It was with disbelief, and finally contempt, that I watched excerpts of the Al Jazeera interview with former Prime Minister Julia Gillard on the topic of her government’s treatment of waterborne asylum seekers, particularly women and children.
Gillard, now a global advocate for the education of girls and women, employed what has disturbingly become a normalised justification for Australian governments’ increasingly callous torment of women and girls in off-shore detention: we do it to stop people drowning at sea.
I have yet to get my head around the psychopathology of those who believe the torment of one group is justified in order to discourage another group from undertaking a particular action. I think such justifications are teetering precariously on just about every ethical and moral ground I can think of, beginning with the Kantian argument that it is reprehensible to use people as a means to an end, and that people are an end in themselves. To treat them in any other way is to dehumanise them, and ultimately, ourselves.
However, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott and now Turnbull apparently have no difficulty with treating waterborne asylum seekers as a means to an end, and justifying their hideous treatment of them as a necessary deterrent in order to save the lives of others.
It has been said more than a million times: arriving in this country by boat, seeking asylum, is not a crime. Indeed, as we are signatories to the UN Refugee Convention, we actively invite people to arrive here by whatever means they manage to employ.
If we want to save people from drowning at sea, and if we care about the humanity of those we already have in detention, we would cease to use the detained as scapegoats, and as examples of what will happen if you legitimately arrive here by boat. We would instead withdraw from the Refugee Convention. People come to Australia because we invite them, through our participation in the Convention, and our agreement with its principles.
Of course, we aren’t about to take that step. So instead we will continue to ill-treat asylum seekers in off-shore detention. We will continue to justify this crime against humanity by claiming it’s done to save lives.
And Ms Gillard will continue to strut the world stage advocating for the education of women and children but not, regrettably, those she imprisoned in mandatory indefinite dentition in tropical hell holes where they are abused, raped and made mad.
Women for Gillard? Non, merci.
No Place For Sheep 
The problem is in two parts. The first is domestic-political, in that both sides of Australian politics have played the xenophobic card, invoking ignorant, basically racist and profoundly selfish public responses, and now, short of some post-Damascene revelation that it would be very difficult to carry electorally, cannot return to an ethical position. The second is that Australia is now bereft of any moral force on the world stage, as this relates specifically to the social and political phenomenon of the 21st century, that of informal human population movement; and more broadly we have neutered ourselves as a voice to be listened to on a range of global social and political issues.
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Yes, and both parts of the problem are utterly disheartening.
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Gillard tried to destroy the people smugglers’ business model. It wasn’t perfect and she knew it, but she had to live with herself, hence the justifications.
She was stuck as well with a job requiring governing for all Australians. As anyone who has ever been in a leadership position should know, there will inevitably be decisions which have catastrophic results for some people. If those people affected are not your own citizens, that is a little more palatable.
It is making the best of a bad lot in many ways.
DQ sighs.
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DQ, you and I have never agreed on Gillard.
That is all. 🙂
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I’m waiting for Marilyn to get stuck into her.
🙂
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No I got stuck into your own stupid support for a racist baby trading coward posing with the likes of Malala who she would have traded to fucking Nauru if she had come here to seek asylum and she would have told Al Jazeera it was the right thing to do.
Unlike her though Al Jazeera have been inside the prison she built, they know very well it is a hell hole and she doesn’t care.
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Well said, Marilyn
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In what way is it well said?
The post attacks me personally, and I object strongly to it.
Your view, Jennifer after a re-reading?
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I didn’t mean well said for getting stuck into you, DQ, I meant well said about Gillard.
I didn’t read it as attacking you personally. You know me well enough that I don’t take sides in personal disagreements between people.
I do agree with Marilyn’s observations about Gillard. They are less colourful than usual, I thought.
You and Marilyn have history and I always leave you to sort it out. You’ve both said much worse than this to each other.
I wouldn’t dream of hurting either of you, or taking sides against either of you.
If you scroll down you’ll see she accuses me of drinking the Kool aid.
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There was cruelty done to people who didn’t deserve it. That’s always cause for reproach in my view, but I guess we have to reflect upon the actions of so many world leaders’ along lines that on a variety of fronts would see many roundly condemned. At the end of the say if we did so by jailing the lot of ’em then I don’t know what kind of leadership we’d be left with, but I wager it’d be pretty timid.
