Kevin Rudd’s advisers were all smiles as they arrived at the Rudd family home this morning.

It was a marked difference from yesterday when there was still uncertainty as to whether Mr Rudd would be challenging Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s leadership

Their smiles may have had something to do with today’s polls, which show Mr Rudd is preferred prime minister over both Ms Gillard and Coalition leader, Tony Abbott.

Mr Rudd’s chief strategist Bruce Hawker said the polls were a clear indication of the people’s preference.

Mr Hawker said it was time for Ms Gillard to reconsider if she would put her name on Monday’s ballot, in the interests of the party’s future.

“If the Labor Party wants to remain in government, it is going to have to put Kevin Rudd into the Prime Minister’s job,” he said.

“I think the Prime Minister should actually think about whether she stands on Monday, I think it is that serious.

“Because the public are saying ‘we want Kevin Rudd’.  She has to consider whether the public is right, or the backrooms, the faction leaders are right.”

Mr Hawker said contrary to reports from Mr Rudd’s detractors, he believed the Rudd led government to have been “very functional”, having managed to steer the country through the beginnings of the global financial crisis.

“They all worked together [then], Julia Gillard was part of the leadership team, Wayne Swan was part of the leadership team; you never heard tales of dysfunctionality then. It seemed everything was going pretty well,” he said.

Mr Hawker said the support of House leader Anthony Albanese was “critically important,” because he was a “respected figure in the Labor Party”.

Mr Hawker also said that he was not being paid to stand behind his “long-time friend”, and that he understood he was taking a risk with his own career by doing so.

Mr Rudd's daughter, Jessica Rudd, later brought “supplies” for the troops; two trays of coffee.

She was cordial and smiling as she walked past the media, expressing concern when a camera man tripped.

Ms Rudd has been outspoken in supporting her father since he made the announcement he was resigning as Foreign Minister on Thursday.

Mr Rudd is expected to address the media later this morning

Polls show It's Time For Gillard To Go, Rudd Camp Says

meanwhile …..

The bloodletting inside the Labor Party is nothing short of animalistic, write Peter Hartcher and Phillip Coorey.

Until now, American presidential candidates have set the standard for bare-knuckle attacks on other members of their own party.

In a striking statistic, Republicans spent 5 per cent of all their ad budgets attacking each other in the election four years ago; so far this time, it's running at 51 per cent, according to The Washington Post.

But the American standard for negativity appears to have been overtaken by an abrupt new Australian outburst. This week, many of the parliamentarians of the federal ALP have cast aside any semblance of unity and torn at each other in unrestrained frenzy.

It became ''animalistic'', said the federal Labor MP from Queensland Graham Perrett. Two of the most seasoned factional warriors from both sides of Labor, Graham Richardson from the NSW Right faction and Doug Cameron from the NSW Left, have declared it to be the most extreme they have seen.

And the percentage of negative statements this week? An analysis for the Herald by Sentia Media, formerly Media Monitors, puts it at 58 per cent.

''The comments have been more internally damaging to Labor than ever before,'' is the assessment of a non-partisan professional observer, Sentia's Patrick Baume. Australian Labor makes the US Republicans look almost charitable to each other by comparison.

On Thursday alone, 18 of the 30 ministers of the Gillard government went public and, to varying degrees, excoriated their former leader, Kevin Rudd, as a chaotic, dysfunctional, ill-tempered, overbearing and, ultimately, an opinion poll- and headline-driven populist who lacked the substance and wherewithal to withstand the rigours of being prime minister.

One remarkable feature of the angry outburst is that it started at the most senior level of the Labor Party. It was a former leader of the party, Simon Crean - other than Rudd, he is the only former leader still in the Parliament - who struck the first blow. He called Rudd ''disloyal'' and said he was ''sick to death'' of Rudd and his supporters acting ''as a collection of individuals, all accusing the other behind their back''.

Crean's attack was pivotal. Rudd said he decided to resign as foreign affairs minister when Julia Gillard repeatedly declined to repudiate Crean; and Crean admitted his attack had provoked Rudd.

