CUTTING THROUGH THE HYPE: September 2011

Let’s not confuse illegitimate with Incompetent

Tony Abbott and his associates keep banging the drum that somehow, we've acquired an illegitimate government. Alan Jones and other extreme people over on the right of the great divide are clamouring for a public revolt to bring down this government. Bronwyn Bishop took time out from the hairdresser’s to support him to declare our government illegitimate.

Let me make it clear right up front: I agree that this government has shown far more incompetence than leadership. Competent leaders don’t jump the gun and announce deals that aren’t done – like East Timor accepting our asylum seekers. Competent leaders don’t paint themselves into corners as this lot did with the Malaysian solution, which had everyone up in arms. Competent leaders don’t dig their heals in on the wrong issues. Competent leaders know when to say: I was wrong. They know others will respect them for it. Gillard knows none of these things.

Back to legitimacy

Julia Gillard sounds like a fishwife, dresses like a colour-blind hairdresser and waddles like a duck. Yes, I loathe the woman and that is my personal view, but she is unarguably our democratically elected prime minister. On what basis are people calling for another election, the shock-jocks demanding we 'ditch the bitch? No, the words I wrote above about Julia Gillard aren’t kind, but I’m not out there agitating to get rid of her because I can’t stand the sight and the sound of her. I’d rather judge her by her deeds than her looks.

Now let me ask a simple question, one that none of our journos has thought of asking:

Tony, how much more legitimate would a minority government led by you and a few independents be?

Tony, how would that scenario differ from the one you’re calling illegitimate?

There would be no difference, since your party didn't win any more votes than labour. You had to negotiate with the independents for their support too, but you lost. What's that? She doesn't have a mandate becasue she changed her mind about the carbon tax? Didn't John Howard change his mind about the GST? Did you tell him he no mandate after that, no legitimacy?

Only last week, after the first year of this government, Tony Windsor, Rob Oakshot and Andrew Wilkie confirmed their support for Gillard and her lumbering lot. Sorry Tony, but isn’t it time you stopped carping and bitching and accepted the umpire’s verdict?

Illegitimate shockjocks

There he was: Alan Jones aka ‘The Parrot’, enjoying the role of agitator on the lawn in front of parliament house, up on a podium with a mike in his claw, seething at the measly few hundred people who'd turned up, shouting that this was ‘the most disgraceful thing that has ever been done to democracy,’ ... ‘a total corruption of the democratic process,’ and claiming that large numbers of truckies that were part of the ‘Convoy of no confidence’ had been stopped by police at the ACT border.

Photo: Andrew Meares, Sydney Morning Herald

All of his claims, repeated for days back in Sydney on his radio show, according to Media Watch (ABC Aug 29, 2011), were rubbish. Why people still listen to Alan Jones after the Cash-for-comment affair is a great mystery. Just how legitimate is Jones as a source of anything, when his comments were for sale to the highest bidder for years?

He wasn’t charged for those misdemeanours, nor for his part as an agitator in the Cronulla riots – for heaven’s sake: how is a radio talkback host getting away with stuff like this? Is there no one in NSW or federal politics with the balls to call this odious little man’s bluff? Gillard didn’t – she grovelled with the best of them, took the abuse from Jones about being 10 minutes late to come on his program instead of saying: Alan, I’m the Prime Minister of your country and I won’t be spoken to like that. Find another target for your vitriol – good bye.

Respect doesn’t fall on you like rain – you have to earn it

That would’ve made people sit up and take notice, but Julia doesn’t know about taking the high ground. She doesn’t have the power of the deft put-down that Keating had – the best she can do is to get down with her opponents in the gutter and lose the mud-wrestle. Competent politicians raise the game to a level that street fighters like Abbott and the shock-jocks with smear campaigns can't reach.

Why would she bother with Alan Jones anyway? How many of his listeners are going to vote for big Julia next election? They used to vote for Pauline Hanson, and now have to settle for Tony Abbott who’s doing his best to sound like Pauline Hanson. Needless to say, Tony Abbott the great opportunist was up there with Alan Jones in Canberra, ready to ingratiate himself with the denizens of Jonestown.

That’s enough for now

Kim