Gillard tells Abbott how it is

[mellie]

Good on Gillard. Everything she said is true. She's been subject to the most disgusting attacks. Abbott is so weak.

https://sites.google.com/a/lakewoodcity ... s-protests

Burning bras on the picket line went out in the 60's, whereby it's clear to most people Gillard is milking the gender discrimination card for all it's worth as a means of distracting us from the real issues,(you know, like the state of our economy) her underlying political failures, incompetencies and even legal misgivings.


At the end of the day, very few people have fallen for it, this or support her gender warmongering in parliament, apart from those who are truly sexist themselves this and discriminate also.


She has ran out of Abbott/opposition blame tactics, hence the extent of her political dialogue and prowess has shamefully regressed to petty gender politics.

Perhaps she should be leading a feminist student union movement again, rather than a leading Australian political party?

Back to the 60's we go.....

[Rorschach]

Here you go mantra.

Greens leader Christine Milne says Julia Gillard is a sexism hypocrite
* by: SIMON BENSON
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* October 15, 2012 12:00AM

GREENS Leader Christine Milne accused Julia Gillard of hypocrisy over her accusations that Tony Abbott was a misogynist, after a derogatory Twitter attack against her by a Labor senator.

Admitting the Greens had made a deliberate decision to stay out of the gender war between the government and the Coalition, Ms Milne admitted the PM undermined her own attack against Mr Abbott as being sexist last week by protecting Peter Slipper. And she warned the PM she would now be forced to stamp out sexism in her own party.

Ms Milne accused Labor senator David Feeney of a sexist and derogatory attack after he tweeted a series of pictures of the Greens leader with captions describing her different emotional states.

"If you're going to call it out you have to call out sexism on all sides, regardless of who is responsible," Ms Milne told Sky's Australian Agenda program yesterday.

Ms Milne said the debate over the past week had diminished the parliament.

"We decided we didn't want to get dragged down into it all," Ms Milne said.

[Rorschach]

No winners in debate's descent into the gutter
* by: Simon Benson
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* October 15, 2012 12:00AM

THERE was not a single winner from the parliamentary gender lunacy which masqueraded as political debate - only losers.

Peter Slipper lost his job as speaker, the Gillard government lost whatever skerrick of credibility it had left and Tony Abbott lost his muse.

But the biggest losers of all were the Australian public.

Sure, Julia Gillard delivered a spirited attack last Tuesday. And the entire world, apparently, was riveted. But were they really?

According to our trusted correspondent from the UK, Charles Miranda, not a soul could be found on the streets of London who knew what he was talking about. According to Miranda, the only creepy male Australian that had transfixed the Brits was one that had turned up uninvited to a restaurant, co-incidentally, in a town not far from where the PM was born.

"It was huge and very hairy," Lilly Lloyd was reported to have told the UK's Telegraph.

She wasn't talking about Tony Abbott. Instead of leading with Gillard's global gender war, The Telegraph devoted page three to the story of a giant huntsman spider, the size of a dinner plate they say, which had found its way into a local eatery - the Granary cafe at Hay on Wye - on the Welsh border.

According to the conservative broadsheet, vets had identified the arachnid as an Australian "venomous huntsman spider". Shows how much they know.

"The customer had just returned from a holiday in Australia and unwittingly carried the creature, which can give a painful bite, in his coat," the paper reported.

Gillard's speech did spill over from social media into the mainstream but on a premise that was completely false and of only passing interest.

And most Labor MPs concede this, despite howls of protest from some commentators about the press gallery's apparent non-observance of Gillard's brilliance. Seems to me most that have observed Gillard are repelled by her dummy spit and hypocrisy.

And that's because the digital folk hero status that Gillard has inspired overseas was devoid of an important factual element - the deceit of the argument. Even the Greens have called Gillard on it. See mantra... oh wait you have me on ignore because you hate the truth.

Dare I say it, but Greens leader Christine Milne emerged as the most sensible MP yesterday when even she accused Gillard on Sky News Australian Agenda of hypocrisy, and achieving little more than diminishing the reputation of the parliament even further.

Gillard's speech, while igniting the passions of young women glued to the ribald on-line women's forum Jezebel, will fail to engage most Australian voters because, unlike the rest of the world, they have lived through weeks of this nonsense. The inevitable focus group research by Labor in the coming days is likely to show that what most Australians saw was Gillard having a red-hot crack at Abbott, Peter Slipper resigning in tears over his sex-text shame and the parliament having a sophomoric argument over who was the biggest hypocrite.

Liberal pollster Mark Textor reckons the importance of Gillard's speech is completely overstated when it comes to the interests and relevance of mainstream Australia - 80-90 per cent of people don't spend their lives on Twitter.

"Last week was twitterers talking to other twitterers about politicians talking about politicians," he says.

