I disagree with the post above this one...

And I hope I'm right.

Tony will carry on with his negativity... In many guises, forms and shapes... No sweat. Unless he engrosses himself to "wedging" cajoling to set the shed on fire behind our back.

But Gillard will prove to be one of the best leaders this country ever had.

It may not be agreed by the Murdoch gang who's going to do all it can to shoot her down at first, but in these times of world "political uncertainty", of social attitudinal manipulation by advertising, of fracturing source of information, of information/disinformation overload, of accelerating disturbances by humans on nature, of overt and covert financial manipulations growing in scales, of religious polarisation, all leading to a strange future for humanity and the planet as a whole, Julia will navigate the good ship Australia with mastery — and this fact alone will help some other countries to "come to terms with reality".

There will be things we, even me as a Gillard supporter, won't agree with, but the sum total of actions will prove very beneficial — and mostly ethical and visionary, despite the whinging of the boring constipated critics.

Imagine for a second that Tony had taken the captain's hat: we'd be in deep trouble already. Howard "deja vu". A lot of has-beens policies and people — with crass opportunism as a carrot and the de-buried stick of Slave-Choices (or whatever you want to call it) as the only visions. Total downgrade of the psyche. Smile in hope of an afterlife while you're being flogged.

This is what would have happened if Julia had not given Rudd the tap on the shoulder. Six month to the next election and Labor would have sunk below the waterline. The goons (the backroom boys who 'masterminded' Labor's wretched election campaign) are not idiots...They knew that. They knew too the times are changing and that if the campaign had been espousing a full ETS, a carbon tax, recognition of global warming and the value of what Labor had done successfully — all this would have been red rag to a bull and torn apart by clever Tony and his Murdoch gang... Labor's campaign had to walk on eggshells...

They knew the "Julia" factor was not going to last under relentless attack from Abbott supported by Murdoch's numerous dung beetles. Contrary to Rudd, Julia can keep Tony at bay in parliament. But out there in the open she can't use the same privileged lingo to do so and Tony knows he can get away with crap in the open air.

An extra week of "campaign" and Labor would have lost... No matter how good the campaign was or not... The Labor goons knew that.

One has to realise the "backroom boys" who 'masterminded' Julia's rise to power would have to know:

• Some men do not like a woman at the helm
• Some women resent another woman at the helm
• The religious nuts don't like Julia because she's an atheist
• Half of the Labor party does not like Julia because she from "Labor' left"
• Half of the Labor party does not like Julia because she's not catholic.
• The backroom boys who pushed her to the fore are from "Labor's right"
• All Liberals (conservative) hate Labor and Julia.
• Swinging voters will vote Liberal (conservative) out of spite and hope of a quick buck on the side
• Julia lives in a defacto relationship
• There is an old love/hate perception of red-head
• and a subconscious resistance to red-head, since the Aussie matches went overseas for manufacturing.

All of these are prejudiced perceptions that we should not feed by comparing Abbott and Julia.

• Julia is a well measured person.
• Abbott is a brat — a clever brat — but a brat nonetheless. End of comparison.

Julia's team is far better than Abbott's goons:

• Swan is a far better treasurer than Costello and Joe Hockey
• Swan is a better deputy than Julie Bishop
• Despite his flaws, Rudd is a far better Foreign Minister than Julie bishop could ever dream to be
• And so on down the list... Labor Team far superior to Libshit Team
• Julia is a far better negotiator than Tony. Tony just lies.

With the strange but not hopeless present parliamentary set up, "new" (I say "new" because I believe a few policies coming our way were always in Julia's bag including policy on climate change — policy that could not be tooted during the "campaign" due to the Tony/Murdoch flame-throwing factor) opportunities will flourish for the common good of this country. The independents saw that.

Their electorates — brainwashed to hate Labor since childhood — will have to come to term with that: Labor is better than the Liberals.

That Tony Abbott gets a primary vote of 38.4%, and that Julia Gillard gets 33.4% is only a reflection of the "illusionary perceptions of a brainwashed confused and manipulated electorate"— which we are part of.

