WITH the upcoming anniversary of Labor’s removal of Kevin Rudd from the office of prime minister, his successor Julia Gillard will be nervously keeping watch on her dangerously low approval ratings.
If she cannot turn public opinion, it can only be a matter of time before her caucus colleagues remove her from the top job.
Gillard’s ability to recover from her slide in the polls will depend on how well entrenched public opinion is of her and her leadership style.
If the public decides it has seen enough of this Prime Minister to …

BACK in the 1960s and 1970s, before the internet, before WikiLeaks, there was something called the alternative press. Sometimes it was called the underground press, with echoes of armed partisans resisting an occupying army.
It claimed to offer the real information, all the news the media refused to print and that governments tried to suppress.
But what if it was all a fraud? Sydney-based Michael Wilding’s new novel ‘The Prisoner Of Mount Warning’ explores this hypothesis.
What if the alternative, or some of it, was not alternative at all but run by an …

ECONOMIST John Kenneth Galbraith once said: “All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.”
If this test were to be applied to the leadership of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, both would fall far short of greatness.
At least Rudd started well, identifying climate change as the “great moral challenge of our age” and working tirelessly to introduce an emissions trading scheme to …

THE Coalition’s proposal to allow schools to self-manage projects makes perfect sense.
It is a bizarre irony that the former minister for education, Julia Gillard, succeeded Kevin Rudd as prime minister when it is the waste and mismanagement of a program she is entirely responsible for that seriously damaged the Rudd government’s credibility and contributed to his downfall.
Given what we know about Gillard’s abilities, it is not surprising that, during the first few weeks of her administration, the wheels have fallen off her solution to stop the influx of asylum-seekers, and …

Julia Gillard once pledged herself to the unions, but today her allegiances are unclear.
AS the dust settles over the prime ministerial demise of Kevin Rudd and the hype surrounding Julia Gillard subsides, the questions remain: who is she and what does she stand for?
The fact that Gillard was parachuted into the job of prime minister by the largely “faceless” union backroom boys has led to the inevitable claim that she is a puppet of the union movement. Gillard recognised she needed to move quickly to counter that impression and declared …

DO we really need regional universities? Surely Australians could access all the teaching and research they need online.
True, if you think of teaching and research as a simple commodity, such as wheat or coal, a commodity to be traded in competitive markets.
This is largely how tertiary education has been treated by recent Coalition and Labor governments. Funding cuts have forced universities to behave like big businesses, where vice-chancellors are now little more than overpaid chief executives who spend virtually all their time fund-raising.
But there are never enough funds, particularly for …

JUST before his ministerial responsibilities were significantly reduced, Peter Garrett made one of Australia’s great political understatements.
The former Midnight Oil frontman said of Labor’s insulation program: “We’re seeing a relatively small number of complaints in the system, given the scale of the system, about 0.5 per cent of complaints given the totality of the system. It has been a very successful program . . .” Two weeks later he was demoted and the program was cancelled.
As Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne pointed out last week, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd …

THREE weeks ago I wondered if there was something wrong with the Canberra press gallery. Despite a growing list of problems in the programs for which she has been responsible, their infatuation with Julia Gillard seemed to know no bounds.
A remarkable demonstration of political acrobatics last week by the Deputy Prime Minister proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. First was the backdown on youth allowance, an admission that country kids can’t be expected to live at home while attending university. Then there was the duck-and-weave on …

JULIA Gillard is the darling of the Canberra press gallery. This makes some sense: she is erudite and sometimes funny in question time, a welcome break from the tedium of our Prime Minister’s mangled bureaucratese. She is also “the woman most likely”, a potential female prime minister in a city obsessed with the symbolism of such potential.
But increasingly concerns are growing in the education sector that she may be out of her depth when it comes to delivering in her very large portfolio areas. On last week’s Q&A program on …