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Australia

At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next?

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You’d be excused if you thought that Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd’s concession speech earlier today sounded more like the victory speech of a man who had just won the election.Australia Flag Icon

In a sense, Rudd did win the battle against expectations — just barely.  Even though Rudd will soon become a former prime minister and has already announced he will step down as the leader of the center-left Australian Labor Party, he can breathe a sigh of relief that Labor did not fare as poorly as some worst-case scenarios projected — either under Rudd’s return to the leadership or under former prime minister Julia Gillard.  So Rudd was probably right to gloat in his speech that he preserved Labor as a ‘viable fighting force for the future.’  What Rudd didn’t have to say was his belief that Gillard would have led Labor to an absolute collapse.

With three seats left to be determined, the center-right Coalition government led by Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott has 91 seats in Australia’s  150-member House of Representatives to just 54 seats for Labor and two independents, with Adam Bandt, the sole MP of the Australian Greens, holding onto his Melbourne seat despite a strong Labor push.  That’s a very strong victory for Abbott, who has picked up 18 seats, but it’s not a historic landslide — four of those gains come from seats formerly held by independents.

Rudd, on the other hand, can claim that his three-month leadership of the party helped avert a catastrophe, though we’ll never know whether Gillard would have done better or worse (and there are some reasons to believe that Labor should have simply stuck with Gillard through September).

You can get all of the seat-by-seat results here, and you can read the pre-election analysis of the marginal seats here.

Here’s the result of the primary vote count:

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The most striking piece is that more than one of every four voters chose as their first preference someone other than a Labor, Coalition or Green candidate, and it corroborates that the election was more a statement of disapproval of the Rudd-Gillard governments than an embrace of Tony Abbott.

So what comes next?  Within a week, Abbott will likely become Australia’s new prime minister.  What does that mean for Australian politics?  Continue reading At the dawn of the Abbott era of Australian politics, what comes next? →

Australia

Rudd-erdämmerung 2013: An election-day guide to Australia’s national elections

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Polls are now open across Australia, where voters will elect all 150 members of the House of Representatives, the lower house of the Australian parliament, and a little over half of the 75 members of the Senate, the upper house.Australia Flag Icon

If polling surveys prove correct, prime minister Kevin Rudd (pictured above, left) and the Australian Labor Party is facing certain defeat at the hands of Tony Abbott (pictured above, right), the leader of the Liberal Party and the center-right Coalition between the Liberals and Australia’s agrarian conservative National Party.

As we wait for results to come in later today, it’s worth taking a closer look at the voting to determine just what could happen.

Polls opened at 8 am and will close at 6 pm (for those of us on the east coast, polls close on Australia’s east coast at 7 am ET and on Australia’s west coast at 9 am ET).  Voting is mandatory in Australia, with a fine of around A$20 for citizens who don’t participate.

Australia elects House members in single-member constituencies, but with a preferential voting system that ranks candidates (much like Ireland’s preferential vote).  Each voter casts a ballot in one of 150 electoral districts throughout Australia.  But instead of just voting for one candidate, voters rank their candidate to indicate preferences from first to last.

The so-called ‘primary vote’ is the tally of the first preferences of all voters.  If, after the primary vote is counted, no candidate wins an absolute majority, the candidate with the lowest amount of support is eliminated, and the second preferences of the voters who preferred the eliminated candidate are distributed to the remaining candidates.  Candidates are eliminated, and preference are allocated, until one candidate wins more than 50% of the vote.  In reality, this typically means that all third-party candidates are eliminated, and the final count comes down to a contest between the Coalition and Labor — this is referred to as the ‘two-party preferred vote.’

So imagine a race with three candidate — Kevin, Tony and Christine.  Suppose that in the primary vote, Kevin wins 35%, Tony wins 45% and Christine wins 20%.  Christine would be eliminated, and we would look at the second preference of all of Christine’s voters.  Suppose that Christine’s voters preferred Kevin and Tony equally — when the second-preference votes are added to the existing tallies, we would see that Tony wins the election with 55% to just 45% for Kevin.

The system for determining senators is even more complex because voters elect 12 senators for each state (in a typical election, voters select just six senators for each state, but in a ‘double dissolution’ election, voters sometimes choose all 12 at once).  Senate elections are conducted with the same principles of preferred voting, but within statewide multi-member districts.  I’ll spare you the details, but if you’re interested in how the vote count becomes exponentially more complex, feel free to watch this primer.

