Well, this is all over the news in Australia, of course, but I know that some of the people who follow this blog aren’t Australian, and, anyway, I sometimes write about Australian politics here, so I’m going to do that.

We have a new Prime Minister, and it’s a woman, Julia Gillard. She was Deputy Prime Minister and now the party has decided they don’t want Kevin Rudd to lead any more, and he has resigned (rather than forcing a vote). I’m kind of fascinated by all of this, because it’s quite different from the U.S. system, where you’re damn well stuck with whomever it is until the next election. Here, the party can decide they don’t like the leader and can vote them out. I’ve seen it happen plenty of times with the party in opposition, but this is a first for me to see it with a sitting Prime Minister (it hasn’t happened in Australia for a long time, around twenty years). Very interesting business, this.

I also think I probably like Julia Gillard, but that does remain to be seen. I was pretty fed up with Kevin Rudd (as I’ve previously noted), and I utterly detest Tony Abbott. I was very much considering voting Green in the federal election, because I won’t vote for any party that Tony Abbott is leading, and I didn’t know if I could, in good conscience, cast a vote that would be an endorsement of Kevin Rudd. Now, I think I’ll probably support Labour and see how Gillard goes in the position, which is what I suspect a lot of Australians are thinking right about now.

So, there you go. Australia now has an unmarried, female, foreign-born, childless, redheaded, atheist Prime Minister. I guess we’ll see how we go.

As for Senator Stephen Conroy, currently (but probably not for long) Communications Minister who has been trying to push through manditory net nannying via a nationwide blacklist and who actually wanted Google to help Australia blacklist certain YouTube videos because “they do it for China”, I’m still pretty annoyed with him. He probably won’t be Communications Minister any more when the seats get shuffled around, but the man actually compared Australia with China’s draconian censorship laws and didn’t see a problem with that. (That’s the thing that bothers me. Not that stupid bill, or the ridiculous way they were trying to implement it, or the fact that it wasn’t going to work, anyway, but that Conroy actually seems to think China’s censorship is something we should look on favourably in Australia.) I think I’m still going to vote below the line and put Conroy last, just to send the message.

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