Gillard bites Rudd

I suppose I should write something about the vote of the federal ALP caucus to keep Julia Gillard as prime minister. I’ll say a few things:

• Julia Gillard is a joke. She’s a Blairite Third-Wayer who came to power thanks to the factional hacks leaking polling to Andrew Bolt. (Anyone who deals with Andrew Bolt is not a progressive in good standing.) She is a cynical, vision-free intellectual lightweight who has never published anything comparable to Rudd’s Monthly essays. Her anti-refugee policies and rhetoric are a disgrace to this country, and there is no ideological space between her and Ayatollah Abbotteini on any issue.
• Kevin Rudd is a joke. He’s another Blairite Third-Wayer who suddenly discovered populism last week when he needed it to overcome his lack of support in the party-room, but had no problem in inviting 1000 academics and celebrities to Canberra to dictate his corporate-friendly policy agenda. He presided over the government which inflicted Conroy’s internet filter and Roxon’s puritanical tax on premixed drinks. He exploits progressives’ genuine fear of an Abbott government to try and make himself the leader of some sort of anti-Abbott Front Populaire, yet it’s not clear what policy differences he has with the Ayatollah. His only redeeming feature is his intellectual nature, but he has done nothing to roll back the ‘Brutopia’ described in his famous 2007 Monthly essay.
• The ALP is a joke. It’s a collection of Blairite Third-Wayers, factional hacks, nanny-state tyrants (Conroy, Roxon…), and Samuel Gompers wannabes (Combet, Shorten…) It is no more than an instrument by which the elites rope progressives into providing bipartisan support for their neoliberal/green/nanny-state agenda.
• The Westminster System is a joke. Political parties are not private organisations, and should be forced to open up leadership positions to American-style primaries as a condition of being registered with the Electoral Commission. A prime minister, once sworn in, should only be removable by a German-style constructive vote of no confidence. Mark Arbib and Paul Howes dictating the choice of the nation’s head of government to a 102-member electoral college is not democracy. 
• This country is a joke. We are governed by a decadent, useless political class which has been deliberately barren of ideas for decades. Neo-liberals have destroyed our egalitarian spirit and our nation-building ethos. Greenies have ensured that we haven’t built a dam since 1985. Prohibitionist puritans want to raise the drinking age to twenty-one. Our economy is a Stalinist, centrally-planned behemoth controlled from above by the Big Two supermarkets, the Big Three television networks, the Big Four banks, and the Big Fat Sandgroper Mining Barons. MBAs in suits produce nothing of value and then whinge that taxation levels are stifling their creativity. Any expression of oppositional culture is stamped out by the tabloids and the current affairs shows. Our problems are much deeper than the question of who leads the ALP.