4.40 a.m.
I read the piece I wrote in January 2010 calling for Gillard’s sacking and deselection. Those things I noted then seem true now too. We were always making allowances for her mistakes, like those of a difficult child.
I spoke of these things with Wedderburn on Tuesday. I said there was in drama what is known as ‘the emotional line’. Things that happen sequentially must make emotional sense. You do not live with a man and not marry him. You do not live with a man who is your intellectual inferior. You make, if you can, in your life, emotional sense. If she had been living with Tim Flannery, John Faulkner, Quentin Dempster, Andrew Denton, Bill Leak or Don Watson there would have been no problem. But she was living with a scaly hairdresser, who seemed, when let loose, a bit of a klutz.
Wedderburn recalled me saying, way back: ‘Imagine Simon Crean were Prime Minister and living with, and refusing to marry, a coarse female hairdresser, and boasting to the press, “Gee, we must be the first de facto couple to sleep in the royal palace of Japan, and to go as an invited couple to the royal wedding of Kate and Wills.” Imagine Crean had done thatt. How bad that would have been. How bad that would have sounded.’
Yet, in terms of the ‘emotional line’, Gillard went one worse than that. She said, outside the wedding, ‘I don’t think Prince William will ever be king of Australia.’ And she knitted a kangaroo for his baby two years later.
The emotional line requires that you be a monarchist, or not knit. And it was this that triggered, I think, what happened last night. She was childless yet knitting, republican yet knitting for a king. This woman was never going to make emotional sense, in the way that Plibersek made emotional sense, being pregnant while a minister, and coping with it with difficulty; or Roxon, being unable to cope with parenting and and leaving public life because of it. Clare Martin and Carmen Lawrence had illegitimate children while managing a political career and gained the highest office. It would have been okay if Gillard, childless, had, like Helen Clarke, childless, or Maxine McKew, childless, or Ben Chifley, childless, or Bob Carr, childless, been married to almost anybody. But she could not, would not, make that jump. The ‘real Julia’ would not make that jump. From a thing to the next thing, the thing that followed it, for all of humankind. The logical, emotional consequence. And it showed.
The real Julia was not real, and could not, ever, never ever, fabricate reality, not even for a minute while speaking, except on those subjects — abortion, rude men — which made her angry. Discuss.
More of this later.
And so it goes.
9.50 am
I dare not ask Viv to sign me in because she is furious about my Gillard pensee, above. Emma, from the Thomson office, arrives and does so. I ask if Labor might now pre-select Craig. ‘No way,’ she says gloomily and goes away.
At the ATM is the beautiful smoke-free lynx-eyed Tom Cameron fiancee Claire, jobless these thirteen hours since Conroy refused to serve. I lose my phone and she rings it for me. It’s there, in the canvas bag, and I thank her, and offer to queue the long quarter mile for her coffee. She says no, she’ll be back in an hour, and goes off depressed. I look around for Joe Kydd, a respondent who thinks me a worthless dirty untidy mendacious person; but he could be anybody.
I learn, really late in life, that Aussies has meat pies. It is my natural food and I buy two, with sauce.
10.10 am
Rudd is sworn in on the television and Abbott baying for an early election though it would be for the Lower House only, and demanding we know instantly when that election is, now, now. He has forgotten perhaps that no PM in world history but Gillard has thus far unveiled this dread secret betimes (ffor it is the chiefest weapon of elective office, is it not old friend, the time-frame of the battle), but Cult Murdoch behaves as if it is a commonplace to reveal it, inventing thereby one more (the way they do) of their big new rules, like ‘not accepting’ the vote of a democratically elected person in a democracy because it is thought that he bought, illegally, now and then, an ice cream or two, though this has not been proven, and his electors should be disenfranchised, as it were, on suspicion.
Minute by minute his credibility drains away. I go on Brisbane radio and tell Shane somebody how he pulled out, if that’s the verb I want, of the wedding to Kathy Donnelly a week before the church nuptials and made his mum make the phone call and drop-kicked the subsequent baby off to Perth, ruining her life, and the baby’s too, probably. It goes out live. He has not sued. ‘Trust?’ Albo could say in the House this afternoon. ‘It’s all about trust, is it? He doesn’t even turn up for the wedding!’
They would be fools to go to the polls before, say, Novermber 23. The people have a right to know who they’re voting for and against, and twenty-two Question Times and ten debates, five between Carr and Bishop on foreign affairs, would inform them wonderfully. Inform them of the choice.
10.40 am
On the television Shorten in earphones radiates truth of his agony and his decency — something I know of personally — and the pain of the friendships lost by what he did; if indeed they are lost; they might be. Curiously, it seems that the Rudd Pitch yesterday at 5 — that for the greater good some private hurt should be endured, and some bitter wounds forgiven- has penetrated through the democracy. It may well be, old friend, that everyone — in the Divorce Court, the boardroom, the locker room, the playing field, the schoolyard — has gone through similar fractures and distortions and breakages of contract and solemn vow and esprit de corps, and they understand., they actually understand. What seemed to most of us, and it certainly seemed to me, to be an irresistible impediment to his return, the film of his colleagues bucketing him, and he himself in apopleptic foul-mouthed fury, seems not to matter a bit, any more than Bob Hawke saying ‘bum’ after the America’s Cup or weeping over his smack-addicted daughter. Australians are better than Americans. They are the first agnostic nation and they understand that life is complex, and can go many ways. They get it; and we are in the race now. Discuss.