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It was nothing to do with people smuggling, there are no people smugglers bringing anyone here and there never has been, it was a lie Ruddock and Sciaca invented in 1999 to justify the cruelty and viciousness of TPV;s and denial of family reunion and led on from the ALP under Hawke calling Cambodians queue jumpers.
It is absurd when even something as stupid as you must know that there are no fucking people smugglers on Nauru and Manus or in the concentration camps, just fucking refugees.
Honest to god, Gillard is a hard core racist, she just told the world and you still claim black is fucking white.
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Ten seconds of Google-fu presents many cases of people who have been imprisoned in Australia for people smuggling.
Are you suggesting that they’ve all been fit up by The Plod?
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No she’s suggesting that it isn’t a crime to claim asylum (true) and that it therefore may not be a crime to offer assistance in the form of a ferry service with that purpose in mind.
There’s the beginnings of an argument here and a certainly a strong case against the language that’s being used. There’s not a lot of actual smuggling going on, but like a lot of things that are politically speaking code for something of which we disapprove the objection to the terminology is a semantic one rather than a game changer.
What many reasonable people will continue to baulk is the negligently unsafe nature of the service these seamen of ill repute tend to provide. They leave us on the thorns of a ridiculous dilemma while we claim to hold concerns for deaths at sea yet remain steadfastly opposed to simply offering these people safe passage.
Which is what I think we should do by the way, much as I know some will despair of surrendering any moral high ground in opposition to the old “we will decide who comes here and the manner in which they come” mantra. It is a resettlement rather that an simple refugee program that offers safe passage. I realise that, but given the hypocrisy with which we currently offer people safe passage to anywhere that’s basically a worse shit hole than the one they left I’m reasonably relieved we’re willing to help any Syrians at all.
We should and I think would be willing to do a lot more, but one way or another the death grip that our abject terror of boats from the North and gormless political acquiescence to it has produced an atmosphere wherein I think lesser of two evil arguments have some marginal utility.
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They aren’t actually people smugglers, because the people they carry aren’t coming here illegally, so there’s no smuggling involved.
They are recklessly uncaring about the safety of the passengers whose money they take, and are turning a profit from the misery and desperation of those people.
The “smugglers” we imprison are likely at the bottom of the food chain, driven by their own lack of resources to take employment anywhere. Which is not to excuse them, but to point out that as always, the ones at the top who profit most from waterborne asylum seekers remain untouched, and living comfortably.
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Nice to see you drinking the kool aid on that one, there are no people at the top of any chain doing anything, they are just other refugees or corrupt officials.
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Ok, I am corrected. There’s usually people at the top of any organisation, with others at the coal face doing the shit work & getting put in jail
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There’s nothing incorrect in what you say, but when it comes to corrupt officials it does make one think that in other ways it goes further up the tree.
Why is it for example that we don’t hear of Indonesia complaining when we pay people to turn back their boats?
Does nobody suspect that Indonesia’s inability to rescue any boats that flounder might not involve reluctance?
Their views on these and any other aspects of the refugee problem so far as it involves or affects them strike me as excessively inscrutable.
I mean in no sense to play down our government’s misdeeds in saying what I mostly suspect is that these two countries are each complicit in what’s going on or we’d surely by now have heard some dissent from our neighbour’s side of the fence. And that means there is corruption of some sort going on higher up the tree. It may be part of a different food chain on a different branch but its still rotten at its roots.
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As our courts have said for the past 16 years that the people they sent to prison were not smuggling anyone here they then sent them to prison for thing not even in the law.
It has taken a number of court cases for the courts to understand that it is illegal to punish people for simply helping refugees.
It is no more smuggling that strapping heroin outside your clothes with a sign on it in red letters saying HEROIN
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There were other ways available to destroy the people smugglers’ business model. Harder, more politically difficult, potentially very disruptive of relations with Indonesia (whose real policy on people smugglers was and would again be supine by design), yes; but feasible with practical effort. Instead, successive governments demonised people as ‘barbarians at the gate’ who were ‘jumping the [non existing] queue’ and would quite likely be dangerous and (though this was unstated) might prick the bubble of Australia’s awful, myopic complacency. in the polity.
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Sorry. Delete ‘in the polity’. Sent unedited 🙂
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I’ve told you about those Kantian arguments….. It’s close but short of exercising any hypocrisy on our own part we probably have to acknowledge the time honoured and quite uncontroversial practice of incentivising parents to raise their children in ways that are variously thought to be “better”. It isn’t even true that the division of labour doesn’t use people as a means unto an end, only that in neither case is any cruelty held to be permissible.
