See Four Corners last night? You know, the program that everyone’s been talking about for weeks, hinting at how nervous Labor insiders were at the idea that The Comeback Kid [insert question mark here] would fuel leadership speculation. Yeah, well, apart from being a highlights reel of 2010 (with a couple of awkward insights like the fact Hillary Clinton seemed to know about the spill before the press gallery did), there was nothing in it.
Just a little bit more fodder for Julia Gillard’s failure of character: you know she can’t be trusted, because there was a speech kicking around two weeks before Kevin Rudd was knifed, and she wouldn’t say if she knew about it.
It was, as Bernard Keane writes today, a great example of how “the whole of federal politics appears to be in a sub-atomic realm, unrelated to any external truth”.
It’s up there with Christopher Pyne’s assertion that the so-called Tent Embassy “cover-up” is on par with — actually, worse than — Nixon’s Watergate cover up. As Keane writes: “… to watch question time yesterday without being conscious of just how separated political life has become, especially when it is dominated by two leaders who are so profoundly disliked by the electorate.”
You certainly wouldn’t have liked the Prime Minister any more watching the ABC last night. Why she took the bait — and ruined any chance to rise above it just this once — is beyond us.
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