11.43 am
I ask Windsor if he is sick and he talks of occasional loss of balance and fadings of consciousness after encountering a low-hanging branch abruptly a year ago. I heavily recommend he see a chiropractor, and he takes me seriously. He feels his neck, and I feel it, and we agree it may be the problem.
If he is cured, and he will be — it takes five minutes of stark terror, but it works — I think he may run again.
As he goes off to the chamber I call out, ‘We are losing all the Chifleys — you, Oakeshott, Jenkins, Andren, Brown — and it’s a pity.’ He is pleased by this, and flushes even redder. A good man.
‘Flattery,’ Phillip Adams told me, ‘always works.’
1.15 pm
Peter Collins occurs at the next table and I give him my book. He says it is ‘competitive, now.’ I remember the quote at the front of his book, and I get it word perfect, of what Gillian Skinner said to him when his leadership was in danger. ‘Hugs, yes. Kisses, yes. Votes, no, It’s nothing personal. It’s just … politics.’ The book, Nothing Personal, was renamed The Bear Pit by Iremonger, the fool, dead publisher, lover once like me of Susan Ryan, and lost thereby forty thousand readers.
He introduces me to Graham Morris, who admits he started twittering yesterday morning, not knowing what the day would hold. He says he gets death threats a lot on his email, but erases them before his family can read them. I speak of the death threats to me in the Bronwyn Bishop campaign, the shit flung at my windscreen on the Bilgolah Bends, and my fear that my little dog Charlie would be flung dead over the fence one midnight. He is a country boy, of course, and easy to get on with. I tell him Sinodinis and Richo have the same voice, and there may be a genetic predisposition that causes both the voice and the backroom profession they are drawn to.
12.20 pm
Rudd makes a short speech to parliament, praising Gillard and Swan hugely, and somehow evaporating the enmity of just a day ago. Abbott, rattled, rails of the ‘faceless men’ and wants an election date. Pyne and Bishop behind him look deathly scared.
1.10 pm
I hug Harry Jenkins and say, ‘Not that it matters, but you’re a great, lost Prime Minister.’ He looks at me as if I have taken leave of my senses.
1.25 pm
Word from a respondent of a Morgan Poll taken after Rudd’s win that has Labor on 49.5 two party preferred.
This means we are on 51.5 now, and landsliding hereinafter.
As I said.
2.10 pm
Question Time occurs and Rudd, on his feet, is as brief and pungent and powerful and, if I may use the word, awesome as a great House of Commons minister, Foot, or Benn, or Powell (though his size and shape are more like Harold Wilson) and Abbott is cringeing under his maelstrom. Pyne is thrown out early, and everyone can’t believe it’s happening. It’s like one of those penalty goals in the last half-minute of a soccer final that changes everything. You can’t believe it’s happened. And it’s over. And you’ve lost.
I will put up a transcript of the first five minutes when I can, in this space.
2.20 pm
Luke Walladge rings mid-Question Time from Perth and predicts, ‘You heard it here first’, a Labor win by 51.5 percent. His theory is that Rudd appeals to those who hate politicians, he seems a non-politician, and any film of politicians cursing him will help him.
3.30 pm
I ask Oakeshott if the events of yesterday have made him think of reconsidering. No way, he says. I line up Windsor to see my chiropractor Anton, soon.
4.25 pm
Smith is resigning. I ring Walladge and ask if he wants Perth. He says there is a better candidate, and names him. I say, ‘How about Beazley?’ He asks, ‘The daughter or the father?’ I say, ‘The father. For not only Smith’s seat, but his job.’ He says that’s a good idea and wants to think about it. I email Carr with the same plan.
4.30 pm
‘Brilliant’, Carr emails, but doubts that Kim, after old, still suppurant wounds, would serve under Rudd.
4.40 pm
Slipper is on his feet doing his ‘provisional valedictory’ lest he lose to Brough. Every time I look up, another hero is going, and piping himself with elegant autumnal grace out of history. ‘It’s a slaughterhouse,’ Natasha’s vile sado-Thatcherist husband Smith says. A feeling all around of both fin de siecle and Paris Barricades, emoty chairs at emoty tables, as in Les Mis. Can it be just a day since Gillard, PM, threw down her gage: hand up now, then out of politics forever.
If Swanny’s great flaw was earnestness, hers, surely, was what we used to call ‘hyperbollicality’, the habit of yelling ‘never, ever’. She did not have to say ‘no government I lead’ will have a carbon tax. She, and Swanny, did not have to say that everything that happened hereafter was useless, pointless, null and void without a Surplus.
