Abbott vs Oakes et al

IT CAN BE quite the distraction when the squawking horde touches down and all the little dogs begin to bark, very hard indeed to concentrate amidst such a racket, so things which should be obvious are sometimes overlooked.  Such was certainly the case when Act I of The Punch & Tony Show preoccupied the quality press three weeks ago and stories of assaulted walls and fearful femmes filled all the news. McTernan’s gooseherds have moved the gaggle quite a ways since then, past Alan Jones and the Opposition leader’s responsibility for everything the compere says, to Julia Gillard’s climactic histrionics and, a couple of hours ago on Lateline, to the depths of our snot drop of a treasurer’s several refusals to disagree that Abbott is a woman-hater. Let them revel in the current shrieks and cackles until the next confected study in misogyny calls all on. For quieter and more reflective sorts it is much more interesting to turn back, enjoy the quiet and pick over the cold case of the Plasterboard Pugilist. Turns out a few things were overlooked.

The first is the selective eye of Laurie Oakes, so prominent amongst those who insisted Abbott had a case to answer for what he may have done as a 19-year-old. A rough nut then could be an even rougher one today -- that thought was implicit in the many words Oakes devoted to the faux scandal, as here:

Abbott’s aggressive style worries many voters. And it is claimed he has particular problem with women. The alleged intimidation of Ramjan combined both areas of vulnerability. Abbott could not afford to leave any doubt. He had to try to kill the issue off.
Deciding the truth or otherwise of the allegation comes down in the end to who you believe. It is Ramjan’s word against Abbott’s.
Abbott argues that, if the incident really occurred, Ramjan would not have waited this long to talk about it. But Sydney barrister David Patch, also prominent in student politics back then, says a “very shaken scared and angry” Ramjan told him about Abbott’s behaviour at the time.

If what people do (or are alleged to have done) at university bears so much on their lives of three decades later, why didn’t Oakes cite his own student days? You might have thought them highly relevant, given that Abbott’s violence is at best alleged while Oakes' eagerness to go the biff is a matter of the public record. From Honi Soit’s Letters to the Editor in 1963:

I was highly amused to read that Mr P. Blake (Arts II) was highly amused by my letter concerning the now famous Honi Soit Form Guide. I was particularly amused to see that Mr Blake accuses me of hypocrisy – so amused, in fact, that I would dearly love to punch the said Mr Blake squarekt on his flaring nostrils.

In the same letter, Oakes dismisses the future Mr Justice Kirby as “a fool” and grows strident about the presence of conservative students on campus.

Memory’s light must be dimming behind Oakes’ disapproving brow, because why else would he not have judged Abbott’s record against his youthful own? It is not as if he has an anti-Abbott barrow to push. Not that, surely not.

AND here is a second passed-over nugget, one that might just have changed perceptions about another of Agro Abbott’s out-of-the-woodwork accusers, perhaps raised doubts that he made a credible corroborator. It is that fellow David Parch, cited by Oakes (above) and many others, as a supporting witness to a young conservative’s thuggery.

Funny thing, though. Even though the following information is readily available in the Silly’s electronic archive, no one thought to mention that Patch has such a habit of sooking about violent Liberals that he he has even accused Malcolm Turnbull of physically abusing him. Yes, Macho Malcolm! (Snort, snigger, chortle and all that.) From the Silly of May 9, 2004:

Mr Turnbull's invective is well known to Mr Patch. He remembers a spring night 29 years ago within the confines of Sydney University when they sat across from each other as student politicians.

Each was a candidate for president of the Students Representative Council. When Mr Patch stood to state his policies, he said Mr Turnbull heckled and interrupted him relentlessly.

"I tried to go with the flow," Mr Patch said. "When he got up to speak, I returned the favour, interrupting him. He got angrier and angrier and then suddenly he lunged at me. His left palm hit me in the upper chest. Before he could hit me with his raised right fist, I sprawled backwards."

It might have made some difference if those easily sourced tidbits about Abbott’s detractors had come to light at the time. But they didn’t, and all the quality journalists do have an excuse. With more counterfeit charges and smears to be laid, there are many more salient facts and perspectives forever in need of overlooking.

  

   

Hot Flashes

INTIMATE thoughts of the man whose Speaker's chair Julia Gillard ordered her troops to defend.

Remember, sheep, Tony Abbott is the real sexist pig. Just keep repeating that.

Did You Know Abbott Is A Catholic?

Throughout his life he has been drawn to a series of masculine and Catholic heroes and mentors. As a result, he is a relic of another time.

Wheeler Centre handbill for Susan Mitchell’s recent lunchtime lecture

Voting for Tony Abbott will deliver a man whose Catholic orthodoxy extends to a belief that this orthodoxy is reasonable and objectively correct and can fairly be imposed on the rest.

-- Leslie Cannold in the Fairfax press

I have always had him cut as an ideologue - you know, big-C social conservative, nuclear family-ist, anti-abortion, papist, et cetera.

-- Martin Daly in the Fairfax press

It's funny too that Abbott, who professes to be a Catholic, is so selective in his application of Christianity, although I should not really be surprised - that's been the way of religious fanatics throughout history.

-- The Age’s Gabriella Coslovich

The role of young Catholics like Tony Abbott was to devote their lives to the grand battle to save civilisation and turn back the cultural tide.

-- Bundoora Bob in The Monthly

Can we believe in his political separation between church and state?

