Yesterday was a day like no other in parliament, with Julia Gillard’s impassioned attack on Tony Abbott and finally Peter Slipper’s resignation from the speaker’s chair. So who won the politics? The nation’s opinion writers have their say …
Jennifer Hewett, The Australian Financial Review:
“This is dangerous and desperate territory for Labor and Gillard as much as it is for the Liberals and Abbott. There is already a bizarre new emphasis on sexual politics in Australia, with Margie Abbott belatedly coming out last week to defend her husband’s attitude to women and condemn Labor for playing the gender card to shut down policy debate. Relief over Slipper’s resignation will be temporary.”
Geoff Kitney, The Australian Financial Review:
“Yesterday Gillard made a terrible error: she made a passionate and angry speech attacking Abbott for double standards and misogyny. But then she offered a weak and dissembling explanation as to why it was not the time to take any action to deal with Slipper despite his appalling language, which reflected attitudes beyond anything Abbott has ever indicated … Despite Slipper’s resignation last night, yesterday Gillard’s judgement failed her.”
Dennis Shanahan, The Australian:
“Gillard’s parliamentary presentation was brilliantly ferocious, emotionally stirring and evocative of a wronged and injured party. But the substance and argument fell well short of an acceptable political strategy and risked only alienating more voters disenchanted with the grubby, hypocritical and personal abuse from both sides of parliament.”
Peter van Onselen, The Australian:
“Is it possible for a political party and a prime minister to have more egg on their collective faces than Labor and Julia Gillard do right now? … The Greens and the independents who sided with the government to defend Slipper’s right to retain the speakership should also be embarrassed.We are in for an extremely brutal period in Australian politics between now and the next election if yesterday’s question time was anything to go by. “
Phillip Coorey, The Sydney Morning Herald:
“With Labor’s Anna Burke to replace Mr Slipper as the Speaker, the government will need the support of five of the seven crossbenchers to win a vote by 75 to 74. The Coalition needs just three.”
Peter Hartcher, The Sydney Morning Herald:
“The moment Gillard rose to defend Slipper and keep him in office, she chose to defend the indefensible, to excuse the inexcusable. The government had spent a month vilifying Tony Abbott for having ‘a problem with women’. But when one of the bulwarks of the government was exposed as having a problem with women, it was suddenly acceptable.”
“The government is well rid of Mr Slipper, but the sequence of yesterday’s events was a bad look for it. Julia Gillard and other government speakers were forced to defend on dubious grounds Mr Slipper continuing in his job, when his situation had become indefensible.The Prime Minister threw everything into her argument, which revolved around trying to pin the ‘misogynist’ label on the Opposition Leader. It was perhaps the only weapon available to her, but it sounded more desperate than convincing.”
“The screeching of the most senior members of the Gillard government and the Abbott opposition yesterday was the sound of Australia’s Parliament scraping the bottom of its barrel … Mr Slipper, of course, wasn’t there to see the vote or to hear the Parliament scraping its barrel. But he heard it from a distance, and ended up making it all a ghastly mistake.”
24 thoughts on “Gillard fires up, Slipper fired: the pundits’ verdict”
O'Connor Mark
October 10, 2012 at 4:18 pmWe can safely set aside any commentary from The Australian, so leaving their cheerleading out, the criticism from the somewhat more credible commentators seems to be not the Prime Minister’s message or delivery, but more about the Government’s lack of consistency in standing up for the standards that they are decrying in the Opposition.
In fairness, that’s a reasonably arguable position, so that line of criticism is OK.
Where the columnists have failed utterly is the bringing to account of the Leader of the Opposition for the parroting of the ‘died of shame’ insult. Where it has been mentioned, it’s been excused (or at least explained) on the basis of the Leader of the Opposition using the expression in the past. The last time I can find this expression on the record from Mr Abbott is in April, more than six months ago, so it’s hardly a well-worn expression for a man whose use of easy-to-remember catchphrases is well known and well executed.
