Embarrassing finale of a lost cause

IS it possible for a political party and a prime minister to have more egg on their collective faces than Labor and Julia Gillard do right now? Having fought to the last man (and woman) to defend his right to remain Speaker of the House of Representatives, Peter Slipper himself resigned last night.

The Greens and the independents who sided with the government to defend Slipper's right to retain the speakership should also be embarrassed.

We are in for an extremely brutal period in Australian politics between now and the next election if yesterday's question time was anything to go by. The opposition had sought to remove Slipper because of revelations about offensive text messages about women. It was a reasonable demand, but the government was more concerned about its numbers on the floor of the house than the credibility of the speakership.

The motion failed by the narrowest of margins, but not before Tony Abbott was directly accused of being a sexist and a misogynist himself. Not by an attack-dog minister mind you - by the Prime Minister herself.

It happened after the Opposition Leader had already engaged in a little rhetorical overreach of his own. He said that the government should have "died of shame": words eerily similar to Alan Jones's now infamous (and condemned) comments.

But rhetorical errors by Abbott pale into insignificance alongside the government's attempts to defend Slipper, especially on the back of the moral outrage they have expressed about Abbott's attitude to women. And especially once Slipper showed more decency by resigning than Labor was prepared to show by removing him. It was a sight to behold watching the conga-line of female Labor MPs vote to retain Slipper as Speaker after so many of them have condemned Abbott for causing offence to women.

Slipper sent text messages offensive to women. That has not been disputed. He had to go, to preserve the integrity of the chair.

Labor should have realised that fighting to retain Slipper as the official Speaker was never going to end well. As it turns out it could not have ended more badly.