-- Susan Mitchell in the Fairfax press (again)

Of course, there are bad Catholics and there are good Catholics 
 

UPDATE: But there are no bad Muslims, as all but one of the same commentators are at pains to note:

…far-right columnists still tried to blame the massacre on Muslims because they were the ones that had caused all the problems in Norway by immigrating there. When that didn’t really wash, they refused to call Breivik a terrorist because that was reserved for Muslims, so they just settled for calling him “insane”.

-- Susan Mitchell

Dr Cannold urged her audience to organise and fight back against religious fundamentalists who take advantage of Australia's acceptance of religious freedom to push their ''violently intolerant ideologies''. In Australia the risks from this ''emanate primarily from evangelical Christian fundamentalists, not jihadist Muslims''.

-- Leslie Cannold,  accepting her Humanist Of The Year award

I had not seen a woman in a djellaba look quite as much like a man's chattel as the petted girl in the white jeans did to me on my first day back in the "West" … . my attitude towards the hijab has changed. I no longer see it as an automatic sign of gender inequality.

-- Gabriella Coslovich

The bitterness of so many Indigenous people and the daily experience of marginalisation faced by Australian Muslims are the consequences [of John Howard]

-- Bundoora Bob .

The only writer in the first list who appears to have had nothing to say about Muslims is Martin Daly. How does Fairfax tolerate such a racist! 

The Hospice Vigil

ANYONE who has endured the anguish of a prolonged deathbed vigil will know how the mind takes refuge in a grim relativism. There is no hope and you know as much, fully aware that sooner or later (and most likely sooner), the loved one laid low will heave the final breath, that the loss will be forever, and why no prayer or medical miracle can alter the coming end. Yet somehow, despite all the evidence of eye and experience, the mood adjusts. As the former Mrs Bunyip’s mum went to her reward via an awful final month of wasting and shrinking, there was even a little laughter amongst the tubes and monitors. It wasn’t a callous jocularity so much as the product of that mental adjustment by which, with chuckles and kisses and by creeping degrees, one begins to accept the loss before it has yet happened. The news that the disease was terminal came as a shock, but once assimilated there was some room for light and shade. True, the visitors’ eruptions of good humour brought comfort to the dying, but it was those gathered ’round who drew the greatest benefit from distraction and delusion. She had a good day, you might say when pain  briefly receded, and you would be fortified with good cheer to overlook for just a moment the certainty of its return.

Something very similar is underway amongst those friends and lovers gathering at the Gillard government’s deathbed. There are bouts of denial, of silencing the grim certainty by shushing the realists who speak so tactlessly of the cancers that are eating it. Ask 2UE’s Michael Smith about that. For two weeks he has been off air, silenced by Fairfax until he agrees not to speak of our PM’s intimate relationship with a swindler. It is a valid matter for discussion, not least because it raises the issue of Gillard’s judgment, the connections that elevated her political career and, in her claim that she was “young and naïve at the time”, the ongoing willingness to fudge and mislead. For the record, Gillard was 35 and a rising lawyer when her then-bedmate was robbing union members blind.

Same thing with those troublesome refugees. Not so long ago, when a government of another stripe was in power, the Fairfax press and ABC could not write enough of conservative Australia’s racist inhumanity. A boat dubbed SIEV-X went down with horrendous loss of life and no charge against John Howard, not even of murder, was too spurious or obscene to be withheld. And where are they now, those outraged accusers, as more boats sink and Gillard clings to the wreckage of her flint-hearted “Malaysian solution”? Apart from a few activists who demonstrated their moral consistency by chasing Immigration Minister Christopher Bowen down the street, the rest of the posse has disbanded. No books or breathless broadsheet exposes of a heartless butcher in The Lodge. Wouldn’t do to be so frank, not at this time, not with a dearly beloved on life support.

Instead we get, well, just read Misha Shubert in this morning’s Sunday Age and observe the latest source of comfort for our PM’s soon-to-be mourners. It’s not that Gillard’s crew is inept, incompetent and ideological incoherent, nor is that Australia’s voters have noticed as much. Yes, Gillard is perhaps a little awkward on the stump, Shubert concedes in passing, but the problem – the real problem – is that Tony Abbott has “torn up the rule book”, as the headline puts it.

“Abbott's success as an opposition leader is that he simply shrugs off the expectation for consistency," Shubert writes. "He is adept and swift at rationalising shifts in position. And, let's face it, he is not often held to sustained account to explain such anomalies.”

Forget Gillard’s inconsistency – from cash-for-clunkers to her stillborn citizens’ assembly and, of course, the no-carbon-tax bill of goods – it is all about Abbott and his Teflon coat. It is a perspective that would have been at home beside the bed in which the ex-Mrs Bunyip’s mum expired. Out of the dying woman’s earshot, the cancer took flesh in her family’s imagination. It was no longer a disease, but a near-human entity, one whose advances and retreats were evidence of the evil her well-wishers projected upon it. Didn’t bother the cancer, of course, but having something to blame did ease the burdens of those following its progress.

Shubert might well enjoy casting Abbott as Tony the Tumour, and while her summation of the opposition leader’s astute tactics as a violation of political fair play would rile the sensible rest of us, leave the poor woman to mop the patient’s brow and see her off with words of blameless comfort.

Gillard's condition is terminal and this government with her. So don't begrudge the Shuberts, Hartchers and Marrs the consolation of pointing the impotent finger at the coming coalition ascendancy. Just be ready to make sure Tony Abbott cleans up her legacy of decay.