Julia Gillard is, rightly or wrongly, seen as being soaked in blood because of the manner of her ascension to the top job and as being untrustworthy because of that. Her recent explanation may have been too little too late.
She also has a list of broken promises, chief among them to the electorate over the carbon tax and to Wilkie over pokie reform, which she is incapable of explaining.
While Wilkie was simply heaved overboard, the carbon tax reversal could be explained easily by speaking to the necessity of accommodating the Greens after the last election. But to do that she would have to give us, the electorate, credit for having eyes to see and brains to think.
Instead she talks at us like a schoolmarm while trying to out-butch Abbott and out-bitch Bishop.
And yet her ability to play our hung parliament like a piano is beyond dispute.
I am unsure how much her gender has to do with any of that.
What gender does have a great deal to do with is her simpering like a schoolgirl when the Yankee Pres came to town, and her reach out for a savior in the form of Carr to replace both Arbib and Rudd.
She convinces no one.
The trouble is neither does Abbott.
If only Turnbull hadn't made his run so early!

My impression of Julia Gillard is that she needs to get rid of her script writers. She seems to be much more credible when she is talking off the cuff. Perhaps that is because she has male script writers who don't understand the female psyche.

Our socialists just don't get it.

Not wanting a Julia has nothing to do with gender, or even presentation, & everything to do with competence.

It would be all well & good to talk about her courage, or her ability to get things done, but only if she was doing the right thing.

Many journalists, & academics, being socialists, probably agree with her agenda, the problem is most Ozzies know it is the wrong agenda for Oz. A stupid idea will always be hard to sell to thinking people, so she has no chance.

She will never be an Obama, but even the yanks are now seeing that there are no more useful thoughts in him, than in any other talking machine. He got away with lying for a while, by hiding the fact he was doing other than he promised, she wasn't even that smart.

It doesn't matter how anything is said, when it is a bad idea, it is a bad idea, & will be impossible to sell. It is only by presenting something as something it is not, a description of lying, that she can con some into falling for the spin. We all know that lying is a characteristic she has in abundance.

Most of her projects have failed, not been what was presented, or been outright lies, & she is reaping what she has sown, in the lack of trust by, & plain dislike of most of us.

Spin it as hard as you like Richard, the only ones you are fooling are yourself, & the rusted on unthinking fools.

It's a case of separating the wheat from the chaff. Some abuses of women in public life are sexist, some are not. Ms Summers does little to make any distinction, preferring to throw virtually all abuse of Julia Gillard into the 'sexist' basket. For example, she provides a string of Julia-abuse quotes from talkback radio callers, such as:

...'a menopausal monster','a lying cow', 'a lying bitch', a 'vitriolic, bitter, lying, condescending facade of a prime minister', 'a horrible mouth on legs' and 'brain dead'.

Of these, 'vitriolic, bitter, lying, condescending facade of a prime minister' and 'brain dead' are generic terms of abuse. They can be equally applied to both men and women. While very nasty, they are not sexist.

The rest do have definite traditional sexist origins - i.e. age-old attitudes that equate menopause with female hysteria and ugly old crones, misogynistic references to female animals (cows and bitches), and the perennial custom of shaming articulate women by referring to them as 'mouths' (and shrews and scolds).

Similarly, 'JuLiar' is not sexist abuse, but 'Bob Brown's witch' definitely is.

Why Julia Gillard cops so much of both forms of abuse - while other female political figures like Anna Bligh receive comparatively little - is a topic for another discussion.

'All very well but there is a huge amount of disquiet in the public sphere about the inability of the prime minister to communicate consistently and to explain adequately what the job getting done actually is.'

Gold!

Hasbeen,

+1. It's all about competency, honesty and policy.

killarney,

As far as I can see from outside Queensland, Bligh was seen as competent during the flood crisis and has acted very quickly when the honesty or integrity of her ministers was in question. So her detractors are more at odds with her over the legitimate area of policy. Gillard has attracted such venom because she has not only been inept and incompetent in policy areas but her honesty has repeatedly been called into question - even as late as today over the Bob Carr as foreign minister fiasco.

