Misogynist nut-jobs deserve the kick in the nuts, but Gillard has not earned a pat on the back from me.
I took a lot of satisfaction from seeing “misogyist nut-jobs” get a well-aimed and well-deserved kick in their over-excited nuts from our First Female Prime Minister yesterday – but I still can’t go as far as to give Julia Gillard a pat on the back.
Visiting UN executive director for women Michelle Bachelet yesterday praised Australia for its current prepoderernce of women in leadership positions. However, female leadership does not in itself necessarily produce female-friendly policy (Margaret Thatcher being the most obvious example of a female leader who kicked away the ladder of opportunity from beneath her, once she had climbed to a secure position). Gillard has overseen the implentation of paid parental leave and increased childcare funding, but she has also continued and extended punitive policies towards the most vulnerable women. The same newspapers that are reporting her strong fightback against sexism and misogyny yesterday are also reporting her government’s intention to press ahead with extending the Howard-era’s punitive policies against single parents, the overwhelming majority of whom are women. Asylum seekers, men and women alike, are to be subject to a savage regime of indefinite detention.
I’m on Gillard’s “side” when it comes to her confrontation with misogynist nut-jobs, but she isn’t on our team. She is fighting for herself, not for us.
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OK I saw the headline above and thought “Oh no someone who wants to maintain the mass media anti-Gillard line…still”.
But your reasons for not wanting to pat PM Gillard make sense.
Good point. A few good points in fact.
But still …
Could we perhaps have framed the headline, and the rest, more positively?
By which I mean not positive about the PM when she doesn’t deserve such, as you ably and appropriately point out.
But negatively towards those who are at least equal if not greater culprits?
Such as the COALition [yes I saw the brief mention of the Howard era- with its vicious anti-women policies] and their current leader Mr. Abbott and the media and other groups [eg churches[.
Who, in turn, place voter pressure on the right wing elements in our political leadership [which includes media pundits] to continue the [un]proud tradition of misogyny, racism and xenophobia that infects our public debate and in which context one woman is, in fact, only one woman.
This is not to excuse PM Gillard’s policies re single women, asylum seekers [and I would add NT indigenous people and people on welfare] but to point out that the responsibility for such nasty policies and attitudes is shared by others and possibly/probably to a greater degree.
Such persons and groups should be included in the condemnation.
Perhaps them as the focus of your well-deserved ire, with PM Gillard in the role of …what ? … complicit weakness?, willing accomplice? unwilling pragmatist? [hardly acceptable I know].
Finally, despite my misgivings about your article I must admit it needed saying. Thank you for that.
Gillard is the PM, she is supposed to force parliament to uphold the law and human rights, the racist buck stops right with her.
If she can’t be a leader on human rights and fairness and can’t stop being Howard in drag she should let someone who can.
Brutalising the marginal is not the sign of a leader, it is the hall mark of a piss weak coward.
That’s another farcically ignorant comment from Shakira.
She’s hitting home runs on that score lately.
The criticism from intelligent observers on both sides of the commentariat wrt the PM’s press conference was that she dishonestly conflated low-rent blog scuttlebutt and coarseness with Hedley Thomas’ and Michael Smith’s excellent detective work.
So there was, in fact, nothing “accurate” in the PM’s dishonest and disingenuous spray.
What forced the PM into finally confronting this issue was her former boss and S&G equity partners Gordon and Styant-Browne statements that S&G happily accepted her resignation (rad she was fired) after an in-camera interview to defend herself.
Hedley Thomas also published a much redacted but fascinating transcript of that interview.
There are three real stories here:
1. How much the Canberra Press Gallery is in the tank for the Left and thus how unprofessional and inadequate they are. Are you listening Bernard Keane?
2. There is a culture of corruption in the union movement and the ALP
3. Just how incestuous this generation of ALP ministers are with the rot in the unions in the 90s
James K – the issues were canvassed on Media Watch tonight. I agree that Julia was happy to indulge with a bit of conflation, but you are very selective in your condemnation. What about the utterly scurrilous campaign on this matter being conducted in cyberspace? What about the Opposition, whose spokespeople and supporters have been pushing misinformation and half-truths since they lost office. What about Tony Abbott’s performance last week – blaming a business decision on Olympic Dam on taxes that do not apply to the project and directly contradicting BHP-Billiton’s advice to investors and the market? What about the outright lyes pushed by the Miners in their campaign against the MRRT and that by the Clubs against Poker Machine reform. What about the Coalition encouraging businesses to jack up prices and blame it on Carbon Pricing. You’re not convincing anyone here – what are you trying to achieve?
I’ll take that as a compliment Steve although I doubt that is what was intended.
And I’ll double down.
What the PM did was dishonest in that she answered questions from an ignorant and heavily left biased Canberra press corp and sprung the opportunity as a surprise.
She did not answer all of the written questions put to her for quite some time by The Australian, Thomas and Smith some of the few real journalists left in this country.
Moreover the answers she gave were woeful.
The don’t pass the sniff test.
If she had any sense of decency she would have resigned.
She resigned from S&G but she was pushed and it was very much in S&G’s interest not to investigate the matter too deeply and not to actually fire her.
But in essence her senior partners got what they wanted : her immediate resignation.
Apart from smearing the good work of those investigative reporters at that presser and thus diminishing the importance of the questions Thomas raised, she pretended that a simple mistake by a junior reporter on page 6 on another aspect of the story which our PM classified as “defamatory” was major and thus The Australian had a history she said of publishing “defamatory” stories about her.
The “defamatory” allegation over a year ago published by The Australian until quashed early that morning was that she lived with her lover on Fitzroy. An incidental and unimportant aspect of his story.
Glenn Milne got fired for that.
It was probably actually true in essence by a several accounts but she owned and shared her house in Collingwood at the time so no one can prove it.
Lefty Denis Atkins in Brisbane wrote the same thing in a very recent article and nothing was said and no correction given or asked for.
But what our PM asserted in aggressively indignant terms “defamatory” was in essence to call a “slush fund” (her words) set up by her in her prior professional life as a ‘trust fund’.
So ‘trust’ is bad and ‘slush’ is good. Geddit?
You’d have to pinch yourself first to believe her shamelessness.
But her brazenness is safely let thru to the keeper with our media.
She gambles on it and the ‘love media’ haven’t let her down yet.
Our PM whether a crook or not, is repetitively dishonest.
I can’t stomach the vile and heavily biased leftist pom Jonathan Holmes so I don’t watch Media Watch.
Of course, you wouldn’t want anything that might challenge your pathetic narrow little rightard view of the world James K…even when it’s party agreeing with you.
You’re welcome to your views but the idiotic duo-tone outlook in which everything you write is a typical sad indictment of the shuttered unrealistic bunch of goons the right has become.
LOL
who lifted JKs rock again?
Surely you mean cowpat SBH?
that particular (sorry) unpolished turd, rather …..
has the swelling gone down yet jk ?
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