Beyond Selidor

Yeah, I think I'm missing a lot of the hatred of Gillard because I'm not in Australia, and tend to read the UK papers rather than the Australian ones. So the media attitude here is more 'huh?' (with a side dish of 'why are Australians so racist and sexist?', which is a favourite British point of discussion). And you'll recall that I left Australia in 2008, when Rudd was still in power and the perception was very much that Gillard was a competent, efficient deputy and was respected a lot because of how aggressively she called out the Coalition when she was in the Opposition. So you're probably right that I don't have an accurate understanding of how hated she was.

About five or six years ago, I was talking to my dad about how political journalism had changed in the years he'd been working in that field. He said to me, with a great deal of sadness, that what had changed in recent years was that most political journalists now saw themselves not as observers, but somehow as part of the story. (He wasn't claiming that any journalist could be truly impartial, even before these changes, but that impartiality was something they should have been striving towards and holding up as an ideal.) I think that's what's behind how the media have behaved in this whole debacle. They did the same thing back in the day with Howard and Costello, and they basically destroyed Costello's career. So when you ask

Why keep allowing Rudd to be relevant? Why keep running stupid articles about how Rudd was on the move again?

I think that you have your answer.