labor in strife, page-27

Gillard's kicking spectacular own goals

Miranda Devine
The Sunday Telegraph
February 02, 201310:00PM



IT REALLY wasn't an auspicious week for the prime minister to announce history's longest election campaign. Whether she chooses to call it a campaign or not, through a combination of bad luck and own goals, the omens for Julia Gillard have not been good.

It began on Monday night with her partner, Tim Mathieson's, unfortunate joke about choosing a "small Asian female doctor" to perform rectal examinations for prostate cancer.

It was the First Bloke's first official speech for the year, at a reception for the West Indies cricket team made right in front of Gillard, whose smile froze solid as the words emerged from his mouth.

In any reasonable environment, what he said would be written off as harmless blokey oafishness. But he fell victim to the anti-bloke jihad Gillard launched last year with her world-famous misogyny rant against Tony Abbott.

The PM's Bloke Trap was meant for the Opposition Leader, an Oxonian Rhodes scholar with degrees in economics and law, who is a bloke, but no oaf. Instead it has become a trap for all blokes, which is a predicament for Labor, the blokiest of all parties.

Own goal one.

Mathieson also fell victim to the outcry over the government's draconian proposed anti-discrimination laws, with their potential threat (since softened) of criminalising such jokes.

Double own goal.

On Tuesday, Rudd supporter Robert McClelland, the former attorney-general Gillard dumped from cabinet, announced he would not be contesting the election, amid reports he would join the bench of the NSW Industrial Relations Commission, and speculation about a by-election in his southern Sydney seat of Barton.

And there came a poll shocker showing Labor would lose up to 18 seats in the election.

Wednesday was Gillard, in her new glasses, with a crisp set-piece speech to the National Press Club and the problem of how to seize the moment, especially with Tony Abbott up the next day in the same venue.

Announcing September 14 as the election date seemed to hit the spot, although for NSW voters it evoked memories, unflattering to Labor, of other longed-for election days set by fixed terms far into the future.

Barely 24 hours later, two long-running Labor scandals hit the headlines.

Central Coast MP Craig Thomson, long protected by Gillard, was arrested, hardly a surprise to him or those he confides in, since Victorian police had invited him to surrender himself in Melbourne before Christmas, an offer they say he had declined.

Then there was former NSW Labor powerbroker Eddie Obeid and family before ICAC in an unfolding story alleging corruption from ill-gotten mining leases involving ministers in the governments of wait for it - Gillard's Foreign Minister, former NSW Premier Bob Carr and his successor Morris Iemma, now said to be a contender to take over McClelland's seat.

Labor's prospects are stinkier than durian in a Shanghai street market.

But there was worse to come. On Friday night, ALP vice-president Tony Sheldon gave an extraordinary speech at the Young Labor annual conference saying the party was suffering from a "crisis of belief brought on by a lack of moral and political purpose", and that the

NSW Labor Right had become "a byword for what is wrong with Australian politics".

A couple of hours later and the Opposition's Christopher Pyne was on ABC's Lateline, wiping the floor with a punch-drunk assistant treasurer (and marginal western Sydney seat-warmer) David Bradbury, hailed as one of Labor's rising stars, who didn't even know about Sheldon's speech.

Then, just before midnight on Friday, came the bombshell news, first tweeted by my colleague Peter van Onselen: First Chris Evans, leader of the senate, and third-most senior minister in the government, and then Gillard ally attorney-general Nicola Roxon, will quit cabinet and retire at the next election.

Oh, and all the while there was also Kevin Rudd, tweeting away innocently on Friday night, including a strange retweet of a spoof movie poster depicting him slaying foes with a chainsaw, while a buxom woman clings desperately to his leg.

Rudd, by the way, had begun the day popping up in his former slot on Channel Seven's Sunrise, opposite his old frenemy Joe Hockey, in what will be a weekly showcase of his talents.

All in all it was a messy start for a PM trying valiantly to defy poll figures showing a dispiriting trouncing for Labor, with a swag of western Sydney seats kaput.

Gillard put on a sunny face yesterday, as she always does, but you can't help but think she is over-strategising every move.

There's not much she can do about ICAC or the Victorian police, but her central campaign strategy of demonising Abbott is a cyanide pill which only exacerbates the empty, calculating cynicism corroding the core of modern Labor. In any case, giving Abbott a seven month platform in the hope he will better hang himself is high risk.

The fact is, that rough edges and all, and pathetically eager as he is to come across as a "good bloke", Abbott is not what Labor says he is. He's not "nuts", weird, or anti-woman, even though the female scold section of the chattering classes keep writing that he makes their "skin crawl".

Abbott and his family are refreshingly normal. They live in an unpretentious house in an unpretentious suburb surrounded by family and long-term friends. The kids work part-time in shopping malls and do volunteer work. The working mum does volunteer work.

The dad has an unusual job that often takes him out of town but he also volunteers.Demonising Abbott demonises any suburban family bloke. You can't draw an imaginary line between them. And it will prove to be Gillard's most profound own goal.

In the marginal seats where this election will be won or lost - former Labor heartland turned relatively affluent aspirational - blokes abound and the women who are married to them like it that way.