15 Sep 2013

Gillard recounts pain of losing power

7:09 am on 15 September 2013

Former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard has broken her silence to tell of the pain of losing power and to look at what Labor should do next.

Breaking her silence of more than two months, Ms Gillard has written an essay on Labor's lessons and future.

"I sat alone on election night as the results came in," she wrote in The Guardian Australia website. "I wanted it that way. I wanted to just let myself be swept up in it."

Ms Gillard said the loss of power is felt physically in moments of distress - something her Labor colleagues must be also feeling.

"We have some grieving to do together," she wrote. "But ultimately it has to be grieving for the biggest thing lost, the power to change our nation for the better."

AAP reports the former prime minister urged her party to learn the lessons from its 1996 loss and make sure it owns its good record in government while also examining which election promises to keep and which to reject.

She said Labor must stand up for its economic record and also policies that are right, but may be unpopular, like carbon pricing.

Ms Gillard conceded she was wrong to not contest Coalition leader Tony Abbott's labelling of the carbon pricing scheme as a "tax".

"I feared the media would end up playing constant silly word games with me, trying to get me to say the word `tax'," she wrote.

"But I made the wrong choice and, politically, it hurt me terribly."

Ms Gillard was ousted as leader of the Australian Labor Party and prime minister on 26 June, and replaced by Kevin Rudd - the leader she deposed in 2010. Labour lost the federal election last Saturday.