Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard seems certain to survive a leadership ballot scheduled for 10am Monday Sydney time (6pm Sunday EST).
Gillard became PM in June 2010 after winning a similar vote of the parliamentary members of the ruling Labor Party, deposing then PM Kevin Rudd. It’s been downhill without any brakes ever since.
Gillard’s party failed to win a majority of seats in the House of Representatives in the 2010 election. Afterwards, she was reappointed as Prime Minister only after winning the support of a motley crew of independents and a Greens member who, together, held the balance of power.
Gillard appears desperately unpopular with the Australian public. Labor is polling below 35% nationally in opinion polls, with Gillard’s personal popularity nudging against the Crazification Factor, despite a steadily growing economy, some significant policy wins (like a new carbon tax) and the fact that the leader of the opposition Liberal (conservative) party, Tony Abbott, is a hatchet-faced wowser best known for being photographed far too often wearing only budgie-smugglers.
I suspect this is because Gillard has yet to show that she is in possession of a spine or any particular left wing ideals other than holding onto power.
Today’s vote is unlikely to resolve anything in the long term. Gillard will continue to be seen as a weak leader. Rudd will return to the backbench until the next, inevitable challenge, and Abbott (a man who makes Joe Lieberman look warm and fuzzy) will continue to await the downfall of a government with no particular direction and no particular hope of survival.
Isn’t it nice to know that our allies are almost as fucked up as we are?
Update: Gillard wins with 72-29, one vote better than most predictions.
Randiego
Gillard makes Rick Santorum vomit.
BGinCHI
Buying bread from a man in Brussels
He was six foot four and full of muscles
I said, “Do you speak-a my language?”
He just smiled and gave me a vegemite sandwich
David Koch
Gillard likes ’em tall, dark, and handsome.
http://resources0.news.com.au/images/2011/11/16/1226196/963252-julia-gillard-greets-barack-obama.jpg
http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/8359/obamajuliagillard.jpg
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
It’s probably no coincidence that Oz is the one other major country on the globe to go full bore in on Climate Denialism.
brettvk
“Budgie-smugglers” is wonderful. If I get to reincarnate I want to be an Aussie.
Egg Berry
A former prison colony, iirc.
slightly-peeved
Two-party preferred is a better measure of who will win govt. Than leader’s popularity. Because of the preferential voting system, people who feel that the Labor party has gone too far right can cast a vote for the Greens, then give their preference to Labor.
Two-party preferred results that recently came in were 46-54 in favor of the libs, which is certainly a problem for Labor, but not quite the problems you’d expect from the personal approval rating. Because everyone votes, there’s a bigger swing section in Australia, and the scope for rapid changes in opinion.
OzoneR
ummm
sounds like some kind of spine to me.
OzoneR
@slightly-peeved:
or a party that’s gone too far right.
slightly-peeved
Oh, and on the ‘messed-up’ thing; despite all this, Australia’s been one of the strongest economies in the world during and since the GFC. Because the current government adopted a massive stimulus program, Australia didn’t even suffer a recession as a result of the GFC. I’ll take uncertainty over which member of Labor will be leading the country over any possibility of frothy mixture running a country.
Sarah Proud and Tall
@Egg Berry:
America got the Puritans, while Australia got the criminals.
I think the Aussies might have gotten the better deal.
salacious crumb
wait, wasnt Gillards unpopularity due to the fact that she actually stood up to the coal companies on the carbon tax issue. How does that make her spineless?
slightly-peeved
@OzoneR: I think the two-party preferred accounts for the ability to vote for the Greens then direct preferences to Labor. If it didn’t, I’d expect the Labor number to be lower than that, since I think Labor got a lower amount of votes in the last election, where the Greens did very well at their expense.
Oh, and twitter just came through; 73-29 Julia. More solid win than expected. Should wrap up the speculation until the next election at least.