In the previous August 2010 election, neither Labor nor the Coalition won enough seats to form an absolute majority in the House — Abbott’s Coalition actually has one more MP in the House today than Rudd’s Labor (a 72-71), which means that Abbott needs to pick up just four seats to become prime minister:

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Realistically, if polling data is correct, it’s not a question of whether Abbott and the Coalition will win — it’s a matter of how large Abbott’s majority will be.  So without further ado, here’s a look at each of Australia’s six states and two territories and where Labor and the Coalition stands in each (for even further reading, here’s a look at the policies that Abbott’s government is likely to pursue and here’s an look at whether Labor MPs should have sacked former prime minister Julia Gillard three months ago in the hopes that Rudd could deliver an improbable victory.

Continue reading Rudd-erdämmerung 2013: An election-day guide to Australia’s national elections →

Australia

What should Australia expect from prime minister Tony Abbott?

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Before the Kevin and Julia show, there was the Tony and Malcolm show.Australia Flag Icon

The rivalry between the dueling camps of Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd and former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard is now legendary — Rudd came to power in November 2007 after waging a near-perfect campaign (‘Kevin 07’) that brought the Australian Labor Party back to power after over a decade in opposition.  But his deputy prime minister Julia Gillard became prime minister in June 2010 after Rudd’s parliamentary colleagues wearied of his leadership style.  Gillard led Labor to the narrowest of reelections in August 2010 in what remains a hung parliament.  Rudd, who returned to government as Gillard’s foreign minister shortly after the election, challenged Gillard for the Labor leadership in February 2012 — and lost.  But as Gillard’s poll standing deteriorated throughout 2013, Rudd’s supporters engineered another vote in June 2013, and so Rudd (not Gillard) is leading Labor into Australia’s election on Saturday.

What’s less well-known is that opposition leader Tony Abbott (pictured above) emerged as the leader of the Liberal Party (and the center-right Liberal/National Coalition) after engineering a leadership spill of his own in December 2009.  After former prime minister John Howard lost his seat in the 2007 election, the Liberals turned initially to Brendan Nelson, but finally to Malcolm Turnbull as its leader in 2008.  But when Turnbull pushed his party to support the Labor government’s carbon reduction scheme, Abbott challenged Turnbull and improbably won a 42-41 victory on the second ballot, giving the Liberals their fourth leader in three years.

It’s an understatement to say that Abbott has proven a hard sell to the Australian public — in some ways, Abbott is akin to the Barry Goldwater or even the Ronald Reagan of Australian governance, a conviction politician and a conservative’s conservative who will undoubtedly pull Australia to the right.

A staunch Catholic who once studied in seminary for a career in the church (nicknamed early in his career by the press as the ‘Mad Monk’), a boxer with plenty of appetite for aggression in Australia’s House of Representatives, and a conservative who once studied at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, Abbott is multifaceted and talented.  But there’s no doubt that he’s socially and economically more conservative than Turnbull, Howard or Malcolm Fraser (prime minister from 1975 to 1983).  Abbott also had more ties to the recently rejected Howard government than Turnbull, having served as employment minister from 1998 to 2003 and health minister from 2003 to 2007.  Australian voters remained too hesitant about Abbott to hand the government back to the Coalition in 2010, but just barely.  Today, the Coalition holds one more (72 to 71) seat than Labor in the  House of Representatives, but independents and the Australian Greens have provided the Gillard/Rudd government a 76-74 majority since 2010.  It’s a similar story in the Senate, where the Coalition already holds a 74 to 71 advantage over Labor, which governs with the support of nine Green senators.

Just as Rudd routinely garnered higher approval ratings than Gillard between 2010 and 2013, Turnbull posted higher ratings as well.  Commentators in early 2013 daydreamed over the possibility that both of Australia’s major parties would dump their unpopular leaders in favor of their more charismatic alternatives.

But while Rudd and Gillard plotted and schemed over leadership, dragging Labor’s government and Australia into what amounted to a personality contest, Turnbull refrained from challenging Abbott for the Liberal leadership.  The difference between the Labor approach and the Liberal approach is one reason why Abbott is a certain favorite to become Australia’s next prime minister.

Since returning as prime minister in June, Rudd has spent most of his time flailing — although a Newspoll survey showed Rudd’s Labor tied with Abbott’s Coalition as recently as July 8, Labor now trails the Coalition in the two-party preferred vote (i.e., after all third-party voter preferences have been distributed to Labor and the Coalition) by a 54% to 46% margin, according to the latest September 1 Newspoll survey.

