Yes, I think it was a rejection of those same back-room boys who have been pulling the strings for so long, setting up puppets and then dumping them when the voters get noisy. Everyone is so sick of it.
I didn't really like Kristina Kenneally, but I feel sorry for her.
I think I made an observation when Julia Gillard became PM that I feared she was made leader purely as a 'face' for these people, and that her being a woman made it easier for them to say she couldn't handle the job if things went wrong. Regular contributors to this thread all seemed to think I was overdoing the 'female' bit.
: Are you with me, Abbott asked Turnbull: I am not, he said
By Barrie Cassidy
Updated Fri Mar 25, 2011 12:26pm AEDT
Former Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has lashed out at new Leader Tony Abbott over his climate policy.
Conviction politicians are hard to find in Australia these days.
Ten years ago, the then Liberal Party federal director, Lynton Crosby, said his research turned up two genuine conviction politicians - John Howard and Bob Brown.
But today, the leaders of the two major parties - Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott - are constantly wrestling with the concept, confusing the public about their positions on key policies. Their approach to climate change is the most graphic demonstration of that.
Gillard by all accounts was instrumental in persuading Kevin Rudd to drop an ETS when he was running the country. Then, as leader and in the run up to the election, she ruled out a carbon tax.
Now she is arguing passionately for a tax and eventually an ETS.
Abbott one day questions the science and the next declares that man made climate change is a reality.
Gillard, from the Labor Party's left, an atheist with a live-in boyfriend, nevertheless resists gay marriage and euthanasia. The public wonders whether that is her political, as opposed to her personal position.
The vulnerability of both leaders was on display in the parliament yesterday as they stood toe to toe and hurled insults at one another.
Abbott said of Gilllard that the public sees "wooden Julia, teary Julia, all the way with LBJ Julia, the George Washington never tell a lie Julia." But, he said, they never see the truthful Julia.
He said if she really was a conviction politician then "she should have the guts to face the people, to seek a mandate for the carbon tax."
Gillard said of Abbott that he was a hollow, bitter man who constantly got the big judgments wrong, whether it be on the flood levy or the mining tax.
She said he was not a liberal in the tradition of liberals past and that "even John Howard went to an election proposing an ETS".
Gillard said the public was "disgusted by his negativity and repulsed by his arrogance" and that he "doesn't stand for one thing that would improve the lives of Australian families".
The fact is that both major parties in recent years have assumed the default position - not doing or saying anything that might upset people.
Only now is the government breaking free from that self imposed constraint and striking out with apparent conviction on climate change. Without putting too much weight on consecutive Newspolls, the tactic seems to have gone down well with a lot of people. As climate change gathers momentum as an issue Abbott's approval rating has suffered and Gillard has opened up a 19 point gap as preferred prime minister.
If that trend holds, then it's worth raising the question: what would have happened had Labor not met the Coalition half way during the election campaign on issues like climate change and a big Australia? Would a sharper focus on those issues have given the public a better sense of Abbott's real dispositions?
Clearly now, Abbott feels he needs a boost to his "direct action" policy on climate change. He recently sat down with former leader Malcolm Turnbull and asked him whether he would now embrace the Coalition's policy. Turnbull said he could not.
Abbott then tried to persuade him to at least soften his stance in some way; offer a gesture.
But again Turnbull refused telling Abbott that he had to understand he felt absolutely committed to his position.
The conversation is evidence that if Turnbull is intent on one day again leading the Liberal Party, it will be on his terms. He refused to give an inch when his leadership was challenged, and as a result, he went down by one vote. Had he offered the party just a semblance of compromise, he probably would have survived. And still he remains true to his convictions.
If Lynton Crosby was to update his research after 10 years, whose name do you think would now emerge as a genuine conviction politician? But the Coalition is unlikely to ask the question for fear they may not like the answer.
First posted Fri Mar 25, 2011 7:21am AEDT
Well it certainly was a stunning rejection of Labor!
How much of it had to do with the party's control by the NSW right, do you think? (If this is further ammunition for the right's demise I'll be absolutely delighted!)
The death of politics, Richo-style
March 28, 2011/the AGE
Julia Gillard and Kristina Keneally. Photo: Andrew Meares
The "whatever it takes" school of Labor politics has been shut down by Saturday's massacre in NSW.
Quote:A GENERATION ago, the New South Wales Right grouping within the Labor Party was considered a political outfit par excellence. In Labor's miserable months after the Whitlam collapse, it had demonstrated that the ALP could still win elections when Neville Wran took office in 1976. Within the Hawke government, the most talented politician ever produced by the NSW Right, Paul Keating, played a stellar role and eventually won the prime ministership.
The faction's chief backroom operator during that time, Graham Richardson, who refined and deployed new and effective forms of electoral campaigning, became a national figure in his own right. He encapsulated his - and his faction's - modus operandi in the title of his memoir: Whatever It Takes. When the ruthless manner of the NSW Right worked, it was a thing to behold. When it did not work, which was the case for at least the last four years of the Iemma-Rees-Keneally government, it was a joke, an embarrassment, a disgrace.
On Saturday, the voters of NSW killed the Labor Right's view of politics, a style that obsesses about the short term, eschews hard decisions in favour of populism and favours intrigue for its own sake. They then gave it a pauper's burial and danced on the grave. And then they threw a party, which is likely to go on for many years.
Of course, the NSW Right itself lives on. But do its members understand that their way of campaigning, communicating and negotiating are dead? This is the vital question when the 2011 NSW election result is assessed for its national significance. ....
Quote:The NSW Right made and then unmade Rudd as Labor leader. Then it moved on to Gillard. The central player in these manoeuvres was Mark Arbib, a former NSW state secretary, now a federal minister.
Gillard's initial liaison with the NSW Right was a Faustian pact. She embraced its political methods: an exhaustive and unyielding reliance on focus-group research that eventually converts political leaders into followers and shreds credibility.
Guided by another ex-NSW party secretary Karl Bitar, who had been elevated to the federal secretary's post, Gillard lost last year's election but managed to hang on by securing the support of independents Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott.
There are signs that after six months of doing things the NSW Right's way, Gillard is heading off in a different direction. Two months ago, she pushed out her chief of staff Amanda Lampe, who, as a former press secretary to ex-NSW premier Bob Carr, was steeped in the ways of the NSW Right, in favour of a Victorian, Ben Hubbard. Earlier this month, Bitar also got the chop.
Quote:There will be plenty of analysis about what the NSW result means for the Gillard government. The truth is, no one can say for certain. Maybe a boil for Labor has been lanced, maybe not. What we do know is that at the federal election only seven months ago, when the state Labor government in NSW was well and truly shot and headed for Saturday's monumental drubbing, the ALP under Gillard won 48.8 per cent of the vote after preferences and got enough marginal seats in Sydney to allow it to keep governing. On Saturday, state Labor achieved about 36 per cent.
The ''whatever it takes'' school of Labor politics has been shut down. The surviving alumni will need to learn how to be contrite and pick up a whole new way of political conduct. All Gillard needs to do is to ignore everything they tell her.
