The swearing-in of a woman as Prime Minister of Australia is a milestone for women in this country, however, a number of woman leaders in our region have contacted me in recent days expressing a degree of puzzlement over the "novelty factor" in response to the change of leader.
I have met a number of these women leaders, most recently at a Women Leaders in Asia Summit where it was generally agreed that it is the policies, principles and competence of a person coupled with a strong set of values and ethics that matter when it comes to national leadership.
It is true that our nation already has a female head of State (the Queen), a female Governor General, female state premiers and women in leadership roles throughout the public and private sectors.
It is also true that women have been popularly elected as leaders by voters in New Zealand, Pakistan, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, among others.
Australia's first female Prime Minister has come to office in the same way that New South Wales also achieved the milestone of first female Premier – through the decision of the parliamentary party factions to remove the male incumbent.
This does not lessen the legitimacy of either position as our political system accommodates such decisions and parliamentary leaders are not directly elected to office.
The next milestone will be for a woman to be elected by the Australian public as the leader of the party that wins office at a federal election.
Nevertheless it is a significant achievement.
The immediate challenge for the Labor Party is to explain why the factional warlords carried out a political assassination of Kevin Rudd and installed Julia Gillard, given that she was at the heart of the same decisions and the implementation of the same policies that led to Labor's dip in the opinion polls.
The hallmark of the Rudd/Gillard Government was wasteful spending, incompetent management and bad policy making and Gillard was co-author of it all.
The public is well aware that Gillard had personal oversight of the infamous school halls program.
She must bear the infamy of being the minister responsible for the most reckless spending in any Federal Government program in political history, given that billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted.
The only way to get to the truth of how this program was so comprehensively mismanaged and who benefited most from it, is to hold an independent inquiry with judicial powers of investigation.
It is simply not good enough for Gillard to say that she had to act quickly because of the global financial crisis and therefore any level of waste of taxpayers money is acceptable.
Her only response to the reports of widespread rorting and buildings costing three or four times more than they should have, has been to set up a so-called taskforce, which will not report until after the election.
The head of that taskforce has recently admitted to not having read a report into the program by the Australian National Audit Office and to not having made any effort to determine value for money from the program.
Prime Minister Gillard used the same GFC alibi when defending the home insulation program under questioning in Parliament: "These were difficult circumstances: the biggest global economic downturn since the Great Depression. We faced a prospect where hundreds of thousands of additional Australians could have been out of work."
While acknowledging that the program was a "mess" Gillard ignored the fact that one of the contributing factors in the tragic deaths of four young installers was the failure to quickly implement an adequate training program, despite numerous warnings from the sector.
Gillard was the senior portfolio Minister responsible for the implementation of that training program.
Another issue of great concern to the Australian people is the influx of people arriving on dangerous leaky boats in our northern waters and seeking asylum.
Under questioning from Laurie Oakes last Sunday, Gillard admitted that she was the principal author of Labor's policy to weaken the nation's border protection laws.
That means she must accept the vast bulk of the responsibility for the resumption of the people smuggling trade that have enabled 141 boats carrying over 6650 people to reach our shores.
Tragically there have been reports of several boats embarking on the dangerous journey but not arriving and grave fears are held for several hundred people.
To date, Ms Gillard has simply parroted Mr Rudd's contradictory rhetoric of being tough but humane.
As we learn more of Ms Gillard's role in crafting the weakened border protection laws, the decision to abandon a climate change policy, the school halls debacle, the home insulation scandal and the mining tax disaster, the public are entitled to ask: is this the same book, just a different cover?
44 comments so far
More comments
New user? Sign up
Make a comment
You are logged in as [Logout]
All information entered below may be published.
Thank you
Your comment has been submitted for approval.
Comments are moderated and are generally published if they are on-topic and not abusive.