Her flaws were the habits of the insecure. ‘As Prime Minister,’ she’d say, reminding us, and herself, of her office thirty-two times a day and emphasising, as if it needed emphasising, how awkward she was in that suit of clothes. It was a migrant’s failing, who am I now, how do I stand, when do I smile, what colour is my hair today, dissembling this and echoing that, a football war-cry, an awe of America, a need to knit for royalty, that wasn’t believed but thought necessary. It would have been okay — Obama, migrant, speaks always in a cascade of acceptable cliche — were we not, always, half a sentence ahead of her waiting to hear, too late, the always tardy mendacity, like a hitched-up skirt, or a late-buckled shoe, with which she declared, declaimed, her vivid insincerity. It was a white-water-rafting voyage down every syllable: which would ring true? Some did, delighting us. Most didn’t. Even in her good weeks, and there were a few, she was never in Question Time, we found, more than fifty-eight percent as good as we wanted her to be. She goaded herself, and us, and her party into eternal vigilance: what will she do next?
Had she been, as she planned, married to Craig Emerson, it would no doubt have been different. But she wasn’t. He dumped her; or so I hear. And though he was her staunchest defender, she could never, withoit his intimate presence, feel secure again.
5.20 pm
David Speers is up on the screen still pretending the Morgan Poll has not occurred. He is talking of the ‘uphill job Kevin Rudd has to turn around Labor’s dire position in the polls’ when he’s done that already.
What a piece of lying filth he is entirely.
What a Cult Murdoch tapeworm.
More to come, above.
Name:
Fuck off bob. It’s barely been a few hours and you’re writing the Murdoch line already?!
Fucking revolting.
Say what is untrue.
Or unfair.
Why is it unfair? For fucks sake!
Because it stinks of opportunism, that’s why. Because the I told you so line is a disgusting look.
But mainly Because it plays gender games that would make even the liberal front bench cringe in shame.
Baby? Motherhood? Partner choice?
.
I don’t give a fuck if she has no kids or if she had 1000. I dint elect her for her capacity to bear children or for her choice of partner.
I elected her because she’s from the left, remember the left bob? Gave more to pensioners, built schools, set up Gonski, set up ndis, jobs during GFC, etc.
Remember them Labor man?
Or are you too busy writing Sattler’s next lines to remember the difference, the real difference, between politics and personality?
You fucked up on this one.
That’s my opinion.
No, the NDIS was the project of Shorten, of the right. She fucked up the schools when minister. Gonski, not she, recommended Gonski. Schoolteachers hate her. The jobs came from Rudd and Swan, of the Right.
I don’t give a fuck if she has no kids. It’s never troubled my friendship with or admiration of Carr. I do think it was stupid politically not to marry Tim. It lost Muslim, Catholic, Hillsong votes Rudd had. How was it sensible?
You tell me.
You’re missing the point. Pull your head out of your arse just this once and look outside yourself.
It doesn’t matter one fucking iota that it was Shorten’s, SHE pushed it through.
SHE set up Gonski. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. He didn’t appoint himself. SHE did it.
SHE pushed it through legislation. YESTERDAY. Remember yesterday? Amongst all that personality, some actual governance took place. I don’t suppose you noticed it, busy as you were with issues of her choice in partners.
No schoolteacher I know hates her. NOT one and I know a lot. My partner is a head teacher and we’ve had this discussion for over 10 fucking years so don’t give me that typical Ellis presumption and hyperbole. NOT fucking TODAY!
If you didnt give a fuck about her having kids you would never have included it in your essay as part of the marriage/partner argument you’re trying to set up. There are too many mentions, too many allusions, too many innuendo’s for you to pull back now saying you don’t give a fuck.
I don’t buy it.
You shouldn’t be selling it.
You think then we should ask her back?
What are you saying?
He’ll come round. Don’t worry
Look at DQ. As easy as a hot knife through butter, as they say.
Your comprehension is still sadly lacking, Rootin’. Read my post at 1.42pm below.
Fuck off Ryutin. You’re out of this conversation.
Nearly out Judd.
No, what WE should have done is back her fully from day fucking one as the Labor LEADER. “We” should not be challenging, destabilising, sabotaging, feeding the rapacious news cycle with DRAMA. “We” should not have been calling her a “dill”. we should NOT be questioning her status as woman/mother or her choice of partners.
“We” should have done a LOT MORE to take the fight to the Liberals by hitting them HARD on POLICY and not by filling this blog with pet theories on poll results.
Poll driven leadership obsessions have seeped into “our” pores Bob.
Take some responsibility for that.
Ask her back?
No, whats done is done. Just don’t give me your childless, partner choice bullshit now.
It’s EXTREMELY fucking unbecoming.
You ask, What am I saying?
I’m saying what Mary is saying below.
I don’t need her to make ANY OTHER sense to me bar policy and political sense.
Anyone, you included, that NEEDS more than that is just part of the problem.
That’s what I’m saying.
I called her a dill six months before she was made leader. And I was right.
I will go and get a cup of coffee and come back and view this conversation a bit later.
Er, what sort of coffee?
10.20am!!!
Damn Pedro, you walking to Brazil for that brew?
Thanks Judd, I’m back. A long day. Back to back meetings, big client lunch, plus trying to catch up with work, some community stuff at the end of the day, then late dinner with family. Time for a coffee again whilst reading today’s posts.
Judd, I’m a school teacher and I fucking love her.
Thanks Daniel. So does my wife and her gang of SCHOOLTEACHER friends.
You listening bob?? Are you fucking listening??
She made numerous errors of political judgement, but education issues are not amongst them. No schoolteachers I know dislike her, much less hate her.
Try another tack.
