Mockumentary Symbolic of Respect Lost
09-September-2011
If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem. – Abraham Lincoln
Perhaps the most damaging outcome of all the dysfunction wrought by the Gillard Government is the shocking loss of respect for the office of Prime Minister itself.
If the headlines of “Dead Woman Walking” and the litany of ridicule in the weekend papers wasn’t enough to convince you that respect is lost, then tomorrow the ABC launches “At Home with Julia” – a sitcom, mockumentary, call it what you will, about the private lives of Gillard and her partner Tim Matheson.
Of course, I haven’t seen it – it may well be a touching tribute. Just as Spinal Tap was an erudite tribute to those much misunderstood rockers. Point is, it’s playing for laughs.
Of course, public figures have always been impersonated for laughs on various comedy shows…but a whole sitcom devoted to having a laugh at our sitting Prime Minister – and worse, focusing on her private life?
It seems, well, very disrespectful.
While Graham Richardson campaigns to have journalists address the Prime Minister by her title, and thus restore some gravitas and respect to the position, he too has as much as admitted in recent days that the Government she leads is now a sad joke that is damaging the nation.
It started when a stunned Australian public witnessed the brutal dispatching of a first-term Labor Prime Minister. Many wondered how someone in such a high office could be disposed of without any reference to the people, especially when Mr Rudd hadn’t even completed his first term. It didn’t feel right. It certainly wasn’t respectful.
While there was celebration in the milestone of our first female Prime Minister, the respect began to slide with the admission of a con with the “real Julia” revelation during the campaign, and most importantly of all a string of policy failures – from the hastily promised and just as hastily dropped cash for clunkers and climate change people’s forum to the East Timor regional solution for boat people.
This was a Prime Minister that passed off ill-conceived thought bubbles as policy and expected the public to buy it.
The “marriage” of Labor and the Greens, complete with signing ceremony, signaled to most Australians that Gillard was beholden to this fringe group. This perception was cemented when she broke her election promise that there would be no carbon tax, in order to deliver on one of the Green’s demands.
I could go on at length … the litany of incompetence and broken confidence is really spectacularly embarrassing. Paradoxically, the very issues she cited as the reason to depose Rudd – illegal entrants, the CPRS and the mining tax – have not been resolved and have actually worsened under her watch.
In all the debris of last week, there was one embarrassing incident that really summed it up – and it wasn’t even the extraordinary attack on the Chief Justice of the High Court.
Last week Gillard met with the Heads of two Unions and an Industry Group to discuss solutions to Australia’s flagging manufacturing sector. They left the meeting believing that the Prime Minister was favourable to an urgent review and told the media as much.
Errr, no, Gillard was forced to come out and say that no such promise had been made.
How exactly does that happen? Is Gillard really that weak that she cannot be upfront and honest - even with the bloke that helped put her there, AWU boss Paul Howes? Has her political capital diminished so much that she’d rather a crucial meeting ended happily than truthfully?
That’s not leadership. It is embarrassing – and exactly the type of thing that diminishes any existing respect.
As US President Abraham Lincoln said: “If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.”
END.