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“The Targeting of Julia Gillard” - Essay
- © Tony Kevin
20 March 2006 Julia Gillard is an
interesting politician with particular charisma. At least until
an awful ten days for her in early March 2006, many saw her as
a “genuine” politician attuned to ordinary people’s concerns,
and a potential future Labor Prime Minister of Something went very
wrong for Gillard between 6 and 15 March 2006. Much of No new statements
from Gillard were feeding the story after her initial comments
about Labor factionalism sapping the strength of the party, that
Kim Beazley needed to take a stand against it, and that he should
have stood by Simon Crean, made on ABC
Australian Story on
6 March and at the Sydney Institute on 7 March.
The “feed” was coming from entirely elsewhere. It is also noteworthy that Gillard’s critique
of factionalism in the ALP was notably milder that Senator John
Faulkner’s, in his Henry Parkes Memorial
Oration in Tenterfield NSW, on 22 October 2005. Gillard’s critique
of factionalism was, with ruthless irony, very quickly turned
against her, in efforts to demonize her and write her off as a
potential future Labor leader.
The media from the start took the line that Gillard’s ambition
to unseat Beazley was the news story, rather than the sensible
and moderate things she had said about a need for party unity
and inclusiveness. Most senior media were quickly persuaded of
a view that Gillard herself was the last leading member of a discredited
minority “Latham-Crean faction”, whose undying resentments against the Right
would sap the unity and strength of Labor under Kim Beazley and
destroy its chances of winning government. This conventional
media wisdom argued that Gillard now had to accept that history
had moved on, if she wanted to salvage any future frontbench career
in the ALP. It was claimed that she was clearly no longer Prime
Minister material or even Deputy Leader model, on the non-confrontational
Jenny Macklin model. As the week wore on,
the media story steadily became more personal and nastier, with
allegations about her hair, her voice, her private life, her claimed
lack of policy inputs in her shadow portfolios (this is readily
disprovable), her claimed disloyalty to her own Left faction,
her claimed inability to reach ordinary Australians (so how, one
wonders, did Helen Clark reach ordinary New Zealanders?). In this increasingly
vicious campaign, mostly waged in Murdoch newspapers,.
the most substantial attacks came from three heavy-hitting opinion
pieces in The Australian, by former Beazley
chief of staff Michael Costello (10
March), and two leading pro-Howard columnists, Christopher
Pearson (11 March) and Janet Albrechtsen
(15 March). How much of the attack
on Gillard was made possible by her own perhaps unwise public
frankness on 6 and 7 March, and how much was orchestrated by a rumoured Howard dirt unit, a supportive Murdoch press, or
an angry and threatened
Labor Right keen to discredit this attractive new contender from
the Left, is hard to say. A lot of people -
not all of whom have the best interests of the ALP at heart -
seemed to share a common agenda to discredit and diminish this
feisty woman politician. ** At the end of February,
Gillard was looking good. She had earned general media praise
for her clear and objective public advocacy of women’s right to
choose in the RU486 debate. Her work on this issue contributed
strongly to the conclusive defeat in a Parliamentary conscience
vote on 16 February of Tony Abbott’s preferred policy [a policy
tacitly endorsed by John Howard].
