Posted on 06/26/2013 4:56:09 AM PDT by Perdogg
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard was ousted as Labor Party leader Wednesday by her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, in a vote of party lawmakers hoping to avoid a huge defeat in upcoming elections.
(Excerpt) Read more at apnews.myway.com ...
Tony Abbott will probably will become PM after the election.
....followed by mass resignations of frontbenchers who didn’t want to serve under K. Rudd because he is a Megalomaniac.
Will Abbott become the next PM?
Well, at the moment, Julia Gillard is still PM - but tomorrow, Kevin Rudd will be commissioned (provided he can give the Governor General the assurances she needs that he has the confidence of the House). Opinion polls would suggest that unless something very unexpected happens, Tony Abbott will become Prime Minister after the next election which could be about six weeks from now at the earliest, five months from now at the latest.
So is this good or bad for Australia?
good.
Rudd is less extremist than Gillard, but is still a socialist. He’d be the lesser of two evils except that he is likely to do better at the election due before the end of the year than Gillard would have, which means the conservative Coalition will be less successful. We would still expect to win with a decent majority unless something went seriously wrong, but winning the House 110-40 would have been better than 80-70, or 90-60 - and we are much less likely to take control of our Senate.
Does the Aussie press fawn over the left as the American Press does here? Will they fawn over Rudd as they already do over Hillary (yuck!) here?
Some of it does. But we have reasonably conservative press organs as well - when it comes to newspapers, for example, we have Fairfax papers and NewsCorp papers - NewsCorp tend to be fairly conservative, Fairfax are solidly left wing.
Will they fawn over Rudd as they already do over Hillary (yuck!) here?
Hopefully not - Rudd was PM from 2007 to 2010 and was removed from office because he was seen as a failure - and still is, just not as big a failure as Gillard. Maybe he can reinvent himself, but I doubt it.
What I've been reading in the Sydney Morning Herald (yes,I know...multiple sources are better) Gilliard would have been trounced in the election but Rudd would win.I don't know if the SMH is a Labour paper or not but that seems to be a pretty stark difference.
But the situation has changed - a number of senior Labor MPs have announced this evening, they will not be contesting the next election, including some who might have managed to hold onto seats because of personal long term links with their electorates - new candidates will be a different matter.
You can never say never - we lost an 'unloseable' election in 1993 - but very few people think Labor has a hope of holding on.
Sydney Morning Herald is as leftoid as they get. A conservative choice is the Aus. Telegraph: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/
Couldn't help but notice the spelling for "Labor." Does Australian spelling of such words routinely vary from the British?
The proper noun ‘Labor’ is spelled that way as a tribute to the American labor movement.
The word ‘labour’ in every day use is spelled the British way
British spellings of words are generally considered more 'correct' in Australian English, but American spellings are treated as an acceptable alternative. I'm a school teacher and we are supposed to use British spellings ourselves, and teach British spellings as standard, but to accept American spelling as valid (ie, a student would not be marked incorrect for using them, or lose marks because of it). Newspapers also tend to use American spellings as well, nowadays, although more academic works still tend towards British spelling.
The Labor Party is a special case, however. They adopted the American spelling as part of their name in 1912 when British spellings were still standard in Australia. They did this because of the influence of a man named King O'Malley who was a prominent member of their party and Parliament, as well as a Cabinet Member. O'Malley claimed to be Canadian at the time which made him a British subject and eligible to be a Member of the Australian Parliament, although he is now believed to have been American born, and he believed in 'spelling reform' to make English spelling simpler. He persuaded his party that 'Labor' was a more modern way to spell their name, and so they adopted it as official.
How civilised. :-)
Thanks for the history lesion.
I was wondering today, is Australia in as dire straits as the USA these days? I am looking for a country who would like a few million Americans who will work hard to make themselves and their new country a success. I was just in Britain and was troubled by the Muslim influence that seems to be gaining strength. What do you think? Just askin’.
As an American I would like to say that I’m sorry America, even in a small way, is responsible for the spelling of the name of a political party “Labor” that has done so much to destroy a faithful ally of the United States!
BTW, if you guys are successful in driving out the Left from the government of Australia, could a conservative Republican Yank like myself obtain political asylum in “Oz?”
After all, I do live in a semi-Communist country on its way to the REAL THING.
I think it's hard to judge America from outside, so I wouldn't want to do that, but I think Australia is in fairly good condition, though there's room for improvement.
I was just in Britain and was troubled by the Muslim influence that seems to be gaining strength. What do you think? Just askin’.
I'm a joint Australian/British citizen who spends some time in the UK each year. I honestly don't think Muslims influence in Britain is as significant as some people seem to think. Parts of London, and some of the other major cities have large Islamic populations, but in the country as a whole, it's not that significant - and I really do think it's fair to say that a lot of British Muslims have come to the UK in search of a better life and a different life than they had in Islamic countries and while they want to be free to live their life of faith, they do not seek to change the country as a whole - unfortunately the extremists are, as always, far more vocal, out of all proportion to their numbers - and even a small number of maniacs can do a lot of damage.
Having said that, I think Islamic and Islamist influence on Australia is lower than it is in the UK, but on the other hand, Australia is also less influenced by Christianity than the US is in many ways.
It's not easy to immigrate to Australia, but those who have the skills we want and who are willing to work hard, still have a very good shot at success. We share a lot of culture and beliefs with the US, as we do with the UK. But there are some areas (such as gun rights and freedom of speech) where I think the US still has a more robust approach to freedom and rights than we do.
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