And so it begins ... Julia Gillard has set the date for the next federal election. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen
The pundits - I suppose that includes me - have been frothing with excitement from the instant the Prime Minister announced she'd send us to the polls on September 14. The clamour was deafening.
''Gillard just sunk [sic] the early election option for Rudd,'' blathered Graham Richardson in The Australian on Thursday. It's sank, Richo, sank. That apart, take your pick of the theories on offer. At one end of the stick, naming the date so early was a mad gift to the Liberal Party planners; at the other, it was a stroke of genius to flush out Tony Abbott's policy confusion.
As ever, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Nobody knows exactly where, though, and in the end it won't make a damn bit of difference. The die is cast. Gillard said on Wednesday that she did not mean to start the nation's longest election campaign, but that's what she's done. It's true she has removed the uncertainty, and that is a good thing. But for the next 32 weeks, every twitch and grunt in the political arena will be ''analysed'' for its effect on the opinion polls, marginal seats, party morale etc, and - most of all - the electability of two leaders who are about equally scorned and distrusted. They cannot escape this endless scrutiny and, worse, nor can we.
My hunch, for this week anyway, is that Gillard has clawed back some popularity since her famous misogyny tirade and the pushing of such bedrock Labor ideals as the national disability insurance scheme. Well, maybe not popularity but respect, perhaps.
Abbott, on the other hand, has lost much of the little cred he had now that his Great Carbon Tax Scare has been revealed as the lie it always was. Whyalla is still standing. Labor should dare him to campaign there. The best he could come up with after Gillard's coup on Wednesday was a warmed-over hash of John Howard's old ''who do you trust?'' lines. It was less than inspiring, especially if you recall Howard's vain boast that ''interest rates will always be lower under a Coalition government than under a Labor government''.
I am truly dreading the television campaign. Night after night, month upon dreary month, the image makers on either side will have their leaders throwing the switch to vaudeville, as Paul Keating used to call it. There will be endless vision of Gillard and Abbott gaily squatting on kindergarten chairs, doing tea and sympathy with old codgers in sunset homes, strolling through shopping malls in Sinny's west, chortling over a beer in country RSL clubs, donning hard hats at building sites - all of it mindless, meaningless floss confected solely to get their faces on the news.
If the TV news editors had any guts they would put their heads together and point-blank refuse, as one, to send camera crews to these stunts. But they don't and they won't.
Labor's backroom chieftains have obediently rubber-stamped their Captain's Pick of Nova Peris to top the ticket for a Northern Territory Senate seat.
Many people who should know better, including a large chunk of the Canberra press gallery, have hailed this as a great leap forward for indigenous Australians. How wonderful, they enthused: at last, an Aboriginal woman in Federal Parliament.
It is not wonderful. It is a travesty, yet another tragic episode in the horrible saga of white paternalism that began in 1788 when Arthur Phillip kidnapped poor Bennelong and togged him out in tailcoat and knee breeches to hang about Government House.
At least Phillip's motives were high minded. A product of the Enlightenment, he genuinely believed he was bringing a primitive heathen into Christian civilisation under the benign protection of George III.
Julia Gillard can claim no such moral purpose. There were three indigenous people hoping to contest preselection for the Senate slot, all of them ALP members. Gillard trampled them into the dirt because she thought a star athlete would be an election winner. It's as simple and cynical as that. Whitey called the shots again.
Just as Bennelong was carefully coached in the use of the snowy napkins and the Georgian silver at Phillip's table, so Peris will be told where to sit, what to say and how to vote. The party machine will ring-fence her with minders to protect her from the media and the punters. As the Northern Territory's Indigenous Advancement Minister, Alison Anderson, scathingly but accurately remarked, she will be a ''maid to do the sheets and serve the cups of tea''.
The ALP postures as the party of social progress, but the Tories have done better in sending indigenous politicians to Canberra. Neville Bonner became a Liberal senator for Queensland, of all places, in 1971. Ken Wyatt, the present Liberal member for Hasluck in Western Australia and the first and only Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives, was chosen in a legitimate preselection contest, not imposed from the top.
Far from crowing, Labor should be ashamed that the Nova Peris stunt is the best it can come up with 225 years after Phillip's arrival in Sydney Cove.
The gaiety of the week was shattered by the melancholy news that Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, 75, is to abdicate in favour of her son Willem-Alexander, Prince of Orange.
Paul Sheehan did a piece on Thursday suggesting that our own dear Queen should take the hint and hand the job to Charles, certainly before 2017, when she would turn 90. ''One would hope that the news from Amsterdam this week will galvanise the succession planning in Buckingham Palace and Westminster,'' he wrote.
Perhaps. But it won't. I did some work on this when I was on radio in London, and all the royal experts are adamant that Elizabeth will reign until her last breath. Abdication has been a dirty word in the House of Windsor since Edward VIII went off with Mrs Simpson in 1936.
The bicycling royals of Europe can do as they please, but Elizabeth believes that monarchy is God-given and that her coronation oath was a sacred commitment for life. She is about as likely to quit the throne as she is to gambol naked down the Mall.
We should really be asking what Australians will do when we wake up one morning to find that Charles III is our new king.
smhcarlton@gmail.com
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