I agree with Bob. She had no hinterland. No depth. No interest in the world apart from narrow selfish ambition. No gravitas for the office of PM. Happy to be photographed with Kyle Sandilands or a 5 hour knitting stunt with a women’s magazine. If Playboy magazine rang, she’d probably do a spread for them too. She had no idea.
Having achieved the highest office in the land, no idea what to do with it, except to hang on to it.
She made many blunders. She should have gone two years ago because she was destroying the Labor party. Finally undone by her own hand in calling for a leadership ballot.
Labor now have a slim chance with Rudd, despite what you may think of the man. He is a vote magnet.
Joined up yet Frank?
The snap Morgan Poll from last night shows Labor nearly level with the LNP.
More than a slim chance I reckon.
It is an undeniable fact that the public want “a leader” and not a leadership team; Rudd redux is not my preferred option (!) but as I have often said before it is a matter for the Labor members of parliament as to who shall be their leader.
Labor under Rudd is still a preferred option to Noalition under Abbott.
To the Rudd supporters : let us hope the Party can unite and defeat the conservative vandals threatening to sack and pillage (but not rape) their way across the excellent policies Labor have set in place and are in the midst of setting in place.
You’ve nailed it. Well said.
hear, hear
Bob, you really are sad. You wander around parliament clutching your pillow and shopping bags like a hobo or drunk, looking for MPs to badger so you can write your blog pretending you engage with them.
I’ve seen your interaction at Aussie’s and seen Members shake their head and tell staff what a fool you are. You wrote of one conversation where the politician told me you are ‘a fucking fool’ - but your account was about urging him run for a particular seat.
Also, you claim to have worked for Beazley and paid by Sid Maher. That would mean an AWA or non union, non staff arrangement would it not? That would mean you were paid as a consultant, a very Tory approach to work seeing as you are not an ALP member but being paid privately and depriving a member of work. Did you pay tax? hope so.
Lastly, you attack Gillard, then defend her, now attack her again. You are a disgrace and no better than the media commentators you disparage.
As one minister said about you, you’re a fucking idiot.
Banned for life? No, several lives.
No I worked for Beazley and was paid by his Chief-of-Staff Sid Hickman from July 1995 till March 1996. I helped with Budget speeches unpaid after that and wrote in full a big speech he gave in praise of Whitlam.
I assume some people think me a fool. Freudenberg, Wedderburn, Whitlam, Hawke, Phillip Adams, Quentin Dempster, Chris Masters, Paul Murphy, Mark Colvin, James Carleton, Tom Cameron, Bill Shorten, Wayne Swan, Nathan Rees, Bob Debus, Duncan Kerr, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor, Bob Katter, Geoff Gallop, Tim Soutphamassane, Darren Hanlon, David Hare, Tom Stoppard, Cheryl Kernot, Natasha Stott-Despoja, Carmen Lawrence, Geoff Gallop, Kim Beazley, Mike Rann, John Ralston Saul, Bob Carr, Bob Brown, Drew Forsythe, John Bell, Tony Barry, Margaret Throsby, Chloe Shorten, Denny Lawrence, Stephen Ramsey, Bill Leak, Roy Masters and Russell Crowe do not. With the latter fifteen I have written books or scripts.
Carrying a pillow outweighs all this I know and I thank you for your comments on my social failings.
But I ask you not to lie about me; and to apologise, in fact, for these lies you have told, or be … banned for a week.
If you do not apologise, in fact, I will sue you.
Fuck you. What are you, a stalker?
Come and have a cup of tea with me.
You know where I am.
You could apologise, face to face.
You tell him Bob. Don’t you mind if they’re grinnin’ in your face. (How good is Son House)
Look….in fact there is I think something in your attempts to put your finger on why Julia Gillard attracted so much hostility. I say this despite being repelled by your “You do not live with a man who is your intellectual inferior” comment which reeks of class snobbery. Sexism too of course but it is the class snobbery which repels.
But yeah she did break the sexual conventions of class society. I could have admired her for that if it wasn’t for some of her other policies….and I think that does have something to do with the “tin ear”…..she didn’t hear the social melody or feel her relationship to it. She was capable of making her famous sexism speech on the same day as she assaulted the families of single parents; and she saw no contradiction, no irony.
Her intimate personal life was a challenge to the class system and her political career was about accomodating to the class system, bending the knee to the miners, the American Empire. But she saw no irony, no contradiction.
Somewhere there was her core problem.
Okay, I’m suing you.
Expect the lawyer’s letter by Tuesday.
I thought you said you don’t sue people.
Yeah, so sue me.
Why do you lie repeatedly about this?
You lied when you told people you were suing themeven though you had no intention of doing so and merely wished to silence your critics. Now it turns out you were lying even when you said your threats to sue were merely lies told to silence your critics. And why is it always $210,000?
*Crack*
In goes another egg into the pan, shell and all. Just as they were setting.
Pucker up and chow down.
I’ve always been very indifferent about Shorten.
He did well yesterday considering the difficult position he was in & moved several rungs up my opinion ladder.
I didn’t need Julia Gillard to make emotional sense just policy and political sense.
And losing a million votes makes political sense.
Quote
”
It is, as I keep saying (and said yesterday on many radio stations while selling my book), easy to win. Gillard could do it. Nineteen others could do it. But Rudd, probably, couldn’t. He would be remembered as the man who killed four boys with pink batts after Garrett asked him not to, and that would be that.
