Wednesday’s Age quotes the Australian Governor-General, Quentin Bryce, as strongly supporting the introduction of statutory paid maternity leave for Australian women, and paid parental leave in general.
Ms. Bryce is also reported by the ABC to be “optimistic about the future of the Murray-Darling Basin”.
Both of these issues are highly topical in Australia at the present time, and Australia’s public and major political actors are far from unanimous about them. Each of Ms. Bryce’s statements would be strongly contested from different points of the political compass. Not surprisingly, the Governor-General’s statements have therefore been seen by some as breaching the convention that Australia’s head of state should be “above politics” – an issue which invariably arises in debates about the form of an Australian republic.
Continue reading ‘The unconventional Ms. Bryce’
Those freethinkers and mavericks and contrarians at the Opposition Organ are at it again. In the wake of the serve Christopher Pearson gave Governor-General Quentin Bryce on Saturday, his colleage Frank Devine piles on today. But with even less sense!
This is not an attempt to portray the accomplished and charming Bryce as a Cromwellian dark star on the horizon.
Sometimes the kowtow can make a useful contribution to the common good, but to be characterised as a kind of household robot would have been hard to take for a girl from the bush who has raised five children and climbed to the top in the demanding profession of the law.
There was also a disconcerting ambiguity about Bryce’s announcement that her first travels would be to the Murray-Darling. Did she mean she would traverse these two immensely long rivers and make whistlestops at all the settlements within their vast embrace? Or was she intending to brief herself on the politics of climate change, conservation and state-commonwealth relations now implicit in the phrase Murray-Darling?
Entirely shamefully, as I contemplated the elegantly coiffured and accoutred new GG, admired her perfect profile and struggled to share her angst, it crossed my mind that if we had played our cards differently we might have recruited Boris Johnson.
Go figure.
There’s an extraordinary rant from Christopher Pearson in today’s Opposition Organ, beginning with a big spray against Quentin Bryce. Let me just observe that her opinion that the reserve powers can be codified is a respectable one, and that Pearson is committing a significant fallacy when he conflates that opinion with the analytically separate question of the political feasibility of such a change to the Constitution.
The actual occasion for his condescending twaddle seems to be a lamentation about the ideological unsoundness of the Liberal Party leadership:
Until recently, it would have been hard to imagine a candidate with Bryce’s limitations and ideological baggage winning the level of broad acceptance within the conservative wing of the political class necessary for her to function as governor-general. Indeed, since Brendan Nelson, Julie Bishop and Malcolm Turnbull could not be described plausibly as conservatives, it may not be safe to assume that Bryce does enjoy that kind of acceptance. In less than a year, the values for which John Howard, Peter Costello and Alexander Downer provided so formidable a bulwark are no longer taken for granted in the Liberal Party room.
More power to Nick Minchin and Tony Abbott appears to be the suggestion. Yep, they’re electoral gold. Attack Rudd from the hard right, urges Pearson.
Continue reading ‘Governor-General “not especially bright”, columnist claims’
History has been made with the swearing in of Quentin Bryce as Australia’s first female Governor-General.
I was interested to read in the Fin Review yesterday that there’s supposedly some social progress because she will become Patron of teh Really Posh North Shore Polo Club or something similar, where women weren’t admitted until recently. Maybe so. But maybe this should also prompt us to reflect on the role of a very modern Governor-General, and whether this sort of Vice-Regal social frippery really reflects what we want from the representative of our Head of State. And while we’re at it, whatever happened to that great debate over Republicanism that Kevin Rudd called for? Another sound bite?
But in any case, congrats to Quentin!
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