Here we have two feminist females who are both on the nose. One is Gillard, Australia's most loathed prime minister ever and whose incompetence has been clearly demonstrated. A compulsive liar and hypocrite.
The we have feminist Nixon, another example of incompetence whose effort while serving as police commissioner (political appointment by Labor Gov in Victoria) was to ignore violence and criminals at large and treat them as poor suffering souls who did not mean what they were doing. Her mentality regarding upholding the law was to change the whole force and introduce political correctness which ofcourse ensured the privileged princesses were promoted over men even though they were incapable of fulfilling their duties, just like her..
Feminists and women in general just hate the idea of accountability as they believe they are above that trivial action. In their own minds they are giants and beyond criticism. If and when they are criticised they claim sexism, that old pathetic feminist canard that no one believes anymore..
Welcome to the world run by women..
Miranda Devine
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 09:47pm
SHE can’t get out of it now, of course, but what on earth was Julia Gillard thinking when she agreed to launch Christine Nixon’s new book?
You only have to know one thing about the former Victorian police commissioner, and that is that on the day of the Black Saturday bushfires, in which 173 people died, she had her hair done, met with her biographer and went out to dinner at a gourmet pub with friends.
“I had to eat,” she said.
Right.
In her 388-page book, Fair Cop, and in all of the publicity interviews she did last week, Nixon, 58, still refuses to acknowledge that vacating the control room on February 7, 2009, was an unforgivable dereliction of duty. Instead she is aggrieved, put upon, a victim.
“The level of passion and invective stirred by that meal was astonishing,” she writes.
“Even with the passage of time it seemed surreal.”
The “seismic repercussions” of that dinner “consumed my life, and threatened to consume my reputation, all I had worked for”.
Boo hoo. Nixon has been thrashing about looking for someone to blame, lashing out at newspaper editors, likening the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission to “the worst kind of kangaroo court” and “a public flogging”.
She claims to have been the victim of “fattists”, sexists, and mysterious enemies with “murky, Byzantine agendas”.
But she only has herself to blame. Because not only did Nixon go out to dinner while the state was burning but, in her first day of testimony at the royal commission, she did not tell the whole truth of her whereabouts on that terrible day.
Ever since, Nixon has seemed incapable of understanding why people are still so dismayed that she went out to dinner when she knew the fires had already claimed lives.
By the time she met her friends at the North Melbourne restaurant that fateful Saturday, 14 people were believed dead and Marysville and Kinglake were well alight.
It’s not good enough to say, as Nixon told the 7.30 Report last week: “I had good people on the ground, I knew they were doing a good job and I trusted them.
“What I didn’t take into account was what would people think of me.”
It wasn’t good enough to turn up at the State Emergency Response Co-ordination Centre at 3pm, stay for just three hours, and never ask for a briefing, as she told the royal commission.
It wasn’t good enough to “look at computer screens over people’s shoulders,” as she told counsel assisting the commission, Rachel Doyle SC.
Asked if she had “considered” during her brief sojourn in the control room, whether people in the path of the fires had been warned of imminent danger, Nixon said she “assumed” they had been.
It’s not good enough to say, as Nixon writes in her book: “The last thing any emergency team needs in the grip of a crisis is the boss breathing down their necks, second-guessing their decisions.”
It’s not good enough to say there were, “things I regretted, things I would do differently if given the gift of time back. But I did not fail my own tests of integrity.”
No one blames Nixon for the fires. But she was the leader. She was the state’s top cop, with primary operational responsibility for the emergency.
A real leader adds value just by being there in a crisis, showing solidarity and confidence to inspire the troops, demonstrating compassion for victims, setting a calm tone and signalling to the world the seriousness of the situation.
It is during times of crisis that the power of leadership must be put to good use, not hidden away in a handbag at a restaurant.
A real leader does not get her hair done and go out to dinner. It never enters a leader’s head that a day of crisis is her rostered day off.
......
What a contrast with Nixon, a leader doing something trivial in the middle of a crisis.
As for her charge of sexism, her chutzpah is beyond belief. It overlooks the positive discrimination applied when she was hired for the top job in Victoria’s police force.
At the time it was regarded as a coup for a progressive government keen to feminise the image of the nation’s most macho police force. There was no mistake that one of Nixon’s greatest assets was her sex. But she proved a disappointment.
Since she was Victoria’s first female police commissioner, could her demise have set back the cause of women?
The corrosive tragedy of affirmative action is that a more accomplished woman may now be overlooked because it takes a different set of skills to succeed in what essentially is a phony marketing game.
Perhaps the dreaded male patriarchy deliberately sets up women to fail, advancing only the sort of acquiescent females who do not threaten the status quo.
Even though Nixon was also appointed on merit, positive discrimination for women sends the message that you don’t have to compete with the bloke at the next locker. And any failures are not your fault, but the fault of sexism, or maybe fattism.
By associating herself with Nixon’s self-serving book, Gillard is drawing the same unwelcome questions to her own leadership.
