In an act some descibe as a ‘Judas kiss’ Tony Hodges revealed where the Alternative Prime Minister was on Australia Day and lost his position ‘for a heinous deed,’ the Prime Minister said, ‘in the approximate vicinity of treason.’
Just kidding, folks; just kidding. She actually said he did nothing wrong, or nothing very wrong, and sacked him anyway.
And Murdochism is working around the clock on this: how could the PM be so reckless as to employ the equivalent of a Suicide Bomber on her personal staff? Did she not know that a Leader of the Opposition’s presence anywhere on Australia Day is always, always a state secret? What if it had been discovered that she herself was eating at the Lobby, like him, amid hundreds of munching witnesses? Catastrophe. Debacle. Dallas all over again.
The looniness of all this beggars description. It puts one in mind of Ronald Reagan, then an FBI informant, identifying the ‘premature anti-fascist’ Charles Chaplin at a pro-Soviet peace rally in 1948. Chaplin was then the most famous man in the world, and needed no identifying among the two thousand leftist pinkoes swarming around him. But Reagan identified him anyway, and was praised by Hoover for a job well done ‘in difficult and trying circumstances’ including, it was said, the copious third-rate champagne.
And the Murdoch Rules Of Criminal Behaviour daily multiply. It is now a crime to leave a sim-card with someone who might blow up Scotland. It is now a crime, or so Murdoch says, to say ‘Do you know who I am?’ to a Woy Woy waiter who possibly does not. It is now a crime for a Minister to say ‘fucking fantastic’ to a room full of adults, and he should be sacked for it immediately, without a day in court. Of course he should.
But it is not a crime to machine-gun two little girls on the eve of their cousin’s wedding. That is ‘acting appropriately in difficult circumstances’; unlike saying ‘Mate’ to Kerry which of course is unforgiveable.
The spectacle of a Prime Minister being dragged face down away from shouting Aborigines on what they call Invasion Day wlll do us no end of good in the Pacific, Asia and Europe, and no-one doubts that this is so. It means they will see how tough we are. At the first sign of trouble we scramble out of there under the armpit of a headshaven copper, shedding shoes. That’s the kind of people we are, the kind that lost Gallipoli. They know that now. And they won’t forget it.
Bob Hawke so beset would have confronted the angry mob and proposed an immediate debate on Old Parliament steps. This Prime Minister fled, lost her shoe, and sacked her media man for saying where she was.
How silly was this.
And how unleaderly.
Name:
Yeah, and every old white raving journo is out and whining.
Gillard has refugees shot at, she tries to flog them to Malaysia for great sums, she is jailing babies because ASIO found them to be a security risk in their feeble brains,
she wants to keep murdering Afghans because Obama says we have to and she and Macklin are stealing aboriginal land and money in return for services that everyone else is entitled to.
Nothing happened except the same cretins who arrested Dr Haneef, shot refugees and kidnapped Dr al Haque on the streets over reacted and behaved like the facist thugs they have become.
And what is the fucking crime in telling anyone where Rabbott is? He is in front of cameras every day doing ridiculous stunts and the moron media lap it up.
Meanwhile our new libyan friends are torturing and killing people while we sanction Iran who are not.
People are still dying in our endless wars, children are starving to death and here no-one was hurt in a non fucking riot.
Now if want a violent Australia Day think back to 2002 and The Man Who Jumped.
Marilyn, the use of raving, whining, murdering, fascist, fucking, torturing, killing, starving, and endless wars in the one short letter is bad arguing. You don’t convince people that way.
It’s like beating at the glass walls of the Lobby.
Everything you say is true but you must, you really must, say it better.
It’s a good piece Marilyn, quit your yabbering; this is about a disgraceful incident that may define a prime minister and Mr Ellis has argued it very well indeed.
I’m not picking on Bob dear, I am picking on whiney old Oakes, Grattan and co.
Bob is well aware of that.
The beat up is extraordinary.
Go and watch The Man Who Jumped, and see me as star of very small screen.
Stunts and storms in teacups are all we get these days it seems.
Exactly what this minor kerfuffle has to do with Afghanistan and/or asylum seekers is a matter of mystery. Non sequitur, anyone?
It’s got to do with Afghanistan is really a war that we should have nothing to do with, the cops really did shoot at and tear gas refugees on Christmas Island and not one violent thing happened except by the moron cops on Australia day at the lobby.
And as Bob rightly points out our media are making a large mountain of bullshit about nothing at all.
Is it just because some brown people dared to protest the ongoing cruelty and dispossession and abuse?
Marilyn, stop this. Concentrate. It is about what happened on Thursday, not what befel Afghanistan since 332 BC.
Concentrate. Win one battle at a time.
Please.
And now, Bob, Gillard has bordered on denouncing Hodges as un-Australian for his tepid link to yesterday’s kerfuffle. That is to say, the man she was seen grinning alongside at the citizenship ceremony just a few hours before, a colleague, a friend, a close associate of hers. And now twenty-four hours later she has implied this person she knew reasonably well up until now was lacking in patriotism and respect for Australia Day because of a mild lapse in judgement on his part.
I mean, no wonder the public can’t understand what really stands for, let alone the Party.
I’m still trying to get my head around this. A PM’s media man tries to twist the Leader of the Opposition’s words and is sacked for it? Twisting opponents’ words is what politics is about. Twisting Abbott’s words is part of Gillard’s job, and every Minister’s job, and every staffer’s job. If you call him ‘relentlessly negative’ it’s probably twisting his words. But that’s all right. It’s what you do for a living.
And letting someone hostile to Abbott know where he is? Why wouldn’t you do that?
I hate this, I really do. Did the Prime Minister really think she was going to be manhandled by Aborigines? Does she know any Aborigines? Doesn’t look like it.
