Real Julia foiled by old battles

The Australian experience appears to be in accord with a study just published by Princeton University Press, written by Deborah Brooks, which shows that female political candidates are treated no differently by the American electorate than men.

There can be little doubt that Kevin Rudd had waged a protracted campaign against Gillard's leadership of the Labor Party, made more difficult by the realities of minority government. But his efforts to undermine her leadership had little affect on Gillard's own standing within the parliamentary party, as evidenced by her commanding defeat of Rudd in the 2012 leadership ballot.

It is not the campaign of destabilisation within the parliamentary party that eventually achieved traction. Rather, it is the destabilisation without that helped to tarnish Labor's public standing that is key here.

The shadow of Kevin Rudd loomed large over just about every policy announcement, nay over almost every public appearance, that Gillard had made following the 2010 election. For that the actions of the corporate media are more important than the actions of Rudd, or his supporters within the ALP.

They are more important because leadership ructions within a parliamentary party become a source of permanent news to the extent that those ructions reflect a significant sentiment of discontent within the party. Rudd had very little support within caucus, so the Rudd destabilisation campaign was waged in alliance with the corporate media and was, we might conclude, largely manufactured to the level of crisis by the corporate media.

As senior Labor figures tiresomely pointed out the leadership crisis was a crisis of the media's making for there was no intrinsic crisis regarding the leadership within the party itself.

Kevin Rudd is simultaneously both arsonist and fire fighter; he lit the fire, with fuel given to him by the media, that engulfed Labor and now he presents himself as the regular CFA.

Of the two, the Rudd forces and the media, it is the actions of the media that are more important as the media was the more powerful player.

This media campaign did tap into a vein of opinion in Australia that is misogynistic and patriarchal, but that tapping of the vein was done for other, predominantly economic, ends. Furthermore, the carbon tax and refugees also were a problem for Gillard to the extent that these issues became closely linked, by means of a scare campaign with the critical assistance of a compliant media, with cost of living pressures particularly in the mortgage belt.

But why did the corporate media portray the Gillard government in so poor a light?

The Bank of International Settlements recently published a report calling for governments to cut public spending, which is a reference to further dismantlement of the welfare state, and to move forward with further labour market deregulation, which is a reference to cutting wages and curtailing the power of the organised working class.

These twin objectives also reflect the preferred policy positions of corporate Australia, and they also are the direction which the Liberal Party would like to take Australia toward. There are very powerful forces in this country that would like the neoliberal transformation of Australia to continue and they have a very effective tool in an increasingly centralised corporate media to further that transformation.