Despite Sacking, Simon Crean Claims He Still Supports PM Julia Gillard
After throwing the Australian Labor Party (ALP) on Thursday in chaos by calling for settling of the party's leadership issue, Labor senior minister Simon Crean is paying a heavy price.
He was sacked from his post, insists he still supports Prime Minister and Labor leader Julia Gillard and denies the ruling party is chaotic.
He said the party leadership ballot of Thursday afternoon, which was easily resolved because no one ran against the incumbent party leaders, Ms Gillard and Deputy Prime Minister Wayne Swan, did not create a mess. Rather, it served as a circuit breaker which resulted in having a united party at the leadership level.
He denied political ambition as the driving force behind his call for the leadership ballot. Mr Crean said former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whom he was pushing to reassume ALP leadership but backed out, had his eyes on Leader of the House Anthony Albanese to be his deputy prime minister.
He insisted that Mr Rudd was wrong in not challenging Ms Gillard's leadership via the caucus ballot.
"There is no point urging this to be done in the interests of the party, urging the healing process and then blinking . . . I wouldn't cast it other than he should have done the right thing. There's a right way and there's a wrong way. He took the wrong way," ABC quoted Mr Crean.
Ms Gillard had accepted the resignation of Rudd supporter and Parliamentary Secretary for Foreign Affairs Richard Marles. Chief whip Joel Fitzgibbons and two other government whips, Ed Husic and Janelle Saffin, also quit on Thursday evening after the bloodbath.
She told ABC she is expecting more Labor members to hand in their resignations although she did not provide specific names nor confirm when asked by ABC if the list includes other Rudd backers such as Chris Bowen and Kim Carr.
With Thursday's events, Crean moves to the backbench and has been labeled in Twitter with the hastag #whippedCrean.
Meanwhile, investors said the ALP leadership circus has little impact on the Australian stock market
"The market has made up its mind that with the election coming up in a few months, what happened here didn't really make a difference to what the potential outcome is in a few months," The Australian quoted George Kanaan, UBS's Australian head of equities distribution.
