In Parliament today, Tony Abbott managed what no national leader before him as ever achieved.
He’s somehow managed to offend every single sector of the Australian community, with the possible exception of bogans. That’s no mean feat.
During parliamentary debate this afternoon, while attacking Labor for a drop in defence job numbers, he decided to emphasize his point by adding a metaphor.
“Under members opposite, defence jobs in this country declined by 10 per cent. There was a holocaust of jobs in defence industries under members opposite,” our national leader said.
Naturally! Why Not? Because the death of six million people in death camps in Europe – most of them Jewish – is, of course, comparable to a drop in job numbers in Australia.
Sigh. Let’s recap.
Since coming to parliament, Tony Abbott has offended women by questioning whether or not sex was theirs to withhold; by seeking to restrict their access to RU486; by referring to them as ‘doing the ironing’; and by asserting that his axing of the carbon tax left more money in the household budget, and that was a boon for women. And of course he described one of his female colleagues as vote worthy because she had sex appeal.
He’s offended Aboriginal people, by describing Australia as ‘nothing but bush’ when the British arrived; describing the arrival of the British as the ‘defining moment in the history of this continent; and by blaming them for their poverty this week in his annual Close the Gap report Card.
He’s offended Canadians by referring to their country as ‘Canadia’. He fell asleep during a war commemoration service in France. He threatened to shirt-front one of the world’s most powerful leaders, sparking a fleet of warships to head to Australia. He awarded a Knighthood to the Queen’s husband. He claimed that Jesus knew that asylum seekers weren’t necessarily meant to come to Australia. In relation to the death of a soldier in Afghanistan, he remarked ‘Shit happens’. He winked like a creep at a radio jock while an adult sex line worker was calling into the show to explain why she had to work extra jobs to pay for her healthcare.
He told colleagues that he diddled his travel allowance, a story that leaked out of the partyroom. And of course Abbott has backflipped on numerous policies.
Most of that was in the past year. It just goes on and on and on.
So the jury is back in folks, and the verdict is not good: Our Prime Minister is a gibbering idiot.
He is a fool of gargantuan proportions; a Tourette’s Syndrome leader with all the public appeal of a carcinoma.
Abbott is not even a full four days out of a leadership spill, and his locker-room mentality is already back on display. He bought himself time on Monday, and he pissed it up the wall by Thursday.
Abbott is a relic from 1950s Australia, and there’s precious little the Liberal Party can do to paper over those cracks.
The question is, how many more Abbott-moments will we have to witness before someone brings on another leadership spill.
* The comments in this article have been deleted… because, frankly, we got sick of censoring anti-Semitic comments, and comments downplaying the Holocaust. New Matilda is the process of developing new guidelines for our commenting rules, and we'll keep readers posted.
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