Goldfish 1 – Did you know that we only have a memory span of three seconds?
Goldfish 2 – That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard!
Goldfish 1 – What is?
Ok, that’s not a very good joke and I’m sure someone will point out that the goldfish memory span of three seconds is an urban myth… possibly started by someone who found it impossible to train his or her goldfish.
Anyway, while goldfish may have a greater memory span than a few seconds, so does just about everyone else apart from political journalists and politicians being questioned by anti-corruption bodies. In the latter case, if anyone has, “I don’t recall” on their drinking bingo card is likely to end up in hospital with alcoholic poisoning.
So I couldn’t help but wonder what Peter Dutton was hoping to achieve by suggesting that the release of the Robodebt Royal Commission report was timed to coincide with the Fadden by-election. Maybe he was hoping that nobody would remember that the release date was set before the Honourable Member, Stuart Robert announced that he wouldn’t be coming back to Parliament because he wanted to focus on his family. Maybe he was hoping that nobody saw a connection between the timing of the by-election and the fact that it was family man, Robert, chose to go before the release of the report.
Whatever…
He was certainly hoping that nobody could see a connection between the fact that Robodebt victims were being asked to prove that they didn’t owe the money and the presumption of innocence. After all, how could any say that Mr Albanese was trying to unseal the contents of the confidential part of the report and follow it up with “There is a presumption of innocence.”
Or have I misunderstood the notion and the presumption of innocence only applies to Coalition MPs? Unless, of course, they betray the party like Peter Slipper and must stand down as Speaker owing to the things they’ve been accused of. (And certainly don’t mention Craig Thomson here. Or David Hicks, Christina Holgate, Katy Gallagher… Ok that’s just off the top of my head.)
And when Peter Dutton said that Robodebt scheme was stopped as soon as the government became aware of the problems… Well, is he hoping that we’ve all forgotten how many times over a number of year that the government was made aware of potential problems before it was stopped, or is he simply hoping that we’ve all forgotten the meaning of the words “as soon as”?
However, that’s nothing compared Scott Morrison. Yes, he’s had to interrupt his time in Italy, and yes, he’s up to his old tricks. The first of these, of course, is that he rejects what he’s been accused of. We all remember the “I reject the premise of the question” being trotted out whenever the interviewer asked him something difficult. Now it’s become “I reject the premise of the Royal Commissioner” because, being just a silly woman, she doesn’t understand government. If she did, she’d know that what he was doing was just fine because, well, he said so and after all, he was the person in charge, so he’d know. When he was giving evidence, she just kept interrupting and making him answer a completely irrelevant question and she doesn’t seem to have accepted all the documentary evidence of the fact that he knew nothing. And he completely rejected all adverse findings against him before adding that executive government would be “completely unworkable” if ministers couldn’t rely on public servants for advice.
Now, apart from the fact that so much of the advice seems to have been ignored or deliberately hidden, Scotty from MuckingItUp is overlooking a key thing here: During the Sports Rorts controversy when Morrison was being questioned about making decisions that were inconsistent with the guidelines and over-ruling certain projects in favour of others who just happened to be in electorates that the Coalition needed to win, he asserted that it was politicians who “lived and breathed in their electorates” were the best ones to make decisions and that this “advice” from public servants wasn’t something to be relied on. It was merely a thought bubble rather like the Canberra bubble that needn’t be reflected in the eventual awarding of grants and ministers could do things like determine that a pool in North Sydney was worthy or a regional grant or that clubs could be given money to build female change rooms on the off chance that they may wonder have a female team.
Morrison also added that he didn’t hold a hose, telling us: “The proposal was initiated within the public service and was not a government-initiated measure by ministers. It was initiated by departments before I became the minister for social services.” See, nothing to do with him; he was just standing there waiting for a photo…
And that silly Commissioner’s account “fails to take into account the context and environment in which the measure was conceived”. Strangely he didn’t elaborate on this, so one must presume it was get the Budget back to surplus no matter even if we have to ruin a few thousand lives to do it.
Commissioner Holmes also ignores the part of the story where he ensured that nothing he did was traceable back to him because, he didn’t do anything. Again, a familiar pattern.
I was surprised that we didn’t hear that it was only after Jen explained to him that it would be terrible if one of his daughters was saddled with a debt she didn’t owe that he stopped the scheme.
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“… I was doing was just fine because, well, I said so and after all, [I] was the person in charge so [I’d] know.”
You forgot to add the most compelling and convincing argument: “… and I’m a Christian.”
Opening up the coalition kitchen drawers would reveal an abundance of blunt knives (or should I say dull ?)