What’s actually reprehensible is the calculus of undeserved human suffering involved in the logic of mandatory detention with deterrence in mind. I will grant that Kant refers, I believe correctly, to a dehumanisation process that is often quite evident in the way the asylum seeker issue is presented to us.
Hypocrisy is something I find myself suspecting of somebody of Gillard’s generation knowing the way most people with Labor values think about the morality of our humanitarian obligations. It isn’t something I find she is as easily caught out on however, much as I expect she’s merely defending past political expediency. Going on what she actually says I find it quite sufficient to say that she’s wrong on the ethical failure both to try and meet our humanitarian obligations and to prevent suffering that was within her remit to do something about. You don’t need any more than that to condemn her views on the matter or indeed her misdeeds.
I’d add that arguments about whether the deterrence works or not shouldn’t come into it. You’d hardly say it was permissible to torture graffiti artists to deter vandalism yet theirs is a crime on the face of it more serious than an immigration paperwork irregularity. Graffiti involves material damage to property, asylum seekers merely invoke humanitarian obligations we’re callously seeking to avoid. Yet the fact we do the opposite and mutter some lame excuses when to do so seems obviously hypocritical to me. Gillard may be patently guilty of that kind of double standard, but she’s hardly alone in so doing.
At this stage it’s more of a worry to me that she and Rudd managed to royally fuck the Labor party for some time to come, and lumped us with Abbott in the process. The race to the bottom thus far is yet to recover even so much as a dead cat bounce under Turnbull so far, so I wonder whatever can be done?
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HG, you have indeed taken me to task before on Kant.
That Gillard isn’t alone in her double standard doesn’t cheer me.
I don’t know what is to be done. I see nothing much to hope for politically in the immediate future. I despise Turnbull’s obfuscating charm, and he is shackled by his obligations to the RW.
As for the ALP – don’t get me started, DQ will have conniptions
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Go for it. They aren’t perfect, only better than the alternative.
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I just finished binge watching Damages, with Glenn Close & Rose Byrne. Makes ALP subterfuge look like kindergarten conspiracies. Not that they ever seemed that sophisticated…. *ducks*
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In what way are they any better when they have stuck to Abbotts’ insanity on everything spying, baby trading and ”terror” like flies on shit for years now without fucking dissent.
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And again, I agree with Marilyn
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It amazes me that the ALP supporters can still pretend they have some high moral ground, they claim it’s about non-existent smugglers while the whole world watches hundreds of thousands of refugees in the EU doing the same thing as those who came here, paying to get to safety.
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Yep.
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It’s not that I require anyone to come up with the answer to injustice (as if anyone could) but it’s heartening when hypocrisy is called out with no ifs or buts. Thanks for calling out Julia Gillard.
What amazed me was that she went into that interview with Al Jazeera apparently thinking she would not be called to account for her past actions. I guess that’s the blindness of ideology, or is it just the complacency of someone who has been immured on the celebrity circuit for far too long?
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Both ideological blindness, and the arrogance of celebrity is my guess, Rhyll. Total inability to see what is wrong with her argument.
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There is another party: http://greens.org.au/safer-pathways 🙂
For my part, as I’ve said until I’ve bored anyone and everyone, Julia Gillard was a dreadful disappointment. Her argument to oppose same sex marriage was simply cray cray.
I have assumed that the explanation for her very right wing behaviour as PM was that her support as leader was based on Joe de Bruyn providing numbers for her. When you lie down with dogs, you will get up with fleas.
Julia Gillard supported NAPLAN, introduced MySchool, advanced US style education reforms, failed to engage teacher’s unions, increased tertiary student contribution for Maths and Science courses, limited access to Commonwealth scholarships, and limited access to Youth Allowance for rural and regional tertiary students. Even Gonski was limited by the priviso that private schools were not to be disadvantaged. And yet, she seems to be successfully engaging in a career promoting education?
Julia Gillard alternately blamed the Greens for her Carbon price, or took credit for her government taking action on Climate change. Similarly she managed to shift blame to the Greens when her mad ‘Malaysian solution’ was rejected in a crazed last night of sitting.
Of course, we would do better not to get involved in illegal wars that destabilise regions where the only understanding we have of the area concerns oil. Although I believe that we should need more than 75% of parliament to send our troops anywhere, the ALP probably would have supported Howard anyway.
