Monday, October 15, 2012

Fast and Loose



A LITTLE over two years ago, freshly installed in the Prime Minister’s office and with Kevin Rudd’s blood still damp on the carpet, Julia Gillard made no bones about plying her admirers in the press corps with cheat sheets of quotes to be used against her opposite number:

Meanwhile, Ms Gillard has not denied reports that Labor has been giving journalists lists of past quotes made by Mr Abbott on various subjects.

"They're quotes of Mr Abbott, they're things that he's said," she said.


"Australians are entitled to know Mr Abbott's words.


"We make his words available. If he's embarrassed by them that's too bad. He said them.”
Gillard had an eager go-fer in this effort, her ally, intimate and chief dirt-distributor Craig Emerson, whose own words from his maiden speech would seem every bit as worth recalling – especially this week, when the general wretchedness of men and female saintliness remain very much in the news:

I thank our children—Ben, Tom and Laura—for the joy they are bringing to us. And I want to express my love for my wife, Cathy, who has nurtured our family, stood resolutely in support of my aspirations at great personal sacrifice and who deserves to achieve her own goals and fulfilment with my total support.

The speech was delivered in 1998, with the Emersons looking on proudly from the gallery.
One wonders if they stayed for the maiden speech by a colleague, also newly elected, of their devoted husband and father.

10 comments:

  1. The Old and Unimproved DaveOctober 15, 2012 at 2:50 PM

    Back in the seventies, the electoral slogan was "Would you buy a used car from this man?"

    Around the ALP these days, it ought to be "Would you trust this Prime Minister to work back late at the office with your husband?"

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  2. Well Great Bunyip all the loony left have is manufactured misdemeanours and mud slinging because they have bugger all else. Tony Abbott, love him or hate him for his policies, plays the other side of the house on a break as far as common decency and humanity goes. If he is a misoginyst [which I seriously doubt] they, the looney left, are proven ethnophobes for what else could they be with their mishandling of the reigns of State and endeavours to destroy a proud country. They must truly hate us. As for Mr Emmerson a.k.a. Saint Vitus - what a Grade A First Class hypocrite he is.

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  3. I particularly liked the bit about Emerson's "milder, more intellectual approach to issues"

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  4. Hypocrisy knows no bounds within the bounds of that doxie and her stupid foxie.

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  5. They (the Liberals) really need to trawl through all the things said by the handbag hit-squad, especially Gillard... then when they find something they just keep repeating it over and over. It's that simple.

    Anyway when a feminist calls Abbott "Phoney Tony", apparently that's not sexist...

    But call Gillard "The Bogan with a Slogan" or "The Droner from Altona" and it is consider sexist.

    Feminist motto~~~"Do as I say, not as I do."

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  6. THe Wyalla boy who drinks contact lenses for breakfast and such a family man as well. Which motel tonight Julia? Remember to have the com car park around the back-----------i have not settled with the misses yet. The kids you say------just young ones who don't know me anyway. I'm with you and yours. Craig-------you were then and are now a dope.

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  7. PhillipGeorge(c)2012October 15, 2012 at 9:27 PM

    Julia makes Richard Nixon look very very good indeed. Come to think of it she makes Craig Thomson look good. Some might think of Craig as a womanizer, thief, liar - but an otherwise decent enough family man. What's one more snout in the trough common as mud thief.

    Julia's legacy? Family, friends? What has she actually achieved in life? "Cheer up", the sign reads, "you can always serve as a bad example". And there it is: Julia serves as an excellent example of what a perfectly wretched state Australia is in. Journalists in the gutter and Parliament a disgrace. Only Peter had the dignity and decency to leave.

    So three cheers for the passing of a relatively decent member.

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  8. You ask why she attacks Tony Abbott every day. If she doesn’t do that, what’s left for her to talk about? Her many successes like BER, or pink batts, or carbon tax, or asylum seekers, or Slipper, or Thompson, or the AWU scandal? That’s why she talks about him, cause there is nothing else for her to talk about!

    Wayne P

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  9. Elizabeth (Lizzie) B.October 15, 2012 at 10:14 PM

    Sad really, Prof, that a bit of political excitement can make a man feel that his wife and children aren't really worth the trouble it takes to hold things together through thick and thin. I know there are lots of reasons why marriages shatter, and we don't know the full story, but a red-headed intervention doesn't sound useful to me when a wife has "stood resolutely in support of my aspirations and at great personal sacrifice". It is certainly pretty hypocritical if that red-headed woman later sets themselves up as a paragon of virtue on 'sexism'. Emerson's Report Card reads 'could have tried harder' in my school of thought. I'd like the zeitgeist to change, so that men who cut and run at least have to explain themselves and perhaps cop some flack for leaning on a wife while on the way to the top and then dumping her.

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  10. Well done professor. Whats good for the goose, is good for the gander. How time makes mockery of our words.

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