A political coup that took all of 12 hours, to be exact.
Australia now has a female PM, which is over-the-moon exciting, but it feels like a hollow victory.
I don’t want to say that a female PM by any means is less momentous, but let’s remember: we, the Australian people, didn’t elect her. So how will they feel about this?
Julia Gillard’s seizure of power feels sour, like a bad taste in the mouth – not that I’m not pleased as punch for her, I am, because I’m hoping she’ll be able to achieve more than Kevin Rudd promised and tried to – because she hasn’t been elected by the people. To quote a Facebook friend of a friend, 'our new prime minister wasn't even chosen by us. the westminster system is shit.'
What feels really awkward is that a Prime Minster has been deposed by his own party for what constitutes no significant or dishonourable reason. His party is simply fed up with him, dissatisfied – but is that the party’s call to make? We voted him in – don’t we retain the right to vote him out, if we so choose?
It was really sad to see Rudd struggle over his words yesterday, as he gave his last press conference as PM, visibly on the verge of tears. The people like(d) and voted for K Rudd, and probably would have supported him to a second term. Sure, Tony Abbott is gaining favour, but he really doesn’t have a strong platform to oppose the ALP yet. Rudd might have been a disappointment, but I think people would have been willing to give him a second chance. He may have been the nose, particularly with the recent super tax/mining issue, but he hadn’t disgraced himself enough to not deserve re-election. Apparently, "I believed that a good Government was losing its way" said Australia's new Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. But is this reason enough?
Has the Labour party actually shot themselves in the foot? In the hopes of establishing a more able challenger to Tony Abbott, have they shown themselves to be backstabbers? Will the Australian people want Kevin Rudd to have a fair shake of the sauce bottle, as it were, and feel he was wrongly done by? It will be very interesting to see...The ALP still have my vote, but how many others?
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JAG
2 comments:
I read about this in the paper today and thought of you :) (duh!) I don't quite follow the dynamics of it all, but I guessing you have a new voting system or something?
Not quite. We don't vote directly for our PM the way America does, we vote for the MPs, and then whoever has the majority of MPs in the House of Representatives wins. So in that sense, we indirectly elect the PM (like the English system, I gather.) However, the Labour Party can vote within the party on their leader, when there's a leadership challenge (which is what Gillard requested from Rudd). Rudd didn't actually contest, but called a vote, and so Gillard ran uncontested and won, becoming the leader of the party and thus the PM, but not voted by the people. Not sure if we should have this system in place, but that's how it stands...some Westminster system, huh? ;)
x
JAG
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