bolt on gillard, page-7

now she's lost annabel

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/11/12/3065051.htm

A horrifying possibility emerges.

All these months, we've been assuming that there was no lasting handover deal between Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.

We've assumed it based on a number of observable clues.

Like the nauseous incapability each exhibited, for a while, to enunciate the other's name in public.

Or the fact that Ms Gillard's team treated Mr Rudd, during the campaign, with all the transfixed caution accorded to an unattended, mysteriously ticking shopping trolley in a Jerusalem marketplace.

Or - I don't know - the fact that their face-to-face meeting, when it did come, was a staged map-reading with all the relaxed bonhomie of an encounter in the Fritzl basement.

These factors screamed: Unresolved Tensions.

But I am having increasing doubts, and it's not just based on Mr Rudd's seamless acquisition of the Foreign Affairs portfolio.

It appears that some kind of amnesty arrangement has been extended, by the Prime Minister, to Mr Rudd's vocabulary.

Ms Gillard began her stint as Prime Minister with a press conference that was blissfully free of detailed programmatic specificities.

But something has happened in the interim.

Some mischievous worm has infested the prime ministerial cortex, adding rogue syllables, creating intransitive verbs willy-nilly, and otherwise taking simple concepts and obliterating them under a toxic sludge of jargon.

Interviewed by Laurie Oakes on Sunday, the Prime Minister promised that her Government's "crackdown" on mortgage exit fees would be "operationalised" this week.

But it was in her discussion of Australia's military commitment in Afghanistan that suspicions of a secret contra deal on Ruddisms were properly excited.

In Afghanistan, euphemisms grow as profusely as the opium poppy.

And the latest one is "transition".

"Transition" is what "Retreat" used to be until it was moved forward.

The United States and its allies in Afghanistan no longer discuss an exit strategy.

They discuss the "transition" to Afghan independence instead, because it sounds more constructive. It also buys them a few extra years, because "transition" is a process, while "exit" used to be a deadline.

And a certain person who was this week depicted in Seoul as a milkmaid seems to have grabbed the new word with both hands.

In her Sunday morning interview, there were several feats of conjugation.

"The talk in Afghanistan is all about transition, the way in which transition will occur, the conditions that will lead to transition," Ms Gillard began.

The Prime Minister quickly dispelled any irrational fears in the minds of Sunday-morning viewers that transition might be hasty, or ill thought-out.

"I dealt with this matter in the parliamentary debate and I've made it very clear that transition needs to be conditions-based," she told Oakes, whose famously impassive features did not betray even a hint of the relief that must have been coursing through his frame at the news.

But there is much more to transition than might have met the eye of a casual observer.

For instance, it can be a verb, as the PM effortlessly demonstrated.

"We should transition at a point that we are satisfied that Afghan security services can take the lead and that lead can be sustained," she said.

"I've been very clear. I think it would be a bad error to transition out only to have to transition back in."

The PM, a woman of significant personal self-effacement, is probably a little hard on herself here.

Having successfully reverse-transitioned on offshore refugee processing and reverse-reverse-transitioned on carbon pricing, it's entirely possible that she could manage something similar in Tarin Kowt.

But she seems immutable on the matter: "I've got a very firm view that we need to be very clear that when we are transitioning our forces and transitioning leadership to local Afghan forces, that that needs to be irreversible. So there's some intellectual labour that needs to be brought to bear when we say we're going to engage in a conditions-based transition."

Indeed, substantial intellectual labour does need to be brought to bear when we hear our Prime Minister talk about engaging in a conditions-based transition of any kind.

Substantial intellectual labour could, in particular, be brought to bear on the following question: "Who are you, Madam? And why have you borrowed Kevin Rudd's brain?"

The Prime Minister concluded with some chit chat about the United States' Force Posture Review, which turns out, disappointingly, to have very little to do with the Growler planes we're buying from them and everything to do with expanding American access to our bases.

Oakes paused for a moment before delivering what must be the punchline of the week.

"Are you developing a passion for this stuff yet?"

The old Julia Gillard might have got the joke.

But the new one responded with the customary treatise about her preference for ennobling children through education.

The best thing about Old Julia was that you could usually understand what she was on about.

Maybe, one day, we can transition back to that.