PeakVT
Mexico has an election coming up in July. I’ve heard only one report about it so far. The PRI candidate is leading right now according to polls, FWIW.
ETA: the PAN (conservative) candidate is a woman, Josefina Mota.
Sarah Proud and Tall
@salacious crumb:
@OzoneR:
I’m being harsh. There seem to have been some wins, but not much success at making any electoral capital out of them.
toujoursdan
@salacious crumb: They also stood up for a mining tax so that the irreplaceable wealth that is being shipped to China (which is why their economy has been so strong) can be used for infrastructure, education and healthcare.
BBC News: Australia Mining Tax
OzoneR
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
I understand, but sometimes you can’t make any electoral capital out of them if you’re doing things people don’t support.
We say all the time that Democrats should stand up for what’s right, even if it means they lose elections. I’ve always argued that wasn’t possible, because if you succeed and lose, we’ll always have an excuse as to why “they didn’t make the argument good enough” “They didn’t stand up for what’s right” Because in the minds of the base- both sides- its not possible that your issues are unpopular.
Isn’t it possible that Gillard’s government is saying “fuck all, I know this unpopular, but we’re doing it anyway, that’s why we’re here”
Felanius Kootea
Abbott may be evil but he sure wears those budgie smugglers well. I mean just imagine Newt Gingrich in budgie….excuse me while I go vomit.
Anne Laurie
@Sarah Proud and Tall: Beat me to it. Although the version I remember just referred to “religious fanatics”, since the encouraged-to-emigrate groups also included William Penn’s Quakers, the Catholic cavaliers in Maryland, and Roger William’s Baptists in Rhode Island. Imagine a time when the Baptists were the weird, progressive, anti-racist sect!
Speaking of which (kinda), you know the old British catchphrase “odds and sods”, used where Americans would say “odds & ends”? According to Patridge’s slang dictionary, the phrase came out of Victoria’s British Army, where new recruits checked off their religious affiliation as CofE, Methodist, RC, or “OD – Other Denomination”. ODs who were pacifists (Quakers, for instance) ended up disproportionately assigned to headquarters… as did those individuals known or suspected to be, well, members of a sexual minority for which a non-judgemental term had yet to be invented…
slightly_peeved
Oh – apparently a recount; now 71-31. With some (presumably Liberal party) wags on twitter suggesting that it’s a second leadership challenge. Takes the shine off Gillard’s victory a little; they were probably liking the optics of Kevin getting less than 30. But still a pretty solid win.
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
Something to bear in mind; the current Labor government is actually a minority government. They need some independents plus 1 Green MP to get stuff passed in the lower House, and the Green party holds the balance of power in the Senate. I think part of the Labor government’s issue is that, like the Democrats in the US, they are getting blamed for changes in position that are harder to avoid when requiring votes from people not in the Labor party. There’s no filibuster or veto mechanism in Australian politics, and the Labor party does not publicly negotiate with its own members on policy the way it’s done in the US system. According to Labor party rules, once you cross the floor on a non-conscience vote, you don’t come back. So the end result of the current situation is a Labor party trying to present a united front on policy while trying to sweet-talk a bunch of independents (& the Green party) at the back. This, combined with the lack of a really skilled Obama-style orator up front, makes the party look quite disorganized.
@Felanius Kootea:
Compared to the Republicans, yeah, Abbott doesn’t look too bad. The guy does ironman triathlons, ferchrissakes. Also, unlike Lieberman, Australia has a pretty good idea what they’ll get with him. He does have a bit of a Santorumesque (link) impose-catholicism-on-my-country history, but in the last election, he showed a new ability to keep his mouth shut, bringing his gaffe rate down from 1 an hour to about 1 a fortnight, and nearly won the election by doing so. I think the Liberals are figuring that the economic record when they were running the country was good enough that a fairly unified public image, while Labor looks like they can’t run a chook raffle, will convince people to vote them in again.
