Gillard: Same horse, different jockey

By solid on Perth IMC

Rudd’s tears at his parting press conference will be the only tears shed for the end of his prime ministership. Arrogant to the end, still believing he was God’s gift to Australian politics, he continued to claim that he was elected to be Prime Minister by the Australian people. (But it was the Labor Party that made him prime minister.)

Kevin Rudd called climate change the “greatest moral challenge of our time” but didn’t have the moral or political will to do anything about it. (But then, neither did Gillard.)

For Labor’s poll-driven number crunchers, the massive dive of Labor and Rudd in the opinion polls sealed Rudd’s fate.

Labor will be hoping that Gillard’s leadership will be enough to boost its polling in the lead up to the federal election this year. But there will be no change in Labor’s political trajectory.

Gillard has been part of the so-called kitchen cabinet of Rudd, Gillard, Swan and Tanner that has been responsible for all the policy flip-flops that have disappointed and discredited the Rudd government.

Dropping action on climate change till 2013, freezing asylum seeker visas, re-opening Curtin detention centre, charging Ark Tribe, dropping the construction of child care centres, WorkChoice Lite – you name it, Julia Gillard has been part of it.

While Gillard is formally with the Left faction, her pedigree is with the right of the party and Labor’s right wing policies.

When Mark Latham was removed as Labor leader, she outlined her background with the right wing leaders in the party: “I was loyal to John Brumby when I served as his Chief of Staff. I was loyal to Kim Beazley as Labor Leader when I was elected in 1998. I was loyal to Simon Crean and then Mark Latham.”

She laid claim to drafting Labor’s policy in 2002 that included towing refugee boats back to Indonesia telling the 2004 conference, "We're here to get Labor elected. I never drafted policy to be the policy of a loser. I drafted it to win."

Gillard he was one of three Left faction members (along with Jenny Macklin and Martin Ferguson) to vote against the Labor for Refugees motion at that conference.

In January this year, when Australian of the Year professor Patrick McGorry declared that detention centres were “factories for mental illness,” it was Gillard that leapt to the defence of Labor’s policy. “We believe mandatory detention is necessary when people arrive unauthorised for security reasons in order to do health checks and in order to check identity, and we will continue to have a mandatory detention policy."

As employment minister, Gillard has been responsible for the introduction of WorkChoices Lite and maintaining Howard’s ABCC anti-union construction police, and she presided over a year long freeze on the minimum wage.

At the ACTU Congress in 2009, she was jeered with cries of "shame" and "you're the Liberal minister" by union delegates.

In April this year, at a union rally to defend Ark Tribe, Victorian Electrical Trades Union, state secretary Dean Mighell, told journalists, “It shocks and disappoints me enormously to see, you know, the likes of
Julia Gillard who made her way through the Labor movement and was supported by the Labor movement, turn her back on workers.”

Julia Gillard has backed the racist politics of the NT Intervention. She now argues that European settlement of Australia was not an invasion.

As Minister for Education, Gillard has endorsed the Howard inspired funding model for non-government schools and argued that the public versus private school debate is part of "an out-dated culture war".

Even before the last federal election Gillard congratulated private schools for, "giving so many Australians the chance, through high quality education, to prosper and be successful".

Gillard has championed neo-liberal education policies and led the Rudd government’s recent confrontation with the teacher unions over My Schools and constructing schools’ league tables.

ABC journalist Peter Mares, in a recent review of a biography of Gillard, says that, “If anything, she emerges…as a Blairite Third-Wayer, influenced by Latham’s idea of a ‘ladder of opportunity’.”

Many people are entranced by the prospect of Gillard being Australia’s first woman Prime Minister. Australian journalist, Caroline Overington breathlessly twittered, “It’s the realisation of the great dream: she’s a woman, she’s got a defacto, and a house in working class Altona. Thanks, Germaine!”

