(Above: would you like a little pickle, onion, pickle and raw herring on bread with your Christopher Pearson column today? Or would you rather be in Amsterdam?)
It's time to hold the presses for some startling, shocking revelation, and here it is.
Club Sensible aka Christopher Pearson believes Tony Abbott is the way forward and spends an entire eloquently explaining Abbott at the helm offers one chance of stability.
Indeed - the stability of the discourse between Abbott and the independents regarding Treasury taking a look at his figures has been remarkable, and is tremendously consoling.
With that kind of stability, the pundits can look forward to a remarkably stable reign where commentary, speculation and innuendo will be made completely redundant. They'll be out of business within the first week of tremendously stable government. Remember, you read that paean to political stability, that fearless club sensible prediction first, here on the pond ...
Home of loons ...
This will be even truer when the Greens, should they ever join with Labor in the Senate, will hold the balance of power on any legislation Abbott might care to bring forward.
Naturally Club Sensible sensibly refrains from discussing the Senate ...
The Club is too busy counting the chickens that are about to be hatched, and prescribing dignified courses of action ...
When, as I expect, Abbott reaches a formal agreement with the rural independents, the most dignified course of action for Gillard would be to advise the Governor-General to invite him to form a government.
Insisting on hanging on until she's defeated on the floor of the parliament when it meets in November would be unseemly and likely to inflame public opinion.
Insisting on hanging on until she's defeated on the floor of the parliament when it meets in November would be unseemly and likely to inflame public opinion.
Well if you want a preposterous proposition to which you can always provide a solution, Club Sensible is always the go ...
But then Club Sensible and Mark Latham have so much in common ...
Mark Latham was the first to say Gillard was destined for the departure lounge. On Tuesday the ALP president and Premier of Queensland attacked those in the party who believed leaders were disposable, saying the experiment had "failed miserably". Anna Bligh has her own agenda, of course, and no shortage of problems on her home patch. Even so, there can be little doubt that Bill Shorten, Tony Burke, Chris Bowen and Jason Clare will all be thinking Gillard has had her turn and it's time to move on.
Of course we love to quote Latham too, but then this is a pond dedicated to loons. Second thoughts, Pearson is equally at home here ...
It's always kindly and done in the right spirit when Club Sensible evokes the turmoil in the Labor party. His evocation of the state of former Chairman Rudd's mind is exemplary, as Club Sensible fleshes out the possibility that Rudd might have been after the Treasury:
Isn't it reasonable to conclude that Rudd believes the mining tax was responsible for his downfall, puts most of the blame on Swan and wants revenge? What form it takes is a work in progress, but seizing the Treasury and humiliating Swan is more in keeping with Rudd's sense of self-worth than settling for foreign affairs.
Um, yes, but with Club Sensible voting into power Tony Abbott, how is Club Sensible also going to satisfy former Chairman Rudd's insatiable demand for the Treasury?
What will jolly Joe Hockey say? Perhaps Club Sensible should offer X-Chairman Rudd the speakership of the house?
Such scenarios may well be delusional, but when has delusion ever stopped Club Sensible from speculating ...
Such a scenario may suggest that Rudd is simply delusional. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt he'd have the power to bring Gillard unstuck if she were somehow to cling on against the odds.
Further evidence of his ambitions came to light on Sunday, when he was reported to have spent Saturday afternoon ringing caucus members to discuss the possibility of a return to the leadership in the event that Labor was defeated.
The parallels he apparently drew were with Robert Menzies in the mid-1940s.
Few who saw Rudd's rambling victory speech televised last Saturday night could have doubted that he thought he was celebrating something momentous.
Such a scenario may suggest that Rudd is simply delusional. Be that as it may, there can be no doubt he'd have the power to bring Gillard unstuck if she were somehow to cling on against the odds.
Further evidence of his ambitions came to light on Sunday, when he was reported to have spent Saturday afternoon ringing caucus members to discuss the possibility of a return to the leadership in the event that Labor was defeated.
The parallels he apparently drew were with Robert Menzies in the mid-1940s.
Few who saw Rudd's rambling victory speech televised last Saturday night could have doubted that he thought he was celebrating something momentous.
There are so many red herrings in that little piece of malicious innuendo and common gossip that we could feed Amsterdam for a week on raw herring (with onion and pickle in a roll thank you very much). A rambling speech celebrating something momentous, such as being delusional? And perhaps out of power? And so therefore entitled to Treasury?
