The recent appointment of Jacinda Ardern as a “professor of practice” (a fancy academic term for people who aren’t qualified in anything but greasing the skids of the jobs-for-mates pipeline) should surprise no one. No left-wing politician can fail so miserably at their job or be so loathed by their own voters that they can’t parlay their post-politics career into an endless, money-spinning series of make-work sinecures whose only purpose appears to be making wealthy socialists even richer than ever. All without having to bother with even the musical-chairs charade of elections.
Australia’s answer to Ardern is Julia Gillard, Australia’s first female PM and one of its most detected (although, to be fair, that’s become a target-rich environment over the last two decades). Between them, these two are the Wonder Twins of socialist ineptitude. So it’s no wonder they were the star attractions at the latest climate gabfest.
Last month, the duo of political has-beens descended upon Fiji for the pre-COP31 summit, a luxurious exercise in carbon-spewing pontification funded, naturally, off the backs of long-suffering taxpayers. Ardern, having run New Zealand’s economy into a ditch before cutting and running just ahead of the electorate’s pitchforks, brought her signature brand of vacant, sanctimonious ‘kindness’. Meanwhile, Gillard rolled up as chair of the Wellcome Trust, ready to lecture the plebs on the supposed perils of global warming on expectant mothers.
It is enough to induce an acute bout of has-been-ophobia.
As chair of the Wellcome Trust, Gillard is speaking about how to protect pregnant women from global heating... But chair Julia, before we get on to the long-term effects of a warming planet on pregnant women, can we clear the first and more immediate hurdle? What is a woman?
A pertinent question, though one guaranteed to induce frantic squirming among the progressive cognoscenti. Before ‘Chair Julia’ frets about the thermometer’s effect on the womb, perhaps she might care to explain her own handiwork. For it was Gillard’s regime that gutlessly legislated women out of legal existence when it overhauled the Sex Discrimination Act back in 2013, stripping the definition of female from any grounding in biological reality and opening the door for blokes in wigs to claim pregnancy entitlements.
When Gillard talks about women, she needs to address the carnage she left for women in Australia. It’s so messed up that after Gillard decided that the Sex Discrimination Act should be changed to remove the definition of woman, men even qualify for pregnancy entitlements. Until Gillard answers the simple question of what a woman is, we must assume that her Pre-COP31 speech includes the effects of global heating on men who claim to be pregnant women. It sounds like something out of a Monty Python movie.
Except John Cleese and the Python troupe intended Life of Brian as satire, not a legislative blueprint. Thanks to Gillard’s ideological vanity, any bloke declaring himself an empress is granted open slather to invade female-only spaces, change rooms and sports, all backed by federal statute.
When recently challenged over why she threw biological women under the bus, Gillard offered the pathetic excuse that 2013 was ‘a different time’ and that ‘no one knew’ what the consequences would be. Rubbish. A formal Senate committee report warned her government in plain, unvarnished English exactly what would happen. She simply didn’t care. The siren song of woke adulation proved far too intoxicating for a prime minister desperately seeking progressive credentials.
The absurdity of her Fijian junket only underlines the historical amnesia of our ruling class. Her climate lecturing comes from the very same politician who famously uttered the immortal lie: “There will be no carbon tax under the government I lead.”
Yet here she is, alongside Saint Jacinda and teal hanger-on Zali Steggall, sunning herself in the South Pacific, collecting international applause and offering unsolicited advice on the weather.
If Gillard possessed a shred of genuine contrition for the mess she authored, she would skip the tropical junkets and use her remaining influence to demand Anthony Albanese restore biological reality to the Sex Discrimination Act. Until she does, her sanctimonious posturing about motherhood and climate remains precisely what it has always been: the empty, self-serving gasbagging of a certified political has-been.
