A Little Less Symbolism, A Little More Action

So Julia Gillard is PM, and I'm surprised but I guess shouldn't be at the strength of reactions from people on facebook.

I'm going to struggle to articulate this... ugh... to me Julia Gillard running the country is like having my Alfredton Primary school principal running the country. It's like any fucken moron can be Prime Minister. This would be the same if Joe Hockey had won the Liberal Leadership and gone on to win the Federal Election. I'm not convinced that Joe Hockey is even smart enough to be leader of a Lawn Bowls team.

Democracy it seems suffers from Prole-drift, just like Louis Vitton and Burberry. I guess what I'm getting at is while I'm not blown away by K-Rudd, and I've always felt that he was the PM we had to vote in, in order to vote out Howard - I felt he was at least politically competent. Like when the insulation workers drove down to Canberra in protest, Krudd went out to talk to them directly infront of the media, address their concerns and then school the rest of his party in 'how to be a politician'. Again Rudd doesn't look brilliant, everybody else looks like a fucken moron.

If you hadn't noticed, I'm still trying to articulate... Julia's status as 'First Female PM' to me is not particularly exciting, because there is little more to be said than that she is Female. If improbably Joe Hockey had deposed Rudd and become PM in much the same manner, there would be no basis for historical excitement, it would simply be 'man replaces other man'.

So there's symbolic value I guess in Gillard's coup. It disproves the hypothesis that 'A woman cannot be Prime Minister of Australia'. What surprises me is how much anybody cares that this hypothesis has now been disproved.

I mean it's 2010 people. England has had a female Prime Minister - Margeret Thatcher - one of the worst leaders in history, because she employed monetarist economic policy same as Reagan and anti-human brand capitalism. It had nothing to do with her gender, just as, I'm sure Julia Gillard's performance won't.

I had assumed that everybody simply assumed that a woman could become Prime Minister. It surely was always a matter of time. I had been excited by the prospect that the waiting game would be one where a female of sufficient quality would take charge. One where the hypothesis really being tested was 'Can a woman be a great prime minister?' that is more exciting. The most exciting hypothesis of all though is:

'Can Australian's elect a great prime minister?'

In stead of revelling in the mediocrity that is Australia's political leadership vacuum. Let's face it, K-Rudd was merely competent, Julia Gillard the same. Wayne Swan is a no goer and from there for leadership it is all downhill. Both parties lack anybody that can arouse the meerest inkling of excitement. None, not Greens, Democrats or Family First have any tangible evidence their party contains somebody who is a 'born leader'

So a symbolic victory for women, competent politician gets promotion - weakens party. I can't empathise with women on what this day means, and that might be my human failing, but lets face it - the notion of A man assuming a traditionally female role that would be exciting/inspiring to any man, anywhere is incredibly hard to imagine.

How to illustrate that, and the more general problem/hype-backlash of symbolic victories. Imagine if the US Presidency had traditionally always been held by a woman. The most 'powerful' person in the world was always a woman. Then one day in 2001 George W Bush does the unthinkable and becomes the 43rd, and 1st male President of the United States. Could I as a man be excited? Possibly. Should I be? Unequivocally NO.

Which is perhaps neither a flattering or fair comparison to the Gillard situation, we are talking about one of the worst, most incompetent and damaging presidents in history afterall.

To maintain perspective, Gillard now has an opportunity, this coup may have been unprecedentedly politically savy - the incumbent will always suffer when there is economic downturn which (particularly in Australia) has very little to do with the ruling parties economic management but the state of the Global Economy, over which an incumbent party has little control. THUS what normally happens is the electorate demands somebody be punished and inevitably turns upon the only leader there to blame, and like Donald Trump to his apprentices punishes those who take responsibility. This causes a change in government whose fortunes then ride on the fate of the economy. By preempting the voter backlash, the electorate get their change in government and punish the messenger without having to vote in another party.

Considering the other party is lead by a cunt like Tony Abbott, lets hope this savvy strategy works.

Gillard has won the symbolic victory and that's greeeeeaaaaaaat it's really greeeeeeeeeeaaaaat* but now it's time for action. She's been on the interchange bench and Kobe has been switched to Shannon Brown**. She can just hold the line and hope the team survives until Kobe can bet back on the floorboards, or she can step up and try and build the lead. She can try and leap over Garnett and do a tomahawk dunk in his face get the bench on their feet and Audience on their knees.

But basketball is not particularly illustrative of what a brilliant political... nay a brilliant leadership performance is. It reminds me of way back in the Obama vs. McCain presidential run of possibly the best piece of political analysis I have ever read. It was talking about how a Broken US needed its next Abraham Lincoln to stitch it back together again. The writers conclusion was - neither candidate were that man. I think history will prove that prophecy correct.

The author highlighted a bunch of qualities in good political (or any context of) leadership that are lacking in the modern day. The first I recall is intelligence, and I can relate. Obama is not intelligent in the way that say Thomas Jefferson was intelligent, which is a hard standard for anybody alive to live up to, but he's also not intelligent in the way that Abraham Lincoln was intelligent, that Theodore Roosevelt was intelligent, that Franklin D Roosevelt or even Truman was intelligent.

This is probably the result of prole drift, whilst people like people much better than them at basketball running the floor of their basketball team, when it comes to who they want running the country they seem to not want somebody who is smarter than them.

This is a relatively recent phenomena, in the same way that Sunrise won the ratings war against Today (with Steve Leiberman) and thus Today switched up its formula to be similarly a news show for morons. It was not so long ago that you had politicians like Kim Beasley, Paul Keating, John Howard, Peter Costello, Natasha Stot Despoja that I could believe actually knew what the fuck they were talking about. Now all I see is trained monkeys working as mouth pieces for their corporate financers.

Which brings me to the articles next quality: Astringency. which if you look it up on dictionary.com you may wonder what the fuck politics has to do with wine. But what it means is the sharp incisive ability to tell people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.

What frustrates me the most about politics in Australia, and anywhere in the free world is that I'm tired. I'm FUCKING EXHAUSTED from being spoken to like a child who needs constant reassurance that everything is going to be alright. The only fucken thing wrong with 'Baby-Boomers' is the word 'Boomer' and I guess the age bracket as the moniker 'Babies' applies equally to all Australians.

The leader I crave is the one that says 'Okay the deal was you got super-annuation and then you got to choose how to invest it, and this was to provide for your retirement and lifestyle aspirations. You chose to sink all your money into property, and didn't understand it and took on risks you blinded YOURSELF to and lost everything. So you had your chance and you blew it, and you blew it because you didn't care enough to get it right, so don't come crying for a pension increase now!' and say things like 'Look BHP don't create the minerals in the ground, and they don't create the demand for mineral exports. If they don't want to pay the tax to the Australian community, they can just fuck off and die and somebody else will. We are not obliged to roll over on a fair and equitable tax just because you chose to include BHP in your share portfolio. You can sell those shares right now.'

That would be leadership. I'd prefer a monkey as a PM that would act that way for 20 days, than a symbollically female mouthpiece that is going to go on treating me and everybody else like a child while taking orders from business.

The human race is going to perish or face a degree of suffering unexperienced since the ice-age if climate change isn't tackled. That challange requires intelligence and integrity and courage in our leaders. I don't see any of those qualities anywhere.

*this is my first attempt at putting apathy into words.

**No offence intended to Kobe Bryant or Shannon Brown who are actually brilliant at their jobs and thus not a fair comparison to any politician in Australia.