Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

I watched Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard with compere Tony Jones and a studio audience in Adelaide, on ABC1's Q&A program last night , 9 August 2010. She's certainly a clever and accomplished politician, with a plenty of negative schtick for her opponents. My abiding impression however was that it was like watching an over-confident  suburban school principal dealing with questions in assembly . No one dared challenge her on her display of well honed defensiveness about her ruthlessness, although there was the occasional cheeky little boy who tried to play it for some laughs. It was not a debate and there was little policy substance.  She returned whenever she could to her saintly parents, sacrificing themselves, emigrating from Wales and doing it tough in suburban Adelaide for the sake of the children, Julia and her sister. This stuff clearly must poll well in focus groups. And I must not be very f...

.   .. Whitlam , Fraser , Hawke ,  Keating ,  Howard , Rudd, Gillard & ... Abbott ? . ... The election news in Australia over the weekend was more than usually depressing. Yeah, I know it's just another election campaign and it is as always pitched at people who aren't interested in politics or policy: swinging voters in marginal seats. I'm not in that target audience. And I know that this is, due to the absence of any actual leadership, a Seinfeld election; about nothing, other than the identities of the leaders. And yeah, the Labor Party has recently and unexpectedly taken a potentially election losing hit in the polls, which, as usual, none of the Fairfax or ABC experts foreshadowed (now why might that be?)   But that's not why for me it's been so depressing. It's because of what we've now learnt, from people who actually knew him, about our former Prime Minister, Kevin...

. Kevin Rudd was right. Climate Change has been "the greatest moral challenge of our time". First Malcolm lost the Liberal leadership trying to lead his party into a path of challenging the climate. Now Kevin has lost the Prime Ministership for being seen to avoid leading his party into challenging it. So can Julia Gillard now survive the change challenge ? Or will Tony Abbott get away with evading the challenge ? The political climate sure seems to be a'changin' at present anyway. What with the recent demise of Gordon Brown in the UK and with the coming mid-terms in the US in November, there is much to chew on in all sorts of places. Then, as well as the Australian federal election sometime in the next 6 or 7 months, there's the  NSW and Victorian State elections looming as well. It is going to be an interesting 12 months. And amidst all this colour and movement in Canberra today, is Obama's replacement, in Washi...