Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald reportedly reports that Julia Gillard’s winning margin over Kevin Rudd in this morning’s Labor leadership vote has been 73-29, coming in at the higher end of market expectations.
UPDATE: The official announcement has actually been that the margin was 71-31. Headline amended. Apologies that comments are currently off, which has been necessary to manage Crikey’s notoriously shaky bandwidth.
UPDATE 2: Ongoing apologies for the offness of the comments. Essential Research has come in at 56-44, up from 55-45 last week and 54-46 the week before. Labor’s primary vote is down a point to 32 per cent and the Coalition’s is up one to 49 per cent, with the Greens steady on 11 per cent. Further questions have 39 per cent blaming Julia Gillard for Labor’s problems against 18 per cent for Kevin Rudd, 23 per cent for others in the party and 10 per cent for the media. Reactions to the Gonski report are typically social democratic, with 61 per cent preferring more education funding to a return to a budget surplus and 68 per cent supporting the report’s recommendations as described against 13 per cent opposed.
Better still
http://www.flickr.com/photos/64041833@N04/6943271941/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Bob Carr would make a good minister for Foreign Affairs.
[ Go and have a look at george’s latest effort.
tinyurl.com/7ape73w ]
Oooh! I like it!
May the Farce be with you!
[You contend that the Australian is making up the report that Carr answered “yes” to the question whether he was offered the FM position. Fine, lets wait for more information, we all know more will come with this ALP and the various unhappy components thereof]
Impossible as that question was never asked of Carr. he was told he would be “considered” for the position which is very different from being “offered”. But that is only a minor fact in this complete fabrication of a story by a thoroughly discredited “news” organisation ofcourse.
I am not blaming Rudd – I am pointing out the logical consequences of assuming the story is the result of an internal leak.
IF it was, then the obvious assumption is that it came from the Rudd camp (applying the ‘who benefits’ rule).
My own opinion, for what it’s worth, based on my knowledge of the way the party works, is that the decision is purely NSW Labor’s, and they would be the first to kick and scream blue murder if there was even a hint that the PM usurped one of their few real powers.
And no Labor PM, knowing this, would go beyond merely indicating – after the event – whether the choice was acceptable to them.
New thread.
[Bob Carr would make a good minister for Foreign Affairs.]
On what basis? For starters the man is good mates with Henry Kissenger who many consider to be akin to a war criminal. secondly he left the state of NSW as a complete shambles decaying infrastructure etc.
3955 smithe
[Ellis is an un-reconstructed Ruddista who has had at least one excruciatingly maudlin and boring paean to Rudd published on The Drum website in the last 12 months. Fair dinkum, it read like a print version of Don Mclean’s The Day the Music Died, dedicated to The Great Man hisself.]
I was drawn to his blog by the mention here. He has turned off Rudd in a big way: likened him to that Doc Martin character on TV, and suggested that he had aspergers. But it hasn’t converted him to Gillard. Most of his other writings don’t make much sense – so the Ruddistas shouldn’t take much offense from it.
He is unreconstructed in regarding Beazley as a hero and the saviour of the Labor party. It is there that he loses me. As likeable as he may have been, I have come to the conclusion that Beazley’s leadership was a major liability for the Labor party throughout the Howard years. As is clear in the Latham Diaries, not only did he run away from the economic legacy of Hawke and Keating, he hardly developed any major policies relying instead on an evening news style point-scoring and fighting yesterday’s battles (GST).
Ironically, the very time he could have gone negative with success was in the 1998 campaign. But he chose the GST (with no alternative plan) and ignored Reith’s attack on the waterside workers with scab labor and bottom-of-the-harbor companies employing people. A simple campaign on ‘How safe is your job?’ with shots of those masked thugs and dogs, plus Howard and Reith shaking hands and backslapping would have cut through. He didn’t lose by much anyway.
If Bob really feels that way, I don’t think there’s much hope. Such a wordsmith at his best, too, but always erratic.
[ Bob Carr would make a good minister for Foreign Affairs. ]
Showie! Get with the program! It is not about how good he would be, it is about how Julia lied!!!! Or at least confused Dennis Shamaham – which must be the same thing!!!. Or something.