The legacy of Rudd Labor - and the challenge confronting Julia Gillard

Such modest reform - providing an annual pool of about $15-$20 billion from an economy that is now at over $1 trillion annual value - could make a genuine and desperately-needed improvement to services in Aged Care, Mental Health, welfare and public education. Given our ageing population, it is also structural fiscal reform that cannot be put off forever without dire consequences!

And in the same spirit, would Gillard introduce a National Disability Insurance Scheme?

How these policy issues are resolved is ultimately what is most important: even more important than the individual who occupies the office of Prime Minister.

While recognising the Rudd legacy, we need now to look to the future and work for a Gillard Labor victory; hopefully with the critical and reasonably conditional support of the Greens in the Senate.

But this needs to take place in the context of building a base of support for reform of tax and social wage provision, and other critical areas such as the environment and industrial relations, under Gillard Labor.

The task for those of us concerned with these issues is to make our support - and with this support for such a reform agenda - indispensable for Labor - but in a context within which Labor is still electable.

Despite recent setbacks, we should not resign ourselves to the notion that this is the end for reformist Labor governments.