Our resident Advocate for the Devil has a question for me

Advocatus diaboli - it's developed over time to mean someone who argues against a cause or position, not as a committed opponent, rather to determine the validity of the cause or position.

Our devil's advocate, the blogger michael, is a real person, I've not met him and I don't know him, but I have verified his details and he is a genuine person with significant qualifications (as in the academic achievement meaning of the word - not as it is applied to financial accounts and statements).   I think it's good to have the devil's advocate test your prejudices.

Michael asks me this

 

michael said:

Michael, Is it actually possible for you to say anything, anything at all about Gillard that isn't critical? Just by the laws of probability, you'd think she must have done something you approve of, or at least something you can't find any semi-plausible way to attack. In anticipation of some responses, I will mention a few things John Howard did which I think were good. The gun-buy back. The GST. Support for an emission trading scheme (much better than direct action schemes, in my view). Any Commonwealth Funding of Roads and Schools during his tenure - I don't know what roads or schools he did fund,  but I agree with it, copyright B Shorten. 

I started on 4BC as its drive-time presenter in mid-2008.   By 2009 about 1 in every 8 radios in Brisbane was listening to my show between 3PM and 5PM.   Everytime there was a government announcement, one of the ministers would be on the show, you could take it to the bank.   I said a lot about Julia Gillard.  I praised a lot of her work, especially the MySchool website.   I hammered Rudd who never once came on the show.   Gillard was a regular, she and I got on very well on the air and there was no problem in having her on the show, just a phone call and she was there.

We first hit dramas over the mining tax.  Ms Gillard quoted false figures to substantially understate the amount of tax the mining companies paid.   I did a bit of homework and proved those figures wrong.   4BC has unhelpfully removed most of my interviews from the web after I parted company with Fairfax, but I know that many of our bloggers know how to find cached and archived material on the web and perhaps those old interviews survive somewhere.

Then when Bill Ludwig decided to replace Rudd with Gillard just months before an election was due, Gillard's people phoned my producer to offer her for a lengthy interview just after she had been appointed Prime Minister, and the day after she had announced the East Timor solution.

At the time a young girl in Cairns was facing serious charges for using the morning after pill RU486 and I started the interview by trying to get to the real Julia, surely as an Emily's lister she'd have an opinion about the matter.

Here's the interview in full, remember she phoned me and asked to go on the show.   This is the day when it all went to custard.   We haven't spoken since.   If you can't stand listening to the whole thing, someone put this little bit up on youtube.

4BC has removed a lot of my interviews, but Andrew Bolt has archived here my conversation with the former finance minister Lindsay Tanner about the Alabama uni student's research paper that was the source of the then government's data, rather than the ATO.   Amazing.   Read it here.

Michael, in answer to your question, I can't think of anything Gillard has done in the last year or so that I like.