Gillard never got married herself. I think she's of that old school feminist mold that says marriage came out of a paternalistic concept of owning women, so why would a modern woman take part in it?
There's similar thinking from some gay writers. Given marriage for so long has been associated with religion and religions in the past weren't very nice to gay people, then some people think gay people shouldn't want to get married. I'd have to look at her comments more closely, but she was openly atheist and I wonder if her comments about tradition could have slyly said that she was listening to those opinions, without really endorsing the conservative schools of thought.
Of course in both cases the far more popular opinion is to say that marriage is about official commitment to loving one other, and a lot of people love the feeling of stability it gives - especially when they're setting off on the long-term project of building a family.
I certainly hope that wasn't her argument - matrimony is a religious institution, marriage is a legal one. The notion that it's a feminist or a LGBTIQA idea to allow religion to hijack a legal institution so as to deny them legal equality would be crazy. Especially when you bare in mind that state conference after state conference voted to support marriage equality as party platform at the time.
I think Bomberboy was more on the mark - she was pandering to the powerful shoppies union in rejecting it.
Never voted for him but I think John Howard deserves to be rated as one of our best ever PMs. Getting the gun control laws passed is probably one of his finest achievements and I like to think the vast majority of Australians would give him plaudits for it.
I don't think it's unreasonable to view this as proof that even a broken clock is right twice a day. Nothing more, nothing less. Don't get me wrong - I watch what happens in the US and I will remain eternally grateful for the political courage it took - but doing one universally laudable thing in the space of 11 years doesn't support the idea that he was a great PM.
Not really, but aside from my own personal misgivings about his handling of Tampa and broader criticism of the increasing security state since 9/11 (not that an ALP government would've done it differently btw), he was competent and the economy went along well. The proportion of the success that can be attributed to him and government is up for debate.
I don't remember any divisions in the Liberal Party at the time when he was PM aside from of course Costello constantly angling for his job. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking. The modern Liberal Party is now deeply divided and while I enjoy seeing them fail, I'd rather they got their shit together.
It would've taken someone extraordinarily mentally deficient to not keep that economy going along well. He road the wave of the Telstra sale and the mining boom. And the reason I agree with the suggestion that his Prime Ministership (and Costello's treasurership) is because we now see the long term impact of the mining boom and the Telstra sale ie. There isn't one.
Those proceeds were pissed away on middle class welfare and tax breaks for the wealthy... and now we find ourselves in debt having to pay for essential infrastructure such as an NDIS and a fibre optic network to replace the long-failing copper network.
Examples of the 'hard right'? Certainly not as hard right as Tony and co.
While there are obviously examples of "hard right" politicians overseas - we've seen them in Europe an of course we saw Thatcherism in the UK.
But I don't believe it was ever an issue that Howard had to deal with. Hanson's infamous speech was in 1996 - she was rightly castigated as an ignorant racist.
It was only after 9/11 that Tea Party politics gained traction in the US, with the Australian version gaining traction shortly after with Tampa.
Shortly after this, Howard had won 3 elections consecutively, coming off the back of a disastrous period of Peacock/Hewson/Downer... by the time this hard right politics was gaining traction, Howard was all-powerful in his party, and was invoking a lot of the same ideals that they'd ridiculed following Hanson's speech.
Howard's "legacy" is a product of timing - he got the back of the mining boom, the fall of the Democrats (which is relevant to the GST), Telstra, the mining boom and Tampa. He got the perfect set of circumstances for a Liberal PM that even Abbott couldn't not have screwed up.
But his lack of a lasting legacy is why his Prime Ministership has quite rightly not aged well.