Her dramatic appearance
on ABC Australian Story on Monday 6 March and
her speech at the Sydney Institute on 7 March,
when she expressed pleasure that Simon
Crean had just fought off the Labor Right’s attempt to evict
him from his long-held parliamentary seat of Hotham,
might have just been unlucky timing. According to Michael Gordon
in The Age (“Waiting for Gillard”, 11 March
– a pro-Gillard feature article that came too late to reverse
the critical trend already set in concrete by then)
: “The fact that the Australian Story profile and Sydney Institute speech
coincided with the most bitter Victorian preselection
battle in years was just that, she [Gillard] insists, a coincidence. She agreed to the profile last year after
clearing it with Beazley's office, not knowing when it would be
televised. And she said yes to the Sydney Institute, a ‘good speaking
venue’, unaware that it would follow the local vote in the preselections.” It is not an insignificant but. In those appearances, Gillard Beazley's initial reaction was to increase
the temperature by accusing Crean of hypocrisy in requesting that
Beazley, as leader, should "stitch-up" a factional deal
to save Crean's skin. It is an accusation Crean dismissed. Whether this is indicative of the kind
of fracture that debilitated the Liberal Party in the Howard-Peacock
years may become clear on Monday, when the two meet in private
in Sydney, and over the weeks ahead. If there is no move from Beazley to be
more inclusive and embrace some form of party reform, and if his
critics are similarly unwilling to make concessions, the kind
of tensions that bubbled over this week could see Labor MPs face
a tough choice before year's end: do they stick with Beazley,
or turn to Kevin Rudd, who has performed strongly on the AWB scandal,
or Gillard? Gillard, for one, says she is optimistic
that stability will return and Beazley and Crean will (once again)
patch up their differences. "I know both of them. I've seen them
work together in what have been very difficult periods from time
to time, and they've both had the capacity for a remarkable focus
on the result and a preparedness to work together to get that
result — and the result, obviously, is a victory in 2007." She has also avoided any personal attack
on Conroy and compliments Pakula and his union for inviting her
to address an international women's day event even though she
campaigned hard for Crean in the preselection. "It is a testament to Martin that
he allowed that to happen. It says something about him and about
the union and the breadth of its outlook." As for party reform, Gillard says her
aim was to put two ideas that could be implemented by the federal
parliamentary party out for debate. Beazley has rejected the first proposition
— that the leader, not the caucus, choose the front bench — saying
it would make the leader a dictator and is the reason Petro Georgiou
is not a minister in the Howard Government. To this, Gillard says it depends on the
approach of the leader, adding that one option would be for part
of the ministry to be appointed by the leader and the rest elected
by the caucus. Beazley is receptive to at least exploring
the second idea — for the four members of the parliamentary leadership
group to withdraw from factional involvement — saying it is "worth
a chat". Moreover, he is open to discussion on other proposals,
provided it is conducted in a civil manner. And there is no shortage
of ideas from the likes of Gillard, Kelvin Thomson, Joel Fitzgibbon,
John Faulkner, Bob McMullan and Barry Jones. Others have not been so charitable. Michael
Costello, for instance, has accused Gillard of breathtaking hypocrisy
because she was the beneficiary of a factional deal when she first
won preselection for the seat of Lalor in 1997. It is a cheap shot because it misses the
point. Gillard does not deny playing, and benefiting from, the
factional game. Her argument is that the situation has become
so serious, especially when it comes to small, unrepresentative
groups choosing candidates, that something has to be done. Indeed, she cites her own example to prove
her point that factional labels have become meaningless in the
modern Labor Party. "Nicola Roxon (a member of the Right)
and I went into federal Parliament on the same day and, if someone
had met us when we gave our first speeches and questioned us about
politics, I don't think they would have walked away and said that
woman is uniquely left and the other woman is uniquely right,"
she says. Much earlier, before Gillard failed in
two initial bids for preselection, her application to join the
Left in Melbourne was rejected because she was considered too
far to the right. One of those who blocked her path back
then, Franz Timmerman, takes a different view now. "If she
was running for the leadership, I'd do whatever I could to support
her," he tells The Age. Not that she is running. Not yet, anyway.
"What I said on Australian Story I meant," she
says during an interview over lunch near her Werribee office. "If, in the dim and distant future,
well down the road, the Labor leadership were vacant, I would
think about it then. But it's never been in my nature, particularly
having seen what happened with Simon, to believe it's about destabilising
leaders." FULLY BOOKED
■ Sydney Institute and European-Australian
Business Council in Sydney.
■ National Union of Workers international
women's day event at Optus Oval.
■ Australian Institute of Management's
Outstanding Women's Series.
■ 'Relaxed and Comfortable: Challenging
John Howard's Australia' conference at Victorian Trades Hall Council.
