Yesterday saw a pretty poor parliamentary performance from the person widely regarded as the best performer in the Government.
Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard was tickled up by the opposition on a range of Government pressure points - importantly the question of misdirected stimulus spending, whether the signage at schools benefiting from the plan amounts to advertising and its promise that nobody would be worse off under new IR awards.
Of course the star performer isn’t just deputy Prime Minister, she’s Education Minister, Minister for Employment Workplace Relations minister and Social Inclusion Minister. And this is the point: Education and IR and the two portfolios that are right at the pointy end of policy and politics and the moment and it’s fair to ask whether the pressure of this super-portfolio is starting to get to Gillard.
Separate from the question of whether stimulus spending should be redirected – a point Kevin Rudd was pretty good on yesterday - there is no getting away from the fact there have been problems with the manner in which the Government spent this huge amount of money.
With that amount of cash sploshing about it would have been pretty amazing if there wasn’t a few issues with its distribution.
But Gillard’s problem yesterday wasn’t just with the stuff-ups it was the manner in which she handled it.
She is, to rephrase John Della Bosca the other day, refusing to take her medicine over any of these issues and doing a pretty bad job at ministerial accountability in the process.
The Australian Electoral Commission has found that the Government’s signs promoting the Building the Education Revolution stimulus projects in primary schools across the country are potentially in breach of the electoral act.
In a letter to Shadow Education Minister Chris Pyne the AEC made this crystal clear and said they’d informed the Government:
“The signs could not lawfully be placed within 6 metres of any “polling booth” on the day of the polling for a federal election. In the event that the sign is within 6 metres of the entrance to a “polling booth”, the sign will need to be either removed or covered during the hours of polling.”
Gillard’s answer to this was not to accept this independent finding from the AEC and get on with it, but point out the Howard Government performed similar stunts under its school funding policy.
This culminated in Gillard waving around an old sticker that was supposed to be stuck onto library books bought under the Howard Government scheme.
Well so what?
The rationale here is weird in that its end point is accepting that this stuff is Government propaganda but says “cause you were shameless propagandists we can be too”.
There’s also the question of whether hundreds of millions of dollars should have been redirected away from science and language labs to fund school halls.
The auditor-general’s department has established that the cost of the Building Education Revolution halls program has blown out from $14.7 to $16.2 billion, with money being taken away from social housing and science and language lab programs for high schools to fund it.
While Gillard’s response was more confident in this instance the logic was not particularly sound:
“If they want at any point to walk into the parliament and table at the dispatch box a list of schools which should not be funded under the National School Pride program or should not be funded under Primary Schools for the 21st Century in order to fund more science and language centres within the $42 billion envelope of our economic stimulus plan then they should feel free to do that,” Gillard told Parliament.
Well yeah, except you can apply the same argument in reverse to her decision to allow a whole stack of schools in some pretty poor areas to miss out on funding language and science labs – not to mention the public housing cut backs.
There was also the question as to why a school with one student received $250,000 worth in funding for a new library.
Gillard’s response to the Liberal member who asked the question, Stuart Robert, was that he must object to the 32 projects in his own electorate.
This is akin to saying that because your policy is popular and well intentioned you should not be responsible for questions of its efficacy in individual cases.
Lastly there was a question on Gillard’s promise on the Government’s IR legislation award modernisation “… that no worker, from the bill we have passed today into Australian law, will be worse off.”
Following comments from the Prime Minister last week that it was an “objective” but no guarantee, Gillard did her best to answer the question saying something rather incomprehensible about their “belts and braces approach.” In the end though there was no getting around it: Rudd has backtracked and she has to wear it, belt and braces.
While Gillard’s inability to answer effectively is hardly new for a politician the Government cannot afford to have Gillard performing as just another politician.
This is the Government’s superwoman who has been given a super-portfolio to match, but yesterday was sounding like she’d been sitting too close to the kryptonite.
Channel 9 political editor and News Limited columnist Laurie Oakes wrote on this theme a couple of weeks ago pointing out that: “The massive cost blow-out focuses attention on claims that Gillard is not capable of handling both Workplace Relations and the Education portfolio.”
Gillard currently has the task of overseeing the enormous and complex education stimulus package and the equally enormous and complex IR legislation, both of which are full of little golden nuggets of opportunity for a vigilant media or opposition to exploit.
The tricky thing for Kevin Rudd is by relieving the Deputy PM of any of her duties it would send a clear message that the star performer and first in line to the throne isn’t handling the responsibilities. It would also be an acceptance that Rudd shouldn’t have given her such a massive role in the first place.
Facebook Recommendations
Read all about it
Punch live
Up to the minute Twitter chatter
Ukraine song pinches chord progression from The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Fo real #sbseurovision
RT @GerardDaffy: @antsharwood all the talk over there is the grannies will win.they entered to get a church built,feelgood story
Recent posts
The latest and greatest
We don’t deserve this huge, exciting scientific project
I’d like to be able to say that sharing the world’s largest radio telescope with South Africa…
Mining money talks the loudest in Australian politics
When North Queensland Liberal MP George Christensen got the idea of launching a new political organisation…
Please enter your password
Help! I’ve succumbed to a crippling modern illness that can strike at any moment. Symptoms include:…
Gentle jabs to the ribs
They must pay for one’s bitter disappointments
A private school girl’s family is sueing her elite, extremely expensive private school for not… Read more
Most commented