Julia Gillard is licking her wounds after a disastrous few days where she was brought back to earth with a thud following her disastrous handling of the Qantas dispute. She swanned around at the CHOGM meeting in Perth trying to reinvent herself as an international statesman, wagging her finger at Europe and having her ego massaged by foreign leaders. It was all going well, the puppy dog reporters were all going along with it heaping praise on her, filing acres of coverage about nothing in particular, then reality intervened. You can't keep up a facade forever.
Biased Labor supporter Laurie Oakes writes a column in the Saturday edition of the Daily Telegraph which really should be headlined "Labor Party advertisement". In this column, the head of the Canberra cheer squad for Gillard usually puts forward the current strategy the Press Gallery will be using to boost Gillard and Labor/The Greens. On Saturday he said that CHOGM would be a circuit breaker and revive Gillard's fortunes. The vuvuzela had sounded, the call went out.
The reporters were dutifully following the directive from His Master's Voice, heaping praise on Gillard, saying nice things about her and CHOGM, pushing the new foreign Julia and going along with her desire to divert attention away from her domestic political failings by swanning around with foreign dignitaries. Everything else was put on hold, Canberra and the rest of the country was a world away. Then Alan Joyce grounded the Qantas fleet.
The Gillard government had stuck its head in the sand over the Qantas dispute. Too gutless to intervene, scared stiff of their union mates, letting it just roll on and do untold damage to Qantas and the reputation of Australia, it dragged on for months. All along the government had the power under the Fair Work Act to intervene and bring it to an end, but they refused. Tony Sheldon from the Transport Workers Union is in line to be the next ALP president, and Gillard and the rest didn't want to do anything that might offend the new boss. While Gillard was in CHOGM fantasy land over the weekend - supping champagne, eating lobster, dressing up in silly clothes and watching Foxtel in luxury hotel rooms - Alan Joyce grounded the entire Qantas fleet. He had no choice. It was the only way he could get action from the federal government, and he forced their hand to send the dispute to Fair Work Australia. Despite being top-heavy with union officials, Fair Work Australia brought the strike action to an end and gave the parties 21 days to come to a resolution. Something that should have been done right from the start.
Watching the scenes in parliament, and listening to the pathetic performances from Gillard, Combet and the other Labor/union stooges, you cannot help but shake your head in bewilderment. Despite this being a political disaster and an embarrassment of unprecedented proportions, Gillard and the rest actually tried to blame Tony Abbott - yet again. Gillard put on her typical mad harridan, shrew-like performance in parliament screaming that Abbott was "Mr WorkChoices". It was comical, a stunning exposition of a leader woefully out of touch with reality and flailing about like a beached whale. Further embarrassment was caused by Gillard's revelation on TV that she refused to impliment section 371 of the Fair Work Act to bring the dispute to an end because "it had never been used before and might create legal problems". So there you have it. Gillard refused to bring in a law she helped draft - the replacement for WorkChoices - because she was too scared it might not stand up if challenged in the courts. So why did she bring it in in the first place? This is absolutely comical, but oh so typical of Labor and their amateurism and incompetence.
This whole disaster should be a salutory lesson to Gillard and the Press Gallery about the futility of trying to create silly diversions to try and cover up Gillard and the government's failings. You can't get away with it forever, over the barbecues in the western suburbs the punters don't give a fig about African dictators or any other nonsense. They just want an end of it. Gillard is now on borrowed time, and the sooner this failed farce of a government is swept from office the better off we will all be.
