Gillard’s humiliation at the hands of the Greens has a perverse quality.
By Gary Scarrabelotti
Up to point, it can be gratifying when human events confirm one’s own judgments. At the same time, being proved right can be an appalling experience.
On February 7 I wrote:
“Julia Gillard just does not get it: she is the issue …”
Eleven days later, the Fairfax press published the latest Nielsen Poll taken over 14 – 15 February.
The poll showed that Labor’s primary vote had slumped 5 points to 30 per cent since the previous Nielsen Poll on taken on 13 – 15 December 2012.
The Nielsen Poll also showed the Coalition’s primary vote had gone up by 4 points to 47 per cent.
To top that off, The Leader of the Opposition, Tony Abbott, surpassed Prime Minister Julia Gillard in the preferred Prime Minister stakes by 49 per cent to 45 per cent.
This is the first time Abbott has been ahead of Gillard on this measure since August 2012. His score jumped 9 per cent since the last Nielsen Poll in December 2012 while Gillard’s fell by 5 per cent.
“Catastrophic” commented Laura Tingle in The Australian Financial Review … just three weeks after the Prime Minister had set (idiosyncratically) the election date for September 14.
This is the same Julia Gillard, remember, who was going to make Tony Abbott the issue.
Chimera
The Nielsen poll results also illustrate something else: that Gillard’s much ballyhooed attack upon Abbott as a misogynist, which took place in the federal parliament on October 9 last year, has proved a flop.
Sure, it won immediate applause in the media and on the net, especially from foreigners ignorant of the speech’s political context. In reality, though, it was pure political posturing by PM Gillard: contrived, morally pretentious, deeply insincere, and cynical.
It was obvious at the time that it was nothing more than a stunt to deflect attention from Gillard’s appalling choice of — and continuing support for – “Slippery Pete” Slipper as Speaker of the House who resigned, just a few minutes after Gillard’s speech, because he had been caught out texting genuinely misogynist and repulsive messages to one of his staff.
As usual, however, too few in the mainstream media were capable of taking the true measure of the Gillard performance. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul Sheehan was one of the honourable exceptions. Although, even he might not have appreciated the subliminal anti-Catholic messaging noted here on this blog.
The acclaim which greeted Julia Gillard’s ugly act on that dreadful parliamentary day reinforced her false sense of self-confidence because she had wrong-footed Abbott and his office. (Even Scarra Blog over-estimated the lasting impact of her words.) Anyway, Abbott ended the year floundering — and doing and saying things he need not have said or done to shore up his allegedly plummeting stocks with Australian women.
(The only ‘positive’ to come out of Abbott’s untidy tactical withdrawal was proof that Margie Abbott is a better public speaker than her husband.)
While it might be true that the Australian media isn’t thick with people who can read astutely the human personality, they can at least understand an opinion poll: “catastrophic” they all get.
Appalling truth
I’ve said here before, a number of times, that Julia Gillard’s alliance with the Greens, formed in haste and desperation in the wake of the indecisive 2010 federal elections, was wholly unnecessary: wholly unnecessary because the Greens, no matter what policy differences they might have with Labor, would always vote to prop up a Labor government so great is their enmity for the Coalition.
Now, as if to prove the point, the amazing Christine Milne delivered to the National Press Club on February 19 a speech – priceless, among other things, for its conspiracy theorising — in which she declared the Labor-Green alliance dead while, at the same time, she guaranteed Green support for Labor on money bills and confidence motions.
Gillard’s humiliation at the hands of the Greens is so complete, cruel, and calculated that it has about it something almost perverse.
Beware Les Liaisons dangereuses!