The fact is Labor's attacks are an entirely confected campaign to distract people who aren't listening, from concerns that may have about other issues namely all the ones the government doesn't have an answer for. gee where have we heard that before?

The government may have been exposed for its mendacity, but it wasn't a good week for Abbott either. But not because more people now think he is a sexist than before. They don't. All that would have been achieved was entrenching existing views. What Abbott didn't expect, however, was that Slipper would actually tap the mat.

The Coalition wanted Slipper to stay as speaker for as long as possible, so it could continue to link the sleaze to Gillard and the government. That now, is gone. If they wanted Slipper to stay, they wouldn't have moved the motion. They wanted Gillard to concede and in doing so prove she has supported and defended the indefensible and has terminal bad judgement.

Abbott may not have realised it at the time but Gillard's speech was also about goading him into responding in way that Gillard had hoped he would with the aggressive posture that women don't like. And he did. It was a tactic to undermine his attempts to soften his image by using wife Margie to defend him against Labor's handbag hit squad. And it worked. He is now down in the cesspit with them.

Perhaps the last word on this should be left to the well regarded new Speaker of the House Anna Burke. Good grief another Neferti.

Burke recently remarked that she was uncomfortable with the formal title of Madam Speaker because it made her sound like she was running a brothel. So what do they call you Anna without sounding disrespectful and sexist?

Well, it may not be a brothel, but parliament certainly has become a house of ill-repute.

[Rorschach]

Amanda Vanstone excerpts...

Abbott and I are from different sides of the broad Liberal church. He is a blokey bloke and he is a staunchly conservative Roman Catholic. Neither of these attributes are my cup of tea. But neither of these attributes are offensive. And neither of these attributes rules you out of being suitable to hold high office. Make no mistake, that's the end point of Labor's attacks.

That Gillard's role as champion of women is a shallow political ploy was brought into the limelight when she and her team voted to keep Peter Slipper as Speaker. Labor under Gillard welcomed into the highest office in the House of Representatives someone the Liberals were trying to get out of Parliament.

It was a serious error of judgment. Gillard's government was formed and survived without Slipper. Life for Labor was just made a bit easier with him in the chair. Even when the ugly truth about Slipper became public, when his vile SMS messages revealed a true misogynist, she voted to support him. She put political convenience ahead of principle. She voted in favour of a misogynist and accused Abbott of being one.

Labor has clearly decided it is a good political trick to send women out to appeal to women by attacking Abbott. But if you point out this tactic by referring to the ''handbag hit squad'', you are accused of being sexist.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politi ... z29KPv7euu" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Neferti]

YouTube goes viral about a lot of stupid things. Those people "internationally" who clapped their hands at Gillard being a bad ass, don't vote in Australia and have no idea. Most Aussie journos look like they are not agreeing with Gillard's rant. Good!

[Rorschach]

Short-sighted see hate at every turn
October 16, 2012
Gerard Henderson
Executive director, The Sydney Institute

According to the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, it is wrong to talk down the economy since Australia has one of the best performing economies in the Western world. Fair enough.

However, supporters of the Prime Minister such as Anne Summers have expressed delight that Gillard's speech in Parliament last Tuesday has been noted in New York and London and has had more than 1 million downloads from YouTube. Yet the message of the Prime Minister's address is that Australia is a society riven by sexism and misogyny.

Gillard presented herself as a political leader who is attacked because of her gender. More seriously, the lead attack-dog is Tony Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition and, as such, the alternative prime minister. According to the Prime Minister, she hears ''misogyny, sexism every day from this Leader of the Opposition''.

The message is clear. All that is standing between a civilised society, in which women play their proper role, and rampant woman-hating is the continuation of a Labor government. Yet such a message to overseas audiences is much more negative than talking down the Australian economy.

The facts are obvious. Women occupy senior roles in politics, business, the judiciary, medicine, law, even sections of the clergy. Labor's Gillard is Australia's first female prime minister. If the Coalition wins next year's election, the Liberal Party's deputy leader, Julie Bishop, will become the most senior female Coalition minister ever.

Certainly Gillard has experienced a degree of misogyny - especially from the likes of cartoonist Larry Pickering, who, these days, is a bit player on the edge of Australian politics. Some of this unpleasantness is documented in Summers's 2012 Human Rights and Social Justice Lecture.

The problem is that, at times, Summers goes right over the top. For example, she claims the word liar ''was not a term used against back-flipping male prime ministers''. But it was. In the early 1980s, Bob Hawke called Malcolm Fraser a liar. Summers went on to work for Hawke. In 2006, Kevin Rudd called Howard a liar. There are all too many examples. Like we've mentioned here elsewhare Summers is notoriously biased and how can I put this delicately? WRONG!!!

