Tag Archives: New England

Turnbull’s latest bag of tripe.

16 Feb

 

One hardly knows where to begin.

Yesterday, Head Galoot Malcolm Turnbull announced that in an effort to curb the apparent enthusiasm of his ministers for shagging their staffers, he was adding a new rule to the ministerial regulations, forbidding sexual relationships.

Only ministers are denied these pleasures: backbenchers can carry on as usual.

Turnbull has experienced considerable difficulty over the last few days defining “relationships.” This is because Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce, Minister Matt Canavan and Turnbull himself appear, at first blush, to have breached ministerial regulations already in existence, by conspiring to create jobs for Joyce’s lover, Vikki Campion, in various ministerial offices while she and Joyce were partners.

Were they in a relationship? Even though Mrs Joyce remains registered as his partner?  The DPM got so Frenchy, so chic, sporting a wife and a mistress, and the ministerial regulations failed to anticipate this circumstance. Bronwyn Bishop took a break from her unrelenting savaging of socialism to explain that a series of one night stands is not a relationship. Centrelink disagrees.

All in all, a shamefully self-serving mangling of meaning by the Head Galoot, I thought, reminiscent of “I did not have sex with that woman” which brings me to my next point: how does Turnbull intend to define not just relationship, but “sexual?” Remember US President Bill Clinton’s infamous denial of fellatio as “sex?”  Will Turnbull take this as a guide? Has he thought his new directive through? It would appear not.

We now have a situation  in which ministers can be chucked out not because they’ve rorted, but because they’ve rooted, which, as Katharine Murphy points out, is  a morals test the like of which we have never seen in this country prior to yesterday.

Let us consider that one in three Australian marriages fail. Some of those failed marriages are going to include those of politicians. Joyce’s marriage by all accounts failed. The reasons for that failure are nobody else’s business.

Joyce fell in love with a staffer. It seems pretty clear that the staffer fell in love with him. People fall in love. This includes politicians and staffers. Many struggling marriages come to an end when one party falls in love with someone else. That’s a well-acknowledged impetus for getting yourself out of a relationship that has run its course. It’s messy. It’s heartbreaking. It’s a catastrophic emotional event. There will be few among us who haven’t been or won’t be an abandoned partner, an abandoning partner, or a lover, at some time in our lives.

The particular problem with Joyce is that it is alleged he misused taxpayers’ money to conceal his affair, and to keep his lover employed. It is also alleged that there are several levels of murk surrounding the gifts of free accommodation and luxury holidays made to him and his lover by a wealthy and influential friend. He also did everything possible to conceal this entire situation from his New England electorate prior to the December by-election. Aided, many would observe, by a complicit media who, while adhering to their convention that politicians’ personal lives are private, failed to document the public interest story underpinning that private life.

The problem is not that Joyce, like millions of Australians, found his marriage was over and fell in love with a new partner. And yet, Turnbull has contrived to make this the core issue, rather than the allegations of ongoing rorting surrounding Joyce’s personal drama.

And so we have a thundering puritanism emerging in our parliament, instead of a sober examination of politicians misusing public money, lying to the parliament and the electorate, and taking “gifts” they ought not to accept.

Not to mention the appalling lack of adequate policies and procedures to protect workers from sexual harassment, and to give anyone who is sexually harassed, by a minister, a back bencher or anyone else, a clear and safe pathway to report that harassment.

Instead we have been served up a stinking bag of raw tripe that encourages the most prurient speculations, and leaves us with our most dire problems entirely unaddressed. This is no accident. How much easier for Turnbull to focus on the root, and leave the rorting alone.

 

 

 

 

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The Joyce affair: how the media didn’t know about it for sure until yesterday. No, really.

9 Feb

 

Over the last twenty-four hours since the Daily Telegraph revealed the worst-kept secret of 2017, there’s been a deluge of rather plaintive articles from journalists explaining why they didn’t publish the story of Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s extra marital affair with his former staffer who is also pregnant with his child, due in April.

Some have claimed they were respecting his right to privacy. Some have taken the high moral ground and spoken at length about gossip, rumours and lack of evidence. Or, “We asked him and he said no, it’s private.” That’s one of my favourites. Not in the public interest to publish, is another explanation. I addressed this last one here,  in October 2017, prior to the New England by-election in December.

In this piece titled “How Vikki Campion came to work for Deputy PM Barnaby Joyce,” Malcolm Farr gives background to the affair. Bearing in mind that Farr has tweeted that the affair was only a rumour, denied by Joyce, I found this paragraph in his piece startling:

Inside the Joyce office there were other clues and they were quickly picked up by the minister’s highly respected chief of staff Di Hallam.
Ms Hallam took two important steps: She sent Mr Joyce to the office of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to reveal the romance and Ms Campion was moved to the office of then Resources Minister Matt Canavan in late 2016.
“Clearly they thought her presence would be a problem, so she (Ms Hallam) made a decision,” said a source familiar with the situation.

In 2016, the affair was far more than a “rumour.” It was considered so serious that the Prime Minister was advised, and Ms Campion was moved (according to some accounts promoted with a salary increase) to Canavan’s office to get her out of the way.