Bligh also did not occupy the highest office in the land. People expect very high standards from the PM. People understand that governments can't always deliver exactly what they want, but they are not stupid either. They can tell if a politician is genuine or acting for venal political gain a mile away.

The real debate we need to have is why society has such problems holding females acocuntable for their actions. We can't even sentence female criminals to the same terms as their male counterparts. When a mother throws her child off a bridge she is 'mentally unstable', yet if a father does it he is an 'evil criminal'. If females do well (like our G-G or Bligh etc) we are happy to praise them but when they don't measure up we get howls of sexism and some made up 'male political discourse' diatribe. Keating once said of Howard,

'What we have got is a dead carcass, swinging in the breeze, but nobody will cut it down to replace him. '

Howard had endless insults (and the odd shoe) thrown at him but we never heard anything about 'masculine discourse' then.

Why can't we admit that like men, women sometimes fail?

Hasbeen, Richard was not spinning, he was pointing out that Gillard's problem is not because she is a woman.

Gillard lost it when she

a. cut down Rudd without warning or explanation and then we found out through Wikileaks cables the she, Arbib and Shorten had been planning it since 2008 when Rudd kicked out the Israeli ambassador for the use of Australian passports in a murder in Dubai. I do wish people would get passed the petty games here.
b. her first speech was an appeal to racism with her talk of "proper and worthy migrants like her", and naughty refugees who pay their way to escape and be safe. Then she dreamed up the stupid East Timor prison idea, the Malaysia which was and is illegal and always will be no matter how much the media choose to believe it only requires parliamentary consent to make a crime against humanity legal.
c. she lost votes not by saying she would have a carbon tax but breaking ALP policy and saying she wouldn't. Before that stupid statement she was going to win the election comfortably.

That stampede you all thought you heard was the extra half million voters who went to the Greens.

I have met and talked to Gillard a number of times, she is as cold as ice with little real interest in human issues.

Oh, c'mon you lot, Julia is merely a female version of Kevin & vice versa.

dane

You get no argument from me about the less than admirable qualities of Gillard’s public persona and track record of cunning and manipulation. But I don’t agree with your claim that women in public life are ‘protected’ from criticism, while men supposedly aren’t.

The difference is that that for women in public life much of the abuse levelled at them is sexist in nature, wherease the abuse of men in public life is not.

How often do you hear choruses of women tearing down a male public figure’s credibility and track record by portraying him in sexual ways? Do you ever get choruses of women carping on about a male public figure ‘thinking with his d*k’, or being a ‘testosterone monster’, or being some female public figure’s ‘stud’ or ‘toy boy’, or laughing at his big bum or beer gut? It doesn’t happen because it’s not part of the culture – or if it does happen, it’s very rare and usually initiated by other men.

It's a two-edged sword. Because female public figures are so often targeted with sexist abuse, it's all to easy to use this to exonerate them when they give a less than adequate performance or fall out of public favour - which is exactly what Ms Summers has done.

Killarney I mostly agree with the points that you've made but i suspect it's mostly a case of people using what they think will hurt most (or stick in the audiences mind) rather than being primarily driven by sexism.

I do recall comedians of both genders discussing what a lousy lover John Howard would be, likewise the attacks on Abbott's Budgie Smugglers has a sexist element to it but I think both are more about attacking the people rather than being primarily sexist.

R0bert

The article also forgot to mention that Julia Gillard is a pathological liar. She tells fibs about unimportant stuff that can easily be found out when she could easily have said nothing or even the truth.

The reason she has trouble communicating is because no one believes her any more.

I hope you lot are still below voting age.

Gillard the solicitor, of whom are the most dishonest grubs in our society, has proven she can lie just as blatantly as any male, her gender means nothing.