I agree with Summers it is ''terrible'' to call the Prime Minister a liar. However, when I asked her if she had expressed such a view when Howard was called a liar, she declined to answer the question. Summers also takes offence that, on occasions, Gillard is referred to as ''she'' or ''her'' and maintains that ''previous prime ministers were accorded the basic respect of being referred to by their last names''.

This is manifestly not so. Moreover, last Thursday Gillard used the words ''he'' and ''he's'' in one sentence when referring to Abbott.

This is normal conversation.

It seems that Summers's evident sensitivity has had an impact on Gillard. Last Tuesday, the Prime Minister complained that Abbott was ''now looking at his watch because, apparently, a woman has spoken for too long''. In the 1992 US presidential campaign, George H.W. Bush was criticised for looking at his watch when debating Bill Clinton. This is not a gender specific act. Nor is being told to shut up. Nor is being called a ''piece of work''. Last year I was called a ''piece of work'' by the Sydney University academic Simon Chapman. It took me a full eight seconds to recover.

The problem with such over-readiness to take offence is that it can lead to setting impossible standards. Last Tuesday, Gillard stated Liberal parliamentary members who were present when Alan Jones made an offensive comment about her late father should have either left the room or walked up to Jones ''and said this was not acceptable''. Yet neither Wayne Swan nor Tanya Plibersek took either course of action last Wednesday when a comedian at a trade union function they attended made an indefensible reference to a senior female Coalition staffer.

Conservative female leaders such as Margaret Thatcher and Angela Merkel - and social democrats such as Hillary Clinton - have learnt to accept criticism and to dismiss abuse. Last week in Greece, for example, Merkel was confronted with banners depicting her as a Nazi. It is difficult to imagine a greater insult. But she did not take offence. Likewise Thatcher, when some radical feminists declared she was really a man. Abbott has been well in control considering all the abuse Labor dumps on him daily.

Gillard was very popular when she became Prime Minister in June 2010. Her credibility was diminished by Abbott doing his job as Opposition Leader and by the damaging leaks against her from inside Labor. Then, after the election, the Prime Minister did the unnecessary deal with the Greens and broke her promise not to introduce a carbon tax. Her problems stem from politics, not gender.

Gillard has suffered no greater abuse than that experienced by such predecessors as Fraser, Keating and Howard. Commentators who look at contemporary Australian politics and see wall-to-wall misogyny, diminish the very real achievements of Australian women in recent decades.

Gerard Henderson is executive director of The Sydney Institute.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/ ... z29QFiuiEh" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Aussie]

Last week, the video of Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard responding to countless inappropriate sexist attacks during her time in office went viral.

While thousands voiced their approval, many criticised Gillard’s speech, labelling it a political ploy or accusing her of overreacting. One blog published by the Telegraph suggested that she had in fact “gratuitously” betrayed her own “emotional sensitivity” in the speech and needed to “man up”. An Australian politician claimed she had “demeaned every woman in this parliament” by “playing the gender card”, concluding “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”

But to suggest that women in power should simply submit to such high levels of misogynistic abuse, founded entirely upon their gender and yet wielded as a weapon against their policies, is simply baffling. To imply, when a woman in power has been repeatedly lambasted with sexist slurs and misogynistic labels like “witch” and “bitch”, that it is she, in standing up to such bullying, who undermines the strength of women in politics, is absurd.

The vital importance of Gillard’s speech lay in the message it sent to young girls around the globe who are forming their ideas about the adult world and deciding where they might like to fit into it.

From the treatment of Angela Merkel, these girls have learned that even if Forbes magazine labels you the most powerful woman in the world, it will still see fit to run an article on your “frumpy power suits” and “silly pageboy haircut”. From Hillary Clinton’s experience they have learned that women in politics will be questioned, not on their political beliefs, but on their favourite designers; that they will be arbitrarily lambasted both for being too feminine and not feminine enough. From Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential campaign they have learned that no matter what your ideas on the environment or the economy, voters will sexually objectify you when you are immortalized as a blow-up doll. And from the experience of French minister Cecile Duflot, they have learned not to dare wear a dress if they want their political point to be heard above the catcalls from fellow MPs.

Here in the UK, girls have learned that MPs’ breasts are fair game for public debate; that a newspaper can bully a female politician by naming a Page 3 picture after her; that when two female politicians disagree, the result is not a debate but a “catfight” – and that they are not MPs, but “blondes”. From our own Prime Minister, they have learned that a female politician who dares to show passion in the House of Commons will be reprimanded by being told to “calm down, dear”. From articles on Cameron’s Cuties and Blair’s Babes to Hollande’s Honeys, girls are learning that cabinet reshuffles lead to new male members being grilled on their past voting records while the women are described as “glamorous political beauties” and reprimanded for their high heels.

