A parliamentary break and a season of diplomacy has Gillard seeming poised, relaxed, and picking up in the polls. Has her luck changed?

Julia Gillard, some think, is on the up, and not only with the opinion polls, but in the sky. November had her saving Australia and the world from carbon pollution, playing hostess to the Queen, and, later, to Commonwealth political heads of government, nipping overseas to a G-20 conference to help save Europe from itself, at Hawaii with Barack Obama and APEC heads, home playing host of Obama today and, shortly off to the East Asia summit in Bali, again with her new best friend.

In the course of three weeks she has talked to almost all of the heads of government in South-East Asia and the Pacific, as well as of the 30 most powerful countries on earth, (apart from that of Israel, where she is very powerfully connected anyway, not least because of her unstinting loyalty even as virtually everyone else on our side of the world has abandoned it).

She has been listened to respectfully, not least because she represents a nation which is not in the sort of self-induced strife many of the others are. Moreover, there have not been many Government pratfalls over recent weeks, and not much has been heard from the Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, or his blood crusade to bring down everything she stands for.

Today, President Obama will say nice things about how good a friend Australia is to the United States, and he will accede to Australia's request that the US actually station some of its military here. Australia's request? Yes, again our hosting is a little like our engagement in Vietnam, where we had to beg South Vietnam to ''invite'' us. It will not be phrased that way, of course: indeed, yet again it will be Australia obligingly helping out the US, as we always do, albeit in a fairly small way in a moment of need. As Admiral Robert Willard, head of US Pacific Command, put it on Monday, ''Australia made overtures to the United States to increase our engagement with the armed forces of Australia and our utility of the training facilities - ranges, and so forth - that are there. That was unprecedented and we're very grateful for that overture. I'm not in a position to make any announcement with regard to the future plans. I would leave that to Prime Minister Gillard and to President Obama.''

Obama's speeches are generally thoughtful and generous, and are unlikely to be as gushing, or nationally embarrassing as Gillard's was when she addressed the US Congress. Sixty years of the ANZUS military alliance - 65 of the secret Quadripartite treaties - will add to the warmth.

Australian troops are being killed in Afghanistan more so as to keep the alliance warm than to promote Australian interests in the region, but it suits both Gillard and Obama to pretend both that our interests are engaged and that Australians are intimately involved in the highest councils of that war. Indeed that we, and the US, know what we are doing.

Obama, indeed, would probably not care much if we withdrew in an orderly way, and wishes only that he could abandon the region more quickly himself. Allied soldiers are making little progress there, least of all in indigenising what is now not much more than a tribal war, but it must be increasingly difficult, in those higher councils, to pretend that what is occurring has any longer much to do with the export of terror.

I'm always reminded, with such visits, and mutual exchanges of regard, of something told me by a senior Reagan-era Defence official during the late 1980s, shortly after a visit to Washington by Margaret Thatcher. Reagan and Thatcher had publicly gushed over each other, and over the close relationship between the two countries. But, during a working session with American officials a day or so later, Thatcher made some reference to the ''special relationship''. My informant said that one of his masters had responded that he supposed that there was a special relationship, given that they had been allies over the years and both spoke the same language, more or less.

But, he said to Mrs Thatcher, she should not attach too much significance to it. When the US was thinking of what to do, when it was thinking of what was in its national interests, it thought of Britain, or was constrained by what Britain might think, or how things might negatively affect Britain, about as much as and as often as Britain, in thinking about its own interests, considered the interests of the Isle of Wight. It was told so that I would take the point that Australia counted even less. Had it needed repetition, I suppose the US reference would have been to Kangaroo Island, not Tasmania.

This is not to suggest, for a second, that Australia, or that Pacific social, political, economic and defence relationships are not very important to the US, particularly during a period that Obama, and Hillary Clinton are trying to portray as America's Pacific Century. It's just that we can be, and are, taken for granted.

Australia is still critical to American intelligence coverage of our side of the world, which includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and a good bit of China and the Asian parts of the old Soviet Empire.

We share insights, and sometimes ferry messages, for each other in a host of bilateral relationships in our region. They understand our politics very well, and so, usually, do we theirs, allowing each of us to speak in a sort of shorthand that is simply not possible even in nations in our region which are very friendly to the US. And if Obama is broadly too polite to play Australian politics, he is unlikely to forget that John Howard attempted to play American politics against him four years ago, and that he is, politically, a lot closer to the things that Julia Gillard stands for than he is to Tony Abbott. Indeed Abbott has been almost consciously mimicking some of the rhetoric and crusades of the America Tea Party and Republican Right, not least in the rather over-the-top way of reflex oppositionism, massive overstatement, promises etched in blood, and focus on taxes, surpluses, borrowing and nativist dog-whistling, particularly about unwanted immigrants. The American political tradition is generally too well disciplined (and the divide between parties, in absolute terms, generally so narrow) that presidents and other senior politicians do not generally play partisan outside their national borders, or much interfere in the politics of other countries.

But if Obama thought that he might serve some domestic purpose, and incidentally do a favour for Gillard, by putting Abbott down, he might find it hard to resist.

But the mere fact that Gillard has had a few weeks without serious stumbles, that she has been strutting a world stage while Abbott has been largely invisible, and that she has climbed a few points in the ratings should not lead to any conclusion that the worst is over for her, and that the business of overtaking Abbott is now but a matter of time.

Her political task is quite different from Obama's. It is misleading to describe him as behind in the polls, or as needing to make up a lot of ground since the mid-term congressional elections, which, traditionally have low turnouts. Generally, the higher the turnout, the better the Democrats do. Obama may have disappointed some of his followers, but he is still a charismatic politician with a big followership.

His task is to inspire and energise them to come out to vote. Not to change minds, as such.

Here in Australia, where voting is compulsory, Gillard has to take votes, and coalitions, away from Abbott, whether by policy contests, beauty contests, by making voters lose faith in Abbott, or even, perhaps more difficult, to inspire in voters some belief and hope in herself.

Until recently, even her strongest supporters have despaired of her capacity to inspire, to dominate, to tell a convincing story, or to drag Labor out of its pit. That she is limited in her capacity to reorganise her team has made things worse.

The year's political season is almost over, and soon Abbott will be deprived of one of his pulpits. Even if one admired his success so far, his tactics have to change as he has to adapt to the possibility of going into government. If Gillard can avoid tripping, and get lucky for a change, she may have a whole season of being able to look presidential while Abbott looks a bit tatty and a bit ratty.

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