Julia Gillard breaks her silence on pain of losing power In quiet moments, she wrote, "a sense of being unfulfilled overwhelms you." She criticised the switch back to Mr Rudd just weeks ahead of the election- a move that led several high-profile ministers to quit - saying it sent Australians "a very cynical and shallow message" about the party's sense of purpose. "It was not done because caucus now believed Kevin Rudd had the greater talent for governing," she wrote. It was only done - indeed expressly done - on the basis that Labor might do better at the election. Labor unambiguously sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament at the polls. But she declined to attack Mr Rudd directly, even describing him at one point as "right and brave" for committing to putting a price on carbon during the recent election campaign. In the essay, Ms Gillard discusses the failures of her leadership, admitting that she should have fought the opposition more stridently when it labelled Labor's carbon emission trading scheme as a "big new tax." "I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word "tax." I wanted to be on the substance of the policy, not playing "gotcha." But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly. Ms Gillard made history in 2010 when she became the first woman to lead the country after ousting Kevin Rudd in a Labor party room coup, a move that shocked the nation, which had voted Rudd into power just three years before.