But Rudd’s campaign has managed to do what even Gillard’s government could not — turn Abbott into a plausible prime minister.  For the first time in the campaign, more voters prefer Abbott as prime minister (43%) than prefer Rudd as prime minister (41%) — that’s an astounding turnaround, given that an early August poll showed that voters widely preferred Rudd to Abbott by a 47% to 33% margin.  Ironically, though Rudd was supposed to be Labor’s secret weapon in winning a third term in power, Abbott has so completely transformed his image through the course of the campaign that Rudd may now be saddled with the kind of landslide defeat that terrorized his Labor colleagues into sacking Gillard just three months ago.

If Abbott delivers the kind of victory that polls predict on Saturday, it will be in large part due to the self-destructive factional battles within Labor, but it will also have much to do with Abbott’s steady happy-warrior approach over the past four years.

So what will Abbott’s likely win mean for Australia as a matter of policy, beyond the presumable end to the instability of the Rudd-Gillard era?

Here’s a look at seven issues to keep an eye on in what’s become an increasingly likely Abbott government. Continue reading What should Australia expect from prime minister Tony Abbott? →

Australia

Rudd stakes reelection bid on passionate same-sex marriage support

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Behind in the polls, despite the fact that supporters engineered his return as prime minister earlier this summer to boost the Australian Labor Party’s reelection hopes, Kevin Rudd is increasingly depending on his support for same-sex marriage to encourage young, urban voters not to abandon him in favor of the center-right coalition headed by Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott.Australia Flag Icon

In a passionate plea on the campaign trail, Rudd confronted an opponent of same-sex marriage by arguing that supporting marriage equality is fully compatible with Christian faith, in one of the most memorable moments of the 2013 Australian campaign — and one that’s largely won cheers from Australians and same-sex marriage enthusiasts globally:

Challenged by a pastor on a Q&A programme on Monday night as to why as a Christian he did not follow the teaching of the Bible, that marriage was between a man and a woman, Rudd replied: “If I was going to have that view, the Bible also says that slavery is a natural condition because St Paul said in the New Testament ‘slaves be obedient to your masters’, and therefore we should all have fought for the confederacy in the US civil war.”

He added: “I mean, for goodness sake, the human condition and social conditions change. What is the central principle of the New Testament? It is one of universal love, loving your fellow man.”

It’s something worth watching in full:

While it might be a ‘West Wing’ or ‘prime ministerial’ moment for Rudd, it’s also perhaps one of the last tricks up Rudd’s sleeve to galvanize Labor enthusiasm ahead of Saturday’s vote — and to plant doubts about the social conservatism of an Abbott-led government.

Unfortunately for Rudd and proponents of same-sex marriage, most polls show that on the two-party preferred vote (Australians rank their preferred parties), Labor faces a 52% to 48% defeat.  Although marriage equality has become one of the top issues in the election, it’s not nearly the only issue in the campaign — it joins Australia’s weakening economy, budget issues, how to handle the ever-growing influx of asylum-seekers, relations with Asia, a controversial Labor carbon tax, and paid parental leave, not to mention the stability, discipline and maturity of a Labor government that, over two terms, has purged a sitting prime minister twice.

Although Rudd has only came to the view that gays and lesbians should have the same marriage rights as other Australian couples, he campaigned in the 2007 election on greater marriage equality and enacted reforms in December 2008 as prime minister that delivered the same rights to ‘de facto partners’ as those enjoyed by cohabiting opposite-sex couples that included many of the key rights that married couples enjoy on joint taxation, inheritance, employment and entitlement.

After losing the prime ministership in June 2010 after an internal Labor revolt against his leadership style, Rudd returned three months ago after polls showed that Labor faced a catastrophic loss under former prime minister Julia Gillard.  In that time, Rudd has not only become the first sitting prime minister to support marriage equality, but announced in the campaign’s first debate against Abbott that he would call a ‘conscience vote’ on same-sex marriage within 100 days of reelection.  Although Abbott supported the reforms to provide same-sex partners with ‘de facto partner’ rights in 2008 and Abbott has a lesbian sister, he has insistently ruled out the possibility that a Liberal/National Coalition government would enact marriage equality.

Australia

Feisty debate leads Abbott to ask Rudd, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’

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The consensus is that prime minister Kevin Rudd, behind narrowly in the polls, had a better performance in the second leaders’ debate earlier in Brisbane, turning his underdog status as a way to poke holes in the platform of his rival, opposition leader Tony Abbott.Australia Flag Icon

At one point, Rudd harped so much about the cuts that Abbott might make as prime minister that Abbott snapped, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’

It’s a sentiment many of Rudd’s rivals — from former Liberal/National Coalition prime minister John Howard to Labor prime minister Julia Gillard, who Rudd deposed as Labor leader only in June.

But Rudd’s tenacity resulted in at least one major concession from Abbott — that Abbott’s plan to cover the costs of a $5.5 billion paid parental leave scheme are insufficient.

Rudd parried with Abbott on the carbon tax that Rudd initially championed, Gillard ultimately enacted and Abbott hopes to repeal.  Rudd warned Abbott that the rest of the world, including the People’s Republic of China, is moving toward Australia’s carbon scheme — China launched its first experimental carbon scheme earlier this year in Shenzhen.

Rudd returned to his pledge from the first debate to introduce a bill legalizing same-sex marriage if Labor wins a third consecutive term, and Abbott reiterated his opposition to marriage equality, however gingerly — Abbott’s sister is gay:

All I can do is candidly and honestly tell people what my view is. I support the traditional definition of marriage as between a man and a woman. I know that others dispute this, because I have lots of arguments inside my own family on this subject now.

The two also bickered over asylum policy, an issue upon which Rudd and Gillard have now both made such a 180-degree turn that Labor’s policy on granting asylum to migrants who attempt to arrive in Australia by boat is now much tougher than the Howard government’s policy in the mid-2000s.

Rudd also repeatedly singled out Abbott’s record as health minister and he cheerfully alleged that Abbott cut $1 billion from public hospital budgets while in government.  Abbott denied the charges, arguing that the Howard government cut the rate of growth in spending, and he asked Rudd to stop telling fibs.

Commentators did not necessarily believe it was the kind of debate that marked a massive turning point in the campaign, though most agreed Rudd performed better than in his first debate:

In an early sign that the Labor leader needed a punchier performance than he had put in at the first debate nearly a fortnight ago, Mr Rudd capitalised first on the more flexible format of the people’s forum in Brisbane’s Broncos Leagues Club to accuse Mr Abbott of having ”ripped” $1 billion from hospital budgets and of planning further cuts. It was a charge Mr Abbott flatly denied after using his opening remarks to remind voters of Labor’s record in office.

Michael Gordon, political editor for The Age, argues that Rudd won narrowly:  Continue reading Feisty debate leads Abbott to ask Rudd, ‘Does this guy ever shut up?’ →

Australia

Rudd’s same-sex marriage pledge biggest surprise in bland Australian leaders debate

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After six years of government defined in large part by the bickering of one odd couple of Labor leaders, current prime minister Kevin Rudd is betting that his push to recognize all Australian couples will push his center-left Australian Labor Party to a third term in government. Australia Flag Icon

In what most commentators agree was a bland performance by both leaders in the first debate between prime minister Kevin Rudd (pictured above, left) and opposition leader Tony Abbott (pictured above, right) in Australia’s election campaign, the biggest news of the night was Rudd’s announcement to take up the cause of full same-sex marriage equality.  When Rudd announced in the debate that he would, if reelected, call a vote within 100 days to enact same-sex marriage equality in Australia, his campaign team was ready to go with a fully-formed campaign-in-miniature (with its own website and Twitter handle) and a nifty slogan, ‘It’s time,’ that draws on Labor’s popular slogan from the 1972 election campaign that brought prime minister Gough Whitlam to power.  Arguing that ‘folk out there want this to happen,’ especially young voters, Rudd pledged a full vote of conscience if Labor wins the September 7 national elections.

In one sense, it marks a step forward for Australian marriage equality, especially after New Zealand enacted a same-sex marriage statute with the support of prime minister John Key, nearly half of his governing National Party and virtually all of the opposition Labour and Green Parties.  Rudd announced earlier this year that he supported full same-sex marriage rights, which put him at odds with the Labor prime minister at the time, Julia Gillard, and it meant that when Rudd replaced Gillard in June after a Labor Party leadership contest, Australia had its first pro-gay marriage prime minister.