Ah well, what's Club Sensible's advice to Julia Gillard, apart from rolling over to Tony Abbott, leaving in a meek and mild and dignified way, unless and except if it changes to hanging around to be ravaged by a delusional Rudd, and unless and except it involves being moved along by the likes of Bill Shorten, not to mention such front and centre key players and powerbrokers as Jason Clare?
Move along, hang about, get ravaged, and keep the peace? Well that's bloody easy for Club Sensible to say.
But y0u have to hand it to Club Sensible. It's a bloody magnanimous and condescending club, in its leather and port way, up there with the best of them ...
Few will doubt Gillard was dealt difficult cards and did her best with them, but the rush to the election to capitalise on the novelty factor of a female prime minister was a serious blunder and there were many more in the course of the campaign.
Interestingly, female voters showed little compunction in depriving her of a parliamentary majority.
I'm inclined to see this as evidence of an electorate more sophisticated than it's generally credited with being, and more swayed by issues than personalities.
Indeed. Perhaps the electorate is more sophisticated than might be imagined in the usual way by Club Sensible and commentariat commentators at large.
Which means, if I can work it out in a dialectical way, that Janet Albrechtsen was being tremendously unsophisticated and swayed by matters of personalities when she blathered Let's be honest about Julia's free gender leg-up:
Plenty of women will vote for Gillard because she is a woman. She will hate to admit it. And certainly the emerging media orthodoxy, a handy echo of the Labor line, is that gender will not play a role in the coming election. In fact, to listen to many in the media these past few days, the only voting bias they want to talk about is Tony Abbott trying to play some apparently unfair "family" card by mentioning his family, and, get this, appearing at a Brisbane childcare centre on Monday with his wife, Margie.
Labor women and their media boosters can't have it both ways. They can't support a gender leg-up for women such as Gillard in the form of quotas that helped the Member for Lalor into parliament and then claim that gender is irrelevant in the Gillard equation. If you play the first round using the gender ace card, relying on affirmative action quotas and the like, then gender talk will tend to follow you around. That, Labor ladies, is the price you pay letting the gender genie out of the bottle.
Labor women and their media boosters can't have it both ways. They can't support a gender leg-up for women such as Gillard in the form of quotas that helped the Member for Lalor into parliament and then claim that gender is irrelevant in the Gillard equation. If you play the first round using the gender ace card, relying on affirmative action quotas and the like, then gender talk will tend to follow you around. That, Labor ladies, is the price you pay letting the gender genie out of the bottle.
Actually commentariat ladies, that's the price you pay for letting Janet Albrechtsen stray into the Club Sensible tent, and promptly embarrass everyone with her pronouncements.
Yep, here at the pond, we're still brooding about the viciousness of that Albrechtsen spray at Gillard, not so much because of its outrageous bitchiness but because of its sheer arrant stupidity ...
Club Sensible might care to take it up some time with Club Janet. Perhaps they could club each other to death ...
Meanwhile, it's times like these that we like to recommend Gerard Henderson's Media Watch vicious hatchet job on Christopher Pearson Moralist, to show the harmony within the Club Sensible of conservative commentators ...
Oh and should Club Sensible get its wish and Abbott come to power, we'd only be too happy to be carefree about what we might wish for.
Oh to be able to leap forward in time and read his columns from July 1st next year, when the wretched Fielding has retired too pasture, and the Greens and the Labor party control the Senate ...
How did that old Eminem song go?
So this is it...
This is what I wished for
Just isn't how I envisioned it
Fame to the point of imprisonment
I just thought the shit'd be different
But something changed
The minute that I got a whiff of it
I started to inhale it
Smell it
Started sniffin' it
And it became my cocaine
I just couldn't quit
I just wanted a little bit
Then it turned me (in)to a Prime Monster
I became a hypocrite
Parliamentary debate after debate ...
Be careful what you wish for
'Cause you just might get it
And if you get it then you just might not know
What to do wit' it, 'cause it might just
Come back on you ten-fold
julia gillard would have lost many women's votes based on her personal track record of ruining many a marriage on her way to the top. In fact, those who know her past tell that she has always entered into a relationship with a man who was either married or in a current serious relationship...so she's quite used to the knife in the back when it comes to ruining families and relationships. Wielding the knife at work would be easy!
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