AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTER WINS HER POST 

Julia Gillard, who became Australia’s first Woman Prime Minister last June, after she toppled the leader of her party, managed to retain her post by persuading two independent members of Parliament and Green party members to join her in forming the country’s first minority coalition government in 67 years.

  (Source, Associated Press, 9/7/10)

 

Ms. Gillard came to power when she replaced former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd as leader of the Labor Party. She then called elections in August, holding on to power after negotiations with other MPs that enabled her to form a government.

A former Deputy Prime Minister, Ms. Gillard has also served as Minister of Education and has been a Member of Parliament since 1998. In a move that surprised many, she appointed Kevin Rudd, the man she ousted as Labor Party leader, as Australia’s new Foreign Minister.

She is expected to serve a full three-year term, and she has promised a stable government, despite her slim majority.

“Labour is prepared to deliver stable, effective and secure government for the next three years,” she told reporters.

The independents’ support means Ms Gillard can continue with her plans to introduce a 30 per cent tax on iron ore and coal miners’ burgeoning profits and make Australia’s biggest polluters pay for carbon gas emissions.

Labour gained the ability to form a government for a second term after two independent politicians, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, joined her coalition more than two weeks after elections failed to deliver a clear winner for the first time since 1940.

Their decision gives Ms Gillard’s party control of 76 seats in the 150-seat House of Representatives and avoids the need for another round of polls.

Ms Gillard has rewarded the two rural-based politicians by promising 10billion Australian dollars (£5.9billion) in new investment on rural schools and hospitals.

She also announced that she had offered Mr Oakeshott a Cabinet post, which he had yet to accept. Mr Windsor had said he did not want such a job in the government.

Ms Gillard also said she would keep her promise to make her predecessor, Kevin Rudd, a senior Cabinet minister.

Party powerbrokers dumped Rudd for Gillard in an internal mutiny in June in a bid to improve Labour’s standing in opinion polls.

Rudd loyalists were suspected to be behind a series of damaging leaks to the media against Ms Gillard during her election campaign.

Labour lost 11 seats in the election, many of them in Rudd’s home state of Queensland.

Bob Katter, an independent who sided with opposition leader Tony Abbott’s conservative Liberal Party, said today that he would have supported Labour if Rudd was still prime minister.

Gillard said voters sent her a message by almost making her government the first to lose power after a single term since 1931.

“What they are asking us to do is not to become waylaid in partisan bickering but to build for the future,” she said.

Abbott’s coalition won 73 seats and with Katter’s support commanded 74 seats. Abbott said today that he was disappointed by the result and said the government should be brought down if it proved to be incompetent.

The August 21 elections were the first since 1940 to fail to deliver a clear winner. That parliament initially chose a conservative minority government, which was brought down when two independents switched their allegiances to Labour.

Windsor and Oakeshott, who have both championed better communications infrastructure for rural areas, said Labour’s plan to introduce a 43billion Australian dollar (£25.6billion) high-speed optical fibre national broadband network was a major factor in their decision.

Abbott’s Liberal Party had promised a smaller, slower 6billion dollar (£3.6billion) network with a range of technologies including optical fibre, wireless and DSL.

“What this is, is a hard decision,” Oakeshott told reporters in announcing his decision. “There’s no question about that. And on my end, it has been an absolute line-ball, points decision, judgment call, six of one, half dozen of the other. This could not get any closer.”

Windsor said he believed that Gillard was more likely than Mr Abbott to work constructively with the independents and govern for a full three-year term rather than call an early election.

During intense negotiations with the independents, both Gillard and Abbott had promised that, if they could form a minority government, they would not later call an early election in the hope of winning an outright majority.

Labour won only 72 seats but has enlisted the support of a politician from the Greens party plus three independents.

Liberal Party politicians argue that the Greens’ influence will make the Labour minority government Australia’s most left-wing government in years.

  

A Celebration of Women

has complete Faith in this WOMAN of ACTION. 

Godspeed to your work, and Leadership from Women in our World is Critical!

Brava, Madame Julia Gillard!