The trickle-down effect of these messages is clear to see in many experiences recorded on the Everyday Sexism Project in the past six months alone. Many young women wrote to describe being dissuaded or belittled in their political ambitions, or even mocked for having them in the first place. One explained:

“I took A-level politics … I had worked hard to prepare for a debate in which I was the only female in my team. While providing a counter-argument my teacher stopped me and asked the males in my team whether they were going to let a woman do all the talking.”

Another described frequently hearing the comment: "Oh, you're doing a politics course? You must be very smart, things like that are really hard for girls!"

Another post read: “I'm very into my politics, but upon entering debates regularly get told I need to 'cheer up', or to 'stop taking life so seriously'. My male friends never receive these comments.”

One even reported an incident at school when she was “Told I should be a "pornstar" and that I look like a "prostitute" when talking about what we wanted to do when older, after I said that I wanted to get involved in politics.”

One schoolgirl said: “Went on a trip to the Houses of Parliament as part of our Government & Political Studies A Level… We were given a tour… The guide said "There is a book shop over there, there are recipe books for the girls".”

And these experiences weren’t only reported by students:

One woman told us: “I was at a political event, being interviewed, the journalist said "women that look like you aren't interested in politics".”

Another wrote “I tweet political views and I'm called "stupid," "whore," "uneducated" despite advanced degrees and long career in politics.”

Even as I write this article, MP Stella Creasy tweets: “How charming. Twitter Troll just asked for my colleague to ‘get her jugs’ out in home office question time.”

In the light of these attitudes towards women in politics, Gillard wasn’t just right to make the speech she did. It was utterly vital for her to send an alternative message to young women: that sexism in politics shouldn’t be tolerated, that they have the right to aspire to any career they choose, and that misogyny should not, and will not, be allowed to stand in their way.

Read more.

[Rorschach]

Gillard tanks in Adelaide.

Liberals buoyed by federal poll results
* by: Political editor Mark Kenny
* From: The Advertiser
* October 16, 2012 11:00PM

SUPPORT for Julia Gillard's Government is in danger of tanking in South Australia, her original home state, according to leaked Liberal Party polling in two safe Labor electorates.

The result, destined to bring renewed campaign focus and perhaps pre-election dollars to a state often regarded as Labor friendly, suggests that voters in SA may be preparing to switch to Tony Abbott, despite his low personal standing.

The slide in support threatens to wipe out several backbenchers and could remove the high-profile Minister for Early Childhood, Kate Ellis.

The telephone poll, conducted by market research firm ReachTel and obtained by The Advertiser, found Labor's vote in the metropolitan seats of Hindmarsh and Makin had all but collapsed, with swings - if an election were held now - of 12 per cent and greater.

In Hindmarsh to the city's west, which has some of the oldest voters in the country, Labor's Steve Georganas would have been bundled out with a swing against him of some 12 per cent.

The phone poll put Labor's primary vote at 28 per cent to the Liberals' 50 per cent.

The Greens vote contracted slightly to 10 per cent from the 12 per cent obtained at the last election. This suggested a two-party-preferred vote for Liberal hopeful Matt Williams of 57 per cent to Mr Georganas on just 43.

In Makin to the city's north-east, where Labor's Tony Zappia enjoys a supposedly very safe 12 per cent margin, he would have been defeated by the Liberals' Sue Lawrie in an even bigger swing. She would have received up to 44 per cent of the primary vote to Labor's 33 per cent which works out to a two-party-preferred split of 55-45 in the Liberal's favour.

Ms Ellis holds her seat of Adelaide with a relatively slim 7.7 per cent buffer.

The polls, conducted last week, canvassed "between 400 and 450 people in each of the two seats", according to a senior Liberal source.

Labor MPs are likely to dismiss the results as propaganda, but they will send shockwaves through a Government that had regarded SA as essentially stable and non-critical to the 2013 election.

[Rorschach]

Oh no, not The Independent again... you gotta stop reading that trash Aussie.

Not only a LW Prog rag but an article written by an femo-nazi from O/S. Gee that's gonna have lots of credibility. Her article, like you shows a complete bias and lack of knowledge re the event.

From bloggers who read the rag regularly.

Just how many articles complaining about how unfair everything is is this author going to write. A small selection of negative experiences are not proof that every woman suffers when she tries to enter politics. Perhaps they should be like Margaret Thatcher, and stop complaining and start trying to change things.

Laura Bates hates men, it's as simple as that. There's no logic or debate to be had about it, you just simply hate men.

[IQS.RLOW]

Jooliar telling 60 minutes how it is...or isn't...or is
Striking a blow for the wimmens everywhere

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yriOLtWJb9U&sns=em[/youtube]

No girls allowed
Shes doing as she's told
I'm hanging outsidenthenshed as instructed