Aussie PM dumped by own party

[Magda Hassan]

The photo revealing Shorten's grim expression just prior to entering the room to vote was one for the ages. As journo Tim Lester (from my home State of Tassie) noted yesterday, Shorten hates Rudd, Rudd despises Shorten, and for Shorten to re-empower the man who would happily drop him off a cliff into a grey ocean would be a large bottle of bitter pills to swallow.

Good . I hope he chokes on them. Rudd should drop him off the cliff. Apart from being a duplicious two faced traitorous power mad Machiavellian wrecker he spends waaaay to much time visiting the US embassy to take his marching orders to have any thing to do with Australian politics. I'm pleased he did what he did last night though. Now he can just ffffffade away. And hopefully take his other traitorous friends of Washington with him.

[Peter Lemkin]

The photo revealing Shorten's grim expression just prior to entering the room to vote was one for the ages. As journo Tim Lester (from my home State of Tassie) noted yesterday, Shorten hates Rudd, Rudd despises Shorten, and for Shorten to re-empower the man who would happily drop him off a cliff into a grey ocean would be a large bottle of bitter pills to swallow.

Good . I hope he chokes on them. Rudd should drop him off the cliff. Apart from being a duplicious two faced traitorous power mad Machiavellian wrecker he spends waaaay to much time visiting the US embassy to take his marching orders to have any thing to do with Australian politics. I'm pleased he did what he did last night though. Now he can just ffffffade away. And hopefully take his other traitorous friends of Washington with him.

A change for the better, it seems to me, from afar. How'd this happen?! I mean, we rarely expect good outcomes in politics, these days! Might this have any effect on how Oz deals with Assange at all. Any other likely practical effects - other than not so supinely taking orders from D.C.?

[Magda Hassan]

The photo revealing Shorten's grim expression just prior to entering the room to vote was one for the ages. As journo Tim Lester (from my home State of Tassie) noted yesterday, Shorten hates Rudd, Rudd despises Shorten, and for Shorten to re-empower the man who would happily drop him off a cliff into a grey ocean would be a large bottle of bitter pills to swallow.

Good . I hope he chokes on them. Rudd should drop him off the cliff. Apart from being a duplicious two faced traitorous power mad Machiavellian wrecker he spends waaaay to much time visiting the US embassy to take his marching orders to have any thing to do with Australian politics. I'm pleased he did what he did last night though. Now he can just ffffffade away. And hopefully take his other traitorous friends of Washington with him.

A change for the better, it seems to me, from afar. How'd this happen?! I mean, we rarely expect good outcomes in politics, these days! Might this have any effect on how Oz deals with Assange at all. Any other likely practical effects - other than not so supinely taking orders from D.C.?

Well, it was very interesting the way it happened. Gillard was never going to be accepted by the voters for a number of reasons but primarily the way she achieved office. She lacked legitimacy. The voters love Rudd. And in their eyes he was taken from them.  There was no way the voters were going to vote for Julia. The party absolutelywould have lost office. But Rudd was so hated by a section of the party that many refused to have him back even if that meant losing office and the government changing to the far far right. As it is 7 ministers resigned their portfolios and several leaving politics altogether rather than work in his government when he was elected to the leadership (again) last night. However, there were enough Rudd supporters and there were enough pragmatists who defied the death wish of the others. The person who was a prime mover behind the coup removing Rudd, Bill Shorten,  this time supported him and used the knife against Julia. He is preserving his own tenuous hold on his seat too and has his own leadership plans. One of the cliques that was dead set against him was the Washington/Zionist clique. For their liking he was far too independent of the US and too close to China and he speaks Mandarin too and has a Chinese son in law. His missus is a millionaire several times over so he is not in the game for the money and can't be bribed. He was outraged that Australian passports were used by the murderers of the Palestinian man in Dubai and was demanding answers. He also wanted Assange to have all the legal and consular protections available. While Gillard was slandering Assange and saying that Assange had broken laws and must be punished Rudd was saying that no (Australian) laws were broken. I hope he does some thing concrete for Assange now he is back in office. For sure Assange would have been gladly handed over to the US on a silver platter by Gillard and company. I will be watching with interest if he keeps his independence or caves in to the pressure. I don't suppose too much will be done in the short term as there is a federal elelction in September and this can also be brought forward to August. He still may not actually survive the election. Certainly the opposition are dirty players here and have the big money behind them. But if he wins the election it will be a most interesting time.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Magda, Anthony - it's great to have some analysis of Australian politics I can actually trust.