Rudd, who came to power for the first time after the November 2007 elections, enacted reforms in December 2008 as prime minister to provide that same-sex couples in Australia would have the same rights as ‘de facto partners’ as cohabitating opposite-sex couples, including inheritance rights, joint tax rights, employment rights, and joint entitlement rights.  The reforms received support at the time not only from Labor, but from the center-right Liberal Party of Australia and the Australian Green Party as well.

But though LGBT rights groups welcomed Rudd’s statement, it has more than the whiff of a gimmick to it, coming less than a month before Australians go to the polls and with Rudd either tied or narrowly behind Abbott in the polls.  Moreover, there’s no guarantee that holding a vote would actually enact gay marriage.  Labor MP Stephen Jones introduced a bill to legalize same-sex marriage in September 2012, and it lost in the House of Representatives on a vote of 98 to 42.  A similar vote in Australia’s Senate lost by a vote of 50 to 26.

Abbott, who leads not only the Liberal Party, but the broad Liberal/National Party ‘Coalition’ in Australia’s parliament, has not committed to hold a free vote on same-sex marriage if he becomes prime minister — despite the fact that his sister, Christine Forster, is a lesbian.  Abbott, who supported the 2008 reforms, currently opposes changing Australia’s Marriage Act, which currently defines marriage as between one man and one woman:  Continue reading Rudd’s same-sex marriage pledge biggest surprise in bland Australian leaders debate →

Australia

Photo of the day: Adorable Korean kid photo bombs Kevin Rudd

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Another day on the campaign trail for Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, though yesterday’s star was Joseph Kim, a five-year-old who delighted in making faces as the cameras rolled away at a Rudd campaign stop at a Korean church in Sydney on Wednesday.Australia Flag Icon

Australians vote in exactly one month on September 7 to determine whether to give Rudd a full term as prime minister, six weeks after his fellow Labor colleagues reinstated him as party leader when polls showed that former prime minister Julia Gillard had virtually no chance of winning this autumn’s election.  Gillard had replaced Rudd as prime minister in June 2010 after griping over Rudd’s management style.

All together, Labor is seeking a third consecutive term — Rudd led the party to a robust victory in November 2007, and Gillard led the party to the narrowest of victories in August 2010.

Rudd faces Tony Abbott, the leader of the National/Liberal Coalition, which governed the country under former prime minister John Howard in the early 2000s.

One more photo:

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Photo credit: Andrew Meares, Sydney Morning Herald

Australia

Rudd’s new policy for asylum seekers tops campaign agenda in Australia

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Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd kicked off his campaign for reelection over the weekend after setting September 7 as Australia’s election date — just over a month from today.Australia Flag Icon

Chief among the issues that will dominate the campaign debate is the Australia’s current immigration conundrum, which has been the subject of Rudd’s most controversial policy reversal since he ousted former prime minister Julia Gillard five weeks ago in the latest of years of intraparty battles to become the leader of the Labor Party and, once again, prime minister.  Rudd last month reintroduced elements of the ‘Pacific solution’ of former prime minister John Howard — a solution that Rudd abandoned as prime minister in 2007 — in a shift on asylum policy that leaves Labor now arguably to the right of anything the Howard government ever enacted.

Imagine, for a moment, that back in 2001, then-president George W. Bush introduced a policy that any foreign national apprehended crossing the southern U.S. border would be shipped to either, say, Greenland or Grenada, with whom U.S. officials negotiated a special arrangement to hold and process migrants bound for the United States.

Now imagine that Democratic president Barack Obama won election in 2008 on a promise to end that policy, and that he promptly did so — only to reintroduce the ‘Greenland solution’ a month before seeking reelection — with the added caveat that foreign nationals will never be resettled in the United States, just in Greenland and Grenada.

Though that’s not exactly what Australia is doing, it’s pretty close.  Rudd, who initially came to power on a promise to reverse the ‘Pacific solution’ six years ago, has now embraced a version of the ‘Pacific solution’ on steroids just one month before Australia’s general election — asylum seekers traveling to Australia by boat will be transferred to Papua New Guinea and Nauru where, if they qualify for asylum, will be resettled in Papua New Guinea or Nauru, not in Australia.

Rudd’s shift has left opposition leader Tony Abbott, flat-footed on an issue that Abbott was expected to use to advantage in the coming election, but it’s left Rudd subject to criticism that he’s carelessly tossing aside the human rights of asylum seekers, to say nothing of his previous principles, in order boost his own reelection chances.