And what does that signify?
What was that “twist” you speak of Bob?
He said ‘move on’ in the way we say it now, as in leave a grievance behind. It was misconstrued, or I think it was, as meaning pack up and move on, physically, strike camp and move on, pull down the tents that had been there for forty years.
Like saying ‘Take down the cenotaph. The war is over.’
Abbott’s particular sleight Bob, one practiced and perfected, is to leave as much space for the ambiguous as the literal.
I took his meaning to be a literal “move on”….I took it the way the North Shore Matrons HEARD it: “pack up that disgusting eyesore and “move on”".
None but the Conservative Dull or the Abbott apologists took it as leave a “grievance behind”, for that would involve the invoking of a particular grievance, would it not?
The “subject” of the statement would have no meaning without that specific “grievance” being articulated.
Abbott offered no articulation.
Not even a trace.
Bob, he was speaking in the code of Dull, Racist Middle Australia – selfish, dim and politically illiterate.
And boy, did they hear him!
I have to comment before I can read through any of the rest of this. IT WAS ABBOTT WHO SAID IT.
I think what he said was Indigenous people should ‘move on’ from a form of protest that wasn’t helping them much any more. Abbott has lived for days and eaten witchetty grubs with tribal people, and Noel Pearson likes him.
It’s wrong that he should be railroaded, and they, with this beat-up. And it’s awful that the Prime Minister and her office were the principal beaters-up.
There was no verballing Bob.
The words issued from the man’s mouth…..
…..”time to move on” was simply a euphemism, sparing the North Shore Matrons the guttural, the bruising, “these bloody Abo’s have desecrated
these lawns for long enough!”
you don”t have any doubts that this is what the man meant, do you?
Or does the act of eating “witchetty grubs” excuse all…..does it bond in word and blood the two men, the two tribes, the two cultures, the two races??
Hodges was simply doing his job.
Gillard sacked him to placate the Dull Buffoons in the Media and Electorate.
There are quite a few of them Bob……in case you have not noticed.
Sometimes I wonder.
But nothing of note happened on Thursday. What a few people beat on some windows and said “shame” and the federal cops over reacted and dragged Gillard out like a stuffed dummy.
Not worth the millions of words everyone is writing about it.
I was at a protest at Tandanya once when Howard arrived and was egged by white people protesting about Woomera.
Almost no-one bothered to keep going on and on about it.
As for Hodges, lordy, anyone would think he had murdered someone’s dear old gran instead of telling people that Abbott was in a public place with most of the stupid media present.
And I am talking about the AFghan war today, this minute, a war where 16,000 women a year are still dying in childbirth, where 30% of kids under 5 starving to death and Gillard spends all her time and money jailing the victims who get here.
The alternative prime minister said they should just move on. I haven’t really been following this but the photo in the paper shows a mob of security surrounded by thin air and while this is true, I still don’t think it’s the point. Gillard should have just gone and spoken with them. This is also true. But did you see the body language this time, Bob? His, not hers. Why am I the only one seeing this? If he gets into office and starts mouthing off, “oh, they should just get over it”, there is going to be trouble.
But the mumsy mode of government is not appropriate here. They need to ditch Jenny Macklin and send in PG. It heralded the death of NSW Labor when they became ridiculously heavy handed in Redfern. Iemma started it, Rees was worse and by the time Keneally came along, they were dressing up police officers as heroin addicts and sending them in undercover. It was property developers who flooded the place with heroin during the nineties. The Redfern community itself is intricately functional.
Well we know that Gillard has no loyalty to anyone and is busy engaged in a stupid game of mines bigger than yours with Rabbott and everything else is meaningless.
Jesus, Marilyn, stop this.
The purpose is to win.
Work out how to do it.
Win what? Two appalling losers battling each other and stuff everyone else.
I am not in that role, I can’t stand either of them Bob.
Meanwhile there is real news, 17 kids going missing from Bowen’s “care”, 140 unaccompanied boys trapped in Leonora for over a year without process, wars, famines.
Nothing happened, I have no idea why the media are still babbling about it.
Why are the media still prattling about nothing?
As we don’t live in North Korea we are allowed to tell people where other people are aren’t we?
They have all lost their tiny minds.
Yes, yes, the point is made.
And really badly made.
I wonder whether someone who has gone on record as saying “Australia, I hate your guts!” as Marilyn Shepherd has, has the nation’s best interests at heart when delivering these deranged diatribes.
Her heart is fine. Her mouth could do with a wash every year or so.
She may learn.
I hope so.
‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast,
Man never is, but always to be blest.’ *
I fear that you are flogging a dead horse here, Bob.
* – Alexander Pope
The fact that Abbott, (and white Australia, and wealthy Aboriginal representatives) puts himself in such a position as to tell others how to feel, how to react and how to progress their interests, is gobsmacking. The power dynamic is whack, it is supposed to be a matter of communication. If Aboriginal people wish to communicate anger, it’s not good enough to say “don’t be angry. It’s unbecoming and inconvenient to my purposes”.
If Aboriginal people want to give up the fight, I’m going to still keep going. This isn’t right. It’s like Damon Young calling himself a feminist and then telling other feminists to be nicer and not so uppity.
Do you agree that a man can be a feminist? It is my view that it is like a baboon claiming to be a goldfish.
Perhaps we need a new word; what about ‘humanist’? . . . Oh, that’s taken. Any suggestions?
No, men can be feminists. They just need a brain.
Barack Obama needs a brain, you mean.
What are you talking about?
Maybe he needs educating on the topic, I don’t know.
I doubt that a brain is the organ in question.
Sexist men are shit in bed.
I’ll take your word for it.
But I agree that the brain is the most important sex organ; imagination is 90% of the real deal.