Gillard and Four Corners

Mike Carlton SMH 18 February 2012

Commenting on Julia Gillard's appearance on Four Corners Mike Carlton writes:

Cringing on the lounge, I found myself asking how her predecessors, Whitlam, Hawke or Keating, would have handled it. First, of course, they wouldn't have fronted. But if they had, they would have chopped the interviewer into cat's meat. Gillard either couldn't or wouldn't. She saved the show, but destroyed herself in the process.

In short, the government has lost that essential political tool: control of the narrative. It does not shape public debate but reacts to it, often in hapless confusion and sometimes close to panic. Take the $16.2 billion Building the Education Revolution program, to give just one example. Designed as part of the stimulus package to get us through the global financial crisis, it was, by any fair measure, a whopping success.

It rescued the building industry from a catastrophic collapse, exactly as planned. More than 23,670 new classrooms, halls, libraries, science laboratories and playgrounds sprang up around the country, to the benefit of millions of students and teachers. Only 3.5 per cent of schools complained of a dud deal; mostly in NSW, which was not the fault of the feds but of incompetence in the state bureaucracy.

Yet the conventional wisdom, whipped along by right-wing rabble-rousers in the press and on talkback radio, is that the BER was a shambolic waste of billions. And nothing the government does or says has changed that perception - not one whit.

You get the feeling this lot couldn't sell hot pies with sauce on a cold day at a footy game.

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