Trouble in Paradise?
Well, the Daily Tele is just the gift that keeps on giving.
Sitting in a cafe in Jindabyne yesterday Mrs Chook was leafing through the rag when she came across this gem by Piers Akerman titled “PM Tony Abbott’s obstinance is protecting chief of staff Peta Credlin”
I’m unable to contain my delight at the ongoing Murdoch press displeasure with its chosen Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, and this piece by the odious Piers had me cackling like a Shakespearean witch. It’s not a good look for the Prime Minister to refer to Chief of Staff Credlin as “the boss” in public, thunders Piers, and if he can’t control his own office how can he control the country? “It is clear that Abbott has developed an almost unhealthy reliance on Credlin’s advice,” roars Piers, and even though that may please feminists it doesn’t please anybody else, he adds. He also takes a swipe at perceived ABC bias, there’s no doubt about Piers, he gets his all favourite prejudices into his copy seamlessly.
In a more general vein, why is it that we can no longer have politicians with any personality? Since when did it become de rigueur that anyone with ambition to political office must first be stripped of individual human characteristics? Why do our elected members have no quirk? Where has the quirk gone? Why can’t we have it anymore? Who said, no more quirk?
And why, when the occasional quirk slips through the quirk police, is the individual concerned pilloried for not knowing how to play the game?
Tony Abbott is the price we pay for eradicating quirk from our political character. Apart from all his other faults, and they are many, the man has absolutely no quirk. He is a bland mouther of hideously outdated sermonising platitudes. He is, like a dust bunny in a dark corner, entirely without substance. Every move he makes screams “Look at me making this move! Look at me being Prime Minister! Look at me threatening Putin! Look at me finding lost aeroplanes! Look at me Peta, look at me!”
And we all look, baffled, and afraid for our country.
Unless we’re in the hot tub
No Place For Sheep 
Is Peter Credlin protecting Tony Abbott from being caught as a constitutional criminal?
Last I heard, Credlin was blocking freedom of information requests on which year Abbott surrendered his British passport.
If he forgot to do this when he first ran for the Federal Parliament in 1994 and then again in 1996, Abbott would now be a double offender.
The penny may have dropped when another Liberal candidate who ran in the 1996 election, couldn’t take their seat, because she still held her New Zealand passport.
If no quirks can be seen in Abbott, is this because he lives behind a wall of shadows.
How many people, it might be wondered, know the truth.
It would be so easy to clear the air and tell the truth.
But then, we may need a new Prime Minister.
Kim Peart
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Well, that’s interesting, I didn’t know Credlin blocked FOI requests like that. What power she has!
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I am personally gob-smacked that this issue has not gained wider coverage ~
https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-strange-and-suspicious-case-of-tony-abbotts-citizenship,6859
Maybe the media is gob-smacked on this one.
The truth could be the killer here.
Kim Peart
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I suspect this issue is being treated like the plague right across the political spectrum because of a possible unconstitutionality of much Australian ordinary legislation with respect to nationality and citizenship as it applies to the British.
Equality of status between permanently resident British citizens and native-born or naturalized Australians is expressly recognised in that part of Section 44 of the Constitution that provides a rider to the provisions of Section 44(iv). A necessary implication of this rider, which deals ostensibly with certain exemptions from disqualification from membership of the Parliament, is that resident British are not definable as ‘foreign’ in the terms of Section 44(i).
For ordinary Australian legislation to define Britain or citizenship thereof as foreign, that recognition of it as being of equal status contained in the rider to Section 44(iv) would first have had to be removed from the Constitution. This has never been done. To have done so would have required the holding and passage of a referendum!
Forget Abbott. There are much larger issues at stake should the general public become aware that members of the Queen’s navy or army and members of the naval or military forces of the Commonwealth covered by this exemption are but sub-classes of an equality of status of all resident British and Australian citizens for electoral purposes.
Like, for example, the 1982 legislation that purported to provide for the conditional disfranchisement of up to an estimated million then permanently resident British. That it was done is one thing, but WHY it was done could be an even more interesting question bearing upon matters electoral.
And Roger was one of them until 1971.
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I am a permanently resident Brit. I always vote
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So, the truth outs.
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That must mean you have always maintained your enrollment since pre-26 January 1984. That was the conditional aspect of the legislation. The politically active and aware would thus never become aware of the impact of the disfranchisement upon the slack to maintain their enrollment, or upon those who had never enrolled in the first case.
I suspect the disfranchisement was designed, in full knowledge of the propensity of many to not enroll, as a safeguard against any audit of population eligible for enrollment as compared to official levels of enrollment recorded ever ringing an alarm bell about over-enrollment.
I trust that is opaque enough.
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I got into an almighty debate about MTR on christmas day…. thought of this blog immediately. Happy Holidays.
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Ahahahaha!! They were interesting times!
Thank you, you too.
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Reblogged this on In my own opinion.
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Piers is a case. Peta probably hung up on him once. 🙂
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A beautiful line, “…a bland mouther of hideously outdated sermonising platitudes.”
That is definitely reminiscent of a stagnant and long soured quirk.
Perhaps a quibble but have you identified an abbrort thingy quirk after all?
Alas, I think so…
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I always think of quirky as including endearing, funny, likeable. I can’t apply any of those to Abbott!
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All very well for you in the hot tub, but think of our tabbott in chief, sitting in the cannibals’ cooking pot! I know I do . . . LOL
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I think we should be the same as the US and only have Australian born PM’s because the two poms in a row have taken us back to Maggie’s days in Britain.
Anyone who wants to see a movie, might I suggest Pride. It was 2 hours and I wanted another 2
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I’ve met (and taught) more than one person whom I would have been delighted to have as an Australian Prime Minister.
Gus Nossal, for one.
Besides, how would that work – telling people they are welcome enough to become members of the Federal Parliament, but not welcome enough to be Prime Minister?
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A perfect gem of a description of a three-year-old boy’s behaviour (gender specified advisedly – both my experience and that of me old mum, who was a kindergarten/preschool teacher for 40 plus years).
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But then, aren’t ALL men little boys, in the end’?
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Don’t get me started
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Hello! Excellent stuff here, please keep us posted.
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