As has been true since 2010, our aspiring leaders seem to be determined to outdo each other in silliness this week. Since Julia Gillard will (with 90 per cent probability) be nothing more than a bad memory in a year’s time, while Tony Abbott will be an unavoidable reality, I’m going to ignore Gillard’s “Rob Peter to Pay Paul” aprroach to funding Gonski and talk about the National Broadband Network.
The Abbott-Turnbull proposal for a cutprice NBN has been an amazing success in clarifying issues that previously seemed too complex to be resolved. Until now, it’s been far from obvious how to assess the NBN – the complaint that we didn’t have a benefit cost analysis was obviously silly in the absence of any easy way of quantifying the benefits. But now that we’ve seen the alternative – a 25MBps network, dependent on Telstra’s failing copper network and non-existent goodwill, it’s obvious that the NBN is the only option that gives us any hope of keeping up with the steady growth in demand for information. The claim that individual subscribers can choose to upgrade to fibre-to-the-premises appears to have collapsed in the face of expert scrutiny. Instead, it seems, we’ll end up with lots of street-corner boxes, which will have to be ripped out and replaced wholesale when their inadequacy becomes apparent.
Given that he is going to win the coming election anyway, Abbott could greatly improve his chances of re-election in 2016 by admitting his mistake and going with the existing NBN plan, maybe with some cosmetic tweaks. As a bonus, from Abbott’s POV, Turnbull would have to eat a lot of humble pie.
The same is true for the other slogans on which he’s relied so far, like “Stop the Boats’ and “Axe the Tax”. Thanks to Labor’s implosion, he can afford to dump them now, and replace them with something more realistic – there’s no shame in changing policies before an election.
I don’t expect Abbott to take this unsolicited advice, but he could look at the cautionary lesson provided by Bligh, Gillard and NSW Labor among others, and consider carefully whether it’s better to take a few lumps now, or gain office on the basis of commitments that will prove a millstone, whether they are abandoned or adhered to.
[Comments are closed]
* I know, this quote attributed to Thomas J Watson is apocryphal, as is a similar one attributed to Bill Gates, but lots of similar statements have been made in reality, and they’ve all proved to be silly. For example, I can remember people saying in the early 80s that 8-bit address space of 64k (a double octet) were all we would ever need. Many more people said, well into the 1990s, that graphical interfaces were an unnecessary luxury and that personal computers would always start with a C:> prompt.
John Quiggin 
In my PhD in public health, one of the issues I’m looking at is whether it’s possible to build a consensus around the value of equity and environmental sustainability that goes beyond adversarial party politics. Will send blog link when it is publicly available – I’d be interested in people’s comments. One of the barriers I’m currently exploring is the patriarchal foundations of knowledge. Better shut up for a while now and do some work! Cheers tks for interesting discussion.
Short of ‘something worth fighting for’ could be an admission on Gillard’s part that the ALP’s (and LNP) asylum policy is full of anomalies. Fran Kelly raised one of them on RN today regarding those asylum seekers adjudged to be refugees who have an adverse ASIO assessment. Some of these poor buggars have been locked up for three years by this ‘anomaly’ and have taken to hunger striking. Like Thatcher in the case of IRA hunger strikers, Gillard could offer nothing but a similar ‘hard line’ on refusing to respond to this form of protest.
Thatcher was a failure in Northern Ireland and Gillard seems intent on following her. Surely she realises that the limbo world that these people face cannot continue indefinitely. If she can’t bring herself to say something inspiring on this issue, that Abbott could hardly wedge her on in their mutual race to the bottom, then she fails any leadership test. Who else but Gillard can offer anything on this issue?
It is such a shame as her Gonski reforms, NBN and all the rest of it could have convinced me
Val I don’t read anybody questioning the existence of gender bias. We are saying there is no evidence whatsoever that it is colouring our opinions of the Gillard Government’s performance, and it is more than a little patronising (not to say offensive) for others to claim that we must be unconsciously biased because we just must be. One can justify criticism of any opinion by claiming it is motivated by unconscious bias – it’s just an exercise in empty rhetoric reminiscent of so many of the reflexive ‘racism!’ responses to any criticisms of Barack Obama.
Anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time will be well aware that ‘structural rather than individual issues’ have long been identified as Labor’s ‘core problem’ by many regular commenters. That does not absolve Gillard of her share of responsibility for the government’s current woes, starting with her extraordinarily ill-advised decision to challenge for the leadership in the way that she did.
