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Armchair_Politician
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FULL marks to Julia Gillard for insight. According to a new book, the ex-PM had this to say the morning after she was dumped by Labor for her rival Kevin Rudd: “This has been contentless, it’s been all about ego and personalities.”
The Australian public had come to that conclusion some months previously, but it’s nice that Gillard eventually caught up.
Actually, this new book, by former ABC presenter, state Labor MP and devoted Gillard fangirl Mary Delahunty, arrives at a useful time.
Just when Labor and its various leftist followers had almost bedded down their mythical version of Gillard’s political demise — brought down by entrenched sexism and Tony Abbott’s horrible misogyny and so on — Delahunty’s Gravity reminds us of just how mundane were the circumstances of her removal.
For example, here’s a tearful Penny Wong explaining to Gillard why she’s abandoning her fellow feminist to support Kevin Rudd: “It’s the South Australian seats.”
Former justice minister Jason Clare was just as blunt, apparently giving an identical reason for his own switch to Rudd: “It’s about my seat.”
So forget the myth-building about the Australian electorate being unable to cope with a visionary first female prime minister. In politics, it always comes down to self-preservation.
Gillard’s ousting in 2013 had more to do with electorates like Blaxland, Hindmarsh and Wakefield than it had to do with any broader sociopolitical issues.
The basic electoral realities of Gillard’s reign don’t really get much play in the Left’s retelling of events. This process began even while Gillard was in office.
Here’s leading Gillard alternative historian Anne Summers, speaking at the University of Newcastle in 2012: “In this lecture I want to examine what I contend is the sexist and discriminatory treatment of Australia’s first female prime minister by the opposition and by some elements in Australian society.”
And just one year later Penny Wong voted against her. How does that square with claimed discriminatory treatment by the Coalition and elements in Australian society? It might be news to Wong that she’s a sexist Liberal Party member.
The central reason for Gillard’s decline as prime minister, leading to Rudd’s eventually successful challenge, came just prior to the 2010 election. Her answer to a question from Ten’s Bill Woods, who asked about Gillard’s view on a carbon tax, would prove to be a trap of her own construction: “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead.”
This was the political equivalent of losing some heat shields during a space shuttle launch. Ascending isn’t an issue, but the attempted re-entry might be a problem. Again, this is a mundane political reality: tell a lie, especially one that costs people money, and you’ll become unpopular with voters.
Labor and the Left have never come to terms with this.
Their subsequent tactic was to invent an entirely different answer than the one Gillard gave. It circulated on the internet for a time and then was picked up and published by Kerry-Anne Walsh in her book The Stalking Of Julia Gillard: “During the election campaign she had stated: ‘There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear, I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme.’ This is what she announced, but not as far as those in the opposition and hysterical commentariat were concerned.”
The second part of that quote, beginning with “but let me be clear”, was not spoken by Gillard.
The ABC’s Jonathan Green also fell for the bogus claim, writing in The Year My Politics Broke: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead ... is probably one of the most infamous pieces of political quotation in Australian history. The other quotable snippet from those last days of the 2010 campaign — ‘but I am determined to put a price on carbon’ — trips less readily off the tongue, largely due to its quite conspicuous lack of endless repetition.”
Yes, because Gillard never said it. Lately this false quote has once again gained currency online.
For the record, here is Gillard’s full carbon tax comment, as given to Ten news in 2010: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead. What we will do is we will tackle the challenge of climate change. We’ve invested record amounts in solar and renewable technologies. Now I want to build the transmission lines that will bring that clean green energy into the national electricity grid. I also want to make sure we have no more dirty, coal-fired power stations. I want to make sure we’re driving greener cars and working from greener buildings. I will be delivering those things and leading our national debate to reach a consensus about putting a cap on carbon pollution.”
And here’s a final carbon tax prediction from the ex-PM, made in the final months of her leadership: “In many ways it was a horror of a debate but we got through it. And it’s a change that will endure, I’m absolutely confident of that.” She got that one wrong, too.
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