Andrew Bolt From: Herald Sun March 21, 2013 9:14PM

Prime Minister Julia Gillard and deputy Wayne Swan front the media after they were re-elected unopposed. Picture: John Feder Source: Herald Sun

JULIA Gillard won. But, as with so many of her farcical battles lately, Labor and the country lost.

The Prime Minister survived yet another leadership battle when Kevin Rudd did something shocking in today's Labor.

He actually kept his word.

Rudd promised a year ago not to challenge Gillard again, and not enough Labor MPs would draft him.

So he refused to stand against Gillard. Note well: he was not defeated, but deferred. Weakened, but not removed.

So Gillard, who has broken so many promises herself, gets to keep leading Labor, a party she's already driven into the ground and stripped of honour.

Gillard wins, but Labor loses. Its desperately compromised leader has been further discredited, but so now has the only alternative leader.

Rudd, Labor's only bringer of slim hope, has burnt his supporters by squibbing. He revealed a lack of nerve - and numbers.

What a farce.

Labor was already headed to catastrophic defeat under Gillard, who is incompetent and widely (and rightly) regarded as a liar.

This contest ripped off the last bandages over Labor's gaping wounds

Someone less "tough", as her supporters praise her - or less selfish - would have resigned long ago, realising she is simply not up to the job.

The leadership battle left her even more damaged, if that were possible.

Gillard has not just been rocked by more destabilisation and denied even the satisfaction of a vote that might at least have finished off Rudd.

"The whole business is completely at an end," declared Gillard afterwards of Rudd's leadership ambitions. But it isn't, of course. Not while the polls show Gillard is poison and Rudd is Labor's only antidote.

But worse, this contest ripped off the last bandages over Labor's gaping wounds.

Foreign Affairs Minister Bob Carr, despite his denials, was revealed as having given up on Gillard.

Labor Whip Joel Fitzgibbon, whose job is actually to keep party discipline, publicly declared Labor had a better chance of winning under Rudd and offered his resignation.

Talented parliamentary secretary Richard Marles has also been forced to quit after backing Rudd. Another loss.

And Regional Australia Minister Simon Crean, who on Monday declared Gillard "has my full support", was giving Gillard devastating criticism and calling for Rudd to replace her.

Crean didn't say exactly what he felt about Gillard now trying to muzzle the media, play the gender card and woo xenophobes by demonising skilled foreign workers.

But his exasperation was clear as he called for a return to "the values that I, like so many others, joined Labor for".

"I think that the way in which the Labor Party has always operated most effectively is when it has been inclusive, when it's sought consensus, not when it's sought division, not when it's gone after class warfare".

It was Crean who urged Gillard to call a spill of leadership positions and demanded Rudd stand - a year after declaring Rudd "can't be prime minister again".

What an own goal.

By the end of the day, the only person out of a job was Crean, sacked for disloyalty. But Crean demonstrated Labor's terrible dilemma.

He conceded there was a "a mood for change" within the party, yet said he was sick of Rudd's destabilisation and wanted to "be there to ensure" his former leader's infamously dysfunctional leadership style had "changed".

Even Gillard's supporters don't think she's good. They simply fear Rudd would be worse.

True, Rudd is the author of some of Gillard's worst problems. It was Rudd who started Labor on the wild spending that has blown billions on trash and left us deep in debt.

It was Rudd who dismantled the border laws of the Howard government, luring in record numbers of boat people.

But how much worse could Rudd be than the woman who replaced him three years ago, claiming "a good government was losing its way".

After all, it didn't only produce a leadership wrangle

It also confirmed Gillard's incompetence when she was forced by the resistance of some independents to drop her plan to punish her media critics by putting the free press under government supervision.

That the Government even tried such an authoritarian stunt was shameful. That it failed to first lock in the numbers was ludicrous. It suffered a week of predictably furious media criticism without a skerrick of gain.

And still to come: a May Budget that will reveal the size of the deficit Gillard swore would actually be a surplus. One more broken promise. One more proof of incompetence.

Yet on Labor sails, sinking under a clueless captain who yesterday only shot more holes in its last lifeboat.

Only the Opposition could be pleased by the latest Labor utter, utter debacle.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard wins, but Labor loses and the farce goes on | Herald Sun