Since Rudd's demise, Labor has been plagued by party infighting. The media has played a huge part in reporting and beating up that infighting.

I still can't "get" that people vote FOR austerity, injustice and all the other evils that the Tories stand for.
Do wombats have higher IQ's than the average Australian?

Actually I don't know that most Aussies do reject reformist policies.
Maybe when labelled as a policy of those nasty people the ALP but not necessarily the policies themselves.
It all goes through the media disinformation filter.

I recall Possum doing an analysis on poll results concerning policies that showed that when the questions were presented without party attribution positive responses ensued. In some cases even COALition voters supported some policies whilst rejecting the ALP.
Possum's point was that there is a disconnect between what Aussies think about policies and what they think when they are given the message from the media in a negative party aligned context.
I'll see if I can find that post of his.
And there have been other polls that have shown the same theme - a disconnect between support for policies when stripped of their party badging.

{I may be conflating this summary with some observations from elsewhere, memory and all that, anyway now I have the link to Poss you can see for yourself].

Found it.
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2012/06/11/what-australians-believe/

Worth a read - here is just one little taste to give you the idea.
"Think about that for a minute. The largest response, a plurality of the population, believes that government is too large, yet clear majorities want government to do more on health, education, public transport and bank regulation – while a plurality wants the government to do more on crime protection and pollution regulation"

His summing apt is particularly cogent.

Interesting pairing of waiters to clients.
Bill seems on the Julia Gillard side and Kevin is waiting on the other side of the cafe that the Abbott will walk out into.

Many social conservatives attack Gillard's character. She is a bad woman: --she is incompetent, a backstabber and untrustworthy. Oh, and she is unmarried.

She is a witch. That means evil, manipulative female power that threatens to kill and emasculate men.

Gillard is a Lady MacBeth for the conservative men. She is beyond human.

It's irrational political hatred towards Gillard from the conservative movement.

" the current leadership tension, which is fuelled by a hostile media's beatup for click bait and has led to the current disunity within the ALP, is about personalities, not policies. "

What we have is a small, but bitter, coterie of Rudd men in the Labor Party talking continually to a small group of predominantly male journalists to undermine Julia Gillard.

Said journalists then write up their 'Gillard must go' column because it is Rudd who will clean up the Labor Party and ensure that Labor is electorally competitive.

" the current leadership tension, which is fuelled by a hostile media's beatup for click bait and has led to the current disunity within the ALP, is about personalities, not policies. "

The Rudd camp has been white anting the Gillard Govt for the last three years. Their desire for revenge outweighs their desire to ensure that the Labor Party wins the 2013 election.

Face it, Kevin Rudd is driven by a desire for revenge for his political execution. He is determined to bring Gillard down, even if that means wrecking federal Labor.