And even if it could reasonably be argued that Mr Abbott regularly says someone or something is or should be “dying of shame”, any human of decency and compassion would seek to avoid such a statement in the light of the last fortnight’s events.
Instead, Mr Abbott uses it, directly at the Prime Minister, at the first available opportunity. At the very least, he has been extremely foolish to say so, and in my view he has done so deliberately, knowing the force and meaning of the expression in such a climate.
It is this comment that should have been the subject of the condemnation of the press gallery. Instead, the Leader of the Opposition is once again let off the hook by the leading political commentators of the established media.
If my conversations with numerous people are any guide, we can at least hope that the court of public opinion will remember and judge the comment, its context, and the character of the man who made it.
Triskele Rey
October 10, 2012 at 5:28 pmJust read this fluff peice on AWW re Ms Gillards speech. How anyone can put thier byline to that, I don’t know.
Misses the whole point of the debate entirely AND the ranifications of ousting Mr Slipper in that way.
Frankly, I found the premise behind the article aimed at WOMEN readers very sexist indeed. Assuming ignorance of facts and promoting it, blatantly.
Hunt Ian
October 10, 2012 at 5:44 pmCurious that there is such wall to wall support from media commentators for Tony Abbott’s move to have Peter Slipper thrown out of the Speaker’s Chair. Curious too that this domestic coverage is so at variance with international reactions and that Slipper’s vulgar, even prurient comments, are so uniformly interpreted as sexist of the same order as the swarm of commentary surrounding Tony Abbot’s campaign against Gillard.
The chain of events is a bit too neat. First, on the weekend a story breaks about Alan Jones, followed by public outrage at his disrespect for the grief of Julia Gillard on losing her father. On the following Wednesday, Ashby’s lawyers rather surprisingly release emails that initially were not released and which, from looking at them, are hardly relevant to the charge of sexual harrassment against Slipper (if anything, they suggest excessive familiarity but make it more surprising that Slipper abused power to pressure Ashby to have sex with him). Then on Friday the Murdoch tabloids, for no apparent reason, give an across the country front page splash treatment to a fairly ordinary defence of Tony Aboott, given by his wife, who could hardly be expected to have lived with him for thirty years or so if she thought he was a male chauvinist pig.This is then followed by Abbott’s move to have Slipper thrown out as speaker.
Mainstream media figures, such as Emma Alberici, then get stuck into the Labor Party for not supporting this motion, as if it is self-evident that Slipper’s private exchanges show he is unfit to be Speaker. Slipper’s comments do suggest that he never left his adolescence behind. This is plausibly a flaw of character but it does not self-evidently warrant putting Slipper before a “kangaroo court”. Previous occupants of the Speaker’s chair were not flawless.
One could almost be forgiven in thinking that a bit over a week ago, liberal politicians and mainstream media connections, who all want to see the Gillard government gone, turned over the problem of how to turn back growing support for Gillard in the polls and shift the outrage against Alan Jones’s remarks to outrage against Slipper and the government. Julia Gillard will have a hard task winning the next election with mainstream media being so obliging for Tony. Still, I fear what an Abbott government will do to country. Since the Gillard government has carelessly left Australia in the same position as Greece, strong measures will be taken to make sure that workers only have the rights to which they are entitled, and those who caused the global financial crisis will no doubt be forced to pay for it.
Alderson Mary
October 10, 2012 at 10:07 pmExcellent point about private comments in writing or recorded speech now being the possible subject of public shame if said words become public knowledge. Rather sad that van Onselen and others employed by News Ltd continue to paint all news in terms of bad news for Gillard. They’ve been at it non-stop since Gillard became PM, giving Abbott a free ride at the same time. As Gillard’s blast at Abbott has received worldwide publicity, Australia would become a knee slapping laughing stock if the Australian people were stupid enough to let Abbott be PM. For all his budgie smuggler strutting to show off his manliness, Abbott has received world recognition as being bested by a woman with more balls than he has.