Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard has insisted she will lead Labor into the next election, even as a new poll Monday showed she is less popular than her predecessor Kevin Rudd.
Gillard heads a fragile Labor coalition government after the party failed to win a majority in the August 2010 election and there is mounting speculation that Rudd, now foreign minister, could challenge her for the top job.
The prime minister, who removed Rudd in a brutal Labor Party room showdown in mid-2010, said she would not be calling a leadership ballot because there was "no need".
"I'm very confident in my leadership," Gillard said in an interview late Sunday.
The defiance comes as Gillard enjoyed a rare boost in ratings according to a Nielsen poll published Monday, which shows she is ahead of opposition leader Tony Abbott as preferred prime minister for the first time in months.
Some 48 percent of those polled said Gillard was their preferred leader, a six point increase since December, while Abbott was steady at 46 percent, the Sydney Morning Herald reported.
But the poll showed Labor would lose if an election were held now, attracting only 47 percent of the vote compared to the opposition's 53 percent.
Worse still, 57 percent of the 1,400 voters surveyed said they wanted Rudd as Labor leader against only 35 percent for Gillard.
Among Labor voters, however, Gillard is slightly ahead of Rudd on this question, polling 50 percent to his 47 percent.
Gillard, who rallied Labor caucus at a Sunday meeting in Canberra's Parliament House, said while questions about her leadership status were "endlessly fascinating" to some, they did not consume her.
She said she intended to lead the party into the 2013 election.
"I'm not someone who wilts under pressure. I'm not someone who obsesses or agonises, I'm someone who gets things done," she said.
The leader of the Australian Greens and a key ally of Gillard's in Canberra, Senator Bob Brown, said the prime minister was increasingly winning over voters despite some sexist criticism.
"There's a big swing around from the average punter in favour of Julia Gillard," Brown said in Canberra of the nation's first female leader.
"She is getting a rough time ... and quite a bit of the criticism is sexist and unfair and unrelenting, and the prime minister needs a bit of a break from that."
During the Sunday evening interview Gillard was asked whether she was an emotional person and whether she cried often.
"I don't. I'm not someone who would spend a lot of time with tears in my eyes," the prime minister answered. "Does that mean that I don't feel emotions and sadness? Of course it doesn't."
She said being Australia's first woman prime minister meant there was a "different image of leadership."
"It is different, but it also speaks of how great a nation we are that we can have truly equal opportunity," she said.
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