By rights, Kevin Rudd should now be facing a revolt within the labour movement, challenging his wretched Howard-lite policy on union and workers' rights and his neoliberal moves like the incipient "school league tables".
In fact he is still doing fairly well in the polls; the main pressure on him is from the newly right-turning Liberal Party under Tony Abbott's leadership; and the union leaders are drowning criticism of Rudd under loud cries of "stop Ab
Recent years have seen a growth in union membership in Australia, the first for a long time. It is better than the years of decline but we don't have a solid trend yet.
Industrial disputes are, if anything, decreasing. During the year ended September 2009, there were 119,000 striker-days, compared with 190,000 in the year ended September 2008.
In even conservative union leaderships like the PSA there is an air of impatience with Rudd's mini-rollback of WorkChoices and his failure to act against the ABCC and the police-state law for the construction industry.
However, there is little political action even from the more left-wing union leaderships. In 2007, in the run-up to the 2007 federal election, the ACTU adopted a clear and radical policy for workers' and union rights, and vowed to make the ALP carry it out.
In fact the union leaderships all buckled when Rudd insisted on diluting the previous ALP policy to rip up the Howard government's industrial legislation. Since November 2007 even the CFMEU's campaign around cases like the victimised construction worker Ark Tribe has been low-key.
Now the ACTU leadership is swinging round to bury union demands in a new campaign to (big print) stop new Liberal leader Tony Abbott's plan to reintroduce a revised WorkChoices and (small print) demand better union and workers' rights from the ALP.
Kevin Rudd and the ALP government have done well in the opinion polls, despite or maybe because of the fact that they took office at the start of a huge global economic crisis
Australia has escaped relatively lightly from the economic crisis so far, mostly thanks to the Chinese government's counter-crisis spending on huge investment projects in China, which has kept demand for Australian exports fairly buoyant. Contrary to plausible expectations, the Australian housing market has only dipped, rather than collapsing. High immigration figures are cited as a factor here, but may not be decisive.
By ousting Malcolm Turnbull to replace him with Tony Abbott, the right wing of the Liberal Party has asserted itself. Some important sectional interests are also served by Abbott. Mine owners were the first group of industrialists Abbot met with after being elected Liberal leader. He claimed 10,000 coal jobs would be lost under the Emissions Trading Scheme. Most of big industry seemed happy with the extra billions that Turnbull got out of the Rudd government in compensation for big polluters, and many capitalists will agree with Turnbull about "the farce that the Coalition's policy, or lack of policy, on climate change has descended into" under Abbott's leadership.
Abbott's current "honeymoon" in the polls could continue if the Rudd government runs into hard times, but unless that happens the switch from Turnbull to Abbott must tend to help Rudd, by making him seem sane and sensible by comparison. Abbott's promise to bring back WorkChoices, rebadged, is likely to work the same way.
Right-wing Liberal party strategists are probably aiming for the federal election after next for a return to office on a new hard-line policy.
In the longer term, Rudd may turn out to play a similar role to Blair and Brown in Britain - disabling the labour movement and opening the way for the hard right to press further. In the shorter term, Rudd has probably have been given a political gift.
Both advantage for Rudd, and advantage for Abbott, depend on the level of activity in the rank and file of the labour movement remaining relatively low. That may continue for a while; but only for a while.
Resurgent price inflation, a real possibility world-wide after the governments' crisis measures in 2008-9; a "second wave" of the global economic crisis, triggered by governments rather than banks becoming unable to pay their debts; or a crisis in the helter-skelter development of the Chinese economy, all could break the spell. We must prepare.