As Farr acknowledges: … the romance, by its very existence, became part of the delivery of public policy and taxpayer-funded staffing.

In other words, it qualified as a public interest story, and did so from the time Ms Hallam intervened in 2016.

I have no idea, of course, when Mr Farr came upon this information. He could quite possibly have acquired it in the last twenty-four hours. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that nobody in the press gallery knew of the seriousness of these events until the Telegraph decided to publish them.

Well, that is what much of the media is asking you to believe.

Mr Farr’s account of the progress of the affair is detailed. He must have spoken to a lot of people over the last twenty-four hours.

Joyce is Acting Prime Minister when Turnbull is absent. Ms Campion was promoted out of his office not because she earned the new job, but to separate them. The affair continues, is described by Farr as “well-known secret,” advances to the point where it appears, according to Farr, that everyone who comes in contact with the couple realises immediately what’s happening except, sadly, Natalie Joyce, Barnaby’s betrayed wife who made this admirably frank statement about her feelings yesterday.

I don’t know about you, but I find it almost impossible to believe the press gallery did not know of the seriousness of the situation until the last twenty-four hours.

One could almost exclaim at the ineptitude of the press gallery, if they didn’t know anything more than “unpublishable rumours.”

It is of course impossible to ascertain what effect the affair would have had on the New England by-election, had it been revealed in October instead of yesterday. There are conflicting opinions on this: Joyce would have won anyway, some claim, while others suggest that New England voters did not go to the polls in full knowledge of Joyce’s character and circumstances, and might well have considered their options had they not been denied that information.

What matters, I’d suggest, is that they were denied that information, and this matters  lot.

What we do know is that the Turnbull government, with a one-seat majority, was desperate for a win in New England.They needed the seat, and they needed the morale boost. They could not afford to risk a loss.

The hounding by the media of private citizens (remember Andie Fox?) other politicians (Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper, Julia Gillard, to name but a few) makes me somewhat leery of high-moral-ground justifications of the hands-off Barnaby policy.

And, if it wasn’t in the public interest to report on Barnaby’s affair before the New England by-election, why is it suddenly in the public interest now?

 

 

 

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Mr Rabbit vows: I’ll sell my arse!

29 Aug

Independent member for New England Tony Windsor, otherwise known as Mr McGregor, revealed yesterday in an interview from his farm that Tony Rabbit had confessed to him that he’d do anything other than sell his arse to be Prime Minister of Hill Top Farm, but if absolutely necessary, he’d likely do that as well.

When confronted Mr Rabbit, looking pale and drawn, declared that he did not use that kind of language, and people in the farmyard should check with Flopsy, Mopsy and Cottontail if they wanted to know the real truth about him.

Precariously balanced on his hind legs, and too weary to hold up his ears, Mr Rabbit claimed that he’d been over-medicated when he had the alleged conversation with Mr McGregor. He’s since weaned himself off his daily intake of three hundred cups of camomile tea, and says he’s left the addiction in the past. As is well-known in complimentary medicine circles, excessive and sustained intake of the tea can cause hyper-sexuality and an overblown sense of worth, making an offer to sell one’s arse and to anybody, entirely plausible.

Meanwhile the real farm boss, Jemima Puddleduck, continues to search for a suitable nest in which to safely lay her eggs. This has proved to be an ongoing challenge moving forward, as one after another they’ve been broken the minute she’s introduced them to the light of day.

Expert opinion suggests that Jemima seems unwilling to allow the eggs their full gestation period (see PM’s Premature Enunciation at No Place For Sheep, an exclusive barnyard publication with no ties to the Murdoch Weasel Press). This practice inevitably results in brittle shells that are excessively vulnerable to critical and destructive predators.

Finally, and sadly, we heard today that Mr Jeremy Fisher aka Christopher Pyne, Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives, was yesterday taken by a trout. Mr Fisher was casting his flies into a lily pond close to his home, in the hope of getting a few good bites. According to preliminary reports Mr Fisher first caught a nasty stickleback, upon which he pricked several of his fingers. Distracted by pain and licking his wounds, he was caught off guard by the unprovoked attack of the hostile fish.

Mr Fisher was wearing a plastic raincoat, the flavour of which did not, in the end, appeal to the predatory trout, which spat him out onto the muddy bank where he lay fighting for his life, his nose and mouth dangerously clogged with fish spittle.

Fortunately Mr Rabbit, having failed in his efforts to sell his arse, staggered by on his way to the refuge of his family home. Upon seeing his colleague’s dire condition Mr Rabbit called paramedics, one of whom was later identified as his second-in-command, Benjamina Bishop Bunny. Ms Bunny, readers may recall, was immortalised in the popular ABC television satire The Chaser, when she employed her infamous death stare to smash an innocent garden dwarf to smithereens.

As we go to press Mr Fisher is still in intensive care. In a freak side effect of the trauma, he has lost his voice and is expected to never again say anything other than “Ribbet.”

Mr Rabbit has since reminded the entire Hill Top Farm electorate that he’s already made it clear that unless he writes something down, it has no substance whatsoever. As no one can produce any written evidence that he ever proposed the sale of his arse, this casts doubt on Mr McGregor’s colourful account of events.

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