Women for Gillard, non, merci.
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Two articles on the ABC news today seem to make your case for you also.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-08/gst-changes-would-raise-same-amount-as-carbon-tax/6921872
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-08/asylum-seeker-who-escaped-christmas-island-dies/6922666
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Re the Joe de Bruyn influence, Di, yes that was also my understanding of her otherwise inexplicable attitudes. Gillard cared nothing for traditional marriage so her stance against ssm was inexplicable, unless catholic RW
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The shoppies had no influence of Gillard,she is simply an ignorant racist and always has been.
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I’m fairly certain that the day after Rudd lost the leadership, he predicted that Gillard would take a harder line on asylum seekers as one of the conditions of her supporters.
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Yes, I think you’re right, Geoff, he did say something to that effect.
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Yep, Rudd did say that but then: http://www.smh.com.au/national/rudd-slams-door-on-refugees-20130719-2qa5b.html
A pox on both their houses.
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When Rudd staged that farce with the boat he sent to Indonesia, Pacific Viking was it, he lost me totally.
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That’s when he lost me too, I had liked him until then.
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He lost me with his stupid pressers outside Sunday church!
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Like many things that are wrong with this society and its politics we don’t get closer to better solutions by comparing equally complicit leaders whether on the same or opposite sides of the partisan divide.
There may be a couple of places we can look, One being that it is such a divisive issue so that regardless of bipartisan bastardry the fact remains that obviously, though to varying degrees, many Australians would prefer to honour some basic standard of humanitarianism.
Then the other part of the question becomes how do politics look that aren’t defined by dog whistling, racing to the bottom, fear we’re being taken advantage of and the mantra of privilege as an accident of birth.
If you must also look to comparisons between governments then the most often mentioned would be the Fraser era of refugee resettlement. Love him or loathe the man’s legacy he answered the question himself. At the time he was able to gain bipartisan support for his resettlement policy and he considered it wise not to tempt a race to the bottom by having too much debate about the issue, preferring instead to take what in his estimation and quite possibly that of those around him in politics at the time was a quietly principled stance.
We still and may always have issues with perceptions of ourselves as this white enclave in an otherwise brownish corner of the globe, but there’s ample potential to lead the conversation either way. The constants being that once a stance is taken it hurts politicians to differentiate themselves on these issues, and none of them wishes to appear weak. It would nonetheless be abundantly preferable to many of us if in a choice between a principled stance and an unprincipled one the former was chosen. The fact that doing so would rely upon conviction politics we’ve been lacking is I think a moot point in those very terms.
It may appear to fly in the face of links we’d make between where we want politics to head and how our social attitudes are shaped by dominant orthodoxies, but of the Greens appearing to be compassionate as opposed to Fraser being more sternly the protector towards refugees I think pragmatic politics favours the latter.
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Well let us all be fucking pragmatic about your life if you are ever in danger and leave you to rot because it is the pragmatic thing to do, then get back to us about fucking pragmatism.
The refugee convention and protocol are for the protection of refugees with a well founded fear of persecution, there is no cruel, harsh, camps, prisons, human trading or any of the other evil pragmatic crap we espouse anywhere it in. Its a fucking humanitarian treaty, END.
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Obviously you’re writing us from within the next instalment of Harry Potter as penned by Malcolm Tucker and “treaty” is your prosaic way of saying magic effing wand.
Some of us have read the early drafts and don’t like the unhappy ending. One where people could be persuaded to do the right thing rather than failing to be bullied into compliance by a distinctly pathetic authority might prove preferable.
Perhaps that’s where we differ. I tend to think of humanitarianism to be sort altruistic and unforced and of politics as a matter of persuading people that it is in their interests to do the right thing. So I have a lot of respect for arguments along the lines of that Martin Niemoller quote people often use, but none whatsoever I’m afraid if it switches to shrill protest when people fail to comply with their preferred code of behaviour. Just because it is agreed in a document doesn’t excuse failing to notice we’ve officially ignored it, in spirit at least, for a decade or more.
Yes it’s a bugger when people do that. Two solutions; either convince others to honour the original or we redraft an updated version that reflects our actual intentions. Let’s just say we’d probably have slight agreement in that we might neither of us wish to hazard the latter.
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I never cease to be amazed by your patience, HG.