Yet Crean had no regrets: ''This is a relief to have it out in the open and, to be fair to Kevin, he's done the right thing.'' But he didn't relent. Rudd should have waited until he returned to Australia to resign. His sudden overseas resignation showed selfishness: ''He sees it all through the prism of Kevin,'' Crean said. ''I think he's going to milk it all for what it's worth. Kevin thinks it's all about the person but people elect parties.''

It was another of the most senior people in the party, and Australia's chief economic officer, the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, who set the tone for the vitriol to come.

On the night Rudd resigned, Swan distributed a 325-word, written assault on the former prime minister. As a piece of premeditated, public savagery against a colleague, it is the standout in modern Australian political history, with the dishonourable exception of The Latham Diaries. Wrote Swan: ''For too long, Kevin Rudd has been putting his own self-interest ahead of the interests of the broader labour movement and the country as a whole, and that needs to stop.

''The party has given Kevin Rudd all the opportunities in the world and he wasted them with his dysfunctional decision-making and his deeply demeaning attitude towards other people, including our caucus colleagues. He sought to tear down the 2010 campaign, deliberately risking an Abbott prime ministership, and now he undermines the government at every turn."

And it was the Prime Minister who rammed home the attack, describing the time of the Rudd government in which she served as being the ''days of dysfunction''. Rudd had left her ''a very big mess'' to clean up when she took his post.

Who benefits? There is clear evidence that anger rebounds on the politicians who use it. A study published last year by Deborah Jordan Brooks, a professor of government at Dartmouth College in the US, studied the reaction of 1219 people to politicians displaying anger. Her conclusion: ''All candidates would be wise to avoid angry outbursts'' if they care what voters think of them. People are markedly more unfavourable to a politician showing anger, and they mark down their estimation of the politician's effectiveness.

So why are they doing it? Not long after it became apparent that the people had been caught by surprise by the June 2010 coup against Rudd, and a public backlash was brewing, Nicola Roxon confided it should have been sold better: ''The biggest mistake we made was not explaining to people why we got rid of him.''

Even though Rudd and the government had nosedived in the polls and hard heads in the Labor and Liberal side thought he could not beat Abbott, the public rankled at the way an elected prime minister was removed. Fully 70 per cent of voters polled by Nielsen for the Herald said that they did not approve of the way Labor treated Rudd.

As Rudd raced home from overseas this week to prepare for Monday's challenge, the Gillard team did what Roxon thought they should have done 20 months ago. They told the public why they got rid of Rudd.

Julia Gillard set out publicly for the first time her critique of her former leader and the man she appointed foreign affairs minister:

''Kevin Rudd as prime minister always had very difficult and very chaotic work patterns. In my view, Kevin Rudd is an excellent campaigner and he was an excellent campaigner in 2007. Indeed, a remarkable campaigner in 2007.

''But government requires different skills. Government requires consistency, purpose, method, discipline, inclusion, consultation; it requires you to lead a big team and to lead it well.

''Kevin Rudd, as prime minister, struggled to do that and by the days of 2010 that struggle had resulted in paralysis in the government.''

The people who knew him best and knew the most about his prime ministership were the ones who withdrew their support, she said.

The Defence Minister, Stephen Smith, normally restrained, pointed out ''that when Kevin ceased being prime minister, his popularity was very low". At the election eight weeks after the coup, Rudd suffered a primary vote fall of 9 percentage points in his own seat of Griffith and was forced to preferences.

Smith said Rudd was dumped because ''the government at that time under his leadership found it very difficult to make any policy or political progress. Frankly, we were frozen, and that's why the change was made.

''You can't run the Commonwealth of Australia and protect its national security interests and protect its economic security interests by every day running off what is on the front page of a newspaper or what you might want to do on TV.''

Roxon said that ''ultimately, we did a very dramatic thing in 2010, which was change leaders, because he was very difficult to work with.

''People might say that we were too polite ultimately about the way we did it. We didn't air all our dirty linen then [but] the truth is that decision was made for very strongly held reasons that I think are just as important now.''