Viva BrisVegas
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
This. Abbott, the conservative Opposition leader seems to have taken a leaf straight out of the Republican playbook. He has attacked the government, then attacked some more, and then attacked again. He has turned what should have been triumphs for the Labor government into liabilities.
Avoiding the GFC with stimulus, became riding China’s back with unsustainable debt.
Investing in infrastructure for schools, became reckless waste and mismanagement.
Building a nationwide optic fibre network to resolve decades of failed commercial monopoly, became socialistic overreach and waste.
Instituting a Carbon Tax, became an economy destroying “great big new tax”.
Restructuring the way mining royalties were collected so as to reduce the way the mining boom was putting pressure on the rest of the economy, became destoying corporations because of their success.
All of the above were popular stances at some stage. Not so much now. The reason is Murdoch. All government policies are being filtered through the Murdoch press and literally years of negative and misleading newspaper headlines have basically set the political agenda as effectively as if Abbott was writing them himself.
As a rather neat example, the major Murdoch paper in Sydney, on the day that Gillard formed government, had a front page that consisted of a big picture of Gillard with a huge headline “FLYING START”.
The only thing was that when the papers are set out for sale they tend to fold down on the left, and what you could see of the headline was “LYING TART”.
Neat huh?
Ruckus
@Sarah Proud and Tall:
I think the Aussies might have gotten the better deal.
Sounds and feels like it.
Have heard brits talk about how they got rid of the criminals and godbotherers and have been better off ever since.
toujoursdan
@Ruckus: I dunno. Most Brits I know think their Parliament is pretty screwed up.
They also had Thatcher and are coping with secession movements in Scotland and (to a much smaller extent) Wales, a real estate bust, bailed out banks and painful (and largely avoidable) austerity.
rhwombat
[email protected]: Tony Abbott – all smuggle, no budgie.
tjbt
As an Aussie, thank-you Sarah for a better summation of out political situation tahn our media is able to provide.
A few highlights from the Rudd/Gillard governments:
Duting the GFC, $900 cheques sent to every taxpayer to promote spending. Infrastructure projects for schools. Free insulation of 1 million homes. High speed rail funding. By the way, Austrlia currently has an unemployment rate of 5.1%, one of the lowest tax rates in the OECD and we’re quite concerend about the fact that our dollar is at record high’s compared to the USD and Euro.
A well proposed (but watered down) tax on mineral mining profits
A carbon emissions trading scheme (the delay of which was the beginning of Rudd’s end)
A government owned fibre optic network providing high speed (up to 1Gbps) internet to 93% of the country. Satellite and LTE to cover the remaining 7% of the population living in rural and remote areas (and at the same price we pay in cities)
And the poll numbers show that a plurality of us here in Australia would prefer a sneering, sanctimonius arsehole with slogans for policies (STOP THE BOATS! PAY DOWN THE DEBT!!!)
It’s fucking depressing. That said, it could be worse. I could live in America.
Danack
@Sarah Proud and Tall: “I’m being harsh. There seem to have been some wins, but not much success at making any electoral capital out of them.”
The things that she’s standing up for are being opposed quite heavily by the media in Australia even though they’re supported by the majority of people e.g. limits on how much people can lose on pokies per day, vast public support but every talk radio host keeps going on about how ‘people’ don’t like it. Same thing for the carbon tax, most people in Australia are terrified by the thought of the climate heating up (cause it’s too hot already) but the radio hosts keep saying it’s a ‘controversial’ issue.
Anyway, I suspect now that Rudd’s out of the picture and not causing trouble, the labour government should run a lot smoother, particularly as people realise the only choice now is between Gillard and Tony Abott, who appears to be a complete nutcase.
Jason
Australia has a four party system. Therefore quoting Gillard’s primary vote support at 35 percent is meaningless and supremely disingenuous. As previous posters have pointed out, the two-party preferred vote is 46-54, problematic but hardly a world-shattering margin.
Rafer Janders