“
I also refer readers to
“How It Will Go”
from 12th of June.
At the time, and probably still, I thought I made a lot of sense.
Mary, my emotional are needs fulfilled by friends and family, I didn’t expect emotional connection with Julia, or now with Kevin, I want good policies
That will do…
All you need to know about Julia Gillard are the names of the 45 who voted for her - among them several nominated by you, Bob, as potential candidates for PM. And all you need to know about politics and expediency are the names of the 57.
So .. you prefer twenty years of Abbottite carnage, do you?
Why?
No, of course not. But I’d rather have Peter Garrett or Greg Combet in my trench than Bob Carr.
Garrett would have to promise not to sing or play any music though….
Bob, utterly contradicting what you said last week.
Yup. I was wrong.
As Lord Keynes said: ‘When I find my opinion is wrong I change it. What, sir, do you do?’
Back on track eh? I was getting a bit worried about you Bob. Hopefully it was the typical hyperbole we can sometimes love, satire too. But in recent days it looked seriously as if bridges were being burnt, all credibility lost.
Julia Gillard has gone back from whence she came – into the maw of the “dregs of the middle class” factional and sexist advancement system that took over from the long-forgotten one that delivered some quality and even quantity to our parliaments. She can now be safely confined to the dustbin of Australian political history.
Unless something changes, and Kevin Rudd does some remarkable change in personality and character only when he goes – months or years – can political historians properly write of these “Years of Three Wreckers”, the Latham. Rudd and Gillard era which brought the ALP to the point of extinction.
Whilst the necessarily total reconstruction of the old party is less certain now that Gillard is gone and the defeat they were facing is not going to be the motivation it might have been, no matter what the result under Rudd (win/lose) the very embers of a principled rebirth are not out. Now that Chris Bowen, Ed Husic and Richard Marles (and other like-minded people of traditional principles whose names are unknown to me right now) will hopefully retain their seats and the wise counsel of traditional Labor people like Martin Ferguson and Simon Crean will not be ignored.
Rather than bother with this any longer (This is not something I could be bothered with as to trying to make stupid personal comments or whatever), I will say it here now. My view of the forthcoming election is “let the people decide”. I won’t be bagging them as “uneducated masses”, “scum” or anything like that. You get the government you deserve.
I accept the will of the people. ALL of the people.
“Rather than bother with this any longer”
Your posts I hope.
We could be so lucky.
Lucky,lucky,lucky.
I cried last night for Julia, for all Australian women, even for Frank’s wife…I have been extremely naïve in believing that Australia was ready for a female PM; this is not Scandinavia after all, Oz has a long way to go to shake off its rampant misogyny.
I do think we deserve better than Abbott, and the sliding back even further to the dark ages, and therefore I declare my reluctant support for Rudd.
Helvi, some woman don’t feel the same. Try Eva Cox at theconversation.com
“Julia Gillard lost the prime ministership not because she was a woman. She lost the prime ministership because she didn’t connect – there were a whole lot of problems and unfortunately a lot of it’s going to be tagged as a gender issue and I don’t think it was.”
…and what would Eva Cox know about personal connection,( I’m not talking about her books here).
Something for Oz misogynists to ponder about…
At a guess I’d stick my scrawny neck out and say nothing any other female says will do if it doesn’t fit the right view.
It’s actually worth a read, the conversation.com.
Very educated on masses of stuff. Unfettered as well.
Helvi, sadly the fact that Julia Gillard has worked hard to elicit this response from you is a major contributor to her loss of public support. She broadened to mysogyny attack from Abbott to all men and in doing so lost them.
Resorting to convenient excuses will just mean the ALP doesn’t learn the real lessons.
No, she didn’t, there was plenty of ugly misogyny dished at her, she didn’t need to go looking for it…
Most women were surprised she did not attack her attackers earlier.
Her misogyny resonated well in Europe and in America.Many Aussie men did fail to see the reason for it.
her misogyny SPEECH
Tears are called for, then anger
The treatment of Gillard has been astounding. It has become a perfect storm, where leaders in our community - from Abbs and Rudd down, have given the basest elements a licence to unleash their deep fear and hatred of women. I refer elsewhere to Anne Summers’ youtube vid which is important to see
It is very similar to Howard’s standing back from stamping out Hanson’s racism because it suited his own ends, and has had similar damaging effects on our community which are still here
Australia was of course founded on racism, and as an outpost of empire was far behind the metropolitan power in lifting itself out of hatred and oppression of women. But until the Howard years and until Abbs-Rudd, there had been steady progress
Ryutin hiding behind the quaintly American platitude now that victory for his camp is almost, almost here.
What a surprise!
The “people” don’t decide - that’s the illusion. It was decided long ago by those that feed the 3 word mantra’s to an electorate gorged on Howard’s preposterous middle class welfare. You know, the Howard battlers who, in a former life, struggled with house payments and one holiday to the beach for kids, and sometimes for food on the table, but now find themselves with McMansions and Holden SS utes to carry tools they don’t use or even need.
Romantic visions have clouded your judgment Ryutin, but I know they’re necessary to sustain your bias and bitterness at the passing of the “good old days” of your alleged union membership.
