Roll on Tuesday
Kevin being popular in Brisbane is a Kevin invention. Pulling a crowd in the Queen Street Mall is easily organized and if you look at the video, it’s all kids. Go in there anytime, after having alerted the media so they can get their TV cameras to record their favourite news item being mugged, and you have a crowd all eager to get on TV.
Rudd strategist Bruce Hawker said dozens of Labor MPs would lose their seats under Julia Gillard’s leadership.
“Anyone that decides that they are not going to vote for him and they are on a margin of less then 10 per cent, kiss your seat goodbye; its all over, you’ll regret at leisure,” he told Network TenI’ve got bad news for you Bruce. Even if they do vote for Rudd they will lose their seat. Do you think the public are enjoying this shit. Do you really believe that Rudd has changed his spots? He hasn’t and is still as dysfunctional as he was before and it will only take a month or so for people to remember why they didn’t like him on his first sojourn into politics. Anyone who can string two words together and smile at the same time can out poll Gillard but that just makes him a winner in a two horse race with the other horse running lame. No big deal. I dislike Gillard but at least she functions and has points on the board even if I don’t like the outcomes but Rudd has simply never achieved anything. My preferred outcome? Rudd loses on Monday, goes to the backbench and snipes every other day until the election with the end result of these clowns being sent to the opposition seats until they remember what leading a country is all about. As part of the keep Gillard campaign, Kate Ellis has dobbed Kevin in for a politically incorrect spray at Gillard in South Australia. He is alleged to have referred to Ms Gillard as a “childless, atheist, ex-communist’. It might be unkind of Kev to say that but every word is true so I don’t quite get Kate’s point.
Facebook
Twitter
The Australian people yawned today.
They are so over the ALP histrionics. The Question of Kevin challenging again remains.
Reading the newspoll, he is good for a 5 per cent short term bounce and such bounces are rarely sustainable. The PM is left more tattered this week than last week, terminal it looks like because the one word description of liar sticks like glue. At least with the people I meet.
Hopefully for Australia’s sake the ALP reconstruct meaningfully and this means their union wings as well have to reconstruct to transparency.
To misquote Bill Clinton on purpose, it’s the policies stupid.
Grubsheet’s source – there’s a risk that yet oanther leadership change will hurt the party by reinforcing the notion that the Labor leadership is a revolving door, totally hostage to the opinion polls. Within Labor, this is called “the New South Wales disease”, after a succession of leadership changes there saw a tired and corrupt government reduced to a rump in the parliament in the last state election. Yet such is the disillusionment with Gillard that MPs are coming to realise that switching jockeys is their only hope, and the sooner the better.This school of thought has it that felling Gillard now will give her successor a clear run of two years to establish himself and have at least some hope of reversing the tsunami of community support for the Liberal-National Party Coalition. Labor foolishly believed that Coalition leader Tony Abbott was unelectable. But Abbott – a fiercely effective opponent of the carbon tax – has streaked eleven points ahead of Gillard as preferred prime minister in the latest poll.Labor now faces a nightmare scenario – that Abbott will not just win the next election, whenever it’s held, but Labor will be so badly beaten that it will be out of office for a generation and may, indeed, cease to be any significant force in Australian politics at all. What to do? Well, here’s the startling scenario outlined to Grubsheet by our source – a Labor “grandee” with close links to all of the main players.Gillard is a dead woman walking and according to this source, most credible figures in the party are now openly conceding the fact. This includes traditional power brokers and number crunchers like former national secretary, Karl Bitar, and former Keating minister, Graham Richardson, who is openly telling people that “the government is f***ed”. Labor is now privately canvassing alternatives. And while there’s some support for former ACTU secretary Greg Combet – Gillard’s Minister for Climate Change – the smart money is on the other former senior union boss in Gillard’s cabinet – Bill Shorten, the Assistant Treasurer.Shorten shot to national fame and popularity five years ago when he became the spokesman for the families of Tasmanian miners trapped in the Beaconsfield mine disaster. He’s credible, articulate and has some powerful connections beyond Labor and the union movement. Shorten is married to Chloe Bryce, the daughter of Governor-General Quentin Bryce. And it’s not lost on Labor that the couple and their 18-month old daughter, Clementine, would present a sharply more voter-friendly image as the nation’s first family compared to Julia Gillard and “First Bloke” Tim Mathieson – her live-in lover at The Lodge.But being Labor, of course, it’s the politics that really count. And what’s decisively in Shorten’s favour is his membership – and leadership, as former national secretary – of the Australian Worker’s Union, the dominant faction in modern Labor. The AWU makes and breaks ministerial careers at will – its Queensland