The Lying Christopher Pyne
Did anybody watch the 7:30 Report last night? If not, you wouldn’t have known that Christopher Pyne told a bold-faced lie about Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, a lie that was promptly exposed and quashed by host Leigh Sales. You can watch it here, in the first few minutes of the show:
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/?series=3152075#/view/39542
It was a lie. Full stop. It was not anything he can be misquoted over; it’s not something he meant only at the time and changed his mind later. It was a calculated, pre-meditated lie delivered with a straight face. The face, I might suspect, of a person quite artful in speaking with a forked tongue.
It’s not the point that he lied for some political traction that infuriates me. The point is, he lied on the 7:30 Report and by 8:00 all was forgiven and forgotten. Where is the outrage? This was a lie on national television and he knew he was telling a lie. He knows he can lie through his teeth and get away with it. Well I’m sick of him getting away with it.
Christopher Pyne lies, and the issue dies.
I have scoured the web today in search of outrage from the Opposition or the mainstream media (MSM) if they suspect that the Prime Minister or any member of her party had lied, regardless if it was a lie or not. To the Opposition and the MSM, anything she says is a lie, and the ferocity of their attack is breathtaking. I need not tell you that the internet provides us with millions of instances where the Opposition and their media allies screeched like banshees over alleged lies, but I have selected three from the usual suspects. Here they are:
Julia Gillard should stop telling lies to the people of Tasmania (Eric Abetz).
Julia Gillard made more dishonest statements in Hobart today about the GST.
The Coalition’s position on the distribution of the GST to the states is clear: we will not support or implement any proposal that disadvantages Tasmania.
In respect of GST allocations, neither Tasmania nor South Australia will be worse off under any future Coalition government.
Despite the Prime Minister’s falsehoods that she repeated today, the government still hasn’t announced its response to the Greiner-Brumby report.
Does your national leader lie? (Andrew Bolt).
The question we now face: Is the Prime Minister of Australia a liar?
Her Four Corners disaster on Monday night is part of a pattern.
Julia Gillard deceives and, I suspect, lies. And what’s killing her is that she does it so badly.
Gillard’s great carbon lie (Piers Ackerman).
The sweeping scope of Julia Gillard’s breathtaking lies in defence of her broken promise on a carbon tax should bury her political career.
Her first lie was to repeatedly claim in the immediate lead-up to the August 21 election that there would not be a carbon tax under a government she led.
That was clearly her biggest lie, but not her only lie by any means.
Now I ask those three moral crusaders, where is the outrage over Pyne’s lie? Where is the outrage over any of his lies? And what about Tony Abbott’s history of lying? And what about your own?
Let the outrage begin.
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Return to home pageHence one of the reasons for a good deal of dismay over the government having anything approaching a fair hearing in the lead up to the forthcoming election. When the opposition tells untruths, will the MSM call them to account…the answer from above would seem, highly unlikely.
The ABC iView isn’t downloading for me so I can’t watch it. Three times I have attended Q&A sessions. Twice of those had Pyne on the panel. Pyne excels at upsetting the audience. On the first time my eldest daughter and I attended, my daughter wanted to tear strips off him for the way he behaved…including but not only the way he responded when my daughter disagreed with him through a question.
He lied about what was in the letter requesting a pair for a Labor MP (Unwell family member vs Sick Baby) & he lied to Oakeshott about needing a pair for a “sick” LNP MP (an MP who was later seen walking around Parliament House). As for Abetz’s comments, it was Abbott himself who made the claim about taking money away Tasmania & South Australia-thinking he could get away with it by only saying it in WA. He then went on to tell a totally different story to Tasmania-so Abbott must be lying to *someone* on this issue-just as was the case with his claims on Farmer’s rights to deny CSG mining on their land!
Bolt only reports on lies if someone he doesn’t like tells a lie. When it’s one of his mates, he covers it up. Ackerman is so one-eyed he should change his name to Eichmann as he represents the same thing that that slimeball was a member of. Australia will go the same way as Nazi Germany if it elects an idiot like Abbott and has Whiney Pyney the liar on the Treasury Benches. An ignorant opulation. If you vote for Abbott because Rupert tells you so, you’re a damn fool.