Perhaps in another life you could have gotten away with saying that you won’t be “be bagging them as “uneducated masses”, “scum” or anything like that”, whilst referring to Gillard’s background as the “the maw of the “dregs of the middle class”.
But not now.
Not as an apologist for EVERYTHING that blurred that line between them. What is that line exactly Ryutin? Can you tell me the line, or is it just another of your mindless quips, full of self import, low on content or meaning or even relevance (to this discussion)?
Actually, don’t bother, I know the answer.
You won’t install Abbott Ryutin. Not you, not Frank, not Metrivcious nor any of the other right hacks here.
He’s already in.
You can thank Rupert and Leigh and Chris and IPA and Catallaxy and Andrew and Piers and Clive and Gina and Janet and Chris and Peter and Michael and Paul and all the others who DIDN’T ask Abbott a question therefore gave us so lovingly, so generously the “government we deserve”.
Will of the people?
Give me a break Ryutin.
I’m still drunk from last night for fuck’s sake!!
Have pity.
Thank you Judd, I’m starting to hate the ABC; the pompous Chris the bitchy Leigh…
Your contempt for the working class is as obvious as your bitterness at being shown to have no clothes.
Oh, Kim Beazley’s father had it SPOT-ON. The cream of the working class HAS been replaced by the absolute dregs of the middle class.
Your words prove it.
Fucking hell Rytuin you spoil me !!!
So much wrong with your tiny post.
1. So your “I accept the will of the people. ALL of the people” doesn’t include the (dregs of the) middle class?
Oh, I get it!
They’re not people, right?
They’re just ideological pawns to be shuffled around by fuckwits like you who give lip service to principles and retreat to default platitudes when exposed.
You’re like mould Ryutin, a quick blast of sunlight and you’re gone!
Even though I’m drunk, you’re still a intellectual wet tissue.
Nice try at avoiding the question.
It’s still there though.
2. “My contempt”?!?!
You have utterly misunderstood Beazley Snr;s quote, you prancing featherweight fuckwit!
Listen carefully: YOUR lot “created” them and now you can’t even articulate a defintion lest you implicate yourself in a hypocrisy too large for even YOU to carry!
YOU turned the “cream” into the “dregs”.
YOU!
Your lot!
Your lot of “enablers” of political “amelioration”, you fucking idiot!
They’re NOT Hawke’s Battlers, or Keating’s Battlers, or even Rudd’s Battlers.
That’s right, they’re Howard’s Battlers.
Transformed by 11 years of liberal policy, liberal tax cuts and liberal middle class, “dreg”, welfare.
You made it, you own it Ryutin.
Can’t walk away from your “creation” now.
Mt contempt isn’t for the working class because that would be contempt for my mum and dad, and that’s simply not possible. My contempt is reserved for people like you - pompous, cowardly fuckwits.
Class got nothing to do with it.
Yours was a short post but by God it revealed you as the irrelevance you are.
Fucking Fool.
I couldn’t be bothered with you and your bitterness. Maybe some day you will internalise it all and accept the narrative that Rudd is the best leader. And stop once and for all the (perhaps automatous) trait of personalising it beyond you to your family as if they are in any way in the sights of your personal critics. Right now your comments are totally unbalanced thanks to your current bitterness.
Some outrageous comments of yours cannot be ignored, however. One thing Mark Latham got right (and you have still missed because of your blinkers) is that the working class doesn’t get defined out of existence because they earn large sums of money. Or want some of the benefits which that hard-earned in, the one who writes letters to the Age criticising the very same “McMansions” and their owners yet who is happily ensconced in a very large home on the water at Williamston in Melbourne.
Yet you laughably (and amazingly) twist and turn enough (oh, George Orwell….) to equate them as the dregs of the middle class as exposed by Kim Beazley senior and not working class at all!
“When I joined the Labor Party it contained the cream of the working class. As I look about me now all I see are the dregs of the middle class. When will you middle-class perverts stop using the Labor Party as a cultural spittoon?”
Beazley knew exactly what he meant and so does any thinking person and never was there a more clear enunciation of the reasons why the wreck that is the ALP has come about. They are defined out of existence by you and people like you. Now that IS lateral thinking. The plumber is not working class, the carpenter is not working class, the electrician and so on. Maybe even the contract miner, the FIFO worker. Working class (to you) can now be working in an office (government or not) living in a multi-million dollar terrace in the inner city or by the bay and pontificating about the worthlessness of those who live in a house at Doonside or Penrith yet want a playroom for their kids, two cars and air conditioning. How they, in fact, live beyond their station in life and now, according to you and the multi-millionaires Williamson and Watson are the problem? How ridiculous, how stupid. How could they do what their betters have done and spend their money on themselves and their families?
You can spew your bile and outrage as much as you like. Nothing can change those facts.
The will of the people means, strangely enough, ALL of the people.
Now I am off to more productive pursuits: watching Tom Conti and classic cast in my new copy of the Norman Conquests.
Like I asked earlier, does ALL of the people include those that you refer to as the ‘dregs of the middle class’?
Still you make it so easy for me Ryutin.
YOU labelled people ‘dregs’, occupiers of a ‘maw’.
You did that.
Not me.
YOU.
