Winners and losers : the ALP leadership spill and the triumph of the insiders

Julia Gillard won an impressive victory today, one that Kevin Rudd will find it very difficult to come back from. The scale of her victory contrasted with support for Rudd among the broader public or even among Labor voters.

The end of the Keating-Howard-Rudd-Gillard era?

Australian political discourse is dominated by ahistorical hyperbole, every election defeat is a landslide, every consecutive electoral loss indicates complete political marginalisation, every poll slump is a crisis, and every struggling leader is the worst ever. Australian Labor is not faring well but we need to distinguish between the ebbs and flows of the political cycle and the fundamentals. Australian politics may be approaching a fundamental break. The political era that began in the early 1990s may be coming to an end and with it Labor's hegemonic position in Australian politics that has endured since Gough Whitlam.

Would you like some gender with that leadership?

The recent toppling of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, continues to raise questions about women and leadership. Gillard was regarded as smart, capable and resilient. However, a string of bad decisions and broken promises had the public and politicians questioning her capacity to lead. In her final exit speech before Kevin Rudd took her place, Gillard responded to the “gender wars” discourse that had come to represent her leadership, saying that “the reaction to being the first female PM”—in other words, gender—did not explain everything nor did it explain nothing.

Is journalism still a men's club?

Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard says in her memoir that the quality of national debate is limited by the male domination in journalism.

How serious is the inequality in our newsrooms? Is it essentially a blokes club?

Louise North is senior research fellow in journalism at Deakin University, and the author of The Gendered Newsroom: How Journalists Experience the Changing World of Media.

Hillary, Kevin and Julia; Margery, Rumwold and Jeff

Review of Liquid Nitrogen by Jennifer Maiden and The Odour of Sanctity by Amy Brown

Spectres of labourism

In March this year, prime minister Julia Gillard boasted that she led a Labor government, not a social democratic one or a progressive one. She described Labor as ‘politically, organisationally, spiritually and even literally, the party of work’. Her academic admirers were in agreement, with labour historian Nick Dyrenfurth arguing that, unlike that latter-day Trotsky, Kevin Rudd, ‘Gillard “gets” the labour movement’.