Although Australia has always been a popular draw for migrants, the latest crisis stems from the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the number of refugees from Iraq and Afghanistan (and also from Vietnam, Myanmar/Burma and Sri Lanka) began to rise.  Howard instituted the ‘Pacific solution’ in 2001 — Australian naval officials who apprehended refugees off the coast of Australia would no longer escort them to Australia, but instead transfer them to processing centers on Christmas Island, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru where, eventually, each refugee’s asylum case would be reviewed.  While some refugees were eventually granted asylum in Australia and New Zealand, around a third of the refugees were refused asylum and sent home.

The policy seems to have worked because boat migration fell rapidly by the mid-2000s.

But when Rudd came to power in November 2007, his Labor government quickly ended the policy, in part due to criticism from human rights organizations over the sanitary conditions at the processing centers and the lengthy amount of time that asylum-seekers would spend in detention at the centers.   It was one element of Rudd’s ‘Big Australia’ campaign to reduce barriers to immigration and boost the country’s population.

But look what’s happened since 2007:

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Ending the ‘Pacific solution’ eliminated what had become a massive disincentive to the decision to risk life and safety to seek a better future in Australia.  So the Rudd policy encourage an unprecedented wave of migration, supplemented by six years of suppressed demand, and all of the horrors that come with it, including the horrors of people trafficking, higher incidence of fatal crashes at sea.  For Australian policymakers, asylum policy had become a lose-lose proposition: the ‘Pacific solution’ left the Australians subject to charges of humanitarian lapses and of subcontracting its moral responsibility to the much-poorer Papua New Guinea; the revocation of the ‘Pacific solution’ encouraged dangerous migration that led to habitual headlines of death and exploitation in its northern seas. (Here’s one narrative of the long and arduous journey from Afghanistan to Australia from Amnesty International).  Continue reading Rudd’s new policy for asylum seekers tops campaign agenda in Australia →

Australia, Western Australia

Why Western Australia doesn’t necessarily spell the end for Gillard

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Saturday’s state elections in Western Australia were not good news for the Labor Party or for its leader, Australian prime minister Julia Gillard (pictured above).WA flag iconAustralia Flag Icon

First off, it’s important to note that no one expected Labor to win the election — premier Colin Barnett faced an electorate largely satisfied with the direction of the state’s economy and governance since he came to office in 2008.

Barnett’s center-right Liberal Party won 47.2% on Saturday to just 33.6% for the center-left Labor Party.  The leftist Green Party finished in third place with 7.9% and the conservative agrarian National Party in fourth with 6% — the National Party competes separately in Western Australia against the Liberal Party (unlike in federal elections, where it competes more or less in tandem with the Liberal Party as part of the Liberal/National Coalition).

Barnett’s victory gives him an expected 32 seats — an increase of eight — in the state’s 59-member lower house, the Legislative Assembly, which means that he’ll be governing with a majority for the first time; his previous minority government required a coalition with the Nationals.

Labor will drop from 28 seats to 20, the Nationals rise from five seats to seven.

That has resulted in yet another round of hand-wringing over Julia Gillard’s Labor government, which is seeking reelection in a vote scheduled for September 14 later this year — one former Western Australian Labor minister argues that Labor will suffer a ‘crucifixion’ at the polls if Gillard leads it through the election.

But while Gillard’s government — and her Labor leadership — remain on shaky ground, it seems doubtful that Western Australia, as such, should necessarily be the final domino to topple Gillard. Continue reading Why Western Australia doesn’t necessarily spell the end for Gillard →

Australia

About that 15-minute speech on misogyny by Australian PM Julia Gillard

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New York tabloid blog Jezebel has officially awarded Australian prime minister Julia Gillard the title of ‘badass motherfucker,’ after Gillard spent 15 minutes in Australia’s House of Representatives on Tuesday calling out Coalition leader Tony Abbott for misogyny in the wake of a scandal that saw the House speaker resign after admitting to using inappropriate language about women in text messages. 

It’s really the most amazing video out of Australian politics since someone uploaded that ‘Happy Vegemite’ video of former prime minister Kevin Rudd going ballistic.