Yesterday she cited specific examples of Rudd's leadership. She told how Rudd, when his plan to increase federal control of health was foundering, decided to make health policy a political ''plaything'' rather than do the hard work to effect the existing policy.

Rudd, she said, resolved that he would hold alongside the 2010 election a referendum proposing a full federal takeover of health.

He knew the states would oppose the referendum, that Canberra alone could not administer health and that the referendum would fail, but she said Rudd told her ''that was something we would deal with afterwards''.

Roxon said she was mortified because the government would have no health policy after the election, and it took three weeks for Rudd to be talked down.

''This is not a plaything. This is about the public getting the best government it can have,'' she says she told him.

Gillard confessed that her initial justification after dumping Rudd - that it was a good government which had lost its way - was a euphemism motivated by politeness and the awareness an election was nigh.

''Out of respect to Kevin Rudd at that time, I didn't canvass every detail. I used the terminology that the government had lost its way. And clearly, with that level of paralysis, the government had lost its way.''

But to outside observers, there is a disjunction between the case against Rudd and the evidence. Roxon described a serious policy disagreement with Rudd, but the electorate knows that this is a common state of affairs in governments. For instance, Peter Costello said in 2008: ''I had big fights with Howard, all the time. Big fights,'' specifically over the level of spending in the budget.

And when Wayne Swan was challenged on ABC Radio's AM program to give evidence that Rudd was undermining the government at every turn, his reply was thin: ''I mean, we now know that he was with journalists during the last parliamentary sitting saying he was going to challenge. He publicly denied that. And we've seen evidence in the last couple of days about his attempts to undermine reforms in the poker machine area.'' Rudd denied that too, strenuously.

It is undeniable Rudd operated a poorly organised and poorly functioning inner operation. Rudd has admitted as much. ''Some of the criticisms made of me were fair cop and a lot of them were exaggerated and sort of produced after the event,'' he told Sky News this week. He said he should have been better organised, should have delegated more, and consulted more widely.

Professor James Walter of Monash University has spent years researching the operations of prime ministerial offices in Australia since World War II. He has interviewed many senior public servants, including ones who worked closely with Rudd. His conclusion: ''The depiction of his government as chaotic is accurate.''

But Walter suggests that Labor's criticisms of Rudd are overdone and counterproductive. ''Public servants say that Julia Gillard was a very good minister. She listened to briefs, she was consultative, she was methodical. But as prime minister, her private office has become the same kind of bubble as Rudd's, and she has no political antennae.''

Walter, head of the Monash school of political science and an expert in political leadership, says the unrestrained attacks on Rudd had ''the strategic intention of making Rudd back off so he won't try again, but it seems to me that they are destroying their own chance of getting back, regardless of who the leader is''.

Rudd has sought to turn the Gillard camp's anger in his favour. By contrast with the fury of the attacks on him, Rudd has called for civility: ''Whatever our different political views … there is a place for civility.'' He said that ''there are tough questions about individuals. But you know, hooking into one another in highly vicious, personalised attacks, I don't think is Australian. And I don't think we should be part of that.'' He called on his supporters to show restraint, and they have.

Acutely aware he lacks majority support of his caucus colleagues, Rudd has made an appeal for people power. Again yesterday, upon his arrival in Brisbane, he called on members of the public to lobby their local MP and senator to vote for him in Monday's ballot. Again, he excoriated those who have been unloading him, including two-thirds of the ministry, as ''faceless men''.

''Be careful of the spin machine of the faceless men,'' he said at Brisbane Airport.

But if Rudd's main constituency is the people, Gillard's is the caucus and the factions. She defended the so-called ''faceless men'' at some length, saying she found the label ''deeply offensive''.

The early evidence suggests the Gillard camp's tactic is not impressing the electorate, but that it is rebounding on her, just as Jordan Brooks's work would predict.