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Me too
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Oh go on. I may have just have been watching too many re-runs of the Thick of it on YouTube, but if you read it again in Malcolm Tucker’s accent it probably gains a sense of impatience that’s lacking on the page…..
Don’t read everything I write in that voice though. It’ll get tiresome, and I’m sure do his scriptwriters a serious insult!
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Do politicians direct society or does society direct politicians? As a society, we have used social media to disrupt a direct threat to our freedom – Border Force inspections in Melbourne a couple of months ago. As a society, we collectively agreed to the Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott & Turnbull treatment of refugees. We have the potential to pull this process-up.
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Tyranny of the majority, m8. That’s a liberal democracy.
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I know that it seems pointless at times, but I still feel that marching and ranting are important, and I think that social media is having an impact.
Tony Windsor said something like history belongs to those that turn up. Maybe, sometimes, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t turn up.
Of course, I wish the MSM would!
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I like that – history belongs to those that turn up.
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I think there is an extreme risk in these digital days that it may come to belong to those with the power to ‘take down’. ‘Taking down’ being in the context of removal and/or alteration of web posts and related records.
Welcome already to the new Dark Age.
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For a while there I notice YouTube becoming steeped in the ritual misuse of the dreaded DMCA notice, but I think it’s subsided a little of late. What the twitteratti are doing I couldn’t say…..
Here at least we’re fairly safe. I expect somebody to call me names that’d make a Scotsman blanch at any moment and get away with it.
I thought the accepted wisdom was that the victors wrote history, and spent a good deal of my youth wondering who these blokes called Victor were. Turns out they were lying about most of it and the real business of the internet concerns itself with illuminating all those dark corners where shooters lurk on grassy knolls and black helicopters make nefarious visits to someplace called building seven. If I’m correct both the shroud of Turin and the moon landings were faked by somebody posing as William Shakespeare.
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But we all know that it was really DQ, don’t we!
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Ssshhhhhhh.
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Who do you like least, Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott?
Think carefully before answering.
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Are you asking me, DQ?
The question makes me want to leave the planet. Is this all there is?
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When you find yourself thinking Syria looks nice then you know we’re in trouble!
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It’d be Gillard, but I’d add that in a choice between Stalin and Pol Pot the right answer is always somebody else. Surely the point of minor parties is having somebody, even if they’re not strictly electable, to keep the bastards honest.
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I would argue that Greens are electable. I mean, they have policies, which is more than can be said of the two old parties.
Anyhow, the question, who to like least…
I am reminded of an essay my daughter had to do in Year 9, ‘Who was most evil, Stalin or Hitler’ She argued Hitler, because Stalin was mad, so could be excused to a degree. On those grounds I would have to say that Gillard is the least liked, because Abbott is mad.
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Ha! Brilliantly argued!
But what a terrible essay topic that was!
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It’s hard to argue with the notion that Abbott has lost it after that excruciating speech he gave last month.
I know it’s only a kid’s essay, but as to Hitler and Stalin I never thought there was quite the cloud over the latter’s sanity that there was over Adolf’s.
Either way I’m reminded by the mistakes we’d be making when it comes to teaching history to small children that we really ought to ask who was Gillard’s Beria and Abbott’s Goebbels?
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I kind of picked that up from your other posts, and there’s nothing too much wrong with the notion, but it’s such a long road to travel to ever go from minor party to forming government in your own right that I see other possible roles for them either as a party holding the big two to account or (I wish) in coalition with Labor.
Unlike the old Democrats before them I don’t see that the greens as centrists who’d ever share more in common with the Liberal National coalition than they have with the ALP.
Watch that space though because you know Mandela,recently Aung San Suu Kyi and the collapse of the Berlin wall have all proven me less optimistic that perhaps I should’ve dared to be. The rub being they also refer to parts of the world that I’d scarcely prefer to live in.
A Green’s environment minister seems like an ideal fit to me, and I even know exactly who I’d like in charge of immigration. Its just that nominees for treasurer and defence minister still elude me.
In the meantime it sometimes seems as if nobody believes support for anything left of centre exists in the electorate. I think they are patently wrong.
Being too young to remember the so called dark years under Menzies I can’t say precisely, but if the lid is kept on progress for too long we could get a repeat of Whitlam. I think history shows that era involved taking a great deal of good with an unhealthy dollop of bad. So whatever the future holds let us hope we’re all better prepared to move decisively but not precipitously away from the mess Abbott et al have left us with.
