Fictional Julia will always be their Favourite Julia

Laborites still get upset when reminded of Julia Gillard’s broken “no carbon tax” promise. Even 14 years later, it hurts them in ways normal people can’t quite appreciate.

She’s looking at something, but Lord only knows what it might be

The leftist solution to this has been to invent an alternative Labor-friendly universe in which Gillard is a planet-saving angel cruelly wronged by wicked forces of anti-goodness.

Kerry-Anne Walsh launched this bold re-imagining in her 2011 book The Stalking of Julia Gillard and newspaper extracts thereof:

Gillard has been hounded and pilloried for stating before last year's election that her government would not introduce a carbon tax. The quote, which has been hurled at her thousands of times by the anti-Gillardites in the Land of the Lunar Right in the tabloid and shock jock world, is this: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead."

What is deliberately omitted – including in the mainstream political press, which uses the quote to flagellate Gillard – is the second half of her sentence.

Her full comment on commercial TV during the 2010 election campaign was: "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead, but let me be clear. I will be putting a price on carbon and I will move to an emissions trading scheme."

Wrong. Gillard never said any of the words after “lead”. Everything in bold was invented, or possibly sourced from the anonymous online scribblings of a mental patient.

As for what she actually did say, see for yourself. Here’s the unedited clip of Gillard’s full comment on commercial TV, as Walsh described it. (Click to follow Lewko’s excellent X feed while you’re there.)

Perhaps mindful of Gillard’s own media command – “when you have written complete crap, then I think you should correct it” – Walsh subsequently re-wrote her mistaken version of events:

What is conveniently ignored is that on at least ten occasions during the campaign she committed a future Gillard government to work towards a carbon pricing scheme.

Nice try, Kerry-Anne. Too bad you’d already hit “publish”.

ABC presenter Jonathan Green also fell for bogus Gillard commentary, larding up the word count in 2013’s sad The Year My Politics Broke with this rubbish:

“There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead …” is probably one of the most infamous pieces of political quotation in Australian history. The other quotable snippet from those last days of the 2010 campaign – “but I am determined to put a price on carbon” – trips less readily off the tongue, largely due to its quite conspicuous lack of endless repetition.

Why repeat something that was never said? Why repeat something false? Again, let’s go to the video. And again, click to follow.

Despite numerous long-ago corrections, Justified Julia the Carbon Tax Truth-Teller lives on even now in Labor minds and various chatter zones. She turned up again the other day in a wayward item by former journalist turned full-time crankypants Barry Tucker that was reposted by serial fake Julia defender Green:

Missing from Nemesis tv show:

"There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead, but I intend to put a price on carbon, first step to introducing an emissions trading scheme." - Julia Gillard, on Ch10.

Abbott/Credlin edited what Gillard sd, claiming it as proof of a lie.

— Barry Tucker (@btckr) January 29, 2024

Full credit to Tony and Peta. Editing an interview as it’s being conducted live on television is extraordinarily difficult. Barry continued:

I'm sure I've got the Ch10 video on a removable drive. Other than that, published records of what Gillard actually said in that Ch10 interview are hard to find. It's like history has been re-written.

Records of what Gillard said are in fact very easy to find, and Tucker is the one doing the historical rewriting here. Let’s save dear old Baz the trouble of digging though his “removable drive” by once again presenting the complete transcript and video of Julia Gillard’s 2010 carbon tax pledge:

There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead. What we will do is we will tackle the challenge of climate change. We’ve invested record amounts in solar and renewable technologies. Now I want to build the transmission lines that will bring that clean green energy into the national electricity grid.

I also want to make sure we have no more dirty, coal-fired power stations. I want to make sure we’re driving greener cars and working from greener buildings. I will be delivering those things and leading our national debate to reach a consensus about putting a cap on carbon pollution.

Poor lefties. Reality is never their friend.

UPDATE. A few years ago there were plans for Julia: The Movie. Wonder what happened with that.