She Can’t Catch A Break
If it wasn’t for bad luck, Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister of Australia would have no luck at all.
The ABC headline reads: Riot police rescue Gillard, Abbott from protesters, but Gillard didn’t need rescuing.
She was at an Australia Day ceremony awarding medals to first responders, when the building was surrounded by protestors. In the rush to evacuate her, she lost a shoe, stumbled, and was caught on film clutching a security officer to regain her footing.
The thing is, the protest had nothing to do with her, or anything she had done.
The leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott, had made an unbelievably stupid [well, stupid for anyone who wasn’t Abbott. for Abbott it was SOP] about the ‘tent embassy’, an Aboriginal protest that has occurred for over a half century on what many Aboriginals call ‘Invasion Day’. The protestors were mad at Abbott, who was in the same building.
Security should have hauled Abbott out [or just handed him over to the protestors 😈 ] and Ms Gillard could have gone about whatever she does as PM. Most of the photos of the incident are cropped so you don’t see Abbott who was just behind Gillard when she stumbled [or was tripped … no, he’s not that talented].
It’s not that there is no reason to protest the actions of Ms Gillard’s government, there are plenty, but this wasn’t one of them.
2 comments
Well, thing is, there was a bit of confusion at the beginning. I saw the tweets start flowing across Twitter at the start and nobody was quite sure what was going on, who these people were, why were they there, who was their target, etc., and security decided that discretion was the part of valor and to get every VIP out of there ASAP. I’m sure that if the security folks and Gillard had been aware of who the protesters exactly were protesting and why, they would have just hustled Abbot to the door, shoved him out it, then locked it behind him :).
Fog of war, I guess you’d call it. Except it wasn’t war, but there was certainly plenty of fog, at least of the mental type.
– Badtux the Newsy Penguin
I was one of the old-fashioned officers – I would have asked one of the protestors what was going on, but I guess that would be too obvious. I like to gather some intel on the ‘enemy’ before I make decisions.
There would be a Liberal government [conservatives in Australia, just to confuse things] if Abbott wasn’t such a maroon. Gillard is not the most adapt politician in the world, and she has shot herself in the foot multiple times, but Abbott seems to save her with his ineptitude at the last moment.
Both major parties in Australia have serious leadership problems.