clean up the mess. Sorry, plural, messes.