JULIA Gillard can be feisty, funny, forensic,
tough and combative. But another quality was on show when she
addressed a modest gathering of true believers at the Trades Hall
Council yesterday: a capacity for understatement. "I have had a bit of a busy week,
as you might have seen, making speeches in a variety of circumstances,"
she began. A bit busy? You might have noticed? A
variety of circumstances? Truth is, this has been a watershed week
in the political career of one of Labor's rising stars, just as
it was in the life of Simon Crean. First came the profile on the
ABC's Australian Story, aired as Crean secured a crushing
victory over those intent on ending his political career. Then came her clarion call speech to the
Sydney Institute for a more courageous Labor Party and for a wholesale
assault on "out of control and destructive factionalism". And, yes, there was criticism of Kim Beazley,
too, most of it related to his treatment of Crean. The decision
to demote Crean in the shadow ministry last year was, Gillard
told Australian Story, ill-conceived, as was the decision
not to offer Crean full support in his preselection battle. "Not offering that kind of support
to Simon risks opening a whole lot of old wounds in the federal
parliamentary Labor Party and it would be better for us all, particularly
better for Kim, if those wounds weren't reopened," she said. There was even a speech to a function
hosted by the National Union of Workers, the union that had backed
the challenge by its state secretary, Martin Pakula, to Crean's
preselection. Here was a woman prepared to enter potentially hostile
territory. To the casual observer, and certainly
to her critics, the appearance was of Gillard, 44, launching her
run for the top job, and — in combination with Crean's challenge
to Beazley's leadership style — signalling the start of another
bout of instability in the federal Labor caucus. As Beazley's
former chief of staff, Michael Costello, wrote in yesterday's
Australian: "The past few days have seen a calculated
attempt to destabilise him and promote herself." Sometimes, however, things are not what
they seem in politics, and Gillard insists this week is one such
occasion. "I can understand that, in a difficult week, people
are given to over-interpretation," she says of the idea that
she is up and running, "but it's wrong." The fact that
the Australian Story profile and Sydney Institute speech
coincided with the most bitter Victorian preselection battle in
years was just that, she insists, a coincidence. urged Beazley to move beyond factionalism towards a more inclusive approach. She pledged her full support to the leader up to the next election, but she criticized Beazley’s making "the wrong call" in refusing to help Crean, and thereby risking opening old wounds that were better left unopened: A textual analysis of how the media spun the Gillard story in the ensuing nine days reveals much about how Australian political and media machines work together these days to shape public agendas and public perceptions of particular politicians. A silk purse can be made out of a sow’s ear, and the reverse can happen too, as stories build and feed off themselves. There are no insider revelations here – I have only met Gillard once, in 2001. I have no particular bias, except that I despise any demeaning of women politicians. This piece is necessarily heavily selective: it is based on a longer referenced media analysis I did (available on request).
On 14 February, SMH journalist Louise Dodson profiled Gillard and Liberal
MP Julie Bishop [“Men's club could be in for a shock”]: “In Parliament they are both regarded - grudgingly by some colleagues - as
star performers. …Gillard daily pits her skills as the Opposition's
health spokeswoman and daily parliamentary tactician against one
of the Government's toughest players, Abbott. She is master of
the taunt as much as the tirade, and because a light touch is
seldom seen in Parliament, it sometimes succeeds where more traditional
attacks are easily rebuffed … Both women have been talked about
as future leaders, often to the chagrin of their male competitors
in Parliament, but both would have problems getting the numbers”.
