#Spill: A Reading List

Hoo boy. That week, huh?

Bet you’re kind of sick of the front page of your preferred paper’s website being cluttered by op-eds competing for your attention.

A lot of them say the same thing anyway — and hardly any of them* say it better than these ones.

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KATHARINE MURPHY for The Guardian: ‘Julia Gillard: Where Did It All Go Wrong?’

An insightful and fair-minded look at the political obstacles, toxic media and, yes, personal flaws that led to the fall of a brave and resilient leader, who had “no time to breathe and grow in a maelstrom.”

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ANNE SUMMERS for Fairfax: ‘Bully Boys Win Gillard Stoush But We All Lose‘

A pithy and shame-inducing takedown of the gender-based bullying that Gillard suffered through her career, right up until Rudd’s “shameful coup”, as her “treacherous colleagues” stood by. “We treated our first woman prime minister disgracefully.”

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HELEN RAZER for Crikey: ‘Gillard’s Knifing Had Nothing To Do With The Patriarchy‘

Helen Razer is disagreeing with Anne Summers (again), and she makes a valid point: we can’t continue to conflate Gillard’s dismissal with “the dismissal of all women”; it is either synecdoche, or stupid. “Vale Gillard,” she writes. “May this flawed but decent leader be remembered as something more than a great gender.”

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NICK EVERSHED for The Guardian: ‘Was Julia Gillard The Most Productive Prime Minister In Australia’s History?‘

“From this dataset, I counted the total acts for each PM, party, and parliament. Then, I determined the number of days in office for each PM, and the number of days each parliament and party governed. Using these figures you can calculate a rate of acts per day, which accounts for different lengths of prime ministers’ or governments’ terms. The results? Julia Gillard had the highest rate of passing legislation with a rate of 0.495, followed by Bob Hawke at 0.491.” Take that, Whitlam.

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CORINNE GRANT for The Hoopla: ‘The Dumbing Down Has Just Begun‘

Although it was technically written just before the spill, this essay will continue to be relevant well into the election. At the heart of Grant’s entertaining argument is a paradox that highlights the failures of the Canberra press gallery, which “on one hand lectures politicians for focusing on leadership instability, while at the same time reporting on nothing else.”

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DAVID MARR for The Guardian: ‘Kevin Rudd: A Man For The Party But Not A Party Man‘

A sharp analysis that goes back to the beginning, to find out how Kevin Rudd became Kevin Rudd: “A micro-manager who found it hard to make up his mind; a national leader with a passion for fine detail, and a big thinker with a short attention span”. The piece also discusses Rudd’s troubled relationship with the caucus, the public and himself.

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BEN ELTHAM for New Matilda: ‘Rudd’s Dirty Game Pays Off‘

In Australia’s representative democracy, we elect our parties, and they elect their leaders — so what went down this week is fine, legal, and, according to polling data, probably the smart thing to do. But in an age when Australian Prime Ministers are becoming more and more Presidential, and voters are “primarily asked to lend their support to leaders, rather than parties or, heaven forbid, policies”, coups like this are fundamentally disenfranchising, and present real risks to the legitimacy of Government.

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LEE ZACHARIAH: ‘Australia Welcomes Prime Minister Not Tony Abbott‘

A nice and short piece of satire to round things off. “Rising through the ranks of the Labor party, Rudd went through a brief phase of Not Being John Howard in 2007, and Sort-Of Being Julia Gillard in 2012, before settling into his role as Not Tony Abbott in 2013.”

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*Obviously there are a bunch of brilliant articles out there. Please post your submissions in the comments!