http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/whatever-the-problem-bl...IF the Gillard government could pin the Ibrahim family's gang wars in Sydney and Mick Gatto's successful auction bid for lunch at the Lodge on Tony Abbott, then it would. Throw in the London riots, too. After all, the Opposition Leader visited there around the same time.
The Prime Minister and her ministers automatically click on to two spin cycles: the first that almost everything that goes wrong flows from Abbott's sins of commission or omission; and the second is that if people think they're bad then look at how hopeless the opposition is. Please.
In the last little while Labor and its acolytes have blamed Abbott's scare campaign on the carbon tax for making it impossible for the government to sell its policy, and further that some of his lines of attack are either xenophobic or racist. His negativity about May's budget made it flop. He has talked down the economy so much he has shaken business and consumer confidence. He created sovereign risk and devalued assets by getting stuck into the coal-seam gas industry. The workers he claims to stand up for will be destroyed by Son of Work Choices.
He has trashed democracy, breached the divide between the justice system and the executive, and infected Australia with down and dirty Tea Party politics.
Meanwhile, the Craig Thomson scandal threatens to drown the Gillard government in a sea of sleaze. The allegations revolve around the use of Health Services Union funds, derived from some of the country's poorest paid workers, to procure prostitutes, pay for hotels, restaurants, luxury goods and cash advances worth more than $100,000, along the way disproving the theory that Labor can't even organise a piss-up in a brewery (or insert preferred analogy here); that NSW Labor allegedly gave him at least $90,000 to pay his legal bills to avoid bankruptcy and be disqualified from parliament yet, questioned in the midst of the squalor, the Prime Minister expresses her full confidence in Thomson.
Huh, Labor says. Call all that a scandal? If you want scandal, look at that female Liberal senator charged with shoplifting $92 worth of goods from the supermarket. And Abbott hid it for two months! Shame. Plus he didn't even bother to ask any questions about Thomson until two weeks ago, when the cesspool had been swirling around for more than two years. Shame heaped on shame.
Not only is Abbott culpable for asking questions about this and ignoring massive job losses in manufacturing as if that is suddenly a good news story, which I guess comparatively it is, he is also remiss for not asking them sooner.
Gillard's chief of staff reportedly calls the Industrial Registrar about his inquiry into Thomson's union before the allegations are made public, and neither she nor he can remember it. She insists it would have been unremarkable for her adviser to call a public servant to check a fact.
Remarkably, they are able to put an unremarkable construction on a phone call they can't remember and, when Abbott calls for an explanation, attack puppy Craig Emerson denounces him for maliciously smearing the Prime Minister and calling her a liar.
Never mind they had set the hounds after George Brandis, CSI, for calling the NSW Police Minister and the Police Commissioner to advise he was seeking an investigation into Thomson's activities.
Emerson had to spoil it all by being unable to answer questions on travel warnings to the US during Cyclone Irene, forgetting his day job was Acting Foreign Minister. And they reckon this issue is not distracting the government.
In a revealing interview on Friday, Leon Compton, of ABC Statewide in Tasmania, valiantly and repeatedly tried to elicit from Gillard some expression of concern about allegations of gross misuse of union members' hard-earned contributions. All he got were platitudes and another swat at the opposition for focusing on rallies, parliamentary games and scandals. She has shown she is tougher than the shoe leather she vowed to wear out selling the carbon tax, but she has also shown little empathy or grace by drawing comparisons with Senator Mary Jo Fisher and refusing to utter even one word of regret about the sheer tawdriness and waste that have enveloped the government and the labour movement. Any wonder she is desperate to make it all about Abbott?
She thinks her only hope is to make him appear unacceptably risky, hopelessly negative, internally inconsistent and completely ill-equipped to be prime minister.
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Whatever the problem, blame Abbott (Read 577 times)
