Protesters' violence a blight on Australia

FRANTIC scenes of the Prime Minister being rescued helter skelter by riot police from a baying crowd are a blight on Australia.

Carted like a mannequin under the arm of her bodyguard, losing a shoe, Julia Gillard's predicament on Australia Day led news bulletins around the world.

Now we know it was Gillard's own media adviser who sparked the violent protest at The Lobby restaurant in Canberra.

But Friday night's press release announcing the resignation of Tony Hodges, 28, left too much unanswered.

Did the PM's office fan the flames on Tony Abbott's innocuous remarks about the Aboriginal tent embassy and leak his whereabouts deliberately to foment trouble for political advantage?

The mysterious third party to whom Hodges disclosed the presence of the Opposition Leader at The Lobby restaurant, triggering angry protests, has now been identified as unionist Kim Sattler. But was Hodges acting on his own? Gillard says he was.

Why did it take nine hours for the Prime Minister to confirm allegations of Hodges' involvement?

It was just after 9am Friday when 2GB's Ray Hadley told listeners an unnamed Gillard staffer had phoned someone from the tent embassy and said, "you should hear what Abbott just said. He wants it all torn down. If you're looking for him he's across the road in a restaurant".

The report was part-right - the embassy's informant was not Hodges but Sattler, the intermediary briefed by Hodges.

The story seems a bungled exercise in the darkest arts of political subterfuge from a Government whose primary goal is not to run the country but run down the Opposition Leader. Malicious untruths were told, gullible people ready to believe the worst of a conservative leader were incited to violence.

Well, this is what Wikipedia has on it.

“Gillard defeated Rudd in a leadership challenge and from there on said no carbon tax would be introduced under a government she led when taking the government to the 2010 election. In the first hung parliament result in 70 years, the government required the support of crossbenchers including the Greens. One requirement for Green support was a carbon tax, which Gillard proceeded with in forming a minority government. A fixed-price carbon tax would proceed to a floating-price ETS within a few years under the plans. The government proposed the Clean Energy Bill in February 2011, which the opposition claimed to be a broken election promise. The Liberal Party vowed to overturn the bill if it is elected.”

The information from Wikipedia is accurate, but misses out a couple of what I consider important details.

The first is that the Greens would never have supported a conservative coalition government over a Labor government. It just wasn't going to happen. The Prime Minister and the Labor Party have tried to claim that they had to change their position on the carbon tax in order to get Green support - that's garbage.

The second is that during the 1990s, one of the key issues in Australian politics were the attempts by the conservative coalition (then in opposition) to reform the tax system, introducing a Goods and Services Tax (Sales Tax, basically) at the same time as reducing income tax. The coalition lost the 'unloseable' 1993 election pretty much because voters rejected the GST at the time, and in the lead up to the 1996 election, John Howard promised not to introduce a GST if elected. Once elected in a landslide in 1996, he decided that he did want to introduce the GST and with a massive majority in the House and far more Senators than Labor, there was absolutely nothing to stop him doing so - except that it would be breaking an election promise. So he called an election - the 1998 election early expressly so he could campaign with the GST as stated party policy and give the Australian people the chance to give him a mandate for the changes he wanted, or reject them. His government was reelected, albeit it with a reduced majority, and only after that had happened, did he introduce the new tax system.

This created a pretty clear precedent in Australian politics on what the people expect a government to do if it changes its mind on a major policy change. Australians can and do accept that a change in situation may mean a policy needs to change - but we expect the Prime Minister to go back to the people in that case to give them a chance to reelect a government based on its new position, or replace it if they reject the change. And it was Ms Gillard's failure to do this that upset people. To hold onto power, she introduced a policy that 87% of Australians had voted against. Even a lot of people who would support the Carbon Tax were angry that she didn't do it properly or for the 'right reasons' - not because she believed in it, but just because she made a political calculation.

I e-posted to the author the following:

Dear Ms. M. Devine,

A bit acquainted with an Australian-style freedom of information and liberties in general, your reader dares to draw your kind attention to his comment submitted to The Herald Sun because of being not quite sure whether it to reach a broader newspaper’s audience:
“Oh, what a worldwide drama- females screaming (let’s look carefully on a pic presenting a blue shoe lost on landscape of a “mob protesting”) were such a mortal threat that the P.M. had been “drugged like mannequin”-an excerpt is from a later media presentation- to a safety.
And how had the Leader of Opposition been carried by to the same vehicle?
If you, Ms. Miranda Devine, is concerned as your reader reckoned, with daily routine threats to democracy he might supply to your consideration some story-lines being, however, of a lesser picturesque presentation than disgraceful photos of The Lobby affairs paraded on the first pages of post-Australia Day Oz newspapers.”
Thank you for your time and your eventual communicating.

Truly,

Michael Kerjman

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