In terms of her legacy, then yeah, probably, but let’s be clear here: Rudd gave up on idea of pricing carbon primarily because he was threatened to ditch it by 2 very senior cabinet ministers; one of which was Gillard. She didn’t believe in pricing carbon then, she didn’t believe in pricing carbon when she signed the deal with the Greens and she still doesn’t believe in price carbon now. There’s essentially no difference between her *private* beliefs and that of Abbott when it comes to pricing carbon. In fact, the similarities of the 2 are quite profound when it comes to that “whatever it takes” philosophy – he’s just a bit more honest about it.
I have a reply to Ikonoclast stuck in moderation (perhaps because I included a link?) The gist of it is that educated people should know that educated people are just as much subject to implicit attitudes as uneducated: this is one area in which education is not preventive. Moreover, the correlation between implicit and explicit attitudes is low (0.24; Hofmann, Gawronski,
et al. 2005). So have non-sexist explicit attitudes does not predict non-sexist implicit attitudes.
@Ken_L
“We must be unconsciously biased because we just must be”.
No, we must be unconsciously biased because more or less everyone is. I think the responses to the claim that sexism colours our perceptions confuses that claim with another one: sexism causes our perceptions. No one should conclude that they don’t have good reasons for their views.
a perfect illustration of the bias Val is talking about yet is vehemently denied by those who perpetuate it. It seems to me that she simply picked up the position when he walked away after it was made clear to him that most of the party had had enough of his inability to cope with the role. But you are certainly repeating the MSM version.
Re carbon pricing, quite frankly I don’t care whether any leader really believes in a policy as long as they enact it anyway. That means they are also culpable for the urgent reforms that they have failed to enact.
@Neil
OK, let’s say my main complaint with the government is their treatment of refugees. Let’s also say that I flatly refuse to in any way endorse a party that acts that way. Let’s say that as a result of sufficient numbers of other citizens also sharing that position, Abbott ends up being PM and LNP the government.
If that is just a fact, it probably doesn’t matter whether I am implicitly or explicitly sexist/biased does it?
Telling me I’m sexist but just aren’t self-aware enough to accept that doesn’t change my opinion of actions and policies.
I see in the Fairfax press that the polls are still pointing to an ALP loss.
Abbott’s rating (on one of the measures) was minus 10 and Gillard’s was minus 22.
It would be nice to have a potential leader who scored a positive result in that category.
@Megan
I am not suggesting that you don’t have good reasons for your views. It is possible that your reasons are confabulated, but you can’t constantly second guess yourself. You can only make a good faith effort to call things as you them (and I take it you are doing that). The practical upshot of discovery that we are all sexist is that we need to work on our sexism (by changing our environments: more exposure to positive female figures and less to negative; this is probably not something we can achieve on our own, since it requires changes in media, in actual proportions of women in leadership positions, and so on). Again, the likelihood is that for most people, their views of Gillard are somewhat less positive than they would be were she male. But we can demonstrate this only at the group level, not the individual level: you can’t know whether, or to what extent, this is true of you.
@Neil
I don’t disagree with your point, but that doesn’t mean people do not try to eliminate psychological influences as best as they can. It also does not imply that sexism or negative implicit attitude towards woman being the main reasons why critics are critical of ALP policies.
To refute systematic policy evaluation (even biased evaluations) which conclusions are derived from technical reasons and evidence, you must also perform systematic evaluation and provide technical reasons (whether it be economic, legality, technological etc.) rather than using sexism or psychological influences as arguments.
@Tom
As I said before, Tom, I agree with very many of those policy evaluations. I can hardly intend to refute evaluations with which I agree. All – *all* – I am doing is dissenting from those people who have asserted, multiple times, on this thread and others, that sexism has nothing to do with their attitudes toward Gillard. The only epistemically responsible position, in light of the massive amounts of data, is to acknowledge that sexism probably plays some – perhaps small – role in our evaluations. I agree it does not imply that sexism is “the main reason why critics are critical of ALP policies”.
@Val
Here’s what I had to say about Paul Keating
.
And here are my thoughts on Bob Hawke, expressed in verse, and with a note that “the theme of a radical labor leader who becomes markedly less radical in office will persist as long as we have radical labor leaders (not that there are many around right now)”.
