http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/the-forbi ... ml?page=-1The forbidden allure of Red Julia
* Annabel Crabb
* July 9, 2009
Something very strange is happening to Julia Gillard. After years of being hyped as the hard face of Australian socialism, she's become something very, very surprising: a right-wing pin-up.
What is it about La Gillardine, the implacable, unflappable executioner of John Howard's industrial legacy, that causes such pandemonium in the hearts of certain conservative males?
I noticed this the other day during the ABC's Insiders program, when my fellow panellist Andrew Bolt, of Melbourne's Herald Sun, interrupted his ordinarily reliable flagellation of the Australian Labor Party with some words of admiration for "DPM", as the Prime Minister fondly knows her.
"Hello, hello, hello," I thought. "What's all this?"
Further investigation reveals the situation to be far more serious than I had suspected. "I have nursed a secret passion for Julia Gillard, but only now is it safe to say so," Bolt wrote in a giddy, confessional rush in February last year. "She has the mouth of Paul Keating but the eyes of Megan Gale, and the one just enhances the other."
Before you panic, you should know that Bolt here is adapting an old comment once made about Margaret Thatcher (another shiver looking for a conservative spine to run up), who was once described by the French president Francois Mitterand as having "the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe".
The Bolt-Gillard thing started out in the usual schoolyard way, with Gillard accusing Bolt in 2003 of "pure and simple propaganda" and Bolt offering in print to buy the then opposition immigration spokeswoman "some pills for her alarming paranoia".
For years after that, Bolt called her "The Left's Julia Gillard". The chosen prefix told readers all they needed to know about what the writer thought of the subject.
But something's changed. Is it Bolt, or is it Gillard? In his 2008 confessional, Bolt explains that "Gillard went from put-down to pin-up simply by applying the finest make-up: a powdering of pure power." But Kevin Rudd's been slathering that stuff on for a year and a half, and it doesn't seem to have inspired anything like the same response down at "Still Not Sorry" HQ.
My Melbourne friend is by no means the only right-wing bloke experiencing these turbulent and unpredictable urges. Even my dad, a South Australian sheep and grain farmer whose political views have scant natural intersection with those of the Labor Left, was sufficiently captivated by Gillard last year to name one of his chickens after her; the Julia Gillard of the Crabb chook house is a personable bird of reddish plumage, with leadership tendencies and a disinclination to lay eggs.
When some loudmouth subsequently told her about the chicken, Gillard wrote a note to Dad declaring that she "could not imagine a greater honour".
Whether Dad would vote for her, I don't know. But like most Australians, he is drawn to any politician capable of having a laugh at their own expense.
Tony Abbott is probably the foundation member of conservative Australia's secretive "Juliaholics Anonymous" chapter, whose members come together now and again to reassure each other that just because they search every crowd for a flash of copper hair and dream of the firm tread of DPM's sturdy ankle boot in the small of their backs, does not mean their commitment to a decentralised system of workplace relations is any the less.
"I think there's an authenticity about Julia Gillard which Kevin Rudd lacks," Abbott sighed last month, helplessly; he cannot lie, poor dear, any more than he can forget the lass who shadowed, then eclipsed him.
Piers Akerman, too, has caught a mild variant strain of the Julia flu.
"PSSST. Want to know a secret? I agree with Julia Gillard on the need for greater transparency in our education system," he wrote in August last year.
"She almost blushed when I told her this on Sunday."
The Australian's Greg Sheridan praised the "grace, eloquence and stature" with which Gillard addressed the US State Department in Washington last year, though to be fair to Sheridan, he was specifically applauding her warm words about Alexander Downer, on whom the writer has a far more established crush.
How can a woman who featured in those grainy Coalition advertisements just two short years ago as a hatchet-faced union moll possibly now find herself the object of even secretive conservative admiration?
The simple truth is that she never really was the person in the grainy ads, as just about anyone in the ALP would tell you. Real Labor lefties split their sides laughing back then to see Gillard portrayed as a dangerous socialist, because they knew from experience that the ambitious Member for Lalor was about as pragmatic as they come.
Silly sensationalist reporting about Gillard's membership of a group called Socialist Forum missed the point about who she had become, and how.
Prodigious natural ability and her strategic alliance with first one right-wing Labor leader (Simon Crean) and then another (Mark Latham) swung her up through the monkey-bars of the parliamentary Labor Party and amassed her sufficient influence to anoint a third: Kevin Rudd.
She does not intend to grow old as one of those Labor pollies of whom it is said that they could have made a terrific leader had they not had the misfortune to be from the Labor Left.
In Opposition, Julia Gillard was a hard-headed and astute operator. In Government, she is a political killing machine; a locomotive of a woman whose sense of humour humanises her unstoppability.
No wonder it titillates the Tory blokes to lash themselves to the tracks.
Annabelle Crabbe tries to write lighthearted, satirical political articles. Usually she comes across as a ditz, the above is a triumph and had me roilling on the floor with laughter