If Julia is the worst-performing leader in a federal election since the 1950s, she might turn out to be the best for this country. I know she will. Whinging is what the Murdoch/libshit alliance want us to do... We've got to stop whinging.

Change for the best is coming fast.

Have you ever wondered what our national politicians might be like before the focus groups audit their ideas and the party apparatchiks rewrite their lines?

We got an idea this week when we heard the maiden speeches of eight new members of Parliament who had just taken their seats after the election.

How about this for raw anger from Andrew Wilkie, the government intelligence analyst who quit his job at the Office of National Assessments and went to the media a week before the Howard government sent Australia to join the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"The government was lying about going to war and should forever stand condemned for that misconduct," Wilkie told Parliament on Thursday.

He damned the architects of the invasion: "The bloodstained pages of history are filled with such people - men and women with no understanding of the real risks and costs of aggression, or care for the consequences.

"There's no chance of them or any of their loved ones lying in the chill desert night air paralysed with fear, or being gutted alive by razor-sharp shrapnel, or losing a foot, or worse, from a mine or cluster bomblet, or having the flesh burned from their bones as they sit trapped in their blazing vehicle.

"There were always other ways to deal with the odious Saddam Hussein. But the US, UK and Australia raced to a war which has killed 5000 US and allied troops and somewhere between 100,000 and 1.5 million Iraqis.

''Even now 50,000 US troops remain in the country, the violence continues and Iraqis keep dying.

"We must learn from this and commit to never make the same mistake again," said Wilkie, elected as an independent from the Tasmanian seat of Denison, formerly a Labor seat. Wilkie is one of the three independents who have decided to support Labor in power, but not necessarily on legislation.

From Wilkie's experience, Australia is about to get new laws to allow whistleblowers legal protection in acting on their consciences to expose official misconduct.

Kevin Rudd, and now Julia Gillard, agreed to support the "whistleblower" law. Wilkie proposes to bolster this with a "shield" law to legally protect the right of journalists to protect the identity of sources. "This is a remarkable development," Wilkie concluded.

And then there was the poignancy and the power of Ken Wyatt's words when he rose to speak on Wednesday, the first Aboriginal member of the House of Representatives in the 110 years of Australian Federation.

"Only 1093 people have been privileged to be a member of the House of Representatives. It is with deep and mixed emotion that I, as an Aboriginal man with Noongar, Yamitji and Wongi heritage, stand before you and the members of the House of Representatives as an equal."

Wyatt told the House he was the eldest of 10 children, his father a railway ganger, his mother one of the stolen generation, brought up in a mission.

"As a teenager I would trap rabbits to put food on the table, sell the excess to the local butcher, and tan the skins to provide money for our family of 10.

''I would get up at 4.30am, light the fire and ride my bike to check my traps before going to school ... after school I would chop firewood for others to earn money."

Wyatt's family, living in the rural WA town of Corrigan, couldn't afford to let him finish high school. The town rallied behind the boy.

The local Rotary Club, the Country Women's Association and a local businessman, Dean Rundle, paid his way. When he eventually graduated as a primary school teacher, his first pay was higher than his father's last at the end of his working life.

Wyatt went on to become a senior official in the NSW and WA government health departments and negotiated a $1.6 billion commitment from all levels of government to improve indigenous health programs.

Standing with a ceremonial kangaroo-skin cloak over his suit, Wyatt acknowledged the two Aboriginal senators who preceded him in Parliament, Neville Bonner and Aiden Ridgeway.

"Regretfully," he said, 39 years after Bonner gave his maiden speech, for the first Australians "not a great deal has changed significantly".

Yet one thing has changed for the better. When Kevin Rudd delivered the apology to the stolen generation, "I shed tears for my mother and her siblings", who had not lived to hear it.

It "would have meant a great deal to them individually. I felt a sense of relief the pain of the past had been acknowledged and the healing could begin. I hope all governments continue to embrace new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have failed."

The surprise is that Ken Wyatt is in Parliament not as a Labor member but as a Liberal. Indeed, he won his WA seat of Hasluck at the expense of Labor.