It’s playing to rave reviews around the English-speaking world — and that’s rare for anything in Australian politics.  Australia is one of the rare countries to have a parliamentary system, but two-party politics.  Gillard, whose Labor party was elected under Rudd in 2007, became prime minister in 2010 after an internal revolt over Rudd’s temperament led to Rudd’s resignation.  Abbott heads the Coalition, which since 1922, has been a coalition of a number of center-right Australian parties, most notably the Liberal and National parties.  Interestingly, Gillard remains more unpopular than Rudd and Abbott remains much less popular than former Coalition leader Malcolm Turnbull.

What’s most interesting is the distinction between how the speech played in Australia and how it’s playing for a global audience, though.  Much of the U.S. and British media commentary is universally glowing — The New Yorker even said Democratic U.S. president Barack Obama, who is widely seen to have turned in a subdued performance in last week’s U.S. presidential debate against Republican Mitt Romney could take some tips from Gillard.  But back in Australia, where Gillard is treading water after finally putting to rest (only temporarily, I assure you) an internal struggle with Rudd earlier in February, in advance of federal elections expected later in 2013, it played to decidedly mixed reviews:

Julia Gillard confronted a stark choice yesterday – the political defence of her parliamentary numbers, or the defence of the principle of respect for women.

She chose to defend her numbers. She chose power over principle. It was the wrong choice. It was an unprincipled decision and turned out not to be pragmatic either. The Prime Minister gained nothing and lost a great deal.

Some of the choice quotes:

And then of course, I was offended too by the sexism, by the misogyny of the Leader of the Opposition catcalling across this table at me as I sit here as Prime Minister, “If the Prime Minister wants to, politically speaking, make an honest woman of herself…”, something that would never have been said to any man sitting in this chair. I was offended when the Leader of the Opposition went outside in the front of Parliament and stood next to a sign that said “Ditch the witch.” Continue reading About that 15-minute speech on misogyny by Australian PM Julia Gillard →

Australia, Nauru, Papua New Guinea

Gillard’s 180-degree turn and what it means for Australian asylum policy

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It’s not just American politicians who have a hard time dealing with illegal immigration.

Unravelling stability in Afghanistan, where the United States has led an 11-year military effort, may be exacerbating a rise in boat-bound refugees to Australia, causing headaches for its Labor-led government.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard yesterday announced that her government would seek to enact the recommendations of a nonpartisan review and adopt a version of the ‘Pacific Solution’ adopted by Labor’s predecessor Liberal government of John Howard — Gillard has called on Australia’s parliament to pass a new law allowing for the reopening of detention centers on Nauru and on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea within as soon as a month.

The move will result in a return to offshore processing for asylum-seekers trying to arrive by boat to Australia.  That means that such refugees would face years of detention in Nauru or PNG if apprehended by Australian authorities at sea.

It’s a 180-degree turnaround for Labor, although Gillard had promised (during her latest interparty leadership contest with former prime minister Kevin Rudd in February) to reverse what’s been a five-year upswing in illegal arrivals by sea to Australia — and a correspondingly higher number of refugee deaths.  So although Gillard may be weakened by the sudden turn, it’s an issue that’s long been a political albatross for her and for Labor.  When Labor returned to power in 2007 under Kevin Rudd, the party quickly scrapped the ‘Pacific solution’ by enacting what Rudd considered more humane policies, closing the Nauru and PNG detention centers in favor of onshore processing centers.

The key question over the past five years is why the number of refugees by boat rose so dramatically in 2007 — proponents of the Pacific Solution, such as Liberal/National Coalition leader Tony Abbott, argue that the leniency of Labor asylum policies encouraged more refugees to arrive by sea.  Abbott supports the return to using offshore detention, has harshly criticized Labor policy for resulting in over 600 refugees deaths by drowning, and is today crowing over Gillard’s reversal:

“I’ve been saying for four years that the Prime Minister should pick up the phone to Nauru,” says the Opposition Leader.

“We have had enormous cost, untold tragedy and trauma that could have been avoided if the Prime Minister had been prepared to do this at any time in the last four years,” says Tony Abbott.

“We’ve had 22,000 illegal arrivals, almost 400 illegal boats.”

Although many of the refugees come directly by boat from Indonesia or Malaysia, asylum-seekers often begin their journey from throughout greater Asia, including China, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan.  Even under the Pacific Solution, most refugees who arrived by boat were bona-fide refugees and around two-thirds were either granted asylum in Australia or resettled in other countries.

Opponents of the Pacific Solution, such as former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, say that the number of refugees rose due to external factors.  Fraser, a former Labor prime minister of Australia from 1975 to 1983, yesterday called Gillard’s propsed approach ‘racist’: Continue reading Gillard’s 180-degree turn and what it means for Australian asylum policy →

Australia

One month on, what future for Labor?