Let me refresh your memory:
‘Julia Gillard has gone back from whence she came – into the maw of the “dregs of the middle class” factional and sexist advancement system….”
I made no such vilification by class. You did that.
And now you want me to applaud your proletarian fantasies? Now you want to hide behind Latham’s political, social and philosophical error?! Now you want to lecture me on what you believe to be the true nature of ‘working class’ when you STILL (for second time now) fail to address the questions I set you, AND still refer to those ‘aspirational’ working families that lift themselves from poverty as ‘the dregs of the middle class’?!?!
You’ve lost your fucking mind!!
You don’t present facts, you present the absurdly comical sight of a drunken featherweight punching at shadows.
And as always Ryutin, you’re punching above your weight.
Fuck you and the prole drift donkey you fucked first then rode in on.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to despise you more.
But after your middle class ‘dregs’ quip it’s happened.
So be it.
Helvi,
I too will support Rudd because he is a far better option for this country than Abbott. Maybe as a nation we are not ready for a female PM after all.
Mary, be positive. NZ is a good example, our ‘little’ brother often preempts our political landscape. Their first female Prime Minister, Jenny Shipley, held office for one term, similar to Julia Gillard. Their second female Prime Minister, Helen Clark, held office for three terms. Shipley was a conservative and Clark a staunch Laborite. On the score of gender, both Shipley and Gillard smashed the template for our geopolitical region.
Well, its been quite a night for some, including my recent lodgers, the faceless men.
Faceless man: I’ve got a hangover.
Faceless men: We’ve all got hangovers.
Faceless man: That red was a bit rough.
Faceless men: That red was a bit rough.
Faceless man: My mouths got a red ring around it.
Faceless men: Our mouths have got red rings around them.
Visiting android: WTF, they’ve got faces…. burp..
No doubt Rudd played a role in destabilising; those acts ended her leadership, just as her acts ended his three years ago.
But we should remember that even in a hypothetical unified government, with Rudd out of parliament (just pretending here), Gillard would never have won the next election. Why?
She made constant misjudgements. They never stopped. She did not connect with people- not only or even primarily for reasons of gender (accept it was a problem for some voters, but mainly conservatives who were never ALP voters) but because she lacked substance. I do not think she had firm beliefs- not even Gonski or NDIS represent beliefs. They are an agenda and she never owned it, merely transacted it on behalf of other people. With great parliamentary skill, yes, but a complete inability to persecute a case for reform.
What Ellis’ piece does hint at is a deeper problem. Julia, with her lack of overarching beliefs, never made sense. Like you, I do not care about her relationship with Tim, not having kids, etc. But Julia consistently lacked what Howard, Keating, Hawke and Whitlam had- and even Rudd had it pre 2010- a sense or belief and conviction.
Hence cutting money out of unis to fund Gonski; patently not being opposed to Gay marriage but pretending to be; her stellar support of Israel (this was an early attempt to be credible about a decade ago after campaigning for Palestine her whole political life); telling Rudd to dump the CPRS, campaigning on a people’s assembly, and then introducing a carbon tax against her promise to the people in a minority govt (this is the single biggest problem); the budget surplus; even on gender issues (misogyny speech whilst cutting into single parents and not backing a female in Batman). And so on. Add silly decisions like naming the election date and installing a Senate candidate in the NT (someone widely held in contempt in the Territory).
Gillard was always going to fail because she lacked substance, consistency and firm beliefs. There is a real Julia and we saw it for three years.
And the destabilisation was formed not only in Rudd’s ressentiment but fermented in the judgement of her collagues. You would be surprised to know how many later stubborn Gillard supporters were sympathetic to a Rudd return in late 2011.
Finally, Julia represented the worst aspects of the Labor party. A union movement that has power out of proportion to its representative and social function propped her up and in return she delivered them favours above and beyond good policy, losing us votes in the electorate because it failed to recognise how life has changed at the workplace. The ALP needs to be reformed in ways Gillard could never do because it was not the agenda of the people who supported her.
Bob Ellis
I am in love with this blog site, it is a breath of fresh air. I dare not presume I have the intellectual capacity or corporate memory to argue with the Judd and M Ryutin types but that does not matter, a cat can look at a king and enjoy every minute of it.
A further comment I would make about Julia Gillard’s style is the automatic presumption, accepted without question by those of high status like Simon Crean and Martin Ferguson (who should know better) that if you questioned Julia’s authority, as Crean did, and then lost, you were honour bound to commit political suicide (i.e. go to the back bench). Julia herself confirmed this presumption as valid operating procedure by declaring before the leadership ballot yesterday that the loser in the ballot must resign from Parliament altogether. Why could she not have offered herself as Education Minister (i.e. asked for her old job back)? Why could not Julia have found some job for Rudd to do to keep him busy and less likely to cause damage? Although Rudd took on the “loser commits suicide” challenge, thank goodness he did not allow this to happen today with some of his critics who are also Ministers, who kept their jobs. Whether he can keep up this co-operative attitude is the next test for him.
Paul Calvert-Smith.
She just didn’t want a repeat of what happened to her, with Rudds white-anting. When a new powerbase takes over, the old one has to be quickly and swiftly decimated.
We still have the Israel-Palestine problem partly because Palestians were not decimated. Japan was tamed via decimation.
