For a moment on the floor of Parliament, Australia’s political landscape seemed upside down. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, whose party is widely expected to lose elections next year, was eviscerating the man who seems destined to replace her.
As opposition leader Tony Abbott sat stony-faced and silent, she ran down a list of comments he had made. She complained he once questioned whether it was a bad thing that men had more power than women in Australian society, and that he had described abortion as “the easy way out.” He once stood beside protesters carrying banners that said “ditch the witch.”
Gillard, who lives with a common-law partner, said she was also offended when Abbott once suggested she should “politically speaking, make an honest woman of herself” by taking the country’s carbon tax to voters.
Given those comments, she said, it was too much when Abbott tried to oust House of Representatives Speaker Peter Slipper over crude and sexist terms Slipper made in text messages.
“I will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. I will not,” Gillard said. “And the government will not be lectured about sexism and misogyny by this man. Not now, not ever.”
It was a convincing blow against Abbott, who has had trouble appealing to female voters.
Gillard’s 15-minute onslaught on Oct. 9 quickly became an Internet sensation, and pleased many women who thought Australia’s first female prime minister had been too quiet on the issue of sexism.
Voters are increasingly favoring her over Abbott, and the popularity of her center-left Labor Party has risen from recent record lows.
However, the party remains well below the 38 percent support that saw it scrape through elections to form a fragile minority government in 2010, and analysts doubt that her newfound fire will turn around Labor’s prospects.
“Every now and again, a prime minister has a great moment in the Parliament when they absolutely demolish their opponent, and she had one of those,” said Nick Economou, a political scientist at Monash University.
“What’s been interesting about Gillard is it’s taken her such a long time to get to the point where she suddenly looks like a leader,” he added.
Abbott later dismissed the criticisms as part of a smear campaign.
“The Australian people are sick and tired of the kind of personal attacks that we see again and again from the prime minister and her senior ministers,” Abbott said.
“I’ll leave the personal attacks and the cheap grubby smears to the Labor Party,” he said.
A poll by Sydney market researcher Newspoll, published in the Australian newspaper on Tuesday, found that more than three in four respondents (78 percent) said Gillard’s response to the sexism issue had been “about right,” including 83 percent of women and 72 percent of men. Only 16 percent accused her of overreacting, while 5 percent said she had underreacted.
Voters were more divided over whether Abbott truly had behaved in a sexist way toward Gillard recently: Most Labor Party supporters said he had; most backers of Abbott’s conservative coalition said he had not.
The poll was based on a random telephone survey of 1,218 voters nationwide on the preceding weekend. It had a 3 percentage point margin of error.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion