Don’t laugh - but Julia Gillard is staking her leadership on her abilities as a salesperson.
Mark Knight gold
The prime minister is gambling that she can sell voters on the idea that all asylum seeker boat arrivals from now on are Tony Abbott’s fault.
She thinks she can be more successful at this than Abbott will be in trying to foist the blame on to her and the Government every time another group of boat people disembarks on Christmas Island.
But sadly, if Gillard’s performance since she became PM is any guide, she is dreaming.
Despite the media training she received recently, her manner has not become discernably less wooden. And her broken election promise on a carbon tax has trashed her credibility.
Abbott, on the other hand, is a slippery but very effective salesman.
People seem prepared to buy just about anything he says, and when he backtracks or contradicts himself on an issue - as he does so often - they buy that too. If they buy Abbott’s line this time, and reject Gillard’s, the push to return Kevin Rudd to the Labor leadership will be almost irresistible.
And there would be irony in that because Gillard and her backers ruthlessly used the asylum seeker issue as a weapon against Rudd when they ousted him from the prime ministership 15 months ago.
What gave impetus to the anti-Rudd move was a NSW state by-election in the western Sydney electorate of Penrith that saw an extraordinary 24 per cent swing against Labor.
The plotters presented the result as evidence of public concern over asylum seeker boat arrivals and Rudd’s failure to solve the problem. Rudd was gone five days later.
That may well have been in Gillard’s mind yesterday as she fronted the media after news that the navy had intercepted two more boats carrying a total of 126 people.
She knows that, with her plan to send asylum seekers to Malaysia for processing now dead in the water, plenty more boats will be on the way.
Some Labor MPs are scratching their heads.
They understand why Gillard wanted legislation to circumvent the High Court decision that ruled her Malaysian solution invalid. But they wonder why she is pressing ahead when, with both the opposition and the Greens opposing it, defeat on the floor of parliament is certain.
“Masochism,” says one. “All pain and no gain,” says another.
But Gillard wants the Coalition to be seen voting the amendments down.
She believes that will give weight to the proposition that the Government is serious about stopping the boats while Abbott is “the people smugglers’ friend”.
“We will see more boats and Mr Abbott will have to take the responsibility,” Gillard said yesterday.
It is the kind of strategy a top class politician like, say, Paul Keating, would be able to execute to deadly effect.
But Gillard is no Keating.She has got herself into a remarkable position. Not only is the opposition leader able to attack from the right, portraying Labor as soft on border security.
With Gillard so committed to the Malaysian solution, he is now coming at her from the left as well, presenting himself as more compassionate towards refugees.
The hypocrisy of Abbott’s stance - that asylum seekers should only be sent to countries that have signed the United Nations refugee convention - is blatant.
Malaysia is not a signatory, but neither was Nauru when the Howard Government built a processing centre there. And the centrepiece of Abbott’s policy is that, where possible, boats should be towed back to Indonesia - even though that country has not signed the UN convention either.
Abbott has also heard directly from the head of the Immigration Department that the government’s proposal offers a much better chance of stopping the boats than the coalition’s Nauru alternative.
It is clear his priority is to destroy the last vestige of Gillard’s authority, not help the government to counter people smuggling.
The Coalition does not have a monopoly on hypocrisisy, though. The Government is into it too.
Labor used to be adamant that refugee processing should not occur in non-signatory countries. And, as ALP elder statesman John Faulkner made clear at Tuesday’s Caucus meeting, the Malaysian deal is incompatible with the party platform.
There is some talk that, if the crunch comes over Gillard’s leadership, a return to the human rights values implicit in the platform could provide part of the justification for a Rudd restoration.
Rudd’s record on asylum seekers is hardly flash, but on the night Gillard moved against him he did warn against “a lurch to the right”.
That now has resonance with many disillusioned Labor supporters as well as with a significant number of Caucus members.
Abbott’s response to Gillard yesterday was typically aggressive:
This is a pretty desperate prime minister who has lost control of our borders, who has lost control of our detention centres and now is in danger of losing control of the parliament.
A majority of Labor MPs would still like to give Gillard more time to turn Labor’s fortunes around. No challenge is imminent, despite this week’s stirring.
But if Abbott again does a better selling job and wins this latest asylum seeker blame game, it’s likely all bets will be off.
Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in News Ltd newspapers.
Monday, September 26, 2011
Gillard’s dreaming and Abbott’s scheming | The Punch
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Why the Christian right don’t like Gillard | The Punch | #Auspol
The Gillard Government has taken the middle road in making changes to the national school chaplaincy program; $222 million has been committed to extend the program until 2014. But now schools can elect to have non-religious person fill the role as a secular worker and still use the $20,000 grant scheme.