Since Thatcher’s name has been raised a couple of times already, I think it’s appropriate to ask the Gillard supporters here how they would apply their arguments to Thatcher. As with Gillard, some of the attacks on her have adopted misogynistic themes. The generic arguments about bias are just as applicable to Thatcher as to Gillard.
So, should UK lefties have supported Thatcher, or at least qualified their criticism of her to offset unconscious bias? If not, why should Gillard (whom no-one here has been willing to defend in substantive policy terms) be supported on the basis of her gender?
I do think there are grounds for thinking that criticism of Thatcher should be tempered very, very slightly, on this basis. I suspect that she is more hated than Cameron for reasons that may include gender, though I think there may be grounds for disliking her only as much. But again since we can’t detect the influence of AIs at the individual level, and we are required to muddle through as best we can despite acknowledging their existence, I don’t take the practical upshot to focus on our response to this or that policy or person. Rather the practical upshot involves means of trying to avoid the attitudes in the first place. Analogous questions arise all the time. Consider the influence of the fact that we have personal commitments to universities in our assessment of the robbing-Peter-to-pay-Paul aspect of Gonski. Are there grounds for thinking that because we are motivated this may influence us? Absolutely. Does that mean that what we have to say is worthless or merely the expression of our motivations? Of course not.
Coming back to the point of the original post, I think John is right. I long suspected that NBN critics were right and it was expensive gold plating. Now that we have seen what the practical alternative is, though, I reckon Conroy’s judgement has been thoroughly vindicated (and I don’t usually have a lot of time for Stephen Conroy).
I cannot understand why, given the history, any government would be willing to entrust itself to Telstra’s tender mercies again. I cannot understand why you’d go for a far slower, less reliable, more expensive to maintain (fibre doesn’t mind water, copper does) and far less flexible sytem to save, on your own figures, only about a quarter of the total construction cost. It makes no sense.
@Neil
Neil with respect, your multiple comments can be summed up as claiming people’s attitudes to Gillard are influenced by sexism because everybody’s must be. But then again nobody can know whether in any individual instance this amounts to a little bit of influence or a lot – not even the person concerned, because the bias is unconscious. That sounds dangerously like the evangelical Christian argument that if we don’t know Jesus we are miserably unhappy, even though we don’t realise it.
Even if we accept your point for the sake of the argument, does it have any practical relevance to this discussion? Or do we just throw our hands up and say it’s impossible to discuss the performance of any female objectively so why bother trying?
I have not read much literature on gender bias lately but I don’t recall it concluding that ‘we are ALL sexist’. Does that mean that even Val’s largely positive attitude to Julia Gillard is still biased against her by her unconscious sexism? Frankly I would need a lot more than a few controlled experiments to be persuaded that such a universal proposition has substance. I expect that the sympathetic attitude that not a few people have towards Gillard reflects conscious or unconscious POSITIVE bias towards women. But again, so what? Her decisions and actions can be examined on their merits, which has largely been the case on this blog.
@Ken_L
Ken: I didn’t say “we are all sexist”. I said “the overwhelming majority of us are sexist”. Here’s a reference. Nosek, Banaji & Greenwald 2002.
I’m not sure how to interpret your demand for more than a “few controlled studies.” Do you want more than a few? Or do you want uncontrolled studies? Perhaps you want a lot of controlled studies, backed up by large scale quantitative and quality studies in the wild. Perhaps you want studies that combine laboratory-based work with real-life interventions and measures of performance. I can provide all these things. I will overwhelm you with quantity: if you want meta-analyses or examples of studies combining inside and outside the lab manipulations let me know and I will tell you which ones are most relevant.
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Neil please read your own comments again before telling us what you did or did not write. I don’t invent direct quotes. I refer you to your comment #10: ‘The practical upshot of discovery that we are all sexist …’. But I’m glad you now concede that your claim was wrong.
Two things irritate me about the NBN debate (and I expect I’d find more if I paid more attention)
1. The entire emphasis is on the connection to people’s homes, with no mention of what backhaul improvements are to be done. I’m fortunate enough to have an ADSL2+ connection which syncs at 18Mbps, and it is very rare for me to saturate that — the bottleneck is always elsewhere. Fibre to the exchange, without other changes, would do nothing for me.
