IN a high-risk and historic move, Gillard Labor has entered a governing alliance with the Greens to keep Labor in office - a measure of Labor's weakness and desperation.
Julia Gillard has conceded little in hard policy but she has surrendered a prize beyond value: she has compromised the Labor brand.
The once great Labor Party passes into history with this deal to ride into government. This agreement, with its five signatures, declares that "stable and effective" government now depends upon a formal Labor-Greens alliance.
Does it? How so? The claim is dubious in the extreme. The Greens were always going to back Labor to form government. Gillard has won nothing more than the Greens had publicly offered - yet she has gifted them a formal alliance covering principles, goals, working partnership and policy.
This deal puts Gillard's leadership on the line. If the independents follow the Greens and she is confirmed as PM there will be fleeting vindication.
But if it fails and Labor is cast into opposition, then Gillard will carry more baggage than ever.
How will people, notably voters in NSW, Queensland and Western Australia, react at hearing that Gillard's response to losing her governing majority at the election is to strike an alliance with the Greens and move even further to the Left?
This is strategic folly. At the tactical level it remains unclear whether this move is a masterstroke or omen of doom. Its aim is to prove Gillard's commitment to the new politics of the hung parliament. Without doubt, this re-stamps the Labor brand. It is an alliance, not a coalition, as Tony Abbott claimed.
But for the first time, Labor and the Greens are governing partners. Their tentative embrace has an enduring justification - to defeat the Coalition. As Abbott said yesterday, the Greens had not been serious about negotiations with the Coalition.
The entire world knows this deal has only one objective: to build momentum to sway the independents into duplicating such an agreement and vote Labor into office.
In terms of costings and policy, Gillard has made few concessions. Much of the agreement deals with process. On climate change, it implies that Labor and the Greens will work together. But it makes no firm commitments beyond the principle of pricing carbon. The option to dump the people's assembly is a plus. Gillard has given no ground on the mining tax, same-sex marriage, Afghanistan or economic policy. Yet this policy hollowness just makes the entire deal more dubious. Why should Labor enter such a hollow agreement that allows the Coalition to entrench the idea of a Labor-Green alliance? The independents know the Greens are supporting Labor on confidence and supply.
They don't need this document to convince them.
Or will they decide the optics are too neat and endorse Gillard as master of the new politics?
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