the liberal party
Julie Bishop #3
Thankyou Annabel Crabb for this article, which contains a fantastic description of Bishop frantically hunting down her supposedly secret ballot paper to prove that she didn’t vote for the man she’s now standing behind, and also this:
“People are calling her The Cockroach,” one MP told ABC Online.
“She’d survive anything.”
Mr Abbott defended his new deputy during their joint press conference on Tuesday, declaring “She’s a loyal girl!” and patting her.
Dark times
I am so concerned by this Tony Abbott thing. I mean, who are they kidding? This is the institutionalisation of the right in Australia. Sophie Mirabella, who has always been my nemesis (and she knows it; I sent her an email once late at night telling her so), is now in a position of raised influence and must be stopped. Minchin the Foul is kingmaker. This is absurd. Surely there will be either a split or an assassination. We enter dark times.
Bishop, I note, is still entrenched as deputy, serving her leader, whoever that may be. Perhaps I was wrong; this may prove to be a very smart move on her part, enabling her to step forward as the consensus candidate at some point in the future when the Liberal party has so terribly damaged its relationship with the female half of the Australian population through the excesses of Abbott and co. that the only possible way of maintaining some kind of electoral significance is to propel Julie Bishop into the spotlight, I was going to say blinking like a possum but as she is renowned for her blue steel gaze, I would imagine she would probably instead try to stare down said spotlight.
The spotlight would win. That is all.
Abbott: A Communiqué From The Leftist Central Committee
[TRANSMISSION BEGINS]
Greetings, sisters and brothers of the underground movement the Australian Left.
It is with no small amount of righteous glee that we greet the Partyroom accession of Tony Abbott to the Leadership of the Federal Parliamentary Liberal Party. Such violent cupidity is typical of the imperialist hyenas in the Coalition. In this time of crisis it is no longer possible for these enemies of the people to hide behind more palatable puppets as Turnbull or Hockey. Every action further reveals them either as dangerous tools or as “village idiots”—as Mr Tuckey shamelessly quipped.
That Mr Abbott is a reactionary droog whose every thought is counter to the interests of all peace-loving people of the globe will be our movement’s most powerful tool. We will use the weight of the reactionaries to bring them down upon themselves—weak in its own ideology, the monster cannot support its own mass.
However, this is not the same as simply asserting that Mr Abbott is a Catholic. That’s just vaguely sectarian innuendo. C’mon people we can do better than that. The Central Committee hereby forbids such juvenilia upon pain of summary wedgie.
No seriously man give me the microphone back I’ll kick yer arse back to
[TRANSMISSION ENDS]
Liberal Stoush: Bishop Fail
I like the Liberal rumble that’s going on at the moment; I enjoy the thought of Malcolm Turnbull privately comparing himself to Alexander the Great as he tackles the Gordian Knot (“familiar as his garter”).
A generally problematic aspect of the Liberal leadership issue, however, is Julie Bishop. Where is she in all this? I mean, supposedly she’s the deputy leader of the Opposition, which believe it or not could be quite a powerful position. Not so powerful as if Bishop had actually stood up and taken the shadow treasury portfolio as was her right, but certainly, on paper, the deputy should be regarded as a natural contender for succession in such a situation as the Opposition currently finds itself. And so I ask, where is she?
It always seemed clear that Bishop’s inclusion in the Opposition lineup was sadly a token gesture, designed to mirror the Labor situation and spin spin spin to counter the clear fact that the Liberal party is a dinosaur of the patriarchy. But I have some sympathy with opinion that regardless of how you get somewhere, what you do when you get there is the important thing. I mean, ideally one would get to the deputy leadership of a major political party on merit alone, but this has never ever been the case in tweedy Liberal land – witness the career trajectory of Alexander Downer - and when you’re contending with a patriarchal right-wing structure operating mostly through cronyism, you surely take your token appointment as part of that structure and run with it as best you can.
Sadly it seems clear that the Liberals have promoted somebody who is apparently unable to take advantage of the current chaos to announce a leadership bid or at least to make some undergroundy rumbling noises of interest in pursuing the leadership in the future. I mean, if Bishop didn’t have leadership ambitions, surely she wouldn’t have accepted a leadership role in the first place? And given this, now is the time to do something with that ambition, surely?
This is mildly unfair to Bishop, of course; given how awful the Liberal party really is, it may be impossible for any woman to ever be the leader. But that’s no reason not to try. The fact that she’s not indicated any wish to do anything but use her potentially key position to be a kind of helpmeet to the prating GPS-inbred leader of the day, melding effortlessly into the patriarchal narrative, makes me wonder what on earth she’s doing in politics and why on earth she accepted the position in the first place.