2. NBN proponents love to pretend that is is vital for applications which can and do use other technologies — e.g. smart meters, which need negligible bandwidth, or ‘next big things’ where the obstacles are really in, and will remain in, other institutions, e.g. e-medicine. I have enough bandwidth now to have a teleconference with a doctor, but I don’t believe and such service is on offer.
@Ken_L
Yeah, that’s wrong; badly put at very least. I think both parts of the claim need qualification. It’s not all of us, it is almost all of us (the predictor is not education levels or explicit belief, by the way). And I think there is a case for denying that having negative implicit attitudes toward women entails *being sexist*. It does entail sometimes being biased in one’s assessments of the achievements and qualities of women. The likelihood is that for each of us, our assessments is somewhat biased in this way.
Val,
As I agree with you on many things it is rather easy for me to respect your opinion. I hope it is clear that even when I disagree with you, I still respect your opinion. FWIW I couldn’t be further from being a Canberra insider – isn’t that obvious – I like Rudd.
There are many reports that Gillard was against the CPRS as deputy (both on and off the record) including Maxine McKew’s book which claims she went so far to put an ultimatum to Rudd over dropping the ETS. This undermines the main argument for her ascension as the main mistake Rudd made; was made despite his reservations and under intense pressure from her.
Rudd and Gillard rose to the the labor leadership on an anti-factionalism platform. Gillard changed her mind and with factional support became prime minister. There is nothing inherently good or bad about the factions, but in this case it seems to have been exercising power in order to maintain control even at the possible expense of loosing government. It is a puzzling thing that Gillard is so much less popular than Rudd with a very similar lists of policies, gender may come in to that, but so will many other things including her ascension, her political judgement and her (fortunately unsuccessful) attempts to appeal to xenophobia.
Many opinions expressed are often an attempt to balance a debate. To my mind the analysis of the Rudd government particularly by his colleagues has been hysterical, unfair and self serving. Although, I don’t dismiss Rudd’s failure to go to a double dissolution over the ETS.
I understand that it is reasonable to balance hysterical criticism of Gillard in some areas of the press by pointing to good things she has done, and yes there are quite a few. Some criticism of Gillard may get an easier ride due to sexism, some but not all. I don’t think there is any evidence JQ is guilty of this. I actually think it is also unfair to apply it to much of the press.
@Ian Milliss
The problem with this position is that we are not talking about Gillard’s belief or disbelief. We are talking about her active opposition to a carbon price as deputy prime minister. Like you, I care very little about the private beliefs of political actors. I do care about the political acts of political actors.
The other problem, of course, is that Gillard’s yes-no-never-yes on carbon pricing is one of the major reasons that a policy which once enjoyed very broad popular support no longer has that support. The Gillard ‘achievement’ on carbon pricing will last about as long as it takes for the repeal bill to go through the next parliament. In the course of using the CPRS to destroy Rudd, Gillard also managed to destroy her own prospects as prime minister.
… this discussion has made me wonder about the following question:
What would a pro-carbon-price, anti-factional-power senate how-to-vote card look like?
@David Rohde
It wouldn’t have any members of the ALP or LNP on it!
I’ve been trying to get solid figures on the number of times ALP & LNP have voted together in the current senate to pass legislation opposed by the other senators. At a guess (from listening to quite a few senate divisions on the radio) I’d say it is about 80% or higher.
Speaking as someone who accepts that misogyny has played a part in the position that the PM finds herself in …
I don’t share the view that all of us or most of us or even most men are ‘(un)/consciously sexist’. I don’t know how anyone could begin to measure that and more importantly, outline the ‘quality’ of the sexism discovered.
There can be little doubt that at the level of public discourse, the visceral hostility of the boss class to the ALP-led regime has been manifest in displays of gender-bias, within the Old Media and to some extent in the new media as well. This in turn has rendered normative resort to constructions of Gillard in popular discourse that are obvious examples of sexism/misogyny. One need not ask what mental or cultural states inform these expressions of angst to situate them within very longstanding male-gender exclusive usages.
IMO, ‘sexism’ has acted as a kind of bonding agent amongst many (especially but not exclusively) on the right, who wish for one reason or another to eject the ALP regime. I don’t suppose for a moment that sexism is anything more than an amplifier or positive feedback mechanism in the decline in the apparent popularity of the ALP regime. If sexism formed only a trivial part of popular usages or was limited to rusted on Coalition voters, it would have played almost no part at all in the ALP’s decline.