They couldn’t do this to Rudd as he was removed for personality defects - like Abbott he has a low overall EQ, (and my guess his failings, such as no loyalty, is made worse by being egged on by a very ambitious and perhaps dominating wife).
She seemed happy to get out. Best I’ve seen her look in a while. A smart woman after all.
Simon Crean dutifully went to the back bench to twiddle his thumbs as under this modus operandi he was expected to, and he was no white-anter.
She might have been happy to get out, but that is not why she issued the challenge to Rudd. She issued it because “there is no place here for persons who challenge me”. This is not team playing. The challenge was unspoken to Simon Crean, but the effect was the same. He had to go to oblivion on the back bench for challenging Julia Gillard.
Paul, Rudd should have restrained his bitterness and his ambition for the good of the party 3 years ago.
He didn’t. And so Gillard suffered 3 years of external and internal attack.
By leaving politics she gave him what he was unable to give to her - freedom to address the ideological enemy.
And I think that’s what upsets me most:
Another poster here somewhere touched on it also : a parallel world where Gillard in 2010, with a 56/44 2 PP, a strong house majority, an energized team, set out to legislate reform, who would now be staring down not Abbott, long gone as feeble seat water, but Turnbull, the almost natural heir to the coalition throne, and readying herself for a second term of government. In 3 years of government in circumstances without peer or precedent, she gave us more reforms and tried for more reforms than Howard did in 11 during prosperous times and in the full glory of boom 1.
Imagine what she would have accomplished in 2 terms with a majority?
Alas, It wasn’t to be…
“Why could not Julia have found some job for Rudd to do to keep him busy and less likely to cause damage? ”
She tried that. He was Foreign minister remember, he still was disloyal. He flew back from New York for the first challenge when he got creamed.
Julia, being an honourable person, does not want to do the same to him. She has the labor cause at heart, unlike the ego maniac.
It is so pathetic that any apparently sensible person could not see what was behind Gillard’s poison-pill option when dealing with the biggest serial-offender rat in Labor history - and that’s saying something
It had no connection with the cases of ministers, etc, but was just a krudd special deal
For the general population, Gillard was too young to be PM as a female. (Clinton, Merkel, Thatcher were older)
Plain, unmarried women have to be seen as matriarchal. Another 5-10 years would have done it. With that time, I’d think she would have made fewer strategic mistakes. When Rudd was deposed, I think she knew this.
For myself, I’m a Gillard supporter, but I’ve had times when I gave up on her, due to no poll improvement when combined with more strategic politicking mistakes - she turned too many unthinking males off her side recently.
Windsor leaving made me sadder than Gillard.
Rudd, whom I detest, is still better than Abbott, and more ALP seats are better than fewer to provide some ongoing opposition to the LNP destruction.
The world’s most expensive ice creams.
No. Ms Gillard didn’t have to marry Mr Intellectual Inferior, the one she took with her to The Lodge.
Australia ready?? 
been hand-wringing over our backwardness at every opportunity.
That wouldn’t have made sense.
She should’ve gone there as Strong Single Woman.
Ground-breaking. Appearing, at least, to be a woman of substance, and not being filmed giggling outside a man’s shed.
Helvi believed Australia was ready for a female PM?
Pleased Gillard’s gone. Not a suitable woman to be a Prime Minister. However she did make a dignified exit. Didn’t blubber like the men when they got shafted.
Now the pink and white jube is leading once more.
It must be tough, pretending to love him.
McGaw
‘It must be tough, pretending to love him.’
In fairness, good line.
Daniel Jenkins, I don’t know who you are, but are replying to the main troll here, P Casey who is metric, who is Gumnut, who is……..
More in sorrow than in anger.
About three years ago, Bob Ellis claimed that Julia had done very little in 1000 days in office, claiming then that being deputy PM was being “in power” (!).
I told him we should review her record after a genuine 1000 days, which by my count allowing for caretaker periods etc has just expired.
What then is her record?
One of quite significant achievements, in the areas oh health, education, industrial relations, foreign affairs and even defence.
You may say that these were the achivements of her ministers and you would be right! Her model of PMship was a collegiate one, where each minister was allowed to run his or her own portfolio. She was more like a chairman of the board than a CEO, which most PMs have sought to be, none more so than Rudd.
I see her flaw as a failure of political judgement, a series of mis-steps at fairly regular intervals. I was prepared to put these down to inexperience and to simple misfortune in timing. But it has been harder and harder to make these allowances as time has gone by.
I can see from Shorten’s anguish that I was not alone in these sentiments : it is clear to me that he was torn between personal loyalty to someone who has genuine warmth in interpersonal relationships and who has a fine track record of achievements; set against the undeniable series of misjudgements and mis-steps which have dogged her regime.
I still believe that Labor under Gillard could have won this next election, as the polls “discovered a late swing to the government”.
I just hope that Rudd can deliver on the results his supporters seem to believe in, and that we can be rid of this failed would be priest and his rag tag dregs of the Howard ministry.
krudd will go down; the spotlight will be on him as never before, and he hasn’t got it
the Summers youtube which is must viewing reminds me that it was krudd’s leaks about Gillard before the last election that put Labor where it is today, just as his backstabbing since has put him where he is today, and the two together will put Australia where it will be in October - under Abbs’ arse
Beautifully put.