Where is the National Press Gallery on the Lies. Will Barry Cassidy devote a piece in the Drum on his and others ready acceptance of out right LIES by Abbott, Pyne, Bishop, Morrison, Abetz and others.
Why are court hearings about Abbott, Craig Thomson, James Ashby being posponed all the time till after the election.I saw Pyne .He would not know how to tell the truth.Abbott said he would not change his front bench can we believe that. This comment is very disjointed as I am so upset about the whole situation.We cannot have this man and his hopeless lot running our wonderful country.
What really dismays me is that the LNP has told so many lies which go unchallenged, and painted such a false image of the PM that the people of Australia have been turned away and no longer listen. Their negative campaign appears to have succeeded. It seems that truth no longer matters, the voters have decided to accept the lies. I saw the 7.30 program last night, and agree with your account of what happened. Pyne was his usual despicable self an I was wondering if it would be left unchallenged. When the lie was acknowledged it was most casual along : ‘oh, and by the way,we have not had any calls from the PM along the lines suggested by Pyne”.
Helen, my heart goes out to you. ‘So upset’ says it all.
Thanks for this Michael. Great stuff. I’m getting the feeling that we need to take action. Not armchair action, like I do, but real stuff, like people in the parks, in the streets. Anyway, I’ve just put up a thread on Fair Media Alliance for people who would like to work towards a Julia Gillard Day. I hope your more frustrated readers will come across and volunteer some stuff – ideas, of course, and commitment to action at the local level.
Michael, Turnbull has not done too bad in the lying section this week. Whether about asbestos, Telstra or the NBNCo.
Who has done any fact checking regarding the so called (LNP stated) Terrorist Jihardist. A commenter on The Conversation piece by Michelle Grattan has made a point that this so called terrorist in our detention centre is a threat to out security.
The man apparently was arrested as a supposedly innocent bystander at an anti Mubarak rally. Anyone who protested at these rallies was called by the Mubarak regime ‘Jihadist Terrorists’.
Of course there was going to be a red flag against his name. Of course our Immigration Department is going to make sure that the man is innocent of these charges. That is why he is still in detention.
Mark Dreyful stated yesterday in QT that the man has done nothing wrong since arriving in our country.
Talk about a disgusting mob of liars this LNP are. They will do & say absolutely anything that will get them the keys to the Lodge.
We need to be outraged whenever we hear LNP liars at work & expose them for what they are. The Murdoch/Reinhart propaganda machine is very much alive & well in this country & we have to negate this propaganda every time it occurs.
Kate, I’m with you. I’d like to do something like that.
Helen, I’m so angry and getting angrier all the time. I have to admit that in years gone by I was one of the not so engaged. I’ve always voted Labor because my values tallied more closely with theirs than with the LNP. However my outrage started back when John Howard lied about the GST. I’ve been listening to their lies ever since and growing angrier by the minute. I’m an honest person myself but I concede that most pollies have lied at some time or other. I will also say that some lies are worse than others. What is so wrong is that the scrutiny applied by the MSM to these lies is so uneven, and in fact are lies in themselves at times! The media should hold all to account for lying or fudging the truth equally and this just does not happen. Pyne, Abbott, Bishop etc. could make a career out of professional lying they’re so good at it. Pyne also claimed that Labor sources told him there would be a leadership challenge on June the 3rd. That’s 2 bald faced lies within a week solely for the purpose of making mischief.
Ok this all seems very depressing but one thing we have in our favour is social media. Yes the opposition can use social media too, but at least we have a voice that cannot be controlled by Murdoch, Reinhart and the IPA. Sandra is right when she says we have to negate this propaganda every time it occurs. We can’t give up – keep tweeting, keep facebooking. Sometimes I feel I’m driving my fb friends mad but occasionally someone new will indicate that they like what I’m posting so I’m heartened by that.
I was also heartened this morning with people who called or texted in to Jon Faine’s Friday Wrap with the abysmal John Roskam and Sally Warhaft. Overwhelmingly they were actually taking the media to task over their attitude, including the ABC. Asking exactly these questions – why do we let the LNP get away with lying like we do.
