Piers Akerman: Left elite will sign up for these curiosities
THERE have been exemplary women leaders and there have been abysmal duds. Just being female — or male — doesn’t necessarily impute genius, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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THERE have been exemplary women leaders and there have been abysmal duds. Just being female — or male — doesn’t necessarily impute genius.
Yet there are some who have been so dazzled by the feminist movement that gender is all and this is part of the Marxist push to split society into ever-diminishing groups, men, women, black, white, Asian, and the whole crazy alphabet of the sexually confused LGBTIQXYZers.
Curiously, the shrillest feminists rarely proclaim their support for the three most prominent and most successful women politicians of the last century, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi and Margaret Thatcher. This would be because these beacons of strength and power didn’t devote much time obsessing about their gender because they were busily running nations.
Oh, that and they also weren’t avowed Leftists.
Next week, Australians will have an opportunity to demonstrate whether they are blind dupes of dopey feminist ideology or whether they are capable of independent and discriminating thought.
Two of the most hopeless female politicians the West has thrown up in recent years are going on the road in a two-hander designed to attract those who wrap themselves in victimhood and subscribe to all the propaganda of the Left.
Yes, former Labor Prime Minister Julia Gillard and former US Secretary of State Hillary “They Were Never Going To Let Me Be President” Clinton are going to share a stage in Melbourne and Sydney next week — and they want the public to pay good money to see this double act.
Seats start at $195 and run to $5495 apiece — prices that would make the legendary US showman P.T. Barnum wonder why he failed to showcase a duo like this alongside his crowd-pleasing collection of other “human curiosities” — midgets, bearded women and the congenitally deformed.
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Doubtless there are those who still want to see Gillard though its unlikely she will spend any time explaining how she managed to squander billions of Australian taxpayers’ money with absolutely nothing to show for it, and perhaps there is an audience for the sneering former First Lady Hillary Clinton, who so spectacularly failed to deliver the greatest health system America was ever going to experience when her husband Bill was in his first term as US President, and grossly mismanaged US foreign policy while serving as Secretary of State under that Nobel Peace prize winner and disaster Barack Obama.
That’s not to mention her amazing inability to beat the current US President Donald Trump in the 2017 US election, the election which saw the people she labelled “a basket of deplorables”, “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.”
Well, the last laugh is surely on the deplorables.
It certainly wasn’t Hillary who brought North Korea to the negotiating table on nuclear arms.
Gillard is too moderate at the two events and, on her past form, Clinton will probably just keep on whining, which should attract Greens and inner-urban Labor types, maybe even that great multicultural moaner, the international ingrate Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who would add a colourful touch to the show and would doubtless help the promoters tick their minority inclusion box.
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Before the keyboard warriors start sending complaints about misogyny to the anti-discrimination storm troopers might I suggest that another former Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, join the jamboree, just to add a male to this inglorious mix?
He’s always looking for a soap box and would help solve the gender imbalance.
Clinton and Gillard enjoy a sisterly bond with the former US senator claiming in her potboiler Hard Choices that Gillard had endured “outrageous sexism” during her term as prime minister. Rudd could obviously expand on this theme as he was ousted by Gillard and in turn turfed her out of The Lodge.
But there’s really no shortage of topics for the former politicians to expound on.
Both Clinton and Gillard might like to explain exactly how Australia benefited from the more than $103 million we taxpayers had handed to the Clinton Foundation and subsequently to an affiliate organisation called the Clinton Health Access Initiative, CHAI, as of 2016.
That’s a lot of loot for an organisation which was still being investigated by the FBI earlier this year. Gillard is something of a fan of foreign fancies having pledged $US270 million to the Global Partnership for Education when she was prime minister, an organisation that later appointed her chairman but surely not because of her accounting skills.
Australia is still struggling to meet the ballooning costs of the NDIS which Gillard promised — without nailing down the funding arrangements — before being ousted by the resurrected Rudd, the prime minister she deposed with the help of Labor MPs beholden to the trade union movement.
If invited, Rudd might explain how he locked Australia into the lethal “pink batts” home insulation program, another Labor project costing more than $1.5 billion and also the lives of four young installers. A fascinating court case currently running in Melbourne has heard how the Rudd government ignored all safety warnings, including advice from New Zealand where three installers had earlier been killed, to lethally push the scheme. No evidence of any consultation by the Commonwealth with any electrical or safety experts before the program began has been discovered and it appears that even after the death of Matthew Fuller, the first installer to die after being electrocuted, departmental officials were still withholding expert advice from Environment Minister Peter Garrett.
Yes, Gillard, Clinton, Abdel-Magied and Rudd could attract the delusional and the unhinged if they toured together.
When P.T. Barnum observed that “nobody ever lost a dollar by underestimating the taste of the American public” he hadn’t realised the fortune he could have made from their Australian cousins.
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