[Magda Hassan]

Another thing that isn't known by a lot of people is that Bill Shorten, the Labor power broker and lover of Washington who played a key role behind the original coup against Rudd and who this time put his vote in supporting him, well, he is married to the daughter of the Govenor General Quentin Bryce.
This interesting article gives a few clues to Bill's interesting connections. [URL="http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/shorten-with-ggs-daughter/story-e6freooo-1111117539805"]http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/shorten-with-ggs-daughter/story-e6freooo-1111117539805
H[/URL]is first wife was a stockbroker and also the daughter of a politician from the so called 'other' party and a grand daughter of the former cabinet minister and Australian ambassador to the US. He is highly ambitious and has leadership aspirations and favored by important people.

[Anthony Thorne]

A worthwhile article by Shaun Carney on the career of Gillard - Carney is an astute writer who was axed from The Age during the last round of Fairfax cuts, but he typically makes good observations:

http://theconversation.com/the-political...lard-15588

Summary from The Age on Shorten's thought processes over the past fortnight. For newcomers, Shorten is the fellow in the second image down at the following link who looks like he's just won a year's worth of proctological examinations in the lottery. Rudd sits immediately to Shorten's right, keeping his distance as if Shorten has cooties.

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politic...2p06h.html

And something to ponder. The day after Rudd regains office, an article appears noting how a cache of explosives has gone missing in Jakarta, and security now needs to be reinforced just prior to Rudd's imminent visit to the country.

http://www.smh.com.au/world/dynamite-goe...2p05k.html

Stay safe Kev.

[Magda Hassan]

Slightly hysterical but some salient points made.

The Political Crisis in Australia
By Patrick O'Connor

June 28, 2013 "Information Clearing House - "WSWS" --- The sudden reinstallation of Kevin Rudd as Australian prime minister and the removal of Julia Gillard, less than three months before a scheduled election, is an event without political precedent. Rudd's comeback has been courtesy of the same Labor Party operatives who suddenly removed him as prime minister and installed Gillard in the inner-party coup of June 2010.

The extraordinary political turmoil belies the international image of Australian capitalism, assiduously promoted by the political and media establishment, as a bastion of political and social stability. Labor, the party that has served as the lynchpin of the parliamentary set-up and two-party system for more than a century, on behalf of the Australian bourgeoisie, is now wracked by a terminal crisis.

Three years ago, the 2010 coup was engineered, behind the backs of the Australian people, as a means of orchestrating far reaching policy shifts, both foreign and domestic. The corporate elite were demanding the junking of the post-financial crisis stimulus spending measures that were associated with Rudd, and the implementation of austerity measures aimed at slashing the living standards of the working class. At the same time, Washington was determined to put an end to Rudd's diplomatic initiatives that were aimed at pressuring the US to cede some of its strategic influence in the Asia-Pacific to China. In Gillard, the Obama administration found a compliant instrument to realign Australia with its aggressive "pivot" to Asia, in order to encircle, and prepare for war against, China.

Three years later, the conflicts and crises that drove the coup have only intensified. Obama's pivot, then outlined as a strategy, is now a reality, involving a major US military build-up in the region and continued provocations against China that have inflamed dangerous flashpoints throughout the Asian region.

The world economic crisis has likewise accelerated, and is now finding far more direct expression in Australia. The China-driven mining export boom, which provided a certain buffer for Australian capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the global financial crash, is now over.

A Bloomberg article, published yesterday, compared the Australian economy to a collateralised debt obligation (CDO), one of the "toxic assets" that triggered the financial crash in 2008. "Australia is a leveraged time bomb waiting to blow," Albert Edwards, Société Générale SA's London-based global strategist, declared. "It is not just a CDO, but a CDO squared. All we have in Australia is, at its simplest, a credit bubble built upon a commodity boom dependent for its sustenance on an even greater credit bubble in China."

Already several Australian states are in official recession. Mass layoffs are accelerating across the economy. In the last twelve months, 18 mining and energy projects worth a total of $150 billion have been abandoned or deferred. The mining and construction downturn is threatening to burst the property and stock market bubbles, with the leading share index down by about 9 percent, or $135 billion, since mid-May. The Australian dollar is now plunging in value against other currencies, driving up the cost of fuel and other imported products upon which working people depend.

Rudd has been returned to office in anticipation of explosive social upheavals and a new period of class struggle.

The immediate aim has been to prevent the outright collapse of the Labor Party. Under Julia Gillard's leadership, the party was forecast to suffer an unparalleled defeat in the federal election later this year. So acute and widespread has been popular hostility towards Gillard, because of her role in the anti-democratic ousting of Rudda reaction that the coup plotters had utterly failed to anticipatethat Labor was on the verge of being reduced to a small and deeply divided parliamentary rump.