The problem is that the ALP has long relied on socially marginalised and quite socially conservative people for its mass appeal. It has often presented it as a party for “every day Australians” who “set their alarms early” “who see dignity in labour” contrasting themselves with the inauthentic ‘inner city elites’ — us ‘latte-sipping Greens’ — hence the pandering over refugee-queue jumpers and 457 visas.
This crowd tends to be pretty unabashed about having ‘non-PC’ attitudes to women, gays, foreigners, dole bludgers, youth, laura norder etc … It’s hardly surprising that misogynist commentary would resonate with them and that Gillard would struggle to come up with an effective response to it. Having valorised their angst, she is going to struggle to confront them on her gender’s claims to equal dealing whatever we of the latte-sipping set might say.
Margaret Thatcher here stands as the exception that proves the rule. As a right-wing woman, she was largely immune from sexist critique, precisely because the left was leary about opening this door. Moreover, she fully embraced one of the acceptable modes of being for strong women — the overbearing school ma’am who knows that what the kiddies need is a firm hand — spare the rod and spoil the child. The boss class was very pleased and the right more generally loved her brutishness. In this case, she was able to reconcile bullying conduct with an acceptable (sex-based) identity. She was of course married (to a man widely seen as “not wearing the trousers”) and had children, thus ticking the box for authentic rightwing womanhood. Gillard, being unmarried and childless, doesn’t tick these boxes — and of course it is mainly the right who are seeking the ouster of her regime. They of course, can say anything.
Actually if you care more about carbon pricing and less about politics, you should care much less about the historical details of the positions held by the various key players and much more about their contemporary beliefs. That’s fundamental of how such controversial policies are “sold” to the constituency or how effectively the constituency is educated about the facts. If the leadership has a complete disinterest in the science as has been proven beyond any doubt, then the champions of the cause will always be fighting an uphill battle.
@Fran Barlow
Fran, go and do an implicit association test for gender (google it). That measures the degree to which you associate women or men more with leadership, intelligence, or whatever other qualities the researchers are interested in. IAT measures correlate well with a variety of other measures, including electrical potentials in the brain and degree of activities in fear related areas of the brain (wrt to negative attitudes toward blacks). They also predict behavior. They predict eye contact, they predict likelihood of listening without interrupting to someone. They also predict a propensity to hire people with the relevant characteristics over others, with everything else held constant. Thee are lots and lots of other things they measure, including how people assess themselves (women underestimate their competence at maths; IAT scores predict degree of underestimation).
@Neil
I dunno… I just remember Bob Katter’s comment to that question before the last Qld election: (to paraphrase) “I don’t know about this sexist thing, at the moment I live in a State lead by a female Premier, in a country lead by a female Prime Minister with a female Governor General and a female Head of State [insert wispy Katter Chuckle]”
@Neil
Fran, go and do an implicit association test for gender (google it).
Neil, I have no wish to deny that people have biases, but I gotta say I think you’re reading way too much into those tests.
I did some of them a couple of weeks ago (I think someone linked to them in another thread on this blog or over at LP).
Specifically, I did the tests on gender, aboriginality and sexual preference bias. My results rated me as having a bias towards women, aboriginal people and GLBT people. I am a white, heterosexual male.
Sorry, I just don’t think the results of the tests are reliable.
Sorry, left out the quotes around your comment.
@Tim Macknay
And even if the tests were ‘reliable’ (i.e measured something like sexism and could quantify it) they still wouldn’t tell us about how it mapped to actual conduct in the real world in every context or the numbers of people that fit the model, and if it became modified and less significant overt time etc …
Measuring mental states is a tough gig. I’m ready to stipulate that a good many people (and not merely men) are predisposed to marginalise women in many settings and likely to map these attitudes when it serves some wider perceived interest of theirs.
Going beyond such generalities is unsound, IMO.
Times have changed. Sexism used to be in your face. These days complicated psychological tests are needed to unearth its entrails
I agree that it’s too strong to say we are all sexist, but would still definitely say that criticism of JG as both incompetent and devious feeds into sexist stereotypes.
