"Voters would be forgiven for thinking she's trying to mess with their heads." Photo: Getty Images
Amanda Bishop did not capture the real Julia in her portrayal of the Prime Minister in At Home With Julia, the comedy about the first couple, on ABC TV.
The flat vowels she got. The wardrobe too, and Gillard's general air of calm, edged ever-so-slightly with bemusement. But to really capture a character, real or fictional, you have to nail her language - the way she speaks and the words she chooses.
And to nail Gillard's language is difficult, if not impossible, because Gillard hasn't yet nailed it herself.
Opinions of her government's competence vary wildly, but there is consensus on one point - Gillard's inability to sell a positive policy message, or to communicate to voters either what she stands for or who she is. The Prime Minister seems to have a profoundly uneasy relationship with the English language.
Speaking off the cuff or in a more casual forum such as the National Press Club, she is witty and tinder-dry, perfectly able to talk plainly.
She won fans with her blunt advice to the media in July, delivered with a laconicism that would have made Bryan Brown jealous.
''Don't write crap,'' she said. ''Can't be that hard.''
But put the Prime Minister in front of a press conference or, heaven forbid, give her a policy speech to deliver, and she shields herself behind a wall of language.
Gillard obfuscates when she should illuminate, uses many words when a few would do, and confuses messages so badly that voters would be forgiven for thinking she's deliberately trying to mess with their heads.
She ends sentences with prepositions (''I explained that we had a High Court case that we were working through our response to,'' she told journalists last week), speaks in the passive voice and uses multiple subjunctive clauses, which tend to bloat her speech.
She has a habit of doubling her adverbs - using two when one, or none, would do.
She is involved in decisions ''personally and directly''; examines policy issues ''appropriately and carefully'' and sees things ''very clearly and very precisely''.
This doesn't just mean that no one knows what her government actually stands for - a common complaint - it makes her seem remote and reinforces the public opinion that she is somehow soulless.
Take her recent radio interview with the ABC's Madonna King, the first after a disastrous High Court result scuttled her Malaysia proposal and precisely the moment when she needed to claw back ground and convince voters she was in control.
Instead the Prime Minister repeated a rote phrase about having a ''clear vision for the future'' seven times in a 15-minute interview. At the end of it we were none the wiser as to what that vision was.
It smacked of a line pre-prepared in a back room by a media flack, something voters can smell a mile off. A recent press conference following the announcement of mass job losses in manufacturing was peppered with the same sort of speech.
She said the government was ''strongly engaged'' with manufacturing, whatever that means. She talked about ''skills settings'' and our ''workplace-relations setting'' and the economy's ''differential needs''.
Australians do not need their political leaders to speak prettily. No one would accuse John Howard of being a fine orator, but his plain speaking gave voters the impression that he meant what he said, whether or not they agreed with what that was.
The terrible waste is that Gillard can in fact speak wonderfully. Her speech at this year's press gallery ball was deft, witty and so well delivered that it seemed she had missed her true calling - comedy.
She is often criticised for being cold and remote, but to observe her interacting with schoolchildren visiting Parliament House, or joking with her frontbenchers in the chamber, is to see a warm, tactile woman whom others find easy to like.
It's a bitter thing that, on some of the few occasions when Gillard has managed to cut the bluster and talk in short sentences, she has said things which have left a negative lasting impression.
To wit, ''There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead'', ''I have full confidence in the member for Dobell'' and her catchphrase from the election campaign, now so infamous it doesn't bear repeating.
Don Watson wrote that politics is a war fought with words, and if that's the case, Gillard needs to build her arsenal. With her approval ratings in free fall and a voting public increasingly alienated from her, straight talking has never been more important than it is now.
Jacqueline Maley is The Sydney Morning Herald's parliamentary sketch writer.
Note: In an earlier version of this article the word adjective was used instead of adverb. This has now been corrected.
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