There is no "us" in the ballot booth, Peter. Just one Australian at a time The Sydney Morning Herald's Peter Hartcher betrays a collectivist mindset that leads him to write nonsense: Gillard and Abbott were both unpopular leaders at the 2010 election. The choice was so dispiriting that Australians couldn't decide and returned the first hung Federal Parliament since the 1940s. Hartcher here treats 13 million Australian voters as a single organism with a single will, an organism too dispirited to choose between two politicians it (or, rather, Hartcher) didn't like. In fact, I was very clear in my choice at the last election. I'd bet millions of other voters were equally adamant in their own choices, passionately wanting their side to win. The trouble wasn't that we were too "dispirited" to decide. The problem was that for all those who voted for the Coalition, there were just as many who foolishly thought Gillard the better bet. The question for Hartcher is this: if just 1 per cent of Australians had voted differently at the last election and installed Abbott instead, would he then write Australians had suddenly become spirited again and able to decide for whom they should vote? Another dreadful misreading - or misleading - from Hartcher: The defining difference between the two parties in the past three years was that Labor under Gillard was obliged, with utmost reluctance, to return to the task of putting a price on carbon as a condition of winning the support to form a minority government. In fact, Gillard was under no such obligation to impose a carbon tax in exchange for single vote of the Greens MP in the House of Representatives. Her real obligation was to honor her promise to voters NOT to introduce a carbon tax. Moreover, even at the time it was clear Gillard had no need to give the Greens a carbon tax in exchange for their support. There was no way the Greens would have installed Tony Abbott as prime minister instead. Greens leader Christine Milne made that perfectly obvious in February, when she tore up the agreement with Gillard: Labor has effectively ended its agreement with the Greens... But we will not allow Labor's failure to uphold the spirit of our agreement to advance the interests of Tony Abbott. Hartcher is making phony excuses for a deceit that has proved to be Gillard's worst political blunder.