Things are going from bad to worse for Julia Gillard and her government.
JULIA Gillard’s Labor-Greens-renegade Nationals administration looks increasingly log-jammed.
Little wonder ANZ chief Mike Smith says she’s joined the world’s “weak government club”, following those headed by gullible politicians hoaxed by the anti-carbon dioxide scare campaign driven by the United Nations.
If this situation persists, Ms Gillard will go the way of her predecessor, Kevin Rudd.
State Scene won’t attempt to fathom Labor’s Byzantine factional ways to predict when any dumping may occur.
How many guessed that, on the eve of a national election, Kevin07 would discover he was history?
Actually, State Scene’s best informant on Labor’s increasingly strange antics – who lives in the electorate of former ‘gang of four’ member, Lindsay Tanner – predicted that coup d’état.
He’d emailed me saying Ms Gillard was likely to soon become leader, something I never suspected would occur so dramatically and promptly.
But it did.
Interestingly, that same informant, a fortnight before the recent NSW election, emailed again saying former GetUp board member Bill Shorten may lead Labor at the next federal election.
Let’s see if that’s another centre-bull.
That’s a second ousting, and though unlikely, it shouldn’t be discounted.
What have Ms Gillard’s milestones been to date?
First and foremost, little has changed since her minority government was cobbled together after last August’s election.
Frankly, Australia still has a Rudd-style government, just without Kevin07.
The mining tax threat lingers and what some call asylum seekers, but others see as illegal migrants, continue arriving to be temporarily held either at Christmas Island, a homeland centre, or ‘in the community’.
And that East Timor-based centre Ms Gillard promised before the election still isn’t in sight and is unlikely to ever be.
That issue, which hails from the torrid Rudd days, and which shouldn’t have seen the light of day as a self-inflicted Labor predicament, continues to smoulder.
Then Ms Gillard comes out signing a covenant with the Greens, now split two-ways – ‘the watermelons’ (bright red within, green outside) and ‘the tree-huggers’ (anti-loggers).
The watermelons include long-time ardent Marxists, NSW senator-to-be Lee Rhiannon and Melbourne MP Adam Bandt, plus senators Scott Ludlam (WA) and Sarah Hanson-Young (SA), who are backers of the global anti-Israel BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) campaign.
Then, during her Gough Whitlam Oration, Ms Gillard claimed the Greens were unsympathetic to mainstream family oriented patriotic Australians, angering Greens leader, Senator Bob Brown.
“The Greens will never embrace Labor’s delight at sharing the values of everyday Australians [who] do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation,” she said.
But the real doozie remains her suicidal plan to tax CO2, arising from the “mother of scare campaigns”, as the late Aaron Wildavsky described it – when there’s no evidence showing this essential plant nutrient (stop fibbing Ms Gillard; it’s not a pollutant) is heating mother earth as suggested by cohorts of government-paid scientists, untaxed globetrotting UN mandarin bureaucrats, and wealthy Greens alarmists.
Her outrageous ‘magic pudding’ CO2 tax will have only half the cash raised going to some voters as so-called compensation, and the rest to boosting the bureaucracy.
Labor’s 25 per cent NSW election outcome may yet appear impressive compared to a federal election outcome.
Following the short-lived Rudd era – during which Ms Gillard wholeheartedly backed a CO2 tax, then reneged, then terminated Mr Rudd’s prime ministership over it – she went into election mode promising no CO2 tax, then teamed-up with the Greens to announce she’d changed her mind to back the original Rudd stance.
Since these many back-flips, the prime minister has seen Labor heading down NSW Labor’s path virtually from day one of its term.
Can Ms Gillard avoid electoral demise? Is there a way off her present road to disaster? Is there a parachute?
Strangely enough, yes, there is.
What she should immediately do is publicly repeat the wise words leading Perth climate scientist David Evans uttered on the steps of Parliament House in Perth when addressing last month’s anti-CO2 tax rally.
“This issue is tearing society apart,” he said.
She should then announce the convening of a world-class scientific inquiry into the CO2 gas issue with anyone wishing to present their case allowed to do so, but giving evidence under oath.
All witnesses must present their views firstly in writing so experts can objectively assess them.
In other words she’d no longer be allowing herself and Labor to be led by the likes of non-scientists such as paid climate change commissioner Tim Flannery, Canberra economist Ross Garnaut, and Australia’s alarmist supremo, Senator Brown.
That would signal a halt to Australia being torn apart.
She should publicise that the New Hampshire House of Representatives last month voted to bury that state’s participation in the regional greenhouse gas initiative cap-and-trade scheme, with Maine and New Jersey considering following.
And acknowledge that French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who’d vowed to “save the human race” by taxing CO2, smartened-up by abandoning that silly crusade.
Things are swinging the other way; abandonment of alarmism and baseless catastrophic predictions designed to justify ever-higher taxation.
But just as this reversal has begun; she’s drifting aimlessly in the other, increasingly discredited direction.
What’s far worse for her prime ministerial ambitions and Labor’s very future is that Ms Gillard’s aimless drifting heralds a disaster like the one former NSW Labor leader, Kristina Keneally, underwent.
This isn’t a case of Sydney or the bush.
It’s Sydney or a proper, professional, scientifically based, investigation into all the empirical (not emotional and propagandistic claims) evidence.
If Ms Gillard was really smart she’d announce simultaneously that, six months after the scientific inquiry handed down its report, she’d be putting the question of whether or not Australia embraced a CO2 tax to a national plebiscite.
Both moves – announcement of an empirically-based inquiry, staffed by experts, not ideologues, with evidence presented under oath; and the flagging of a national plebiscite so all Australians could democratically decide – would immediately defuse this endlessly destructive Greens-initiated imbroglio.
Ms Gillard would thus get Greens off her and Labor’s backs and that alarmist entity that’s been promoting the mother of scare campaigns for years now would have to focus upon other truly important questions.
Where, for instance, do the Greens stand on Australia’s increasingly unmanageable, costly, and failed “open door” policy of foreigners just sailing here unhindered?
What about a plebiscite on that?
Where do the Greens stand on the fact that Australian taxpayers are being ever more burdened by mountains of costly unneeded federal duplicating of state responsibilities with ever larger bureaucracies and more regulations?
Whatever happened to Mr Rudd’s one-day wonder media announcement that Australia should move to acquiring a dozen-strong flotilla of state-of-the-art submarines?
Where do the Greens stand on 101 other crucial issues like the several hundred thousand people, especially those under 30, drawing disability benefits when challenging away-from-home jobs exist around Australia?
And so on.
If Ms Gillard and her equally culpable deputy, big taxing Wayne Swan, don’t brace-up they’ll be taking, if not Kevin07’s, then Kristina Keneally’s path.