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Nearly one month on from the leadership race that nearly tore apart the Labor Party, what do we know about the state of Australian politics?

First the relevant facts:

  • Kevin Rudd has returned to the backbenches after losing the leadership vote (71-31), where he has pledged not to challenge prime minister Julia Gillard for the party leadership before the next federal election.
  • Rudd has once again taken to his home state of Queensland to lick his political wounds, campaigning hard in advance of local state elections to be held this Saturday, March 24.  Rudd, who remains perhaps the most popular politician in Australia, is especially popular in Queensland.  Labor has held state-level power since 1996, but Queensland premier Anna Bligh seems unlikely to win a sixth-consecutive term for her party in the state, leaving Labor party out of power in the four largest of Australia’s six states.
  • Gillard remains slightly more popular than Coalition leader Tony Abbott as prime minister, but Labor’s primary vote share has fallen from 35% to just 31% since the leadership crisis — on a two-party preferred basis, the Coalition would defeat Labor 53% to 47%.  Gillard must announce a general election before November 2013.
  • Former NSW premier Bob Carr has been appointed by Gillard to the Senate and as the new foreign minister, replacing Rudd.
  • Gillard yesterday secured the passage of the Mining Resource Rent Tax, a 30% tax on Australian coal and iron ore miners with profits in excess of $75 million, which is expected to raise around $11 billion in revenue over three years.  The mining tax is a complimentary step to Australia’s carbon tax, both of which take effect this July.  The carbon tax passed in November 2010 and imposes a pricing regime on carbon emissions by fixing a a tax on each ton of carbon emitted by the top 500 polluters, and will move to an emissions trading scheme in July 2015.

What does this all really mean? Continue reading One month on, what future for Labor? →

Australia

We need to talk about Kevin

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Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd (and, as of three days ago, foreign minister) is busy this weekend working to secure as many votes as possible in the Labor Party leadership contest on Monday morning, called by current Prime Minister Julia Gillard last week.

The latest count, as of Friday, gave Gillard about 60 supporters in the 103-member caucus to just about 30 supporters for Rudd. So why is there such remaining doubt over the contest? Allegiances can change in 48 hours, especially as regards a secret ballot.  If Rudd significantly underpeforms, it could well draw a bright line to the infighting that has plagued Labor for the past three years; if he meets or exceeds expectations, don’t believe that this is the end of it.

Somewhat extraordinarily, a sitting prime minister has called a leadership contest as a referendum about her predecessor (and not herself). Continue reading We need to talk about Kevin →

Australia

We need to talk about Julia

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Footage from about 12 hours ago in which former prime minister and former foreign minister Kevin Rudd announced that he would challenge prime minister Julie Gillard.  In so doing, Rudd gave quite a bit of a show as to how he would go after Liberal Party / Coalition leader Tony Abbott as a man of the past.

I’ll have a little more later on what to expect in Monday’s vote and what comes next for Rudd, Gillard, the Labor Party and Australia.

For now, the state of play is that around 60 MPs have announced for Gillard, about 30 have announced for Rudd, and the latest polls show that Rudd is now the favorite to take on Abbott in a general election.

But a weekend can be a long time…

Australia

Rudd-Gillard showdown looming in Australia

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It’s been an extraordinary day in Australian politics, where Julia Gillard has called a leadership vote for Monday in the latest showdown of a long-simmering feud with foreign minister and former prime minister Kevin Rudd that has undermined the Labor Party almost since it took over government in 2007.

Rudd, who’s been visiting Washington, DC, resigned as foreign minister today in a press conference outside of Washington’s Willard Hotel, announced he will return immediately to Australia, indicating that he would stand for the leadership against Gillard:

I do not believe that Prime Minister Gillard can lead the Australian Labor Party to success in the next election. That is a deep belief, I believe it’s a belief also shared right across the Australian community…. Their overall argument to me is that they regard me as the best prospect to lead the Australian Labor Party successfully to the next elections, to save the Australian Labor Party and those next elections and to save the country from the ravages of an Abbott government.

One commentator said earlier today that the feud has left them both “screwed” — Rudd unable to win the leadership and Gillard unable to win the next election.
Meanwhile, Labor voices are already coming out loudly and strongly — mostly against Rudd.