Chaplains have really become budget student counsellors under the program. Since 2006, it has been rolled out to 2681 schools, 28 per cent are public schools. While the school applies for a chaplain to DEEWR, the funding is administered to a third party employer, in most cases a Christian organisation like Access Ministries who then engage a person to be a chaplain at the school.
Chaplains have a set of guidelines from the Government which prohibit proselytising, which they adhere to by signing a code of conduct.
A chaplain is, according to the NSCP guidelines, to provide “general religious and personal advice to those seeking it, comfort and support to students and staff”. There is a prohibition against trying to convert someone to their religion.
Seventeen per cent of the 277 complaints to DEEWR since the program’s inception have been allegations of proselytising. Is this the fine line where the difficulty starts? Is preaching the same as trying to convert? There are so many issues and advice from religious counsellors which would inevitably reflect on their broad religious and Christian views that it renders the line not as much blurred, as artificial.
The Government has attempted to address the issue by clarifying the expectations of a Chaplain in the new guidelines, following a report by the Commonwealth Ombudsman in July. The report says parents had complained to the ombudsman that the chaplain issue had divided the school community.
Many other parents were simply uncomfortable with the possibility, as former NSW premier Bob Carr put it: “If you give a religious fundamentalist access to a school to counsel students, it is only a matter of time before he gives into the temptation to collect a few young converts on the way. While he is, in effect, on the taxpayer payroll”.
A central lobbying group, the “Stop the National Schools Chaplaincy Program!” was formed in 2008 with support from groups like Atheist Foundation and the Rationalist Society.
Currently, a Queensland Dad is taking the matter to the High Court, alleging the Government contravenes s116 of the Constitution for making chaplains take a ‘religious test’ to adhere to NCSP guidelines. This may all be evidence of an angry new atheism.
The Government’s announcement last Wednesday may or may not be a response to the secular backlash. Schools will now have the choice whether they want a chaplain or a secular worker – a definite dilution of the Chaplaincy program.
Within hours of the announcement on Wednesday, the Australian Christian Lobby issued a press release saying the Chaplaincy program must not be secularised and called for a separate funding source for secular workers.
The need for more funding for Chaplains may not prove to be necessary as the ACL contends. If schools are given a choice, many will simply want a secular youth worker.
If it wasn’t for the controversy, this was simply an announcement for more youth workers in schools. On the face of it, all the Government is doing now is providing schools and parents with extra funding and extra choice. This was the reaction from one reader on ACL’s website:
“If Christianity wasn’t so methodically and consistently attacked in this country… The hypocrisy of Australia is that while they reject any Christian teaching, they happily accept (and expect) our services, our time and money to meet the needs of all the godless carnage.”
Indeed, our Prime Minister has not been embraced by Christian voters. While there was a swing to the ALP amongst Muslims, Buddhists and Atheists – Christians, and particularly people from evangelical churches, swung against Gillard at the 2010 election.
Research from former ALP Senator John Black’s Australian Development Strategies, suggested the four seats with the biggest Pentecostal populations had a 7.2 per cent swing against Labor. There a few reasons for this.
One is the Gillard Government is simply not conservative enough on social issues. In the Australian Christian Values Institute how to vote sheet for the 2010 election, the ALP scored just 3 ticks out of 22 questions on policy standpoints, while the Liberals scored 14, Family First and the Christian Democratic Party scored a full 22.
Almost all the questions of the ACVI’s vote sheet related to marriage, family or censorship.
The ALP still did not have a tick from the institute on the issue of school chaplains, despite extending the program under Rudd in 2008. Interestingly, Rudd who wrote long essays about how his religion informed his politics, also scored just 3 out of 22 ticks on ACVI’s 2007 sheet. Yet, in the 2007 election, most voters in evangelical church groups swung to Rudd.
This only points to the elephant in the room.
No matter how much Ms Gillard talks about her Baptist upbringing and love of bible stories, she is unmarried atheist without children. For people who see family, marriage and religion as the centre of a healthy society, their lives and perhaps their salvationm, her private life would inevitably lead to suspicion about her character.
In response to the defence of Ms Gillard’s honesty about her atheism, former Australian Family Association Vice President Bill Muehlenberg said “An unashamed paedophile who extols his lifestyle is also being honest; does that make his activities commendable then?… To reject Christ and his provision for salvation is not to show respect; it is to show the highest disrespect. …”.
If it’s aggressive atheism against zealous evangelical Christianity, then Gillard will be hoping she walked down the middle road in a way that leaves both groups still in her sight.