On the upcoming On the vexed Labor preselection issue, Glenn Milne commented presciently in The Australian on 14 February that if Beazley needed a shot across his bow, Gillard had fired it at the National Press Club last week Asked about whether Crean should stay on, Gillard had given him a five-star endorsement. Now, in the Beazley camp, the knives were out for Gillard, reported Milne. By 5 March, Gillard’s
public position on the divisive Crean
issue had hardened: Chris Tinkler reported in the Commenting on Crean’s win on 6 March , Laurie Oakes
wrote {MSN 6 March}, “The big winner will probably be Crean's closest ally, Julia Gillard, who is now unashamedly staking her claim to future leadership of the party. While the Hotham pre-selection votes were being counted, she was touting her wares on Australian Story ... This was a job application. For Beazley's job.” ** Matt Price was
scathing in “The Sketch”, in The
Australian, 7 March
(“Shy Julia airs her ambitions”) :
“Gillard's performance will galvanise caucus
divisions about the talented wannabe leader. Admirers tout the
intelligent, combative Victorian as Labor's next big thing. As
many others cringe at the prospect of shy Julia assuming a leadership
role …”. The same day, Michael Bachelard and Samantha Maiden commented in The Australian that Gillard’s statements on ABC “threatened to open a new rift in the party” . Gillard gave her speech at the Sydney Institute, repeating her Australian Story views, early on the evening on 7 March. Over the next two days, all hell broke loose in the media. ** The well-regarded AAP news agency reported on 8 March, in “I'd run for PM - but not yet”. This was a factually balanced report of Gillard’s expressed views. But the story was already away and running. A news analysis by Peter Hartcher and Mark Metherell in the SMH,
“Labor's angry forces plot life after Beazley”, suggested that
the federal Labor Party had entered a
new phase of unrest and divisiveness that threatened the future
of Kim Beazley as leader. Gillard’s
speech had been “a swipe at Mr Beazley's
management … But Mr Beazley's supporters are even more critical of Ms Gillard,
calling her treacherous and ‘grossly disloyal’ after her open
criticism of her leader ...”. Hartcher in SMH, “Some Dirty Dancing
…”, concluded that Labor had now returned to what it did best
- doing battle with itself. An
openly hostile piece by Phillip Coorey
in The Advertiser, “Gillard mixes disdain for Beazley
with a call for leadership loyalty” cited
views of unnamed Caucus critics of Gillard: “ ‘Everyone knows she could be leader one day. She doesn't need to do this,’
said one senior Caucus member. Ms
Gillard is a figure of interest to the broader public and keen
to promote herself. Yet she chooses to damage herself in the eyes
of her colleagues, the majority of whom either support Beazley
or are mortified at Labor disintegrating just as the party has
become competitive.” . ** Matt Price returned to his theme in The Australian on 9 March, “Labor divided along lines of fear and loathing”. He wrote that “the once-powerful Gillard” complains she's been sidelined under Beazley, and that many in Caucus dislike her intensely. There are those on the Left who believe Gillard, “nominally a fellow traveler”, sold out by producing a hardline post-Tampa immigration policy under Crean. Gillard's flair for publicity, much in evidence this week, also invited derision and suspicion; and her.sustained support of Latham infuriated many Labor MPs. Nick Leys recalled
Gillard’s Latham connections in The
Australian on 9 March, “Gillard takes leaf out of Latham”.
He wrote that her Sydney Institute speech was “straight
out of the Mark Latham textbook”, and that Gillard had been one
of Latham's closest parliamentary colleagues during the last election
and a politician he named as a future Labor leader. ** The next day 10 March, Crikey (again, perhaps, in an accident of timing?) published a recent Roy Morgan Internet poll of 2248 Crikey readers which produced the following remarkable result: Q. If you were a Labor party voter, and helping to choose the Labor leader
for the next federal election, who would you prefer?
Carmen Lawrence criticized Gillard with Maxine McKew on ABC Lateline 10 March: :“I think it's important that people who are on the frontbench, particularly, pull in behind the leader and they aren't making public comments that are critical of him, or undermining policy.” Encouraged by Ms Maiden went on in similar vein: “Ms Gillard has previously come under attack for her failure to have children and the austerity of her kitchen, after it was photographed by a newspaper without fruit in the fruit bowl”. Kim Beazley’s former Chief of Staff and now commentator Michael Costello weighed in, in The Australian on 10 March, “End Labor revisionism and face facts”. He accused Gillard of breathtaking hypocrisy about factionalism from which her career had benefited. He suggested that since January 2005, she had never missed an opportunity to tear at Beazley, and the past few days had seen a calculated attempt by her to destabilize Beazley and promote herself. He continued: “Gillard is the present media darling. Just like Kernot did, she presents herself as an aggrieved party, nobly wanting to do only what is good for the party but hindered by dark and sinister forces”. Costello claimed (this could readily be refuted, e.g on RU 486) that Gillard had not laid a glove on Abbott or on government health policy in all the time she has been in the job. Malcolm Farr, in the