On which point, re Rudd and the CPRS: it could not get through in the first place because the Greens would not support it, and they have been quite clear that was because it was too weak. Then Rudd, who was the PM, chose not to go to a double dissolution. If people here are saying it was JG who made him do that, as you seem to be, it just reinforces my point – she is always to blame in your eyes. By your reasoning as far as I can see, if JG makes a mistake it’s her fault, no matter who advised her (and rightly so in my opinion, she is the PM), but if Kevin Rudd made a mistake, it was Julia Gillard’s fault as well. Doesn’t cut it as a defense against bias.
By the same token, I’ve just watched some videos of JG campaigning in 2010 and they are awful, so I have to concede that (although I thought John Howard was a total embarrassment and that didn’t stop him from winning). I hope and think that she has grown into the role since them, if only she could get some clear air.
Re some of JQ’s earlier comments, from my perspective Rudd spent two years undermining Gillard (longest dummy spit in history) and got away with it at least in part because of these perceptions of her as devious etc. if she had stepped down, even when he did not have the support of the majority of caucus, it would have been a terrible precedent.
@ John Quiggin
You say that JG has never supported a price on carbon. That contradicts both her public statements and what she has in fact done, so again it seems to me to suggest bias. I would prefer to accept the more economical explanation that what she said was actually true – she supported it but thought there needed to be a community consensus about it before it was introduced. I think if people are going to make such strong accusations, there needs to some pretty strong evidence to back them up, oherwise it does look like bias.
Oddly enough your skepticism does not move me in the face of a mountain of data, just some of which I have mentioned. It does predict real world behaviour. I’m afraid your response is no better informed or grounded than the skepticism of climate change deniers. I will stick to the data, you stay with your gut feelings and frankly uninformed criticisms.
Actually Rudd spent nearly three years undermining her (re previous comment)
Val,
I’m certainly not suggesting Rudd is a saint. Yup, he certainly has been undermining her in many phases of this current term as have other key players of the ministry and cabinet which is pretty poor form.
However, she has publicly conceded herself that she held a political gun to his head to drop the CPRS. BTW: the allegation that she never has supported a price on carbon was one I made, not JQ IIRC. Yup, she has publicly stated her support for the “deal” promised to the greens (of course she was obligated to), but why don’t you ask former Chief Scientist Penny Sackett about Gillard’s *real* desire to act on climate change! Please note the difference between *actions* that are forced on politicians and *actions* that aren’t but are in the interests of the constituents they represent. Why hasn’t she implemented any of the suggestions listed on this blog by clever people like Ken Fabian (IIRC) to sell or educate the electorate on the science of climate change?
I am almost computer illiterate but I reckon the NBN looks like a good pick for a winner long term. Why not pause some of the superannuation tax breaks for 3 or 4 years to pay for some of it.
I think the govt has lots of problems that add up to a 30% poll number. They are all interrelated but a short list in order
1) news ltd media
2) Incumbency – bad news stories adding up over the years
3) moving to the right
4) Labor white anting – Crean, Rudd etc
5) logistical / PR errors of policy implementation – errors and angry state govts etc
6) boats
7) gender bias – works both ways
I just noticed that T Abbott is not on the list !
As far as unconscious sexism goes I think many people don’t like to admit that kind of possibility as it implies radical doubt in general terms once its admitted. IAT empirical evidence isn’t the only path to that end.
Casting doubt aside , i would like to see some government do a bit of social engineering of the populace away from useless consumption . They would not be advised to call the department resposible ‘the department of social engineering ‘
The gender card is Abbotts because he and his mates are the ones who keep talking about it . Gillard stayed away from the issue for ages . If Obama mentioned race as a factor he would be flogged with it forever too.
Let’s all agree that reactions to female and male politicians are different, and that there is probably some net disadvantage for women. Still, lots of women have achieved high office here and in comparable countries, so the net disadvantage can’t be decisive. Similarly, Labor governments have generally faced a hostile media, but have still won their fair share. And virtually all political leaders have ambitious subordinates hoping to fill their place (mostly with less justification for “disloyalty” than Rudd, who was, after all, only repaying the favor in kind).
Gillard’s government is currently polling at 29 per cent. Whatever is going on here, it’s more than can be explained by generic references to media and gender bias, or by demonizing Kevin Rudd.
Again, I’ll ask – is anyone actually willing to defend Gillard on the merits? If not, isn’t defending her on the basis of her gender damaging to the whole idea that women should be judged equally with men.
I’ve just been looking over your article “Sceptics and suckers: A look back at Iraq”. Very poor, in my view, and in marked contrast to your economics essays.
