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Sex issue won’t lure swingers
Miranda Devine – Sunday, October 28, 2012 (4:09pm)
AUSTRALIA’S first female prime minister has been trying to exploit the gender gap with her world famous “misogyny” speech to parliament and assorted allegations of sexism against the Opposition Leader.
For the most part it has come across as hypocritical and contrived, a cynical attempt to deflect attention from the Opposition’s attacks on her government failings.
But Tony Abbott played into Julia Gillard’s hands last week when he blamed a lack of “experience” with children in the government for its cuts to the Baby Bonus.
Apart from the fact there are plenty of parents, including mothers, on the government front benches, attacking Gillard’s childless status, if that is what was intended, was a bridge too far, a blow too low.
Apart from the fact there are plenty of parents, including mothers, on the government front benches, attacking Gillard’s childless status, if that is what was intended, was a bridge too far, a blow too low.
And in the fetid atmosphere of gender politics in Canberra, all it did was draw the unwelcome spotlight on the dearth of women on Abbott’s own team.
Only a week earlier, the senior Coalition female, deputy leader Julie Bishop,congratulated an audience of Liberal party women in a set speech for being there on merit alone.
“You are here because of your qualities, you are here because you’ve been judged on your merits, you are not (here) because you’re part of a quota system, and the Liberal party is proud of you,’’ she told Victorian Liberal State Council in Ballarat.
But are there really so few women in the Coalition who merit being in the shadow cabinet? Only Bishop and Sophie Mirabella make the cut. That is two women of 20 positions.
Still, in the entire shadow ministry women hold six of 32 positions, which is close to 20 percent, a more respectable proportion but still short of ideal for a party which needs to appeal to women in order to remain a broad church – not to mention survive electorally.
Labor, however, has the opposite problem, and one which carries more deleterious consequences, with an aggressive affirmative action policy enforced by Emily’s List, the unofficial pro-abortion feminist faction of the party.
The result is a higher percentage of its MPs are women, but the majority are signed up members of the self-described political support network for “progressive” women.
In other words they don’t support women, just a particular type of woman, who agrees with the group’s chief preoccupation, abortion on demand, despite the fact that the electorate is increasingly nuanced on the issue.
Most Australians are neither aggressively pro-or anti-abortion but judge by circumstances. In other words, they agree with Tony Abbott - and Hillary Clinton – that abortion should be “safe, legal, but rare”.
What Emily’s List’s enforcement of the uncompromising pro-abortion line means for Labor is that the majority of its women subscribe to a narrow ideological view which does not represent the views of most women in the community, an irony for a group that purports to promote “diversity”.
In effect, a single issue lobby group has taken over the Labor party, and no deviation from Emily’s List policy is tolerated.
The result is that the Labor party further alienates itself from the electorate. This is neither good for women nor for the Labor party.
It’s not something Labor men want to talk about publicly but they sure are discussing it privately as being a significant part of Labor’s current woes.
“It’s a parasite on the body politic,” says one retired Catholic Labor MP, who is still very influential in the party.
“It’s attached itself to the Labor party… and it alienates voters especially in marginal seats.”
When I mentioned this viewpoint to a well-connected Labor feminist last week she dismissed it out of hand, saying Julia Gillard would never have reached the top without Emily’s List.
But that may be the point. Regardless of her pluckiness and personal qualities, it’s doubtful history will show the Gillard period to have been a great boon to the Labor party.
Instead, the ousting of Kevin Rudd and Gillard’s extraordinarily gaffe-prone reign will likely consign Labor to the wilderness for some time.
Gillard is entirely a creature of Emily’s List. She was a founding member in 1996, with her mentor, the former Victorian premier Joan Kirner, and helped write its constitution.
Modelled after a similar pro-choice group in the US, the organisation describes itself as a “financial, political and personal support network assisting in the election of progressive Labor women candidates”. EMILY stands for “Early Money is Like Yeast”.
It boasts of two great successes: driving abortion law reform in the ACT, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia; and enshrining in Labor policy the “40/40/20 Affirmative Action Rule”, to ensure 40 percent of women are preselected in winnable seats.
In 2008, Emily’s Listers cracked open the champagne to celebrate their greatest victory to date when the Victorian parliament passed the most liberal abortion laws in the nation, if not the western world, sanctioning abortion on demand up to 24 weeks of pregnancy; extreme late-term abortions are permitted with the consent of two doctors.
There was no compromise brooked with feminists in their own party who attempted to soften the bill with amendments to include counselling services to inform women considering abortion of alternatives, or even to lower the cut-off date to 20 weeks. Emily’s Listers had the numbers and were determined to have their way,
But the more successful they are at pushing extreme feminist policies the less electable Labor will become.
And as Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney is showing in the US, where he has all but closed the female gender gap with President Barrack Obama among likely female voters in swing states, elections are not won on single issues.
===
RACISM, SEXISM AND HOMOPHOBIA
Tim Blair – Sunday, October 28, 2012 (12:57am)
A gay Asian woman is humiliated by the Labor party, and I think it raises the question about the role that Tony Abbott’s playing.
