Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, January 25, 2005
 
Bizarre notions of unity
The extensive media coverage given to the Labor leadership contest helps to ensure that issues actually affecting people's lives are barely examined, while political coverage is again reduced to a mix of sporting contest and soap opera.

The bizarre notion is still being widely pushed that avoiding a contested ballot would enable a show of unity, even though many Labor MPs have been openly stating differing preferences. Quite how it enables unity by preventing them expressing that preference via secret ballot is beyond me. Maybe the media will start proposing we should cancel the next election and just keep John Howard there as long as he wants, because having people vote for different parties and candidates will be divisive and harm national unity.

Amongst all the coverage, it's been particularly sad to see Julia Gillard's suitability seriously being questioned due to her being single and childless! Frankly, if you're going to be totally cold and ruthless about it, not having children or a partner would be a plus as it means you are not going to be distracted from your job.

In addition, she reportedly favours a (gasp) independent foreign policy for Australia. Apparently "independent foreign policy" is code for "anti-American" - someone must teach me all these hidden codes one day, I've always suffered from a tendency to actually take people's words at face value.

Still, I guess no one in the mainstream media has picked up on the criticism I saw in one letter to the editor that Julia Gillard was unsuitable because she had just taken her holidays in a communist country! Apparently all those Liberal and Labor party people who've been sucking up to the Chinese communist dictatorship for years because of the economic opportunities are OK, but visiting a communist dictatorship for a holiday is clearly suspect.


posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Tuesday, January 25, 2005 Permalink
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