Be mad! Be very mad at the circus that is Australian Labor Party at the moment! In fact if you are a loyal Labor supporter you should be very very mad at Gillard, Rudd, Swan, Conroy & everyone else in the senior ranks of Labor!
Almost all expert political commentators from both left & right leaning media in the have commented about the debacle of last Thursday's spill. Anyone with the slightest shred of interest in politics in general, but more specifically in Labor Party, should read some of the articles written in print media in the last few days & take note of this bunch of self serving, incompetent & inward looking politicians who are taking the Labor Party & its hard earned & much cherished values to the ground & to the point of irrelevance with them!
However, Martin Ferguson's resignation speech says it all. A competent life long servant of ALP summed up the hopeless situation Labor finds itself in. If Gillard & her faceless backers ignored the recommendations of Faulkner/Bracks/Carr in 2010, they must take their heads out of the sand & take notice of Martin Ferguson's speech.
Let's take a few steps back to late 2012:
By mid 2012 the Treasurer was spruiking his much criticised "Class War rhetoric" whilst blindly walking right into the trap set by the wily opposition in continuing to insist the Gillard Government would be delivering a budget surplus in FY2013. This was despite both business groups & unions advising the Government not to slow down the economy any further by cutting services in order to bring about a totally irrelevant surplus of less than $2 billion! But, sadly, they were dealing with the Treasurer who so ineptly had helped PM Gillard design a face saving and as it turned out meaningless Mineral Resources Tax Policy even though surely by now he should have known the expected tax revenue was going to be a simple fraction what had been projected!
In December, Wayne Swan had to come out & admitted the surplus was not even as good as a mirage!
Then the PM inexplicably announced the date of the Federal Elections 8 months in advance in January. It is difficult to guess whether this was to disarm Kevin Rudd & his supporters, or whether it was once again another strategic miscalculation by Gillard & her accident prone advisers! But although she claimed this was done in order that she could get on with governing, Gillard has done nothing but electioneering since the announcement!
A few days later, two of Gillard's most competent Ministers, Roxon & Evans resigned! The rest of 2013 is simply a case of Politics 101 of "How to lose influence & get kicked out of government".
The much contrived PM's trip to the marginal seats of Western Sydney where the PM literally did not end up coming face to face with a single disgruntled voter, to the total bungling of the Media Reform Legislation by the hapless clueless Steven Conroy (who despite his total incompetence remains a senior cabinet minister only because his factional union bosses continue to support Gillard), to the spill that wasn't spill & finally proved Rudd has no ticker & finally to the mass resignation of some of the most competent Labor politicians in the ranks as sacrificial Rudd supporters last weekend!
And the circus of these egotistic self serving performers is guaranteed to continue in the coming months in the run up to the desperately needed elections in September.
And the voters should be mad & should vote Labor out of office with baseball bats!
It is simply not good enough to claim Julia Gillard is tough as nails! Whilst Rudd & his supporters have done nothing but destabilise her & she has no doubt out muscled them in every turn, she has sold out Labor values to cater to the Greens & a independents. She has also sold out the hard fought visionary Labor policies that Hawke & Keating used to bring ALP closer to business & in doing so has tarnished labor's legacy of the Hawke-Keating era.
Gillard & Swan have criticised and blamed Kevin Rudd every step of the way whilst incompetently stumbling from one policy debacle to another, and in doing so have bought themselves more time in Government! And Gillard has never once demoted a senior minister due to poor performance (mainly Swan & Conroy).
Graham Richardson summed up the situation perfectly when he said: "Gillard now has full ownership of the amssacre to come!"