I expect Dutton and National’s leader for the time being, David Littleproud to be blaming Robodebt on the Voice which seems quite reasonable when you consider that they have already blamed the Voice for power prices, inflation, the Murray Darling woes and the Ukraine skirmish.
It seemed a world wide plague recently in politics, with such bowwelblockagebuffoonboastingboringbugles as Trump, Johnson, Morrison, with court clowns like Farage, Joyce, Le Pen, Johnson…but the recent revelations of extreme incompetence, laziness, egofixation, mental onanism and downright supremacist triumphalism of the Scum from Cronulla is horrifying (that is sickening enough) in its glaring obvious revelation; yet. Peter Duckwit-Futton, the Skintskulled scabby comedian (let’s laugh at Pacific islander’s doomed future) who loved indigenous youth so much he gave them a one way ride. Some errors were made, said the festering foulmouth, in life threatening matters like Robodebt. “Good people,” actually criminalminded practitioners, did it, because careers in distorted filth drove them, as it has with the despicable Morrison. Advanced superstition, a cancerous voluntary decision, eats out the heart, mind, soul, leaving one a rubbish tip of refuse and brainless indifference to the reality of human existence. Such poxed political perverts need exposing, charging, committing, dungeoning. Uncivilised filth has no place here anymore, and all the conservative clan members need pest prevention treatment. The nation has a pustular plague of selfcentred right wing nobodies; take a bow Merde Dog, for this preservation of the hordes of halfbaked wannabeseenandheard mediocrities that infest the media like scabs on a skunk’s skibbyhole.
What’s the bloater from Cronulla doing on the Amalfi Coast? Readying to cut and run …. pitching for a job as a drug runner. Seems that all the band of brigands identified in the Robodebt RC (sealed or not) should be hauled in and hung out to dry.
They’re all shaping up to cut and run to their preferred high-paying ignominy.
For Slobbo, I can’t decide whether the Inquisition, the Swiss Guards, the Carabinieri, the ICC or the Kangaroo Court.
Bugger ’em. They never operated via due diligence; no redemption.
Put all of ’em on a Red Notice, and let all the contenders take a piece of ’em leaving their stinking hides for us to feed to the crocs.
@ Clakka: You are too kind ….. I suggest that the first step should be to revoke their passports to keep them in Australia until the respective court cases are completed, because flight is a very real consideration.
.
Then, with Manus & Nauru empty post the jailing of legal refugees, it seems fitting that those pollies found by the Royal Commission to have acted improperly (something that legal refugees DID NOT do) serve their pre-hearing time on that beautiful tropic island without being bothered by any communications technology. After all, it was good enough for legal refugees fleeing the horrors that successive COALition Prim Monsters inflicted upon innocent persons merely trying to keep their families housed and fed.
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Finally any judgment of guilt must result in the total loss of any and all post-politics benefits paid by Australian taxpayers for the term of those pollies natural lives.
.
Treason deserves the harshest consequences …. is this just a wish list??
NEC:
Seems perfectly reasonable to me but I’m not a poltiician.
leefe and NEC, you are both TOO KIND. Yes a financial penalty and then put in gaol. Just as lying by ommision is lying, killing by wilful malfesence is still killing. Forcing people over the edge is pure malice. He needs to be made accountable big time.
Also, i would dearly love Hillside to condem his actions as totally UNCHRISTIAN. I would love the catholic church to have a moral backbone and condemn the pathology around dole bludgers and refugees. Time to take its fucking eyes out of the bedroom and show true leadership. I AINT HOLDING MY BREATH.
New England Cocky – removal of all pensions and post parliament perks, now THAT would be a fitting penalty for ANY politician found to have committed a misdeed against the people of this country at any time during their tenure. Perhaps we might see better behaviour all round ??
I reckon we’re dreamin’
2000 dead, 400000 distraught and clare says the morrison, robert et al will, like the crook bankers, suffer from a guilty conscience.
What an effing joke, jason.
The Liar Morrison will be protesting his innocence as he is led to the gallows.For that matter, so will Bat Ears,Sludge and Porker,after all,none of them know what shame or honesty is.The fun has barely begun.I note that boofhead now has to lie on two fronts,that will severely tax his limited intelligence,not to mention the liklihood of another by election.If the Liar insists on clinging on in Parliament,Benito’s alleged popularity will end up somewhere near the Marianas Trench.What a hoot.