For the Australian corporate elite, the implosion of the Labor Party threatens to deprive it of its most critical mechanism for containing the class struggle and for preventing working class anger and hostility to its austerity agenda taking dangerous, extra-parliamentary forms. Gillard began the shift to austerity, entrenching a long term budget schedule of deep spending cuts, targeting single parents, the unemployed and other welfare recipients. But the ruling elite is demanding nothing less than a European-style social counter-revolution, with permanent, sweeping spending cuts to public education, healthcare, welfare, other basic services and social infrastructure.

Rudd is the only Labor politician who retains any degree of popular supportdue solely to his status as victim of the anti-democratic coup. As a result, he is regarded by the corporate and financial elites as the only viable means of salvaging the careers of dozens of Labor politicians, preventing the collapse of the Labor Party, and of implementing their stepped-up offensive against the social position of the working class.

In his first speech after being reinstated, Rudd pointedly placed particular emphasis on the need for Labor to win back young people disgusted with the entire parliamentary setup. He is well aware that, beneath the surface appearance of social stability in Australia, class tensions are rapidly reaching breaking point. As in Egypt and Tunisia in 2011, and in Turkey and Brazil this year, mass unrest will erupt suddenly and in unanticipated forms. Rudd has been installed in a desperate attempt to channel the coming social explosions back within the parliamentary framework.

For Washington, the maintenance of the two party system in Australia is likewise of strategic importance. The US has invested considerable resources in the Labor Party over the past 70 years, ever since Labor prime minister John Curtin effected a strategic shift away from the British Empire and towards Washington in 1941. US embassy and CIA personnel have for decades cultivated a wide network of assets within the Labor Party and trade union bureaucracy. Notwithstanding Obama administration concerns about Rudd, it no doubt understands that Labor's collapse would leave the US-Australia alliance in unchartered waters.

In fact, some of the very same US "protected sources" within the Labor Party that orchestrated the coup in 2010 were behind Rudd's reinstatement this week.

Deep divisions nevertheless remain, both within the Labor Party and the opposition Liberal-National coalition. Rudd retains the backing of significant sections of the American foreign policy establishment that oppose Obama's "pivot" and are urging a more conciliatory approach towards Beijing. Former national security advisor Henry Kissinger is a prominent figure within this faction and, in recent years, has developed close ties with Rudd. The two had been due to speak today in Beijing at a government-sponsored foreign policy forum. Rudd also enjoys the confidence of those layers within the Australian ruling elite that have been alarmed by Obama's reckless and provocative stance towards China which, they fear, will disrupt Australian capitalism's crucial economic ties with Beijing.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Rudd has been returned to office in anticipation of explosive social upheavals and a new period of class struggle.

Good luck Down Under, then.......

[Peter Lemkin]

Is Rudd the PM of Australia, or of Papua New Guinea?! The new 'immigrant' policy is nothing short of ugly and inhumane. If he's 'progressive', I'm the Pope.

[Anthony Thorne]

Rudd may well have a progressive streak in him but the toxic legacy of John Howard's lengthy span in government still lingers. Howard shamelessly used cruel and racist tactics to wedge the opposition, and encouraged national fear-mongering against refugees for the late 2001 election. (The best book on this incident remains Mungo MacCallum's entry in the Quarterly Essay series, GIRT BY SEA: AUSTRALIA, THE REFUGEES AND THE POLITICS OF FEAR.) Labor foolishly capitulated at the time, giving credence to Howard's shaping of the public narrative, then (pathetically) did little of note to reverse things for years later. Howard even stacked the board of the government funded national ABC TV network with conservatives, all of whom gradually dragged the tone of the station to the right and demanded 'equal time' for conservative perspectives on issues such as refugees. Labor also acquiesced to the various radio shock jocks (mostly from Sydney) who Howard courted during his time in Government, rather than shunning them as the domestic equivalent of Fox News mouthpieces. Opposition Leader (conservative) Tony Abbott has spent the last few years proclaiming he'd 'stop the boats', and Gillard stupidly did little to encourage a more humane viewpoint. Without supporting it at all, I read Rudd's latest actions as an attempt to neutralise Abbott prior to the imminent election - Rudd has seemingly been running through a list in the last couple of weeks addressing each of Abbott's cudgels against the government, and this is the latest. (I'm sure Rudd expects few Labor voters to depart over the issue, and the ones that do will vote Green, which preferences the Labor party anyway). If Rudd regains office, I wouldn't be surprised if he works to reframe the narrative again and gradually encourages a more humane perspective, but at this point Rudd is determined to do 'whatever it takes' to hang on to office.