Jun 17, 2013 4 min read

On Julia Gillard’s gender war:

Yet again, Julia Gillard has played the gender card to distract voters from Labor’s policy challenges and the continuing speculation about her leadership, and to set up a phony dichotomy with Tony Abbott.

In doing so, the Prime Minister confirmed she has a tin ear for understanding the mainstream of Australian politics. Before an enthusiastic audience of Labor women on Tuesday, Gillard launched Women for Gillard — a fundraising vehicle seeking to exploit her attempt to manipulate a gender divide in the community. Yet the poorly scripted speech, replete with an absurd reference to men who wear blue ties, confirms how detached Gillard is from mainstream voters.

It is understandable that Australia’s first female Prime Minister wants to make women’s issues a focus of her government, but her words would have greater authority if she had not supported a man for Speaker who had sent text messages describing women in vulgar terms …

Gillard described the election as “a decision about whether, once again, we banish women’s voices from our political life”. Voters looking for facts to substantiate this assertion will search in vain.

The discovery of a tawdry menu depicting Gillard in sexist terms at a Coalition fundraiser undermined the Coalition’s rebuttal of Gillard’s gender war — at least until the revelation last night that it had not been distributed. Yet her jarring rhetoric has not been welcomed by several well-known feminists who would normally be in her corner. Eva Cox said it was a shallow attempt to appeal to female voters. Jane Caro said it was clumsy and manipulative. …

The Australian, Sydney

On U.S. phone spying:

If Americans preferred not to think about how much they have surrendered in the war on terror, they can’t avoid doing so now. They can’t make a phone call to their dentist or hairdresser without having their home or cellphone number secretly taken down by Washington, along with the other party’s number, the time of the call and its length. It’s that bad.

If Osama bin Laden were still alive he’d chalk up this surveillance gone wild as a coup for Al Qaeda. More than a decade after the 9/11 attack, it still has the U.S. living in fear and trading away freedoms for security. This is beginning to look like a war the U.S. is determined to lose, one way or another.

Thanks to media leaks Americans now know that under the Patriot Act the secrecy-shrouded Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered the Verizon telecommunications company, serving 121 million customers, to hand over to the security services its records on an “ongoing, daily basis.” …

Stung by the leaks, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has moved to tamp down a public outcry by taking the rare step of declassifying some details about the “telephony metadata” surveillance. Americans should be reassured that key members of Congress have been kept in the loop, he said. The White House is committed to protecting “privacy and civil liberties.” …

Perhaps some good will come of this. Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and others are pressing for “a real debate in the Congress and the country” over balancing privacy rights and security. Ominously for the administration, people are calling the surveillance “un-American.”

In effect, the U.S. government is asking its citizens (and people elsewhere who use the Internet) to trust it as it trolls through their private lives looking for bad actors. The sheer audacity of that demand speaks volumes about America’s unhealthy obsession with terror. It’s past time to move on.

The Star, Toronto