Julia gillard why did you lie

In short, she was the best close-quarters politician the Federal Parliament has ever seen. And these attributes were well suited to the endless negotiating that was needed in the fraught circumstances of the 43rd Parliament — with Gillard leading a minority government and a Labor caucus that was split.

The policy achievements of the period include the national broadband network, putting a price on carbon, education reform, children's dental care, the national disability insurance scheme and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In federal-state relations, there was the negotiation of health reform with the conservative premiers and in foreign affairs there was a strengthening of relations with our major partners, particularly China and the US. Not a roll call like the Hawke-Keating years but a very solid three years, especially given the circumstances.

The first problem was the way she became prime minister. The toppling of Kevin Rudd came as a complete shock to most Australians. There was no proper explanation of the reasons given at the time. And when it eventually came, it was too late.

The events of June also sparked a long-running war against Gillard, prosecuted from inside the Labor caucus. Beginning with the leaks during the election campaign, it managed to rear up and stymie her. One consequence of this was the hung parliament. The constant deal-making to pass legislation was a steady drain on her political capital. Then there was the carbon tax. Gillard won the policy debate but badly lost the political debate to Abbott.

A further problem was the unrelenting storm of issues that arose through a combination of bad luck and what Gillard's enemies described as a lack of judgment.

Finally, there is the issue of Gillard's communication skills: she was highly engaging in close quarters and confident in the Parliament, but this did not translate effectively through the electronic media.

The feistiness of her media performances as deputy prime minister was replaced by a formality when she became PM that seemed strained and did not connect with the audience. As a consequence, controversies were harder to shake off and the government's message was often not heard. Gender issues did make Gillard's job harder — the endless news stories about white jackets, jocular talkback about her earlobes, plus the poisonous undercurrents eating away at her from the darker recesses of the Australian polity.

Their journalism is starkly different from coverage in the UK, where much reporting has focused on working class concerns about soaring energy prices. Ask just one question before buying the snake oil of global warming hustlers like Adam Bandt, Anthony Albanese and Malcolm Turnbull.

If wind and solar power really is now cheaper than coal, why is China building 95 new coal-fired power stations? Read Today's Paper Tributes. JULIA Gillard has admitted she promised there would be no carbon tax during the last election but said circumstances had changed. The Prime Minister today qualified her comments made a week before the August poll, when she ruled out a carbon tax, arguing her government had wanted to legislate for an emissions trading scheme.

Join the conversation. Gillard's brief was to provide - ironically for this government - some political insulation ahead of the election. But her biggest watering-down of Rudd's original agenda, the icing on her cop-out cake of cowardice, if you will, was her climate change policy. The entire point of her woeful Citizens' Assembly was to protect her from having to take action, while still making her seem to care about the issue slightly more than the Coalition.

Gillard was so reluctant to expose herself on the issue that she wanted to set up a whole separate representative body - a second Parliament, or perhaps a national focus group - so that it could recommend an ETS without obliging her to implement it. And if this doesn't convince you of her heartfelt desire to punt the whole carbon issue into the stands like that apocryphal full-forward for the Western Bulldogs, at least until the term after this one, then I'd remind you of the commonly-accepted report that she convinced Rudd to drop his own ETS.

With a rather amusing lack of self-awareness, Gillard told the National Press Club that "in the moment I truly believed I was going to be Prime Minister I told myself, 'Don't ever put a hard call off, because it will only get harder every day. She failed, of course. And as soon as it became clear that the Parliament was hung, all bets were off. Both leaders were forced to make new commitments to win cross-bench support. Had Tony Abbott succeeded, he would have had to break campaign promises too - and we know he offered Andrew Wilkie a billion-dollar hospital.

Sure, that's nowhere near as major a change as a carbon tax, but does anyone honestly think that Abbott wouldn't have offered equally dramatic policy backflips in return for becoming PM? As Gillard has admitted and they have boasted, it was the Greens who forced her to take on the risk of the carbon tax if she wanted to form government - and her fear that it would prove politically problematic has certainly been vindicated over the past few months.

In short, she changed her policy in response to a major change in circumstance. And that doesn't make her a liar, it makes her a better negotiator than Abbott. Ultimately we are having a carbon tax not because Gillard broke her promise, but because the Greens found themselves in a position to achieve theirs.

If we learn anything from the carbon stoush, it should be that our hopes of political promise-keeping are as doomed to failure as an American teenager's abstinence pledge.

If the supposed idealist Barack Obama can go from being one of Guantanamo's harshest critics to merrily keeping the place open, then surely no contemporary politician can be trusted to adhere to their pre-poll commitments. We should vote on the basis of their values and priorities, which are less likely to change in response to circumstances. The flood levy was entirely unforeseeable, for example, but the fact that it was means-tested under a Labor government was no surprise.

There are many things one could fairly call Julia Gillard. Some - well, perhaps just Albo , at this point - might call her a skilful legislative tactician who has guided a raft of contentious policies through an extremely difficult Parliament. Others, responding to her view on gay marriage, might call her But despite the hilarious punnery that the name 'Julia' makes possible, despite her surname also being one letter away from containing 'liar', and despite the fact that even her electorate of Lalor sounds very much like that same word, her promise not to introduce a carbon tax was sincere.

Personally, I'm delighted she was forced to change her mind. Dominic Knight is a novelist and annoyingly prolific tweeter.