The issue with the potential to kill the tax is revised speculation that the career of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, is once again in jeopardy – and if she goes the “house of cards” government she has concocted will inevitably follow.

Driving Miss Gillard to the brink of destruction are a number of problems. Craig Thomson, the naughty member of Parliament in trouble over allegedly misspent union funds is the headline grabber – or was until Friday.

That was when a much larger shadow fell across the PM in the shape of Gina Rinehart and her plan to import up to 1715 skilled and unskilled workers to help build the Roy Hill iron ore mine in WA.

When news of the plan first surfaced some two years ago, Blower dismissed it as wishful thinking because he believed the Australian union movement would never tolerate foreign workers on local projects.

The union view of the plan hasn’t changed but some of Gillard’s fellow travellers in the parliamentary Labor Party have certainly changed their tune, with the most significant being Martin Ferguson, the Minister for Resources – and a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

Ferguson, more than anyone else in Gillard’s government, understands both sides of the argument about bringing “guest” workers into Australia on special work visas.

For most of his life before entering Parliament he was a union official of some sort – 15 years with the Miscellaneous Workers Union, vice-president of the ACTU from 1985 to 1990, and president from 1990 to 1996, the year he was elected to Parliament, and awarded an Order of Australia for “his contribution to working people”

That “working people” citation, listed on Ferguson’s website, doesn’t speak volumes as much as yell them.

As resources minister, Ferguson has been a friend of the mining sector, albeit sometimes forced to fly beneath the extreme views of some firebrand younger unionists.

Now, the man with an AO for services to working people has signed up as a card-carrying member of the Gina Rinehart fan club, a decision which will reverberate across Australia because it was totally unexpected but indicates that he is tired of playing point-scoring games and recognised that it’s time to do the right thing for the country.

Ferguson, and the other ministers who organised the special visa deal for Rinehart’s project – Immigration Minister Chris Bowen and Special Minister of State Gary Gray – must have known that their “guest” worker deal would infuriate the unions.

They should also have known that it would infuriate their leader, Gillard, if it is true that she was kept in the dark, a claim that Blower finds implausible.

A more likely twist to Gillard’s reported anger at being told that the visa deal was done and dusted is that her office failed to keep her fully informed while she was hosing down the Thomson affair and hobnobbing with US President Barack Obama at a NATO conference in Chicago.

The problem for Gillard is that whether she wasn’t told, or didn’t know, reflects badly on her control of the government, because the choice boils down to ignorance or incompetence.

Faced with the reality of a union-backed PM ignorant of a union-infuriating decision, or unaware of a momentous policy decision, the people who promoted Gillard as PM over the deposed Kevin Rudd are now reconsidering (for the third time) whether she is up to the job.

Essentially, what’s happened is that Gillard is being undone by a woman with far greater determination than her, not to mention a bottomless bank account.

Rinehart has been planning Roy Hill with “guest” workers in mind for several years, and the closer she got to developing the mine the more important that plan became because of the reluctance of east coast Australian workers to take jobs in remote locations.

Putting aside the precious-princess nature of some workers in Sydney and Melbourne, who would prefer to collect unemployment benefits than go bush, there is the more pressing question of the political fall-out of Rinehart’s visa win.

For Gillard, the Rinehart win means she has been beaten by a stronger woman, and a class enemy. She will forever be seen as a loser in a fight she started by attacking Australia’s richest people – foolishly overlooking the fact that it is also the rich who create jobs.

For the rest of the Labor government it means there are now people like Ferguson, Bowen and Gray, who recognise that it’s time to drop the class-war game and do the right thing for Australia.

For Tony Abbott, the Opposition Leader and PM-in waiting, it means the awarding of another free kick from the most incompetent government in Australia since Gough Whitlam promenaded around the country.

And for the mining industry it means that a change of government has moved closer, and with it the promised death of the mining tax.

This article first appeared in ILN's sister publication MiningNews.net.