In the Drum this morning, Annabel Crabb critiques an interview on Sixty Minutes last night in which Prime Minister Julia Gillard and her partner Tim Mathieson are questioned, apparently mortifyingly for the viewer, about their relationship. It’s degrading, Crabb concludes, and though I didn’t see the interview, I’m sure Crabb’s assessment is spot on.
The question we need to ask is how desperate is this Prime Minister that she allows herself to go on prime time television with her partner to subject both of them to degrading interrogations about their personal lives?
Julia Gillard seriously damaged the dignity of the office of Prime Minister by the manner in which she assumed it. Remember her breathless, hysterical claims that we had lost our way, and she had taken over to help us find it again? It sounded then as if the country was on the brink of destruction thanks to Kevin, and Gillard was here to save us.
Now she seems incapable of exercising any of the discretion and restraint one would hope was second nature to a prime minister when it comes to her personal life and her intimate feelings.
You can’t blame the program. They’re after ratings like any other commercial television station. The responsibility for this self inflicted public humiliation lies solely with Julia Gillard. Its a timely reflection on her lack of judgement, her lack of wisdom, her lack of character, and her increasing desperation about her plummeting popularity, that she now exposes her intimate life for public spectacle as a last resort.
At the very least it’s tacky and embarrassing. At worst, it’s proof that the country is not in serious, capable hands, and that Gillard’s capacity for unwise silliness (first demonstrated in that Women’ s Weekly airbrushed photo shoot) and her lack of sophistication and political judgement are more deeply entrenched than we feared.
Related articles
- ‘We won’t marry for political gain’ (heraldsun.com.au)
No Place For Sheep 
More or less “degrading” than Abbott in budgie smugglers?
LikeLike
Oh,oh oh! (sounds of lamentation) To what parlous state have we descended that we are faced with such abject choices????
LikeLike
Kevin Rudd didn’t hold for very long the title of “Worst Prime Minister ever”.
This one is a National Embarassment.
LikeLike
No, I’m not sure you can say, “you can’t blame the program” and that making a quid some how obviates an ethical decison. we can criticise anti refugee Hansonist peasants for the same reason- self interest- because they fear population influxes may leave the more vulnerable already here under pressure, but they are reviled as racist for their anxieties. How much worse people who not can, but wont, when they know better, make the sacrifice of running with decent current affairs rather than pap.
If we want a better world, everyone must make an effort.
All I’d ask from commercial tv is that it makes it money from good programming, rather than running stale ideology for tobacco companies and the like, along wiih the general w-nk that chokes the mind of a nation with its deliberate toxic discharges of dumb downed, fantastical clog.
Sorry, that’s just how I feel, just at the moment.
LikeLike
Well I still blame John Howard.
I just think he changed the face of politics beyond recognition during the time he was in office. He turned it from a theatre where the major protagonists actually held to some measure of principal, integrity, outward-looking vision and inward-looking self-critique (this last category of course invariably producing positive results!), and turned it to a race to the bottom of the popularity contest. It took 16 years for the voters of Bennelong to cotton on, but by that time the damage was done.
When this is all over, and when Julia is sitting in front of the mirror, Tim attending to her roots with a paint brush, and half the population of Iraq housed in prison hulks off the coast of Zimbabwe, she will look at herself through the steam from her tea cup, and know that she has sold herself out.
I’m starting to wonder whether we’ve got it all topsy-turvy, and whether we shouldn’t just hand this land back to its original owners to govern as they see fit.
LikeLike
Gee, wouldn’t I like to say Sam Jandwich is wrong.
The latest from the Labor camp concerns a caucus meeting a day or two ago, where the dominant right faction ritually psychically disembowled the refugee dissenters, Dougie Cameron, the last labor politician to be actually “labor” and by implication, Faulkner.
They have been banned from commenting on issues without ALP approval and of late this mechanism appears to have been in the hands of that shining light of open government, Phalangist Senator Arbib.
LikeLike