Courtesy of Piers Akerman/Daily Telegraph:

For more articles by Piers go to; http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/piersakerman/

Piers Akerman –, Monday, December, 03, 2012

JULIA GILLARD has branded Tony Abbott’s fight for law and order as confirmation he is determined to “stay wedded to sleaze and smear” even in government.

What a finale to the parliamentary year.

It is an indictment on Gillard and her deluded supporters in the Canberra press gallery that she has not been publicly derided and held to account for her appalling performance.

Gillard has been given every opportunity to make a parliamentary statement about the events surrounding the formation of the AWU Workplace Reform Association slush fund (as she described it) in which she undoubtedly played a pivotal role.

She has strenuously rejected the very thought of addressing the topic in the forum in which she sits as leader of the nation.

Despite shrilly and frequently screeching her innocence, her responses have been those of a person in denial.

Rather than give a simple point-by-point explanation of the matter which ended her four-year relationship with the fraudulent former union boss Bruce Wilson and terminated her career as an industrial law partner with the Labor law firm Slater & Gordon, she has claimed loss of memory or, more laughably, said she was young naive at the time.

She was a law partner in her thirties at the time.

Gillard’s image merchants have worked hard to sell her to a truly young and naive audience – girls who may be impressed with the fact that a female holds the highest office in the land.

That campaign stops at gender however as by no analysis can Gillard be portrayed as a successful prime minister.

She is prime minister only because of the ambition of three Independents, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Andrew Wilkie, who have attempted to use her as a vehicle for their own overblown ambitions.

Gillard told the Ten Network’s Meet The Press program yesterday: ‘“Mr Abbott is now going to ask the Australian people in 2013 to vote for him on the basis that the centre of his prime ministership would be continuing with this personal campaign of sleaze and smear.”

“‘The driving purpose of his prime ministership would be to continue a fight against me, rather than a fight for the Australian people.
‘
“Well, I think Australians are heartily sick of this.”

On my colleague Andrew Bolt’s ratings-winning program which immediately preceded Gillard’s appearance, the former NSW Labor treasurer and one-time union leader Michael Costa called on Gillard to co-operate with any police inquiry into the AWU slush fund affair.

Costa has changed his mind since 1996 when the affair first surfaced in union circles – and he was a union powerbroker.

His reaction today is more attuned to that of ordinary Australians not reliant on propping up union power.

Former Labor Opposition leader Mark Latham has decided that there was no conflict of interest in Gillard working for her former boyfriend though her firm’s client was the AWU – because she didn’t charge Wilson for her work.

That sort of thinking would see absolution for a dodgy tradesman who didn’t bill for his work.

The Galaxy poll taken last week showed that only one-on-five people now believe Gillard has told the truth about the affair.

They would be the people not wedded to the notion of law and order.

Abbott has a range of credible policies for the election – to which he has now added the search for justice in this sleazy affair.

Gillard has only a record of broken promises, failed policies and evasion.

That any people still believe her is the miracle.