Gillard In Denial As Support Amongst Males Drops To All Time Low

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has responded to news of the collapse of her support amongst Australia’s voting public with an air of denial that has even stunned her harshest critics.

With news today that Labor’s support has fallen to 28 per cent, just one percent shy of the figure that has decimated the Queensland Labor party only a few days ago, with a loss of over 40 seats, fears are now growing that Gillard is simply too detached from reality to meet the herculian challenge that is facing Labor at a federal level.

If the same voting patterns that were seen in Queensland were repeated at a federal level, Labor would be facing electoral oblivion, with some electoral experts claiming that Labor could lose its status as an official party.

The two-party preferred result has also sent ALP powerbrokers’ into a frenzy of anxiety, with Labor down four points to 43 per cent and the Coalition up four points to 57 per cent.

Senior federal Labor MPs are warning Ms Gillard that she needs a strategy to win back the hearts and minds of middle Australians, especially males, otherwise Labor faces being decimated at the next federal election.

Many critics have identified two key policies that have wedged hard-core Labor supporters away from Labor and into the fold of the Coalition.

The deeply unpopular Carbon tax, and in particular the pre-election promise not introducing it, has seriously dented the public’s ‘trust’ in Gillard, and her ongoing dismissal of the seriousness of this perceived betrayal has only further entrenched this mistrust.

And a policy that has received little news media coverage but has caused significant grass roots upheaval has been the recent 2011 Family Law amendments, which have effectively dismantled Australia’s popular and broadly successful shared parenting laws, and replaced them with what is largely perceived to be anti-male, anti-fatherhood policies, many seeing this as Gillard cowering to feminist ideologues.

Critics have warned Gillard that she needs to win back the support of male blue-collar workers, who are the traditional Labor mainstays who have abandoned Labor en masse.

“Men see Gillard as an androphobe, given that she has introduced laws that vilify and discriminate against men to a degree that has never been experienced in this country before”, claims Ash Patil from Fathers4Equality.

“Our recent online poll had over 90% of voters wanting Gillard removed as PM, primarily for this reason”, he adds.

Editor of articlesaboutmen.com, Sonja Hastings, claims that Labor has lost the male vote, “because Labor have focussed too much on pandering to extremist elements within the women’s movement. The dismantling of Australia’s shared parenting laws was a reckless and needless effort in circumspect, especially given how successful these laws were. The impression amongst many men now is that Gillard is anti-male, and this will be a very tough perception to change”, Hasting adds.

Many believe that the dye is cast for Labor, as there is very little wiggle room for Labor to change the policies that it has staked its reputation on.

The Carbon tax has already had one backflip by Gillard, and another backflip would only make her position untenable.

While the highly unpopular 2011 family law amendments are seen as un-negotiable given that the current Attorney-General , Nicola Roxon, is widely perceived to hold extreme anti-shared parenting views, as evidenced by her controversial minority report into shared parenting in 2006, in which she genderised family law and promoted an unshakable nexus between shared parenting and domestic violence.

Labor now is at a cross-roads in its history, where it can take some bold and tough decisions that acknowledge the mistakes its made ….or it can stay the course, as Gillard is doing right now, and face the same electoral result that has made history for Labor in Queensland, for all the wrong reasons.