There are probably very few people left who still doubt Julia Gillard’s toughness. Today, she was required to yet again demonstrate it, on a day in which she delivered a heartfelt and deeply moving apology for forced adoptions, faced a defection from one of her strongest supporters (and the man who first awarded her a shadow ministry), and walked into question time knowing her leadership would be on the line a couple of hours later.
But she has emerged unbloodied and certainly unbowed after her chief rival Kevin Rudd declined to bring it on. Time and again the media and her critics have thrown deadlines, challenges and demands at her and she has kept her head and her job as prime minister.
Labor’s problems, however, remain. Its vote remains at a level likely to see it wrecked at the forthcoming election. It remains divided between a hard core of Rudd supporters, a broader group of Gillard supporters and a group of undecideds deeply worried about their fate at the polls.
“The result was a non-spill, and two former leaders now sitting on the backbench, and the impression of a party focused only on itself.”
And most of all, the party now looks even more shambolic after Simon Crean sought to resolve the leadership dilemma by abandoning the Prime Minister, calling for a spill and urging Rudd to stand with himself as deputy leader. Rudd declined to do so. The result was a non-spill, and two former leaders now sitting on the backbench, and the impression of a party focused only on itself.
The adamantine Gillard may have survived more than comfortably, and declared that the leadership has now been resolved (again), but that is unlikely to quiet the leadership speculation from the press, which has relentlessly focused on the leadership and the party’s polling regardless of the fact that the Rudd camp has never had the numbers since Rudd so decisively lost the previous leadership ballot in February last year.
The ultimate beneficiaries, thus, are Tony Abbott and the media, who will continue to have a divided and weakened Labor to run against and speculate about. It is unlikely to prove the circuit-breaker that Crean was desperate to create with his intervention.
MPs now take a long break between now and the budget in May, which is intended to shape Labor’s election strategy (in contrast to usual election-year budgets) by identifying structural savings that will pay for the NDIS — which passed into law this week, if anyone was paying attention — and the Gonski school funding reforms. Likely, it will be again turned into a “crucial test for Gillard” by the media and internal critics.
And you can go a join the rest of the gormless, witless, gutless and testes free trash up your own fundamental orifice.
She has been forensically examined like no other human in history, and the pathetic trash that call for this examination are incapable of comprehending the obvious.
She is 52% of the current Australian population and nearly 60% of those eligible to vote. Something the gutless wonders who cannot handle a woman in power fail every time to realise.
Old white men lost it for the nutbags in America and, thankfully, because of the same nutbags in the press and opposition here, they will lose it here too. They lost it again today.
So we have a government that has kept Australia with one of the most stable and healthy economies in the world, a media that has convinced the constituency to believe that Australia has an unstable government who has wrecked our economy and destroyed our quality of life, an opposition party that has been historically accepted as being economically safer but with a leadership that seems to have no economic clue on how to lead Australia into the futre… The result is a deeply unpopular government leading a nation that is in rude health when compared to most of the western world, and a government that has decided to follow the media lead and tear itself apart.
Oh Democracy!
(or is that Tabloid Democracy?)
Today has not shown anyone up in a positive light, but it would be nice to know that if we are to be afflicted with the LNP, we know what they are supposed to be putting forward as policies. If they have any …
At least the current Government is letting that sort of policy show, even if it gets messed up in the process.
How about you start looking at the oppposition parties and their leaders in the same forensic manner that the ALP and PM Gillard has been scrutinised?
While the media runs the Labor party, who’s running the country?
Gillards unanimous win (again) is far more conclusive than Abbotts one vote win.