In the long, long ago when Miss Eagle was a union official at the Australian Workers Union (AWU) in North Queensland where she was one of only two female AWU officials in the whole of Australia - and, at one stage, the only one - I used to tell my boss (who was great, by the way) that, while the blokes in the AWU all had penises, I was the only one with balls. Working at the coal face of the working-class patriarchy, I had to have balls. How else could I have survived?It seems that, as she writes about Julia Gillard, Kaz Cooke has come to a similar conclusion. Women - while being penis-less - can have balls. Whatever the blokes and Bill Ludwig thinks - Julia is leadership material. And she is acting like it. This week it was Australian Story. Of course the blokes of the ALP right (girls are not leadership material in the faction either) are not going to sit idly by and see the leadership of the ALP go to someone on the left - irrespective of gender. So Bill had to get nasty and personal - which he can do rather well. The master of the comb-over had a go at Julia about her hair. Well, what else could be expected? I have only known Bill to support one woman in her career and that had overtones.
Interesting this week was Bill Shorten's deft handling of Bill Ludwig's boots and all attitude to a single site agreement with Qantas moving some of its maintenance to Brisbane. Shorten managed to praise Ludwig, hose him down publicly, and shift criticism to Qantas in a short space of time. Is this why they refer to Bill Shorten as a future leader?