I’m hoping their arrogance will be their downfall.
So we have to keep fighting, maybe there are more of us out there than the media would like to admit.
What is really appalling is that it goes straight through to the keeper. He has been ‘lying’ for a long time – note all those unnamed Labor sources that have for some unknown reason decided he is their dear Abby and they will confide in him about all their doubts and fears. I have yet to hear any ‘professional’ journalist challenge him to produce names. It’s disgraceful and we can only assume that if the Coalition wins the next election Pyne will continue to lie and continue to get away with it, thanks to those who will tell you they are there to keep politicians accountable and under scrutiny.
l must admit l enjoyed Mr-Poodles lies last night, he got right up Leigh`s nose.
Can one imagine Pyne as leader of the house?
And when the country goes down the tube after an Abbott win, of course it will be Labor’s fault. There followed by a barage of lies.
Joolya`s lot paved the road for Mr-Rabbit stroll to power, this would not be the case if Rudd had been left in charge. Now we have white-flags and box-packers. Thanks ALP.
Serious doubts have arisen over claims that an asylum seeker at the centre of a political furore over immigration security was convicted of murder and the possession of explosives, Guardian Australia has learned.
Sayed Abdellatif, an Egyptian asylum seeker who arrived in Australia in May 2012, has been labelled a “convicted jihadist terrorist” by the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, and in numerous media reports. Last Thursday Australian federal police deputy commissioner Peter Drennan told a Senate estimates committee that Abdellatif had been convicted of premeditated murder and possession of explosives.
The allegations and the fact that Abdellatif had been placed under a severe “red notice” warning by Interpol since 2001, prompted Julia Gillard on Wednesday to call for an immediate review by the inspector general of intelligence and security of the way security services deal with “high-risk” asylum seekers. The furore over the case has plagued the prime minister over the past week in Canberra, with opposition politicians scathing about the fact that the immigration minister, Brendan O’Connor, was not told that Abdellatif had been housed in low-security detention up until August, when he was transferred to Villawood, a higher security detention centre in Sydney.
On Wednesday, Abbott said in question time: “Given that a convicted jihadist terrorist was held at a family facility in the Adelaide hills for almost a year through what officials call a clerical error, will the prime minister now concede that Labor’s policies have made Australia less safe than it was under the former government?” He reiterated his criticism in parliament on Thursday.
But court documents seen by Guardian Australia, which appear to detail the convictions used to issue Interpol’s red notice, make no record of a murder case or of any possession of explosives. The Egyptian Organisation for Human Rights (EOHR), an independent human rights body in Cairo, has verified the documents. Abdellatif’s actual convictions, of being party to a criminal agreement and being a member of an illegal extremist group – under the rule of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt – were part of the “returnees from Albania” trial in Cairo in 1999, heavily criticised by Amnesty International at the time for using evidence allegedly obtained under torture.
Speaking to Guardian Australia, Abdellatif’s Cairo lawyer, Muntassir al-Zayyat, said that his client was not accused or convicted of murder or bomb charges at the 1999 trial. Asked if Abdellatif had ever been accused or convicted of these offences Zayyat, who was speaking from Kuwait, said: “Not at all. The accusations were only joining a secret organisation and being party to a criminal agreement to topple the regime [of Mubarak, who was later overthrown in the 2011 Egyptian uprising]. There was no killing mentioned at all.”
Zayyat’s office were unaware of any other charges against Abdellatif.
A second lawyer, Majdi Salem, who also worked on the case, said that the 1999 charges against Abdellatif had been misreported.
He told Guardian Australia: “There were no bomb-making charges. This detail emerged because at the time of the case, the local media often took their information from the Egyptian security services, and the sources were intentionally orienting the details to suit their own interests.”
The developments follow comments from the foreign minister, Bob Carr, that the judicial system under Mubarak should be treated with “suspicion”.
He added that he would be “interested in further information that throws light on the nature of the prosecution”.
“Certainly the judicial system that President Morsi’s government has inherited from the Mubarak regime has got to be treated with a great deal of caution, even suspicion,” he said.
