PM believes Fitzgibbon not undermining her

May 27th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Prime Minister Julia Gillard insists she’s satisfied with government whip Joel Fitzgibbon’s very brief response to claims that he’s been campaigning to have her replaced with Kevin Rudd.

Mr Fitzgibbon took to Twitter on Sunday after newspaper reports said he’d begun urging his caucus colleagues to get behind Mr Rudd’s return.

“I thank my colleagues for the publicity, but no-one does more to support the PM and the government than me!” Mr Fitzgibbon tweeted.

Mr Fitzgibbon was one of Ms Gillard’s supporters but is understood to have switched camps because he believes minority government is killing Labor.

“We need to make the switch. The chaos is killing us,” reports have quoted Mr Fitzgibbon as telling other Labor MPs.

Mr Fitzgibbon has refused to answer further questions about the reports but Ms Gillard says she’s satisfied.

“I think his words are clear, so it’s not the vehicle as to how they have been disseminated but what they say,” she told reporters in Canberra.

Ms Gillard would not say whether she had spoken with Mr Fitzgibbon about the report but insisted her leadership was on steady ground.

“I’ll be happily leading Labor to the next election,” she told reporters in Canberra.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said Mr Fitzgibbon’s tweet highlighted the ALP’s divisions.

“Plainly he has not actually denied the story so that tweet was his way of putting the leadership problems of this government up there in flashing neon lights,” Mr Abbott told reporters in the NSW town of Goulburn.

“It’s a government at war with itself. It’s a government where the left hand doesn’t know what the far left hand is doing.”

The fresh leadership rumblings come amid backbench and union anger at the government’s decision to allow 1700 foreign workers to be imported to work on a mining project in Western Australia.

Ms Gillard won a decisive victory in February in a caucus ballot against Mr Rudd, who quit as foreign minister to make the challenge and now sits on the backbench.

His replacement as foreign minister, Bob Carr, dismissed the latest leadership rumblings as a “non-story”.

“I don’t want to dignify it with the attention it doesn’t deserve,” Mr Carr told Network Ten on Sunday.

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said he had spent Friday with Mr Fitzgibbon and he had mentioned nothing about his support for a leadership change.

Asked if Mr Fitzgibbon’s position as whip was untenable, Mr Combet said: “That’s for the boss to determine.”

Greens leader Christine Milne said her party would continue to support Labor if it did make the switch to Kevin Rudd or another leader.

Independent Senator Nick Xenophon said he was detecting a lot of despondency among government MPs but did not think another “bloody transition” was likely.