Aside from all the poor arguments to support the claims of WMDs you fail to register on fundamental legal principles:
(1) There was never any immediate threat of military attack from Saddam, especially against the US.
(2) There was no UN mandate authorizing the invasion.
Absent these two items, the war was totally illegal. All 28 of the UK Foreign Office lawyers wrote to Tony Blair before the invasion telling him exactly that.
@John Quiggin
Don’t disagree with any of that (I hope that’s clear), except that of course in some situations small differences can be decisive because margins are tight. The case of Gillard is not one such situation.
@damien
WTF? Are you saying that the post is poor because I only mentioned the arguments that were decisive enough for me to oppose the war? Obviously there was no immediate threat (there were no WMDs!) and obviously the war was illegal (UNSC 1441 demanded inspections and Saddam agreed). You’re upset because I didn’t spell out every single point? This is a blog, not an encyclopedia.
To pick another issue that would be on my list: “Pokies”.
ALP promised Wilkie that he would get ‘reforms’, then dudded him as much as possible until all he got was a sliver of what he wanted – THEN refused to take it to the house of reps because “it wouldn’t get the numbers”.
I think I’m not the only person who remembers, consciously or subconsciously, that episode.
Rightly or wrongly I imagine a lot of people would see that as ALP walking away from a promise to placate powerful money interests (as well as their own “mates”).
@Val
The greens did not have the balance of power in the senate until 2010. One of the great myths of the Gillard defence is that the CPRS could have been strengthened and passed with Greens support. The reality is there not enough Green senators. The CPRS was crafted to try and draw the Coalition’s support. Unlike Gillard, Rudd did not have the luxury of a friendly senate.
Gillard is exalted by her defenders for dealing with the cross-bench in the house, although they have broadly supportive. Rudd is damned by Gillard’s defenders for dealing with an unfriendly senate violently opposed to most of his program. Like a lot of the Gillard defence, the exalted Gillard legislative record is preposterously counterfactual.
Exactly, the reason the CPRS was so weak initially is because to pass without liberal support it required xenophon, the greens and Steve Fielding (an active denier) to pass through the senate. If Rudd had the senate that Gillard has to deal with I suspect a lot of the issues around his apparent ‘inaction’ disappear, conversely if she was dealing with his senate then almost all of her achievements probably evaporate.
After all we can’t just gloss over the fact that she largely implemented leftover policies from the Rudd era
To add to this point, along with gifting a massive liberal majority in the HoR Gillard’s government seems likely to setback her potential successors with the collapse in the senate. A right-wing HoR might only last a few years but we’re stuck with this senate for two terms regardless
@ John Quiggin
I’ve actually listed quite a few things I think JG has done right, in several posts. You’ve ignored them. Your acceptance of sexism is also really begrudging, it’s hard to believe it means anything. I’m really surprised and disappointed by this.
John, would you have supported the war if it was lswful, and there were WMDs?
From tablet so typing worse than normal
I guess my starting point is that I don’t think an Abbott victory is inevitable, and I certainly don’t think LNP control of the Senate is inevitable. I think people on the left should be doing what we can to prevent it. Labor and JG are not perfect and in some ways they are appalling, but they are what we’ve got to work with. Of course we can first preference greens or even socialist alliance in my electorate, but we still have to put ALP before LNP at some point unless we actually want Abbott to win. If that happens, we stand to lose the carbon price and the NBN, we’ll go backwards on school funding equity and super and probably on private health insurance (they will all become more inequitable and more regressive) and that’s just for starters. The bigger victory Abbott gets, the worse it will be. And I stand by my positions:
That the continual bagging of JG from the left is contributing to the rise of Abbott
Sexism and bias against women has been an enabling factor in the bagging and undermining of JG
As for all this stuff about who had the best policies, who thought of them first, Rudd or Gillard, it’s BS. Sorry, but it just is. All of those policies I mentioned have been through huge amounts of development and debate. They don’t belong to any one person. Whether we preferred Rudd or Gillard just seems to me irrelevant now. I’ve worked with JG, and she’s a good manager and a good team leader, so I can understand why people chose her in preference to Rudd, who seems to have been a bit of a nightmare. But whatever the reasons, it’s happened, and it seems to me the best we can do is accept it and get on with working to ensure Abbott does not take over or at least his victory is minimized.