An online poll asked readers at the Herald's website, smh.com.au, which leader's address to the media they preferred. With 46,045 votes recorded, responses were running 30 per cent in favour of Gillard and 70 per cent to Rudd. This is not a scientific poll, however.

More significantly, today's Herald Nielsen poll finds that Gillard's approval rating is down 4 percentage points and her disapproval rating has risen 5 percentage points. Voters continue to prefer Rudd over Gillard as Labor leader by an overwhelming 58 per cent to 34.

The worry in Labor and beyond is that Monday's ballot, which Gillard is expected to win, will not resolve the issue. Although Rudd pledged yesterday that if unsuccessful he would not challenge again, his supporters, including the Housing Minister, Robert McClelland, are refusing to guarantee that will end the matter.

Despite Gillard demanding Monday's loser move to the backbench and renounce further leadership ambitions, Rudd's strategy is to win enough votes on Monday to keep alive the prospect of a second challenge in a few months.

But so violent have the attacks been on Rudd by his own colleagues that the fear is he will be mortally damaged. Certainly the Coalition is collating all the material. Already, it has distributed collections of quotes featuring Swan both praising and damning Rudd.

One of the few ministers to stay quiet, Anthony Albanese, is disgusted at what is happening and has been urging colleagues to desist. Albanese, who is undecided as to who he will vote for, believes the behaviour from both sides has seriously wounded Gillard and Rudd and he is not alone.

One backbencher likened what was occurring to the ''mutually assured destruction'' of student politics.

Australian politics was already notably negative across the aisle. One telltale sign: governors of the Reserve Bank never make public comment on politics, but last year the governor, Glenn Stevens, felt obliged to note that ''the increasingly bitter political debate'' was damaging consumer confidence. The new internecine savagery in Labor adds another layer of discord and damage.

Looking at Australia from the outside, it's incomprehensible. ''People overseas don't understand how Australian Labor went from a big majority in 2007, to kicking out the guy who delivered it, to losing its majority, and now this bloody brawl,'' says Ken Courtis, an Asia-based, Canadian-born international economist and former vice-chair of Goldman Sachs in Asia.

''We read stories that he was a dictator and hard to work with, but it doesn't really explain it.''

The Labor leadership contest has generated a level of open anger so great that it is confounding observers, rebounding on the Gillard supporters who are deploying it, and, perhaps, inflicting damage on Labor overall. And Labor, at its lowest standing in the public eye in the 40-year history of the Nielsen poll, does not seem well-placed to afford the luxury.

Locked In The Fight Of Their Lives

and, from Mike Carlton …..

We're angry little Vegemites as

vicious as can be,

We've ripped into each other

since we joined the ALP.

The polling spells disaster,

getting worse with every week

But we enjoy a faction fight,

A savage brawl of left and right

It puts a rose in every cheek!

The last time a minority government fell apart like this was in 1941, when Robert Menzies' wartime Tories tore each other to shreds. That, too, was a fight over power and personalities, not policy and principle.

Menzies was knifed by his own United Australia Party, which was so hopelessly disunited it could not throw up a replacement for him. The Country Party's Arthur Fadden took the prime ministership for just 40 days and 40 nights. Fed up by the continuing chaos, the two independent backbenchers keeping Fadden in power voted against his budget and brought down the government. Labor's John Curtin won the next election in a landslide.

History has a way of repeating itself, especially for those who don't learn its lessons. An ironclad rule of Australian politics is that disunity is death. If Rudd was behaving in The Lodge like a Borgia pope, as everyone now tells us, why on earth didn't a taskforce of senior ministers tell him to pull his head in from the start?

Too late now. When Julia Gillard retains the leadership on Monday and Rudd stalks off the battlefield to sulk in his tent, as surely will happen, she will still be staring death in the face. The awful prospect of a lazy and cynical Abbott government looms ever larger.

As one reader emailed me this week: ''Our choice is a party strong on policies but utterly useless on politics, or a party strong on politics but utterly useless on policies.

''Could you call Keating and tell him to get off his arse and stage an encore? After all, he is still 20 years younger than Mugabe.''

If only.