Having recently availed myself of a Type 60 TT capsule, I have decided to go back in time and interview a figure critical to current politics today - a young, fresh-faced firebrand by the name of Julia Gillard.
Old Angry Guy: Ms Gillard, thank you for consenting to this interview for my blog.
Julia Gillard: No worries mate. What's a 'blog'?
OAG: Ah... a kind of news/discussion space on a thing called the 'internet' which is a kind of computer-based, shared data storage. It's like a cross between newspapers and television.
JG: Sounds pretty schmick.
OAG: Well yes. Ms Gillard, I wanted to interview you because, where I come from in the future, you are currently a key figure at the Labor Party National Conference.
JG: Groovy! Am I some kind of radical union MP or something?
OAG: Actually, you're uh... Prime Minister.
JG: BULLSHIT!!
OAG: No, you're Australia's first female PM.
JG: 'Woman' PM, you sexist piece of crap.
OAG: Well, quite.
JG: I'm stoked. That's cool.
OAG: Ms Gillard, there are three critical issues being debated at the Conference. The first, marriage equality for same-sex couples, was resolved today, with support for marriage equality being introduced to the party platform, with a conscience vote permitted for members if it is introduced into Parliament.
JG: Oh, a sticky compromise huh? Conscience vote? Why a conscience vote? That's only for major stuff. I bet it was those sexist pricks on the right who forced that in eh?
OAG: Actually Ms Gillard, you were one of the figures who fought against marriage equality being introduced to the party platform, and the one who pushed hardest for a conscience vote.
JG: GET FUCKED! Seriously?
OAG: Yes. What do you think of that?
JG: I think I sound like some old fascist Thatcherite mole actually. So, people still hate gays in the future?
OAG: Well, a far-right Christian PM changed the Marriage Act in 2004 to deliberately exclude same-sex couples.
JG: And I changed it back, but some right wing bastards fought me about it yeah?
OAG: No, actually in this case you and that far-right Christian PM are in full agreement.
JG: That's totally fucked.
OAG: Maybe we'd better move on. Another key issue is the asylum seeker debate. The Labor Party platform demands onshore processing of asylum seekers, but as PM you've been constantly pushing to have asylum seekers processed offshore so they are no longer Australia's problem. The latest choice of processing was in Malaysia, a country with a terrible human rights record.
JG: What happened to that treaty on the rights of refugees? Did that get thrown out or something?
OAG: No, it's still there.
JG: So why aren't we processing those poor people onshore?
OAG: Because the Australian public are starkly divided over extending humanitarian aid to them and Labor wants to look tough on them in the polls.
JG: What kind of spineless pack of fucking cowards has the ALP turned into?
OAG: Well, a particularly loathesome specimen of such, in my opinion.
JG: This all sounds crap. What's the third issue? You mentioned a third issue.
OAG: The third topic of major discussion was a proposal to sell uranium to India. They have their own uranium mines, but they'd prefer to enrich that uranium for weapons development, for their ongoing border tensions with Pakistan. They want to buy our uranium for their power requirements.
JG: WHAT IN THE FUCK?! Some fucking arsehole has proposed selling uranium - why are we still mining uranium? - to sell to India so they can use their own to make nuclear bombs??? Which dead-set fuckwit came up with that? Tell me it was a Liberal. It couldn't have been someone from the Labor Party. We fight tooth and nail against that shit.
OAG: Actually Ms Gillard, it was you. You said that party policy against selling uranium is silly and outdated.
JG: Skrag. Mole. Bitch!
(Silence for a few moments)
JG: Why in the living FUCK am I doing all this bullshit? Aren't I a lefty PM? Didn't I ride into the role on a wave of leftist support from unions and activist groups?
OAG: Um... well, no actually. You were deputy PM, and you made a deal with the far right of your party to depose the sitting Labor Right PM in a spill. You then went on to narrowly form a minority government after the election, with help from a couple of independent MPs and one from the Greens. Ever since then, you've been pushing a right wing line - keeping troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, anti-gay rights, you voted against Palestinian statehood, rejected a war crimes tribunal finding against Israel in their brief war with Palestine, pro-uranium mining, and a plethora of other right wing stances.
JG: Right, that does it. I don't know what sort of mole I've turned into, but it ends. TODAY. I gotta go, I've got some protests and picketing to organise.
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And thus, I returned to my present.
Where did you get that photocopy of the news article?
ReplyDelete@Anonymous
ReplyDeletePosted publicly online somewhere. I remember grabbing it a while ago thinking it was a bit of a laugh, the idea for the interview came later, so I can't recall where I saw it first.
Thank you OldAngryGuy. :-) Since then have located the actual real version of it - though no doubt the one you copied is a more correct version! Still she is a sad representation of women - real women don't want abortion, real women't certainly don't want abortion up to the day of birth and real women want to marry real men, not live with them.
ReplyDeleteHere is a link for the real one fyi - http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/dont_pass_on_the_doctored_version/
Cheers.
@Anonymous
ReplyDeleteThe two looked pretty much the same content wise after my initial skim.
I don't think 'real women' (as opposed to what, robot duplicates?) have any united opinion on abortion. Some don't see an issue, some do, some aren't sure.
I'm no medical expert, but I'm pretty sure no-one can get an abortion on the day of birth. If it comes to a choice between saving a mother's life and saving the baby's that's a choice that has to be made then and there, but I wouldn't call that an abortion, more a hard decision made in extremis.
And again I wouldn't make any call on whether women want to marry or live with a man (or another woman). I don't think marrying a man suddenly validates a woman as a woman.
I don't know that I'd call Gillard a good or bad example of womanhood. All I know is, for an avowed leftist, she has some pretty right wing ideas. Her domestic situation is only really relevant to me as an element of her hypocrisy on the whole gay marriage issue.
Lastly, I don't know that I'd trust the veracity of anything found on Andrew Bolt's blog, as he's known to tell the odd porky pie, especially when it comes to anything vaguely to the left of Attila the Hun.