Special to WorldTribune.com

Global Information System / Defense & Foreign Affairs

CANBERRA, Australia — The Gillard Government in Australia has fallen into what Australian analysts have called disarray and ridicule.

With Parliament now in recess, the government at least avoided a full no-confidence vote, but it has become essentially a paralyzed government. There are now questions as to whether the government can even last until the scheduled elections in September.

A rebellion within the governing Australian Labor Party (ALP) failed, scattering any semblance of cohesion within the government. It was only seven weeks earlier that Ms. Julia Gillard had reshuffled her Cabinet.

An attempt to remove Australian Prime Minister Gillard from leadership of the ALP, and therefore from the Premiership, was attempted — and failed — on Feb. 21.

In the end, the attempted putsch, centering around former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, fell apart when Rudd, sensing that he could not gain the votes within the Parliamentary Labor Party — the ALP members of Federal Parliament — failed to participate in the challenge to Ms. Gillard, declaring he would not contest the leadership. This was too late for those parliamentarians, including several ministers, who had already shown their support for Rudd. They were obliged to leave the government.

The matter was brought to a head by former ALP leader (when it was in opposition) Simon Crean, previously a strong backer of Gillard, who called on Prime Minister Gilllard to call a caucus meeting to decide the leadership issue. Crean, who held the portfolios of regional Australia, regional development, local government and arts, declared that he would not stand for the position of party leader, but urged Rudd to do so and announced that he would be seeking the position of deputy leader. Rudd had inspired the move, but when he began counting the numbers he could muster, he knew he could not win, and so he failed to make the challenge, but not before seeing Crean and others exposed as opponents of the Prime Minister.

Cabinet Ministers Chris Bowen, Kim Carr, and Martin Ferguson also resigned on March 22, after they had shown their opposition to Ms. Gillard. Parliamentary secretary for Foreign Affairs Richard Marles was also forced to relinquish his position.

Ms. Gillard had, with a few loyalists, attempted to introduce legislation almost unparalleled in post-World War II Western societies, to control the media, and this move helped polarize her own party.

That attempt at creating legislation — essentially to muzzle criticism of her increasing authoritarianism and links to allegedly criminal acts before she became a politician — has failed. In fact, on March 21, she was forced to withdraw this legislation, and three other pieces of legislation she had proposed.

In the meantime, the opposition Liberal-National Party coalition, has continued to gain ground to the point where Labor faces possibly the worst political defeat in its history.

Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who was appointed to a vacant Senate seat to enable him to be brought into the Gillard Cabinet, has also, like Ms Gillard, become entangled in allegations of malfeasance. Carr was former Premier of the most populous Australian state, New South Wales, and is now being tarred by association with fellow Labor politicians in that state over court hearings over major fiscal improprieties.

There was little doubt, even though the current New South Wales legal proceedings against Labor officials focus on the period after the Carr Government, that Carr’s own Administration was also corrupt and created the climate of criminality which came to pervade the two successive Labor administrations in the state. Nonetheless — or perhaps because of this — he was brought into the Gillard Government as Foreign Minister.

But it was former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd‘s dramatic disloyalty to his own supporters in the childishly inept leadership challenge on Feb. 21, which will ensure that he never again has high office in Australia, nor, possibly, even the chance at a senior United Nations position which he cherishes. He emerged from the failed putsch as cowardly, disloyal, vain, and incompetent.

The question, then, is what decisions can the government make in its remaining time in office. And what commitments can it make on behalf of the nation which a future government would not overturn.

  Australian Labor Party, Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd, Liberal-National Party, New South Wales, Paralysis in key U.S. ally Australia as effort to replace failed government falls flat, Richard Marles