A Different Mood, a Different Voice

In “Girls and women, heed the Gillard examples” at Quadrant Online, Dr Philippa Martyr explains rather well how our dear but tense PM coped with irksome questions:

When you read the transcript of the interview, it’s clear that Gillard dealt with Howard Sattler’s question very well.  She defused it, answered it, and moved on.  That actually shows competence, not offence.

This rather explains, I reckon, why so many people suspect that Ms Gillard was expecting the tenor of those questions, though she was unimpressed with the artless expression thereof, and that some sort of deal had been devised.  There was far less tightness of the throat and strident argumentativeness which she revealed when pressed by Ben Fordham to state whether she’d been in the same room as Ralph Blewitt (when she allegedly witnessed his odd Power of Attorney), and there was none of the hysterical shrillness accompanied by a grumpy demeanour which she manifests whenever peeved by questions from wicked bêtes noires in Question Time.


Since we know that the PM’s career has been marked at all stages by assistance from various puppeteers, it is not irrational, whenever we suspect some degree of competence from the PM, to suspect also that there’s been some manipulation from below to make her seem competent.

[This was posted originally as a comment at Catallaxy Files.]

UPDATE I:  some earlier commentary on Twitter about the PM:

UPDATE II:  some much earlier commentary from the PM, when she was in opposition, in 2006:

UPDATE III (17 June):  meanwhile, police from the Victorian Fraud Squad continue to investigate the PM’s dodgy conduct as a lawyer; see update xiv of “The Prime Minister Is a Liar”.

Try Stopping This, Conroy, You Totalitarian Moron

to Senator the Hon. Stephen Conroy, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy:

My websites and my ’blogs are all based overseas.  Do you think that, by enacting licensing requirements for Australian media, you can stop my describing you, on various websites, as a witless, corrupt, incompetent, fascistic, widdiful moron, whenever you speak or act like a witless, corrupt, incompetent, fascistic, widdiful moron?

Think again, fool.

(See also Rara Temporum.) 

UPDATE I:  see Michael Connor, at Quadrant Online, on “Stamping out freedom”:

The free press, an unlicensed press, is one of the oldest of Australia’s freedoms.
If the Gillard government attempts to licen[s]e the media it will be an act of tyranny that has no place in our democracy.  In the 1820s and 1830s colonists fought government imposed controls by reminding everyone that they were British and had British rights.  Ms Gillard, and the government of despair she directs, might like to remember that we are Australians and our birthright is freedom.  [...]

This is a government that has completely lost its way.

UPDATE II (17 September):  see also TWAKI’s “20 ways the left is silencing dissent”.

UPDATE III (7 Deember):  Sen. Conroy, it seems, is a sooky wuss who blubs over spoiled milk; see Tim Blair’s “Crying over nuked milk” and Andrew Bolt’s “Conroy’s tears will not wash away the facts”.

“My family had no milk, for a month, five years before I was born!  Waah!