Naturally, given the circumstance of Bishop’s election to the role of deputy, there’s this inherent comparison with Julia Gillard, who, despite the apparent solidity of the Rudd leadership, is constantly being touted as the next Prime Minister. This is a shocking commentary on the Liberal party as an institution that is a) poison to women of talent and b) more willing to promote a person of apparently little talent to what should be a key leadership role than to make a genuine effort to actually recruit women of talent to its ranks.
Stacks On: Hawke, Clarke, Urbanchich
Mr Hawke says the event was a scheduled meeting of the local Young Liberals branch.
“I think there were probably some heated tempers,” he said.
Some context for the Tiny Tory Fight Club (Mitchell Branch) can be found at the SMH here, and at Irfan Yusuf’s place here.
Clarke was immediately interested in my background. He was particularly interested in whether I had a “Moslem” affiliation. From Day 1, he encouraged me to get “Moslems” to join the Young Libs. I told him I found it difficult to recruit as most of my friends were ALP voters.
“Don’t worry about that. Even if they’re ALP members, we can get them in. Take me along to their functions. I’d be happy to show them that we hate homosexuals and Jews as much as they do”.
At first, I thought he may have been joking about hating Jews. I wasn’t sure whether his beef was with specific Jewish people or with Jews as a whole. It was also often hard to tell if Clarkey was serious or half-joking - he always came across as a jovial fellow.
But in my subsequent encounters, Clarke boasted about how he had acted for Slovenian writer Lyenko Urbanchich in a defamation action against prominent Jewish community figures.
Stop Him Before He Recruits Again
Malcolm Turnbull describes Johno:
Mr Turnbull was “definitely flirting” with the idea of joining the ALP and, at the time, was also close to the “godfather” of the NSW Labor Right, “Johno” Johnson.
Tony Abbott describes Johno:
“You know, back in the late eighties my friend Johnno Johnson tried to recruit me to the Labor Party and for a while I was quite interested,” Mr Abbott told ABC Radio.
Jan Burnswoods describes Johno:
Certainly loyalty is John’s most notable attribute. I am an ex-Catholic. Many years ago, like many other members of the left, Johno tried to convert me. If you were still a Catholic in the left, he tried to convert you to the right; if you were a lapsed Catholic, he tried to convert you back to Catholicism. I guess if he had ever succeeded, he would then have tried to convert you to the right.
So is there anyone Johno hasn’t tried to recruit to the Labor Party?
Right power broker, “Johno” Johnson, who was backing one of the candidates, warned: “We are not going to be treated as cyphers …
“Peter Garrett is a very principled person. I don’t think he would want to put himself in the position were 1200 branch members would be opposed to him.”
Italics mine. Standards Johno’s.
Brendan Nelson: Welcome to Country
Something I hadn’t realised before: Brendan Nelson’s seemingly self-consciously ad-libbed speech at the Welcome to Country Ceremony that greeted the 42nd Parliament, was actually cribbed in large part from that awful piece of work he delivered at the Stolen Generations apology the next day.
Naturally, nobody realised this at the time and despite the jarring ring to his talk about “involuntary sacrifices that made possible the economic and social development of this nation” he was cheered at the end of this first speech.
These involuntary sacrifices that he keeps going on about - is he obliquely referring to the creation of the indigenous pastoral slave system that suppported our agricultural industry for so long? Talking about this at least makes a kind of sense in the Welcome to Country. The later reference to nationalistic “sacrifices” specifically in relation to the Stolen Generations, whose “involuntary sacrifice” of family, culture and place surely didn’t contribute to our economic development, is more confusing.
Post mortem deception
Brian Loughnane, in his National Press Club address the other day said:
Labor has been given a clear mandate by the Australian people based on specific promises and this will be the basis on which they will be judged at the next election.
Labor has set high expectations, and voters will expect the new Government to live up to them. They made very specific promises to prevent grocery prices going up, to prevent petrol prices going up and to prevent interest rates from going up. Our research shows the Australian people are watching carefully to see whether Labor’s promises are just more spin or whether they can deliver. The Coalition intends to hold Labor to the standards it set itself. Mr Rudd declared the buck stops with him – it will not be good enough or acceptable to the Australian people for Labor to try and blame the previous Government when times get tough. The Australian people have given Labor a go based on very specific promises and they expect them to be delivered. (Emphasis added)
Incredible really. The Libs are trying to say that the ALP made the same mistake this election as the Libs did in 2004.
Capitulation.
Nelson declares WorkChoices dead
Federal Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson says the Coalition has dropped its WorkChoices policy.
Dr Nelson says the Coalition was damaged at the election by its industrial relations policies and he has officially declared WorkChoices dead.
He has called on the Government to move quickly to introduce its draft industrial relations legislation.