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And still they come, more than ever
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:32pm)
Which brings us to nearly 2000 arrivals for the second month in a row:
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Bolt Report today
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(10:08am)
Julia Gillard’s first three promises. What happened?
Peter Costello says it will take decades to replace Labor’s deficits. Some advice to Tony Abbott, talk economy and rise above the gender war gotchas.
Judith Sloan and Michael Costa on frittering away our future.
(NOTE: This is the only open thread today. Apologies, but no moderators are avilable.)
What Mitt Romney can teach Tony Abbott.
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Bomb plot disrupted
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(8:18am)
Indonesian authorities have been remarkably good at combatting the extremists:
National police spokesman Suhardi Alius said the Australian-trained anti-terror police unit Detachment 88, had arrested the terror suspects in four different locations around the Indonesian island of Java in a coordinated sweep on Friday and Saturday.
===
Who made the Wilderness Society the government of Tasmania?
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:41am)
Two limp Labor/Green governments leave it to unelected green activists to work out with embattled bosses how to regulate one of Tasmania’s most important assets and sources of jobs:
GREEN groups will resume their war against the Tasmanian timber industry on Monday after the collapse of forest peace talks.
After more than two years of negotiation and interim agreements, the process was finally declared “dead” today after talks last night ended without a final deal.The Wilderness Society told The Australian it would on Monday resume campaigning to cripple the activities of a few large Tasmanian sawmillers who had sunk the talks…The Australian understands the deal fell over after [the Forest Industry Association of Tasmania’s] largest sawmilling members insisted that almost 60,000 cubic metres of saw logs - able to be retired under a federal buy-out program - be instead reissued to other sawmillers…
Unless the process can be resurrected, Tasmania will miss out on $100 million in regional development funds that the federal government had made contingent upon a final agreement.
Who is running Tasmania? The Wilderness Society? It is hard to imagine more feeble government. No wonder Tasmania’s unemployment rate is the highest in the country.
===
Gillard can turn back boat people, after all
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:36am)
FOURTEEN suspected pirate asylum seekers who hijacked a boat two weeks ago off Sri Lanka’s southern coast have been detained for questioning in the capital Colombo.
They were intercepted and flown back from Cocos Islands by Australian authorities on a specially chartered flight…
The spokesman said the 14, believed to include three crew members and three children, were being “returned” rather than officially deported, as they had not sought asylum from authorities and so had not triggered any international obligations on the part of the Australian government.
None asked for asylum? Really?
===
Greens turn pale
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:30am)
The Greens lost the Victorian by-election in Melbourne. They were then hammered in the NSW council elections. Last Saturday they lost a third of their vote and three of their four seats in the ACT. Now this:
MELBOURNE’S Lord Mayor Robert Doyle is set to remain in the Town Hall, with a resounding election victory looking likely…
Cr Doyle has picked up at least 40 per cent of the lord mayoral primary vote, well ahead of the Greens…
That said, the Greens may have got a second councillor up.
===
Simn Crean regrets the switch; Kevin Rudd writes of “betrayal”
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:24am)
An even bigger mistake when you contemplate what came after:
FORMER Labor leader Simon Crean has declared it was “a mistake” to dump Kevin Rudd as leader, but warned MPs they cannot go back to the past.
The Labor frontbencher is a long-standing mentor of the Prime Minister, but insisted his assessment was not a criticism of her but rather an honest reflection on the political damage caused by Labor’s revolving door of leaders.
“We shouldn’t have changed leader. But we have and we can’t change again,” Mr Crean told the Sunday Herald Sun.
Crean isn’t saying whether Gillard herself used the research, which she’s denied but others like Maxine McKew insist:
“I’ve agreed with John Faulkner the use of internal party research was wrong. It was used against me and it was used against Beazley. There’s no purity in this...”
Kevin Rudd releases his own writings on betrayal:
The document, obtained by Sunday Herald Sun, is a written account of the leadership coup provided to author Maxine McKew in the preparation for her book, Tales from the Political Trenches…“And I, too, wanted to see a female prime minister.“So given all of that, I was stunned when the coup occurred. Did I feel let down and indeed betrayed? Well of course. I am as human as the next person.”..Mr Rudd writes that he was blindsided by Ms Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan, whom he said had given him no indication there was a problem in 2010.
“So did I feel let down by these two ministers to whom I had given unqualified support over many years? Well of course I felt let down,” he writes.
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Greens prepare to talk to aliens, now that voters here no longer listen
Andrew BoltOCTOBER282012(4:14am)
In May, then Greens leader Bob Brown feared aliens had extincted themselves:
So why isn’t life out there contacting us? Why aren’t the intergalactic phones ringing?
Here is one sobering possibility for our isolation: maybe life has often evolved to intelligence on other planets with biospheres and every time that intelligence, when it became able to alter its environment, did so with catastrophic consequences. Maybe we have had many predecessors in the Cosmos but all have brought about their own downfall.
