A few months ago we were going to ban Mr Putin from G20. He wasn’t welcome.
But hey, who are we to go around banning people? God, it’s enough work to try and ban any discussion of climate change. After all, this is an economic forum and, as we all know, climate change has nothing to do with economics.
Besides, the G20’ll be a good opportunity for Tony to “shirtfront”Mr Putin.
We know because Mr Abbott told us this:
“I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin..
“I am going to be saying to Mr Putin Australians were murdered.
“There’ll be a lot of tough conversations with Russia and I suspect the conversation I have with Mr Putin will be the toughest conversation of all.”
So what exactly is a “shirtfront”? Well, looking it on the internet could just lead to confusion because the definition given there is:
the breast of a shirt, in particular that of a stiffened evening shirt.
In the AFL, however, it refers to a solid bump to the opposition player which knocks him to the ground, so, if one presumes that one is not talking about the breast of an evening shirt, one presumes that our PM is planning to give Mr Putin a solid bump. Metaphorically speaking, one hopes, as actually physically bumping another leader could lead to all sorts of nasty things being said about Mr Abbott’s lack of political finesse, and his treatment of older people. After all, Mr Putin is in his sixties and while Joe Hockey would tell you that clearly Putin is fit enough to work for another thirty years, the photos of Abbott standing over an older opponent could be used for memes with captions to the effect that Costello lacked the ticker to do this to Howard.
So, a good solid metaphoric bump that knocks Mr Putin to the metaphoric ground, because Mr Abbott will give Mr Putin the toughest conversation of all – that’ll teach the Russian Embassy to remind everyone that Mr Putin does judo, while Mr Abbott rides bikes. And Mr Putin, being a Russian, won’t be used to us plain-speaking Aussies and will be quite shocked to be spoken to in such a rough way because nobody would have ever spoken roughly to Mr Putin during in his time in the KGB.
That is, unless he doesn’t happen to meet up with him, because according to the news report I just heard, there’s been no formal request from Australia for an actual bilateral meeting between the two, with Mr Abbott revising his position and now seems to be saying that if he happened to pass Mr Putin in the corridor, he’d go over to him and give him a jolly good talking to about how we didn’t like it when that plane went down and we think you had something to do with it, so you just better get out of the Ukraine right now or else, he’ll tell Peta Credlin and she’s really tough and she’ll come to Queensland and give him a Chinese Burn and she gives really good Chinese Burns that really hurt and all the backbenchers and ministers are afraid of her…
And if that doesn’t work, he’ll tell his mum.
But whatever, calling for Mr Putin to be banned… Well, that’s just juvenile!