The court documents, translated independently for Guardian Australia, show that Abdellatif was charged in May 1999 for “joining a group that was established against the rules of law [and] held leadership in it”, and “participating in a criminal agreement”. Further documents appear to show that Abdellatif successfully overturned the charges of “criminal agreement” years later. Abdellatif is understood to be challenging his conviction for being a member of an extremist group, and Guardian Australia has also seen correspondence from Abdellatif to the EOHR, which details an application for amnesty made to the current Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi, three months ago.
Zayyat claimed that Abdellatif’s 1999 trial, in which he was convicted in absentia while exiled in the UK, was a farce. Mubarak jailed thousands of Islamists in the 30 years of his presidency. “This case was a set-up,” Zayyat said. “During the Mubarak era, the Egyptian authorities wanted to charge all of the exiled Islamist opposition so they can justify requests to have them handed back to Egypt. The charges are vague, like joining an organisation that was formed illegally, or criminal agreement to topple the regime. Therefore, Mubarak had the case transferred to a military court to guarantee verdicts against them. My client Mr Sayed Abdullatif is innocent.”
The “returnees from Albania” trial, which saw 107 people, including the current head of al-Qaida, Ayman al-Zawahiri (in absentia), stand accused of a variety of offences in Egypt in 1999, relied heavily on evidence supplied by Ahmed Ibrahim Sayed el-Naggar, who was allegedly rendered to Egypt after being arrested for involvement in a Tirana-based network of militants. This evidence is alleged to have been obtained through torture.
Abdellatif was convicted as a member of “Jihad Tanzim” or Egyptian Islamic Jihad, an Egyptian terror group. On Friday Fairfax media revealed Abdellatif had worked as an accountant for the Kuwait-based Society of the Revival of Islamic Heritage, an organisation that was blacklisted in 2002 by the US for its links to al-Qaida. Ian Rintoul, an advocate working for Abdellatif in Sydney told Fairfax that Abdellatif had been working for the group years before it was deemed a threat.
Abdellatif came to Australia by boat from Indonesia on 11 May 2012. He was accompanied by his wife and six children. In an interview with IRIN, a humanitarian news website funded by the United Nations, conducted in February 2012, as Abdellatif arrived in Australia, he is quoted as saying: “Since leaving Egypt, I have taken my family from Albania to the UK and then onward to Iran. For years I languished in an Iraqi refugee camp there – pretending to be Palestinian lest I be found out and returned to Egypt. Later we travelled to Malaysia via India on fake passports and onward to Indonesia, again illegally. Throughout this journey, I faced repeated arrest and detention, as have members of my family.
“I arrived in Malaysia from Iran in 2010 before making my way to Indonesia in the hope of taking my family to the UK. After boarding the plane in Jakarta, we were again arrested in Singapore and sent back to Indonesia on 3 June 2010. I applied for refugee status on 30 August 2010, but almost two years on have no idea what is happening with my case.
“As a result, I have no choice but to make my way to Australia on my own.”
Guardian Australia also understands that the Australian Human Rights Commission had already intervened in Abdellatif’s asylum case, concerned about allegations that the continued detention of him and his family in Australia was arbitrary, and therefore in breach of article nine of the international covenant on civil and political rights.
Amnesty International Australia’s refugee spokesperson, Graeme McGregor, said in a statement: “We welcome the federal government’s announcement of an independent review into the legitimacy of terror charges against a man identified as Sayed Abdellatif.
“However, it is vital that the review take into account the serious flaws in Mr Abdellatif’s original trial by an Egyptian military court in 1999, on which the charges are apparently based.
“The trial violated some of the most fundamental requirements of international law, including the right to be tried before independent and competent judges. What’s more, Amnesty representatives attended several of the mass trials of civilians before military courts, where they heard defence lawyers complain consistently that they were denied enough time to prepare their cases.
“It is vital that the case against Sayed be resolved as soon as possible so that the accusations can be addressed and so that he is not separated from his wife and children for any longer than necessary.”
Red notices are issued by Interpol following a request from a member country that is passed to the Interpol secretariat for assessment and approval. They are not binding arrest warrants but are the most severe warning Interpol can issue.