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The thing I am sick of hearing is that Australia is to blame for all drownings at sea, detention centres and anything that goes wrong in them, blaming every bloody politician. Australia cannot save the whole fucking world and the sooner people realise this the bloody better. Why the hell should Australia take more and more of these “So Called Refugees” who most of them are not even legitimate refugees. Most of them are just scum and I think the world knows it. They just want to infiltrate countries for their own evil ends. Most of this scum don’t even like the country they are settled in! What the fuck does that tell you. That woman who claimed she was raped? Bullshit! It was just another dirty tactic to get into this country on the back of sympathy. With all these middle eastern people invading countries round the world will in the future cause such havoc it will make Adolf Hitler look like a daycare teacher! Wake up you bloody morons out there and all you bloody bleeding hearts who think that by giving this scum a real country to live in will solve all the problems! It will not! Their race and their stinking culture will see to that. They don’t assimilate, they won’t change their beliefs, they won’t change their hatred for any western country, they will rape and pillage every fucking country they manage to get themselves into and the pathetic governments and the United Nations will not lift a fucking hand to stop it! Hence “THE NAZIS”
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We’re not asked to save the whole effing world only to carry our fair share of the burden especially in our own region where I’m sure you’ll rightly point out that support for human rights among our less developed neighbours remains patchy.
Most of “these people” when processed are found to be legitimate refugees. You seem to be applying your own standard other that UNHCR’s “Well founded fear of persecution” then turning upon them for being to timid.
You have everything from Nazis to rape in there and yet you fail to realise that Australia does not require people to change their beliefs, we promote religious freedom, nor do we require “assimilation’, we promote tolerance…. Speaking of which yours is manifestly absent and if you think you can intimidate anyone here with getting a bit sweary the allow me to pop a jaunty little bonnet on your opinion and ram it up your arse with a couple of well lubricated Tuckerisms!
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Jolly Jumbuck, Your remarks are ill considered, ill informed and ignorant.
There’s no way any Matilda will waltz with you.
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The elite have done a great job creating this “drowning at sea” narrative and as such built a dangerous and influential policy around it. This won’t be fixed by politicians or external bodies, to turn this around requires a new, stronger narrative, one that undermines the xenophobia as well as the lies created by the Stop the Boats campaign.
The only people who can create this narrative are the Australian people. The best way they can do that is by continuing to highlight the suffering of asylum seekers.
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Where the drowning at sea narrative gains purchase its only for want of mindfulness that people willing to take that risk are driven to it. Part of what they’re driven into rickety boats by is the lack of other options we provide. So the revised narrative you refer to should relate the difference between saying we don’t want them to come by sea and not just saying we don’t want them to come. The later can be addressed with resettlement programs and I think that’s the better solution.
I would argue that even if we can’t manage to convince people to abandon the cruel obsession with deterrents in the short term then no disincentive works that does not provide some positive incentive. We should on that basis be able to mount some kind of case for a greater intake of people before they’re driven into those boats.
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I asked above “Who do you like least, Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott?
Think carefully before answering.”
The responses were underwhelming.
If commenters here cannot choose between one of our better Prime Ministers and the total disaster that was Tony Abbott, pity the rest of the nation.
Single issue floggers really have no idea which way is up.
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I’m sorry, I thought it was a rhetorical question?? Of course I prefer Gillard (but especially the wonderful bank of talent she was working with in the parliamentary ALP at the time), but what is the point of the question?
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I prefer Gillard, but really I’d prefer someone who hasn’t been invented yet.
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Tanya Plibersek seeeeems pretty good??
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I had hoped it was a rhetorical question, but the replies were truly absurd. Sometimes I wonder.
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DQ, I think many people, including myself, have become very disillusioned with the ALP since the Rudd/Gillard years. I always voted for our local ALP member, because she did a terrific job for her electorate. I’ll probably vote for her again as I hear she intends to return to the hustings for the next election.
I’ve done this in spite of my distaste for ALP leaders, thankful not to be in their electorates
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Some fool elsewhere said he/she hated all lawyers. Superficially glib and good for a giggle, isn’t it? But did he/she really hate Mahatma Gandhi? Hate Nelson Mandela? Hate Franklin Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln? Hate Gough Whiltlam, and Barack Obama?
Gillard may not have done all that we hoped, but no-one can wave a magic wand. Labor is distasteful, until you consider the mob in government by comparison.
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