Daily Telegraph on 10 March:, “Gillard keeps ALP bickering” (note the accusatory title) reported that
a bitter backlash was gathering strength in the ALP against
Julia Gillard. He predicted that Gillard's
bid for leadership of Labor would fizzle. ** On 11 March The Australian ran a crushing critique by Christopher Pearson, “Something about Julia”, which had clearly involved a great deal of research into Gillard’s past. He suggested that she had risen in Caucus almost without policy trace, and it was hard to see what she really believed. As immigration spokeswoman she had constructed a policy very like the Government's. Latham had approved of her: "I like Gillard because she has a go. She's the opposite of white bread: feisty, irreverent, good sense of humour, the closest thing we have to charisma in caucus ... steady and sensible." But, suggested Pearson, “Julia just doesn't put in the hard yards. – her work in the shadow Health portfolio is “mostly a matter of winging it and posture politics”. Pearson went on to excoriate her broad, grating proletarian accent, her “wilful philistinism” in buying a house in industrial Altona in Melbourne overlooking a petrochemical plant and in her former employment as a lawyer at Slater and Gordon, "the ultimate ambulance-chasing law firm”. Pearson finally questioned whether she was a really serious politician. After all this, it
was a relief to read Michael Gordon’s lengthy sympathetic piece
in The Age on 11 March, “Waiting
for Gillard”, which I won’t attempt to summarise
here. ** But the damage had been done. On ABC Insiders on Sunday 12 March, Paul Kelly suggested that the NSW right –wing machine wanted to ensure that Julia Gillard was not the next leader of the Labor Party. If Beazley ceases to be a viable leader, they will switch their support to Kevin Rudd. The new leader won't be Julia Gillard, sad Kelly. In the Sunday Mail on 12 March, [“Julia's jump to the right”] Glenn Milne reported a leaked story of damaging claims that Gillard had tried to switch factions last year in a bid to boost her chances of becoming ALP leader. ** The next day, 13 March, Samantha Maiden in The Australian reported Gillard’s angry response to her critics [“Gillard slams 'lying cowards'”], and a warning from Labor frontbencher Joel Fitzgibbon that “launching a jihad on Ms Gillard” was not the way to build Labor unity. At that point, Labor stopped (one
hopes) the fratricidal public bloodletting of the past week. But
there was one final shot in The
Australian’s locker, a broadside by Janet Albrechtsen
on 15 March, in a piece titled “Julia won't be PM - Can anyone seriously imagine this aspiring Labor
leader appealing to the Howard battlers?”: According to Albrechtsen,
a Labor Party led by a left-wing feminist lawyer would be unelectable
in 2007, and this would be “only the start of the cascading catastrophe
that a Julia Gillard ascendancy would represent for Labor”. Here
are some representative quotes: ”Gillard is single and childless,
has the Mark Latham albatross hanging around her neck and has
been a strident critic of the “ According to
Albrechtsen, for mainstream Australians to vote for
Gillard is “as unthinkable as Australians electing, say, “Gillard and
co are having their Latham moment: crying
foul when things go awry”. “It's a big call
to describe Gillard as a bigger disaster than Latham. But it's
a prediction based on the cumulative effect of bad leadership
choices that risk sending Labor into political oblivion. Can Labor
really afford another crazy brave moment?”
Conclusion A lot of people from various political
and media quarters tried very hard between 6 and 15 March to comprehensively
destroy Julia Gillard’s faith in herself and her political future.
The contrast with the warm treatment of Gillard in February was
remarkable to non-Labor and non-media insiders. Gillard is tough and resilient,
and it is too early to write her off as a future Labor leader.
At least now she will know her enemies and the worst they can
throw at her. As Nietsche truly said, “that which does not kill me makes me
stronger”. The vehemence of the attack, coming
from both Labor people and people one would expect to be opposed
to any Labor government, raises this question for me: Is Gillard
really too “proletarian”, too feminist, or too
far to the Left, to be
electable in conservative-mainstream Australia? Or is it perhaps
precisely because Gillard does has the authenticity and populist
charisma to be an electable Australian
Labor Prime Minister in the 21st century ( remember
that Crikey poll and others like it)
– she is only 44 still
- that certain people felt
she had to be ruthlessly cut down now, before
her career advances much further ? I don’t think this week will destroy Gillard’s political career. But I am sure it is a week she will remember as one of her worst in politics. © Tony Kevin
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