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Moving forward, trust me

By Jennifer Wilson - posted Thursday, 22 July 2010


The term “moving forward” is employed by politicians when they’ve done something they don’t want to dwell on for any number of reasons, usually because they fear close examination will put them in a bad light. So they urge us not to live in the past, even if the past is only a matter of a couple of weeks ago, but rather to forget everything we ever knew about what they’ve just done, and “move forward” with them into a rosy and sustainable future.

Over the last 24 hours a vision has come to me unbidden whenever I’ve heard Julia Gillard’s voice. It is of a doll fashioned in her image with a key in its back. When you turn this key, the doll advances slowly on stiff legs, chanting: “Move forward! Move forward! The country must move forward!” in a voice that resembles that of a feminised dalek.

I take full responsibility for this psychic aberration. Nobody made me see it.

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Gillard has made quite a lot of acknowledging that she isn’t the “elected Prime Minister”. She sees the coming election as an opportunity to remedy that and gain a mandate. The Australian people, she assures us with monotonous repetition, have the right to “choose” their Prime Minister.

What she won’t address, indeed, has stated she will never address, is the circumstances in which the Australian people did not have the right to decide whether or not we retained the Prime Minister Ms Gillard assures us we’d chosen.

What the Rudd downfall shows is that the people of Australia are not in control of who will be the Prime Minister, no matter how much Julia Gillard says we are. Though campaigns are blatantly run on the appeal of the party leader, though that leader is frequently better known than the local member, though many a vote is actually for the leader when the punters choose their local candidate, none of this means a thing, because the party can change the Prime Minister anytime it wants.

Rumour has it that Gillard agreed to Rudd staying on and working to turn the polls around. She then left the room for consultations with her backers, and on her return she reneged on that deal, and made her tilt for the leadership.

Nobody is denying or confirming these rumours, claiming the conversations were confidential and private.

I take issue with these claims. Conversations about the removal of the country’s PM ought not to be private and confidential. The punters have a right to know what went down that night. It’s in the public interest for those dealings to be revealed. After all, we are being asked to consider the usurper as our future leader, and this rumour certainly goes towards establishing her moral character.

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There are many countries in which such unilateral action would have caused riots in the streets and bloodshed.

Ever since that event, Gillard has expended a great deal of energy earnestly reassuring us that she’s saved us, and is committed to continuing that merciful project if we’ll trust her and move forward with her.

But exactly what is it she’s saved us from? A coalition government led by the mad monk? The restraints of so-called political correctness? Death by boredom with Kevin Rudd?

She certainly hasn’t saved us from Rudd’s policies, all of which she supported.

I remain uneasy at the recollection of her first words to the Australian people when she appeared to tell us about the leadership change. “I have taken control,” she informed us. “The government has lost its way and I have taken control.”

Like most everybody else, I didn’t know the government had lost its way, let alone that we were about to chuck out the PM. Usually these things take quite a bit of time to build momentum, and somebody notices what’s going on. But voters didn’t have the chance to catch up before it was all over.

There were indeed night terrors in the ALP as the fear grew that they might lose the election with Rudd at the helm. It must have been a serious worry for them, but not for the rest of us because we didn’t know or didn’t care about it. The crisis Julia stepped in to avert was all the ALP’s, not the country’s. People who didn’t vote Labor wouldn’t have given a toss, except to exploit the circumstances for their own advantage. Julia and her gang weren’t protecting “us”. They were protecting their own backsides.

The ALP also wants it both ways. They want to assure us that we do indeed choose our Prime Minister. And they want to be able to get rid of that Prime Minister if unelected interests and powerful party factions decide the PM needs to go.

Furthermore, if we, the people, demand information about what was involved in usurping our democratic choice, we will be told the process is “confidential” and “private”. In other words, leave it to us, even if you didn’t elect us; we know best, and we don’t have to explain ourselves to anybody.

It is the height of hypocrisy for Gillard to tell us we have the right to choose our Prime Minister, when she herself has so spectacularly demonstrated that the people have no right at all to determine whether or not the PM we’ve chosen sees out his or her term. This demonstration renders our “choice” worse than useless. This demonstration degrades our “choice” to the level of a wishful illusion. This is Ms Gillard messing with our heads, and we acquiesce with her manipulations at our peril. This alone demonstrates that Julia Gillard cannot be trusted.

If the ALP wins government, the Australian people will have endorsed the right of non-elected interests and party factions to decide who will be the Prime Minister of this country.

I’d really like to know what’s happened since the leadership change that has assisted the government to find again the way it had so regrettably lost. Things don’t seem much different, and if that’s the case, why should I vote any differently from when Kevin Rudd was steering the boat?

Apart from that, I fear that Ms Gillard’s brand of dull, repetitive and unnecessary reassurance may well turn out to be as deathly boring as some people found Kevin’s unending waffle. There’s something insulting about her repressive reassurances. The “I know best and you don’t need to worry because everything’s going to be all right” method of quietening dissent.

“Don’t you worry about that,” said Jo Bjelke-Petersen. And look where that got the Queenslanders.

And I really don’t like the accomplished manner in which Julia avoids answering questions. Yes, I know it’s a mandatory skill for politicians. But on another level, it’s a bit unsettling that the PM should be so good at it.

An astute friend recently observed that in chucking Rudd out the ALP has proved itself to be very much the party for the 21st century. Unlike earlier generations, she maintains, we don’t believe there’s a necessity to produce anything that lasts. We don’t have that same desire to mend what’s broken. If something collapses we’re inclined to give it the flick and get a new one.

This is one of the more obvious differences between the ALP and the Coalition, and there aren’t many of those left. In spite of apparently horrendous leadership difficulties and Costello waiting in the wings for years, the Coalition didn’t chuck out John Howard, and Costello never challenged him. It’s a different mind set altogether, and the voters eventually got to make the call.

There’s obviously a time and a place for both mind-sets. There are situations when the only thing to do is to chuck out something that’s not working, be it a marriage, a Prime Minister, or a washing machine. You try to weigh up the investment you’ve put in so far against what it’s going to cost you to maintain the status quo and risk complete collapse. The wisdom lies in knowing when to chuck out, and when to retain and repair.

But you’re an absolute fool if you go out and replace what you’ve chucked with something that looks and sounds a tiny bit different, yet on even cursory examination offers you exactly the same.

What matters more than anything in this election is that the Greens and Independents win enough of a voice to challenge the major parties. The major parties have to be made accountable, and they have to be kept accountable. The overthrow of a democratically chosen Prime Minister in circumstances of absolute secrecy demonstrates there is an urgent need to curb the power of non-elected interests and party factions in government.

There have been moments in the last few days when I’ve even wondered if Tony Abbott and his crowd might indeed make a better fist of it than the ALP. I’ve now arranged for a member of my household to turn the hose on me if I signal that I’m in the grip of that particular hallucination. But this is what it’s come to. What, one wonders, is the difference, and isn’t time for something altogether new?

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About the Author

Dr Jennifer Wilson worked with adult survivors of child abuse for 20 years. On leaving clinical practice she returned to academia, where she taught critical theory and creative writing, and pursued her interest in human rights, popular cultural representations of death and dying, and forgiveness. Dr Wilson has presented papers on human rights and other issues at Oxford, Barcelona, and East London Universities, as well as at several international human rights conferences. Her academic work has been published in national and international journals. Her fiction has also appeared in several anthologies. She is currently working on a secular exploration of forgiveness, and a collection of essays. She blogs at http://www.noplaceforsheep.wordpress.com.

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