Why Liberal? He has said he noticed as a state official in health and education, funding for Aboriginal programs rose under Liberal administrations and often fell under Labor.

Wyatt is not in Parliament just to solicit funds for indigenous Australians, however. Apart from promising to represent all the 93,000 voters of Hasluck, of whom only a couple of thousand are Aboriginal, he has an Aboriginal lesson he wants to help teach the rest of us:

"Campaigning and meeting people at their front doors, I was affected by the number of ordinary Australians who struggle from day to day and in particular the number of seniors, retirees and veterans struggling to make ends meet.

"Elders within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander societies are revered and respected, and hold a special place - they do not go away but remain as wisdom-givers and guides in our future. The same concept has to be applied to all seniors and retirees, and the support they require should be accorded to them."

And there was the urgency of Adam Bandt, the man who took Lindsay Tanner's old seat of Melbourne, formerly one of the safest Labor seats in the country. Bandt is the first Greens MP to win a seat in the House of Representatives at a general election.

"We wouldn't get on an airplane if it had a 50 per cent risk of crashing, or even a 15 per cent or 5 per cent risk," said Bandt in his maiden speech this week.

"Yet these are precisely the kind of risks we seem to be prepared to take with the planet and all its inhabitants."

He quoted the NASA climate scientist James Hansen: "We have reached a point of planetary emergency."

And he said: "Imagine if we reacted to the financial crisis in the same way as the climate crisis, with global meetings deferred for years at a time.

"Perhaps if the planet were a merchant bank, we might see the speedy, internationally co-ordinated and massive government activity we saw during the financial crisis ...

"I simply hope our institutions of government here and abroad will extend to the planet the same courtesy as they do to the finance sector."

And for any teachers who are feeling frustrated or underappreciated, take heart. Most of the new members spoke of their deep gratitude to their teachers, to their belief in the power of education, and two of them thanked their year 1 teachers by name. These new members all share a burning desire to right a wrong. Instead of listening to focus groups of uncommitted voters, party leaders should listen to their own MPs.

Instead of silencing them in the name of party discipline, the leaders should draw on their passion and idealism.

Paul Keating said this week through a spokeswoman he had "always taken as anathema the regurgitation of focus-group comment back to the community as some expression of policy".

The essence of leadership was about "shaping of community opinion rather than policy arising on some basis of popular default".

Labor listened to the focus groups in walking away from the problem of climate change. This destroyed the Rudd prime ministership and brought Labor to the threshold of destruction.

It has taken the independents and the Greens to give the Labor minority government the spine to resume work on climate change.

There are 43 new members in this Parliament. If their parties are prepared to listen to them, they could be a hell of a focus group.

Peter Hartcher

Australia's employment growth has exceeded expectations, with the number of people employed in September increasing significantly.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics says 49,500 overall new jobs were created in September, more than double the 20,000 jobs predicted by analysts.

The Australian dollar jumped after today's announcement, reaching a new two-year high of 98.35 US cents from an early 97.65 US cents.

The share market also reacted positively with the All Ordinaries up six points at 4,743 and the ASX 200 up three points at 4,689 at 1:10pm (AEDT).

The rise in employment was driven by an increase in full-time employment, leaving Australia's unemployment rate unchanged at 5.1 per cent in September.

There were 55,800 new full-time jobs in September, offsetting a fall of 6,300 part-time positions during the month.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/10/07/3031884.htm

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Gus: I can already hear the grumbles from the Libshits... :

"the roof is about to cave in" ... "the numbers would have been better under the Libs (CONservative party)"... "Labor is wasting money" ... "the interest rates will be going up" ... "We need to spend more money on war thingies." ... "Abbott is great, Julia is hopeless" ... "Abbott needs his beauty sleep"... "global warming is a communist plot" ... " the carbon tax will kill the Aussie economy"... "The bureau of statistics is a secret Labor organisation" ... "we're paying too much tax" ... "Mr Murdoch is god" ... "workers earn too much, bankers bonuses are too small" ...