There is nothing quite like waking up in a foreign country to an SMS from my good friend and “political correspondent”, Rob, telling me that we have a new Prime Minister.
What is even better is waking up to an SMS telling me that our new Prime Minister is Julia Gillard.
I don’t know whether her policies will be an improvement on KRudd’s, I don’t know whether she’s going to blow them all out of the water, as everyone hopes. What I do know is that I’m damn proud to have a female PM, especially one who has copped so much crap from the media for being unmarried, childless, red-haired and not-religious. These things don’t matter, (do you hear that newspapers? They DON’T MATTER). Gillard has shown herself to be clever and competent, and I hope she can keep it up.
As for Kevin Rudd, yeah, things started to unravel a bit this year. But he wasn’t all bad, and he didn’t deserve to be so brutally removed from office, (yeah, yeah, I know he stood down without a ballot. But under a lot of pressure…).
So I raise my glass of beer to Julia – may you smite Abbott in the election, get rid of internet censoring and do something about the environment.
Cheers.
