I must admit I had to admire Rudd.

The way he quietly stuck a knife in Juliar and her cabinet in such a way that she cannot respond without looking worse. He gently painted the labor cabinet as a bunch of back stabbing hypocrites that forced him to ditch the ETS, subsequently executed him as the scapegoat, and then revived the carbon tax when they thought politically expedient, while pretending they wanted it all along.

He also only gave enough information so that any comment by Juliar could only make things worse for her, and any move against him would appear as direct confirmation.

I saw Julie Bishop's face. It looked as though Xmas had come.

SM, the rather crazy look that visits Julie Bishop's face at times like that the other night, are a gateway into her 'intellect'.

She is a really shallow person as far as I can see from her political record so far, and highly unsuited to being a deputy anything.

That said, Gillard is just a political machine, without any underpinning ideals beyond her constantly recalled Sunday School with Baptists influences.

I read a hagiography of her some weeks back, and she seems to have ignored living a life beyond the very narrow confines of the ALP.

She too is unsuited to such a position as PM, with nothing to inform her life beyond mean, nasty and all too frequently dishonest machinations of factional dealing.

Her membership of the 'socialist left' was clearly not connected to any ideaology. She fits naturally into the DLP side of the ALP, with the Shoppos, with Australia's Worst Union, with the Opus Dei Conroy, with the toerags from the Can't F76k Much Else Up from the timber workers side of the CFMEU (the ones who all vote for Howard).

It's not so much that she is a 'liar', as your placards were booming the other day, more that she has never quite understood the need for truthfulness in her screaming ride through the ALP, where such niceties are foreign to the players.

Her latest grovelling to Jim Wallace- the ACL- and the constantly sex offending Vicar of Rome's mob, shows how shallow and, frankly, stupid, she really is and with what utter contempt she holds the idea of a 'secular' nation in.

I regard Rudd with as much contempt as her, but he has lived a slightly more varied life, and can draw on a range of emotions and understandings beyond a Baptist Sunday school and working with a bunch of no-hopers within the factions of the ALP.

While Turnbull no doubt has his backers even they know the ets stinks with the electorate. When he was opposition leader Rudd was always miles ahead in the poles. Now Abbott is a long way in front with Julia doing them a favour by lying about the ets. Some liberals might be dumb enough to want someone who would lose the election but most are not that stupid. Turnbull will only get another chance if the unlikely event of Liberals lose thge next election. Turnbull should start his own party with Oakshott, Rudd and other regressives. They could call each it the smirkers.

Most people miss the point that the disagreements in Cabinet about the ETS revolved entirely around its effects on the incumbency of the ALP in Canberra. The Labor squabbles and backstabbing had nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not introducing an ETS is the right and responsible response to AGW.

Much the same as the Opposition, actually. Speaking of whom, Julie Bishop looked positively deranged on Q&A the other night.

runner,
You appear to believe that there is never any controversy in the Coalition ranks. Remember that Malcolm Turnbull favoured a carbon trading scheme and was within one vote of retaining his liberal leadership position. That doesn't sound like a united Liberal Party.

I suspect that the Country/National Party would only favour a trading scheme that gave another handout to the farming lobby. hence Tony Abbott's adoption of a soil carbon policy.

runner
You are certainly the master at misconstruction. I did not mention Julia Gillard once in my post nor anything about the leadership challenge. This is not the subject of your thread.

There is sometimes a big difference, as revealed by your responses to various people, between what people write and what you think they have written.