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The Gillard government might have been rounding out a year of achievement with the Abbott opposition in retreat, but instead goes into the last week of Parliament facing its greatest crisis.
Its asylum seeker policy is in disarray, but that is not an existential threat to the government. The grave and immediate danger to Labor's hold on power is the fast-building crisis over the Prime Minister's connections to a major union fraud case from 1991 to 1995.