The senior lawmaker, Simon Crean, who led the Labor Party when it was in the opposition from 2001 to 2003, told reporters at a hastily assembled news conference in the capital, Canberra, that he had personally asked Ms. Gillard to hold the ballot — known in Australia as a “spill” — because the party had lost its way and had no confidence in her leadership.
“Something needs to be done to break this deadlock,” he said.
A defiant Ms. Gillard quickly announced on the floor of Parliament that she would hold the ballot at 4:30 p.m. Thursday. In the meantime, she told her colleagues, “take your best shot.”
Ms. Gillard, who became Australia’s first female prime minister in a 2010 party coup that ousted Kevin Rudd, who was derided during his tenure for an authoritarian leadership style. But she has seen her poll ratings plummet since announcing in January, unusually early, that federal elections would be held in September.
Ms. Gillard has led a tenuous minority government since her parliamentary majority was diminished in a disappointing 2010 election. Although she beat back a leadership challenge from Mr. Rudd early in 2012, she has since slid in the polls against Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition Liberal-National coalition.
Mr. Rudd has insisted that he would not challenge Ms. Gillard for the leadership, but his supporters, including Mr. Crean, seemed confident that Mr. Rudd would be nominated and would prevail in Thursday’s vote. “I wouldn’t be doing this if I did not believe there was the mood and the need for change within the party,” Mr. Crean told reporters when questioned on the internal vote count.
The vote comes after Ms. Gillard failed to salvage contentious media-oversight legislation that angered much of the Australian news industry and emboldened the political opposition.
The legislation, which was withdrawn Thursday morning for lack of support, had been proposed by Stephen Conroy, the communications minister, after an inquiry into news media practices that Ms. Gillard announced in 2011 at the height of the phone hacking scandal involving Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Most episodes occurred in Britain, and no major allegations were proved against Mr. Murdoch’s Australian media holdings.
The new proposals — particularly the creation of a government post given responsibility for overseeing the news media’s self-regulatory bodies and determining whether media mergers can proceed — were greeted by some of Australia’s leading news media outlets with a scathing public campaign. “For the first time in Australian history outside wartime,” said Greg Hywood, the chief executive of Fairfax Media, which publishes The Sydney Morning Herald, “there will be political oversight over the conduct of journalism in this country.”
But Susan Forde, a professor of journalism at Griffith University, said the proposed media laws were “fairly weak and timid” and “certainly nothing to be concerned about in terms of our democracy and freedom.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/world/asia/australian-leader-tries-to-save-media-law.html?partner=rss&emc=rss