boss Bill Ludwig arguably Labor’s most powerful figure, to whom senior figures like Treasurer Wayne Swan owe their entire careers.So Bill Shorten is both “connected” – in Mafia parlance – and user friendly. The bookies in Queensland already have him as odds-on favourite to replace Gillard and Labor’s elder statesmen like Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley long ago identified him as a potential future prime minister. And he has the all important killer instinct to both succeed in politics and survive in Labor ranks, a key figure in the political assassination of former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and the installation of Gillard as his successor.Will Shorten actively move against Gillard? Only the coming days and weeks will tell. But one thing is certain. The draft is well and truly on, with senior Labor figures – including some of Gillard’s own ministers – convinced that the electorate has stopped listening to her and her chances of a political resurrection are now zero.The one wild card is Kevin Rudd, who makes no secret of wanting to make a comeback. The chances of that are also said to be zero, such is the personal animosity towards him in Labor’s ranks. But if the party calls the bluff of the independents and removes Gillard and installs Shorten, what then? Would Rudd seek to bring the whole house of cards down by resigning his Queensland seat and prompting a bye-election that the polls show Labor would surely lose? Here again, the growing mood is to call Rudd’s bluff, to dare him to enter history as a Labor “Rat”, who brought down a government and made Tony Abbott prime minister in an act of petulant personal revenge.Some Labor figures now perceive the entire future of the party to be at risk, as its traditional “aspirational working class” constituency turns to Abbott and “left leaning progressives” in the cities turn to the “save-the-planet-at-all costs” Greens. Certainly, there’s a growing sense that the Greens – with whom Labor entered into an uneasy coalition to govern – are the real enemy, more dangerous even than Abbott as they steadily erode Labor’s primary vote.So here’s oanther scenario. That if the independents make good on their promise of “Julia or dust” and sacrifice themselves by returning the country to the polls, Labor will turn on the Greens. They’ll do a preference deal with the Liberal-National Coalition to put the Greens last on ballot papers across the country and try to destroy them as a mainstream party altogether. Sound extreme? Well, some senior Labor figures now see this as the party’s only hope of keeping it alive in any form at all to continue its proud record of governing Australia stretching back more than a century. “May you live in interesting times”, goes Chinese saying.Comment:This will happen and the sooner the better, for Labor likes nothing more than a good knifing of a failed leader at five minutes to midnight. Gillard is just waiting for a tap on the shoulder. Those currently plotting to knife her are the same conspirators that installed her after stabbing Rudd in the back last year, sooner or later they might get it right. If they do go with Shorten, it would be something of a fleeting surge for him, not unlike the act Hawke pulled on Hayden, of which I was reminded as to just how repulsive he was then (and still is) in a film on Foxtel on Sunday night. To think that Australia had that egocentric bodgie as our PM for nine years, it doesn’t say much for the quality of the electorate, does it?Admittedly, Shorten has a bit more style than Hawke, but he’s still only a lacklustre pick from a party devoid of any real talent. The reason I think this change will happen, is because Labor knows that the loathsome rural independents only have one self-serving objective in mind, and that is to qualify for huge retirement payments that are triggered around the end of 2011 and early in 2012. They couldn’t care less what happens to Gillard, so long as they get their ‘super qualification dates’ attained. Charming – isn’t it? Mind you, if any ‘one’ of them had a grain of decency and a genuine concern for Australia, they would pull the pin on Labor and force an election but pigs can’t fly as far as I’m aware. I don’t believe Rudd would cause a problem, but then wouldn’t it be lovely if he did, since we know he’s nether forgiven nor forgotten their act of treachery.The political landscape would alter slightly with Shorten as the ALP leader, for the reasons mentioned above – he being a far more acceptable type than the hapless one who currently, unfittingly, occupies The Lodge. But Shorten is someone that can only be called extemporaneous prime minister material as he’s only been in parliament for 5 minutes. However, this Labor government, as Graham Richardson so eloquently put it – “ .is f***ed”. The electorate are definitely not buying this ridiculous carbon tax sham for starters, plus they’re fed up with the never-ending wholesale mismanagement of everything this bunch of morons try to implement, so irrespective of whatever leadership stunt they try-on, nobody is listening and they want them out urgently. The sooner Labor acknowledges that they’ve totally stuffed up the whole shooting match and call an election, the better. I tend to think the point above about the Greens being their biggest worry for the future, is spot on, as let’s face it – these feckless ex-union types are all about self preservation, what the hell else are they going to do – go back to the union?