However much we wish, these poor excuses for human beings – if being a reasonable one implies the capacity for feeling shame and the willingness to acknowledge guilt, along with possessing an active conscience – won’t face the justice they deserve. Some things have improved over time wrt the dispensation of justice, for example, we no longer hang, draw & quarter, or engage in that Oriental delight of Death By a Thousand Cuts, and neither do we endorse the Aztec practice of dosing victims on psychedelic mushrooms and then ripping their still-beating hearts from their chests, or staking their naked bodies over a bull ant’s nest, but nevertheless, we can, and should, wish for something akin to appropriate punishment.
Nauru won’t happen. Who would pay for their incarceration? Surely not the taxpayers, who’ve already had to bear the burden of being fleeced by virtue of their presence in parliament, along with picking up the tab for their legal fees. Let them pay for their upkeep themselves… they can afford to. But in principle it’s not a bad idea. Exile… in the traditional sense, one of the worst punishments. Shamed, denied accommodation within society, in fact deemed unfit to be a member of the community… this would be fitting for these venal, corrupt, criminal carpetbaggers.
I’d like to see them publicly shamed, and in that sense the following: shaved heads, dressed in sackcloth, shackled in a tumbril, horse-drawn through the main streets of all of the major Australian cities with the citizens invited to throw rotten fruit and eggs at will. Let the shaming take place over weeks, months even, and if it results in their breakdown and descent into insanity and madness, so much the better, and in addition a major lesson to anyone still suffering the illusion that Liberal party politicians are in the main a good bunch of folk with the exception of an odd outlier or two. Bring it on.
Oh good. Seems to me we’re all pretty well in agreement, with entertaining possibilities drawn from olde worlde practices, and variations on modern themes of justice, reform and most importantly, retribution.
That said, I am still left pondering when the parliament and legislators will actually show interest in the rights of citizens and mandate, in politics and their agents in publishing, truth telling and outlaw misdirection and deception.
Brandis opens mouth and spews bullshit!
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/left-s-identity-crisis-means-dutton-can-be-a-champion-for-equality-20230709-p5dmti.html
Brandis must be confusing boofhead with someone with a heart.Either that or he’s suffering from an unreported brain trauma.Or irrelevance.Maybe he’s trying to erase his association with the most criminally incompetent and corrupt government we’ve ever had.It seems on the face of things that the members of the previous government haven’t realised just how much they stink.Dutton obviously doesn’,he just thinks the voters made a mistake.
GL and Harry, I couldn’t bear to read the article. Brandis is part of the spin club. The fact he doesn’t understand affirmative action works is his problem, not mine. Notice how many women in labor party vs the libs? The fact he goes out to bat for identity politics putting it on labor again shows what an F’n idiot he is. Again doing a trump, goblels act. Accuse the others of that which you do. Burn you bastard.
It’s almost IMPOSSIBLE to imagine anyone MORE callous, MORE disingenuous and MORE hypocritical than the lying, conniving, psuedo-religious Hillsong cultist: Scott Morrison! The fact that Morrison was a signed-up member of that hideous CULT of Hillsong and, despite horrific evidence of Frank Houston’s depravity and continual sexual predation of under-aged children, Morrison and his best friend, Brian Houston (who is the late Frank Houston’s notorious son), continually chose to defend that indefensible predator and the paedophile-protecting CULT that protected him!
If that wasn’t depraved enough, the fact that Morrison helped instigate and introduce the callously inhumane Witch Hunt, ROBODEBT, that drove more than 2,000+ desperate Australian citizens to tragic suicide, is yet MORE proof of Morrison’s catastrophic level of cold-blooded inhumanity! There are very few people in the world who are COMPLETELY DEVOID of any remnant of human virtue, but Abbott, Morrison and Dutton are the depraved exceptions! The Lying Nasty Party are overflowing with hateful white-supremacist racists, rusted-on misogynists, unspeakably depraved religious hypocrites and self-serving sociopaths! Not only does history show that both Morrison nor Dutton have absolutely ZERO regard for anybody but themselves, Morrison (in particular) has proven himself to be the Mother and Father of ALL self-serving, internationally notorious, pathological liars who couldn’t tell the truth if his useless, non-achieving, self-obsessed life depended upon it!
The French President, Emmanuel Macron, certainly had Morrison’s (lack of) character pegged when he accused the bone-idle, self-promoting, misogynistic and sociopathic bible-thumping hypocrite, Sloth Morrison, of being an uncompromising liar who’s one and only “dubious” achievement was to shame our nation on the world stage! It is not at all surprising that Morrison has expressed admiration for the misogynistic predator, Donald Trump – both of those appalling, self-obsessed, born-to-rule political psychopaths have so much in common!