The Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was elected in 2007 by a majority of Australians. On Thursday morning, June 24, 2010, Mr Rudd was ousted and replaced by his deputy, Ms Julia Gillard, in one of the most vicious political executions in Australia’s political history, a bloodless coup d'état.

The executioners were a collection of right-wing Labor Party (ALP) “powerbrokers”, trade union bosses, and mining billionaires. It is expected that Ms Gillard’s elevation as an illegitimate Prime Minister will serve the interests of a wealthy minority at the expense of ordinary Australians.

This article is not about supporting Kevin Rudd or the Labor Party; it is about the destruction of Australian democracy and the flagrant disregard for the democratic right of the Australian people in choosing their leaders through the ballot box. It is about mafia-like groups of faceless political assassins masquerading as powerbrokers exerting total control on the Australian political system.

The ALP is a factional party with self-serving “Left” and “Right” factional brokers. “Their only value is to stay in power”, writes Laura Tingle, political editor of the Australian Financial Review. While Mr Rudd’s execution was unique, it was a carbon copy of the execution-style that has come to characterise Australian political system. It was based on the NSW Labor style of executions of premiers by the Sussex Street mafia in Sydney, known as the NSW ALP House.

Mr Rudd was not executed because his government “lost its way” or a “high-handed leadership" style, which was hardly a good reason to topple a democratically elected prime minister in his first term. Mr Rudd was instrumental in proposing a 40 per cent mining tax, known as the resource “super profits” tax (RSPT) or rent, recommended by the Henry Tax Review of Treasury secretary Ken Henry. Rudd rightly felt that Australians deserved a greater share of the super profits from the sale of the nation's mining resources. Despite a deceptive and scaremongering multi-million dollar campaign by mining companies and the Murdoch fascist media, the RSPT has the support of the majority of ordinary Australians. Mr Rudd was executed because of poor results in the polls, as a result of anti-Rudd scaremongering campaign by multi-national mining companies and the media.

Just few minutes after Rudd’s ousting, Ms Gillard’s selection as Prime Minister was greeted with approval by the super rich. BHP Billiton stocks rose by 2 per cent to $39.90 and Fortescue Metals by as much as 4 per cent. The mining industry multi-million dollar campaign of misleading and scaremongering propaganda stopped as soon as Ms Gillard suspended the government’s advertising campaign in support of the RSPT. Mining billionaires like Andrew Forrest and Clive Palmer immediately claimed credit for the brutal assassination of Kevin Rudd.

As his background attests, Rudd, as a politician, was too honest. “Part of the problem was Rudd's old ambition to find decent solutions to the nation's ills. Decency is personal, intuitive, hard to delegate. Marry that to a sense of indispensability right off the Richter scale, and you had a recipe for ruin. Rudd had enemies everywhere. When the polls turned after Copenhagen [Climate Change Conference], and plunged once Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan persuaded Rudd to dump the ETS [Emissions Trading Scheme], he found he had few friends where it mattered: in caucus,” writes David Marr of the Sydney Morning Herald.

Furthermore, Rudd cannot be accused of “high-handed leadership style”. Ms Gillard was Rudd’s deputy and she was party to and deeply involved in every major policy and decision of the Rudd government. She was one of the “gang of four” that included Kevin Rudd, Treasurer Wayne Swan, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner. Indeed, Gillard and Swan (now her deputy) together advocated the dumping of ETS, which is fiercely opposed by the multi-national mining companies. Rudd was under pressure from Gillard and her handlers to dump the ETS. Ms Gillard, of course, blamed the Australian Greens, who deservedly benefited from the ALP’s flawed policy on the environment. Her social policies, including disparaging attacks on refugees and Australian Aborigines, are more right-wing than Rudd’s social policies. Now, of course, she has started to distance herself from Kevin Rudd.

This illegitimate change of government is designed to manipulate the public. In Australia, it has become a trend to use women as a seductive tool to manipulate the public and serve the interests of few powerful and super rich elites. On December 03, 2009, Kristina Keneally was chosen by the NSW Labor factions as NSW Premier to provide a “new look” to the highly corrupt NSW Labor Party. Keneally, who migrated from the U.S. to Australia ten years ago, was unknown to most people in NSW. According to media reports, Keneally was chosen by the Sussex Street mafia because of her “glamorous look” and would make the best “puppet premier”.

The selection of women to high office by groups of self-serving Australian men has nothing to do with gender equality. In fact, it is a cover for women’s disadvantages in one of the most male-dominated Western societies. Ms Gillard’s role is to con the public and win the next elections. If she loses, she will be removed swiftly. The idea that, ‘female voters like having female candidates’ and will vote for Ms Gillard is flawed. The economy and racism (scaremongering) have always played a significant role in Australian elections.

It is not true that a person with ambition and hard work can achieve everything he or she aspires to achieve in Australia. Ms Gillard is a white Anglo-Celtic who migrated as a child from Wales with her parents, to a warmer climate in Australia. They were not poor refugees. After privileged schooling in Adelaide, she went on to study at the University of Melbourne and from there she went on to lead one of the most anti-student organisations, the Australian Union of Students, and then into opportunist politics. She is very individualistic. The way she has been shot into to the Prime Minister’s position and her utter disloyalty have shocked the nation. Most Australians do not know what Ms Gillard stands for. Again, she will serve the interests of those who groomed her to the top job.

Of course, Ms Gillard denied that she is beholden to any faction that she once called the “dark side” of the Labor Party. But as Tony Wright, the national affairs editor of The Age writes: “It was Gillard and her skill at forming factional pacts (including with the NSW Right) that made Rudd ALP leader in 2006 when Kim Beazley was discarded”. She is described as “Leftist”, but she is installed by the Right faction, “the same faction that installed and then uninstalled Rudd like a piece of software”, added Phillip Coorey, chief political correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald.

A few hours after the coup, the Executive Council of Australian Zionist Jews welcomed Ms Gillard’s selection, and praised her courage for supporting Israel’s massacre of Palestinian women and children in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine. On her part, Ms Gillard has assured the Washington mafia that “her” ALP government will continue Australia’s complicity in the U.S.-NATO criminal war in Afghanistan, despite strong opposition by a majority of Australians. On foreign policy, the Sydney Morning Herald (June 25, 2010 Editorial) revealed no change in policy under Ms Gillard. “She has been a participant in the second-track diplomacy effort known as the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue, and in the newer Australia-Israel forum set up last year. In these two sensitive areas, where politicians are carefully watched for deviation by powerful [Zionist] lobbies, she has flagged her adherence to the norm”.

Furthermore, Ms Gillard pledged that she will implement tougher control of Australian borders to stop desperate refugees from reaching Australia, and that immigration and scaremongering will be high on Ms Gillard’s agenda for the next elections.

Finally, over the past few decades, Australia has moved from a democratic society into a society controlled by party factional powerbrokers. Let’s hope, at the next federal election, Australians will reject an illegitimate government installed by a coup d’état orchestrated by a handful of political assassins. Labor doesn’t deserve to win, not this way.

Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.

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