But The Australian did her no favours by listing her alongside a rogues’ gallery of woman leaders such as Britain’s Margaret Thatcher, Israel’s Golda Meir, and more recent leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and
New Zealand’s Helen Clark. More than anything it showed that it is not gender but politics that determines what women leaders actually do in office. There’s a woman premier in Queensland but the government is still
privatising forests and railways and refuses to decriminalise abortion.

Before he was toppled, Rudd was already backing down over the super profits tax, saying the government was “seeking a sensible and balanced outcome with the mining companies". Now, Gillard has declared that the “…doors of the government are open to the mining companies,” and re-committed to the war in Afghanistan.

Gillard has stepped into Rudd’s shoes but she is walking in the same direction – to the right. It is that shift to the right which has given space to Tony Abbott. To stop Abbott, over the mining tax, refugees,
climate change, union rights, we are going to have to fight brand Gillard’s Labor just as we had to fight brand Rudd.

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Comments

By Richard Downs, spokesperson for Alyawarr people and organiser for the
July gathering of elders and leaders:

"In Julia Gillard's address to the nation, there was no mention of the
first Australians and owners of this country on the way forward.

"She did mention how wonderfully the previous PM Kevin Rudd's apology
to the first Australians was given. Little does she know this has all
been a farce and now gone by the way side, blown across all directions
with the wind.

"Until the new PM acknowledges the racism and discrimination policy
that has been imposed on our people across the NT, until the NT
intervention is abolished; until a new chapter of engagement and
consultations begins to create a joint partnership with us... nothing
will ever change as we as Aboriginal people have lost all confidence
with the governments at federal and state levels.

"Yet we leave our door open for the new PM to meet with myself, elders
and leaders from all different language groups on the new way forward.
We advise the Prime Minister to remove all previous baggabe, including
indigenous affairs minister Jenny Macklin, who we have no confidence
in, to achieve the goals set by the federal government in closing the
gap."

Added to: http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/44543

Read these articles from the World Socialist Web which really explain why the rich and powerful of this country had Kevin Rudd removed. The factional heavies of the ALP only moved on Rudd at the behest of the mining industry and other capitalist interests who want to ensure that whoever wins the election - massive cuts to public spending and welfare are delivered. God forbid we could take the rich to pay for the bail out and stimulus package when ordinary people can be made to pay instead!

Australia: Big business and mining companies issue diktats to new prime minister
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/gill-j25.shtml

Australian prime minister Rudd ousted in political coup
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/rudd-j24.shtml

The ABC's online service has two excellent analyses:

The great leap backwards, by Luke Walladge, http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2939033.htm?WT.mc_id=newsmail

Who killed Kevin Rudd's prime ministership?, by Peter Medadue,
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2938940.htm?WT.mc_id=newsmail

TOM Albanese, the chief executive of Rio Tinto, doesn't pull any punches about who rules the roost. At a recent shindig in London he highlighted to the privately owned mining sector the dangers of "resource nationalism" (''Let Rudd's fate be a lesson on minerals taxing: Rio chief'', BusinessDay, 10/7).

It seems Albanese and his ilk are concerned that sovereign nation states that own the resources from which mining companies are making extraordinary profits want a bigger share of the cake.

Albanese made it quite clear to the miners in London that the dumping of Kevin 07 as prime minister by a fainthearted Labor caucus would be the fate of other world leaders if they got between a mining company and a pile of cash.

Not that this is anything new: mining companies have been supporting coups all over the developing world for decades to ensure that governments who believe that profits should be shared by the people and not just the mining corporations come to a sticky end.

What happened to the people of Bougainville when they closed Rio Tinto's copper mine is a classic example. For nearly a decade, the country was the site of an ugly conflict over who had the rights to the profits from the island's lucrative copper deposits: the locals, or the Papua New Guinean government and Australian and international corporate interests. Up to 20,000 men, women and children reportedly died as a result.

Kevin 07's public execution is now being used as an example by mining corporations on how to deal with governments in the developed world that hold elections. Any elected leader will now think twice before taking on the mining sector.

Joseph Toscano, Anarchist Media Institute, Fitzroy
(letter published in the Age