That’s why they are not communicating with Earth. They have extincted themselves. They have come and gone.
So this seem wasted preparation:
A copy of the NSW planning day agenda obtained by The Sunday Telegraph reveals Greens MPs were instructed to imagine they were talking to aliens to outline their policies.
But it’s the Greens who are off the planet. It’s voters who have to imagine the policies were drawn up by aliens.
===
Quit Trashing Obama’s Accomplishments
An impressive list of accomplishments:
First President to apply for college aid as a foreign student, then deny he was a foreigner.
First President to have a social security number from a state hehas never lived in.
First President to preside over a cut to the credit-rating of the United States
First President to violate the War Powers Act.
First President to be held in contempt of court for illegally obstructing oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico .
First President to defy a Federal Judge’s court order to cease implementing the Health Care Reform Law.
First President to require all Americans to purchase a product from a third party.
First President to spend a trillion dollars on ‘shovel-ready’ jobs when there was no such thing as ‘shovel-ready’ jobs.
First President to abrogate bankruptcy law to turn over control of companies to his union supporters.
First President to by-pass Congress and implement the Dream Act through executive fiat.
First President to order a secret amnesty program that stopped the deportation of illegal immigrants across the U.S. , including those with criminal convictions.
First President to demand a company hand-over $20 billion to one of his political appointees.
First President to terminate America ‘s ability to put a man in space.
First President to have a law signed by an auto-pen without being present.
First President to arbitrarily declare an existing law unconstitutional and refuse to enforce it.
First President to threaten insurance companies if they publicly spoke-out on the reasons for their rate increases.
First President to tell a major manufacturing company in which state it is allowed to locate a factory.
First President to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect (AZ, WI, OH, IN).
First President to withdraw an existing coal permit that had been properly issued years ago.
First President to fire an inspector general of Ameri-Corps for catching one of his friends in a corruption case.
First President to appoint 45 czars to replace elected officials in his office.
First President to golf 73 separate times in his first two and a half years in office, 90 to date.
First President to hide his medical, educational, and travel records.
First President to win a Nobel Peace Prize for doing NOTHING to earn it.
First President to go on multiple global ‘apology tours’.
First President to go on 17 lavish vacations, including date nights and Wednesday evening White House parties for his friends paid for by the taxpayer.
First President to have 22 personal servants (taxpayer funded) for his wife.
First President to keep a dog trainer on retainer for $102,000 a year at taxpayer expense.
First President to repeat the Holy Quran tells us the early morning call of the Azan (Islamic call to worship) is the most beautiful sound on earth.
First President to take a 17 day vacation.
===
WILL 40 BE ENOUGH? .. Larry Pickering
How many more of our young men need to die, Julia? Will 40 be enough?
After the 40th death will you again display a drawn face and utter heartfelt condolences before attending your next anti-Abbott conference?
Will you sleep well that night, or will you awake at 3am and, hands cupping your face, stare at the bathroom mirror thinking of that little girl who was so looking forw
ard to seeing her dad again?
No, you won’t do that Julia. And you will never meet that little girl who will go to school silently suffering other kids happily talking about their dads.
You won’t see her at home sitting on that empty lounge chair where her dad once nursed her before carrying her to bed.
There is one thing about the number 40. We, the unrelated, have become numerically immune to the pain of others.
Why haven’t we learnt we can’t change 3,000 years of barbaric history in one decade. Is Iraq a better place because we hung Hussein? Are the bombings less newsworthy now we are not there?
Is Libya now a peaceful place? Has the changing of the guard made Egypt more West-friendly now the Islamic Brotherhood are in government?
Will the Taliban and the warlords be different people once we leave Afghanistan? Will Karzai become incorruptible? The might of Russia, next door, didn’t change them.
The death of ten thousand decadent Taliban rabble are not worth the death of one Aussie boy, and that one Aussie boy could have been mine.
Our boys will be home next year you say. Does that mean more about an election than that little girl?
If so, I bet that little girl wishes an election had been this year.
===No, you won’t do that Julia. And you will never meet that little girl who will go to school silently suffering other kids happily talking about their dads.
You won’t see her at home sitting on that empty lounge chair where her dad once nursed her before carrying her to bed.
There is one thing about the number 40. We, the unrelated, have become numerically immune to the pain of others.
Why haven’t we learnt we can’t change 3,000 years of barbaric history in one decade. Is Iraq a better place because we hung Hussein? Are the bombings less newsworthy now we are not there?
Is Libya now a peaceful place? Has the changing of the guard made Egypt more West-friendly now the Islamic Brotherhood are in government?
Will the Taliban and the warlords be different people once we leave Afghanistan? Will Karzai become incorruptible? The might of Russia, next door, didn’t change them.
The death of ten thousand decadent Taliban rabble are not worth the death of one Aussie boy, and that one Aussie boy could have been mine.
Our boys will be home next year you say. Does that mean more about an election than that little girl?
If so, I bet that little girl wishes an election had been this year.
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