A quick tour through the halls of academia and left-wing journalism of the past 15 years will reveal that Howard was subjected to just as much, if not more, vitriol as Gillard

Australia's 1% is shaping the structure of the coalition, Labor is doing its best to govern for all people.
Julia is a very strong female and tough as nails, abbott on the other hand is subject to the vested interests of australia's richest people.
We need opposition policies without black holes, and fully costed.

To suggest the current gutless Australian PM, the one with the touch of paranoid/schizophrenia with her chaotic government characterised by infighting, lying, evasiveness and policy backflips is in any way comparable to The Iron Lady is utterly ludicrous.

It's like comparing steel with lead.

A contrast is far more apt.

First I need to declare that one of the many reasons I came to Australia was to get away from the sound of her voice - condescension, strangled vowels, schoolmarm values, the lot.

Now I can feel more comfortable in my heartfelt objection to the Gillard/Thatcher comparison. Whatever her faults - and to my mind the Lady had a few - there was never, ever, any doubt as to what Margaret Thatcher stood for.

Instead of an article that attempts to draw parallels between the two, I would have thought it more instructive - and healthier for our political self-image - to point out the fundamental differences in their approach.

Thatcher led through the articulation of some very simple, consistent ideals. While the manner of that articulation was akin to listening to a strangled chicken reciting childrens' stories, there was an absolute clarity to her ambition for her Party and for Britain. This gave the electorate the luxury of being able to decide, with equal clarity, whether they agreed with her or not.

And for good measure, there is absolutely no way that she would ever, ever, allow her gender to be a factor. Nor was she, or would she be, swayed by the prevailing wind of public opinion, or the random wish-lists of a couple of maverick, self-interested cross-benchers.

"To me, consensus seems to be the process of abandoning all beliefs, principles, values and policies. So it is something in which no one believes and to which no one objects." (Margaret Thatcher, 1981. Interestingly, possibly presciently, during a visit to Melbourne)

As a side note, I believe that using a movie, with all the demands and constraints that medium puts on factual accuracy, as the basis of comparison is a massive mistake. The script is drama, not biography. And while Meryl Streep is a monumentally fine actor, she is not Margaret Thatcher.

If this lady is comparing the make believe of Hollywood, to the make believe of the current Oz government, it is not a bad idea.

If, as I think, she is trying to justify our hopeless government by reference to some make believe, it shows how far from reality Julia, the government & Evelyn really are.

I avoided the Thatcher movie like the plague. One reason for this was that, after enduring Maggie T’s toxic legacy for thirty years, even from this distance, there was no way I was going to put myself through 2 hours of her up close and personal.

The other reason was my sense of overwhelming outrage at that grotesque ‘I have done battle every day of my life…' scene that kept popping up in all those trailers that there was no escaping from, the context of which was resoundingly clear. How dare that screenplay writer (a woman) and those who made the film equate a decision to go to war with feminism!

How could the families of those 900 Argentinean conscripts on the General Belgrano, who plunged to the bottom of the Atlantic after being fired on OUTSIDE the war zone, possibly feel to have the lives of their loved ones reduced by a Hollywood film to one woman’s feminist career struggle! On that basis, are we also to assume that Thatcher’s utter contempt for the lives of the H-Block hunger strikers in Belfast also had a feminist motive – as well as her wanton destruction of Britain’s mining industry and the thousands of lives ruined in the process?

I’ve seen many sick and unjustifiable misinterpretations of feminism in my time. But this one scrapes the bottom of the barrel.