Guardian Australia has contacted Interpol for clarity on the circumstances of the red notice served on Abdellatif and is awaiting a response. A public search of the Interpol wanted persons list showed no results for Abdellatif. Under Interpol’s rules the country issuing the red notice is allowed to keep its listing private.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young told Guardian Australia she was “dismayed at how this matter has been handled, with the Oppostion so desperate to whip fear and hysteria in the community. That approach has made it near impossible to have all the facts of the case calmly and reasonably considered.”
“The Opposition are exploiting the government’s failures in this case to continue their fear mingering campaign.”
A spokesperson from the Australian federal police said they stood by the evidence delivered at Senate estimates last Thursday.
A spokesman for the minister of home affairs declined to comment.
A spokesman for Tony Abbott’s office said: “I refer you to the statements from the Australian federal police.”
Slippery reply, from Abbott’s spokesman. As usual.
Robyn Hannan wrote:
What lie?
Howard went to the March, 1996 election on a ‘No GST’ platform. He won a term in office, kept his promise and did not introduce it.
When he decided he was open to a GST, he told the Australian people in May, 1997.
Then in August, 1997, he announced that the Coalition were definitely going to the next election on a ‘pro-GST’ platform.
He then campaigned and argued his case for 1 year and 2 months to try and convince the Australian people to vote for him.
And in October, 1998, he was re-elected. He then kept his promise and introduced a GST.
The crucial difference between “adopting a new position” and “lying to the people” is whether the politican respects the Australian electorate enough to let them vote on the new position before implementing it.
Howard showed this respect. Gillard failed to do so.
The irony is that claiming Howard lied about the GST is in itself… a lie.
Leigh Sailes was the first to call out an opposition blatant lie. Good for her. Wish there was more of it.
And he must have really got up her nose for her to do that. She’s very pro-Libs.
Did you take into account Mr-Rabbit is just a puppet.?
Not that it probably matters much but has Politifact pinged Pyne for his latest lie?
The bastards just keep lying with impunity.
But I will keep calling them out.
Howard did lie about the GST, as he was committed to it for years prior to his “Never ever” statement, which he made prior to the election to take the heat out of the issue, knowing full well that he would reintroduce it , as governments traditionally get a second term.And that’s what he did. It was a blatant LIE.
CS still censored
(Or should that be still spinning):
_______________
Do tell us what the Lying Rodent meant by this:
“There’s no way that a GST will ever be part of our policy. Never ever. It’s dead. It was killed by the voters in the last election.
Any suggestion that I left the door open is absolute nonsense. I didn’t. I never will. The last election killed the GST. It’s not part of our policy and it won’t be part of our policy at any time in the future. ”
Help mods, my comment has disappeared.
And what this labor government hasn’t! and the independence have not lied when they say they have confidence in this government! Come on who really is telling the truth with this government! Bold face or not a least we know in 100 days we get a whole new parliament
CS Still censored, your reply is a fair one and it is hard to argue that something taken to an election constitutes a lie. It is also a convenient out that overlooks the dozens of actual lies told by John Howard, from children overboard to the AWB scandal and a host of other lesser untruths or disingenuous statements that characterised his Prime Ministership. When a man whose relationship with truth is as tenuous as that of George Brandis describes Mr Howard as a ‘lying rodent’ then you have to wonder at the size of the whoppers he was routinely telling over the years.
You also overlook the change in circumstances that demanded Julia Gillard’s introduction of a carbon price – the same change in circumstances that would have required Mr Abbott to do the same were he judged fit for the office by those in whose hands the decision lay. To describe it as a lie suits a political purpose but hardly bares much relationship to reality. Funny too that the people who carp on about this statement are so willing to overlook the abundance of lies told by Mr Abbott and his shady crew in the years since. I struggle to think of a single day – barring those when he has been on holiday – that Mr Abbott has not lied through his teeth. If you are going to call the Prime Minister a liar on the most dubious of grounds your head must be spinning when you listen to almost any one of the Liberals or Nationals. Then again, I suspect that it is really not the ‘lie’ that bothers you, it’s just a smokescreen behind which lies your contempt for the Prime Minister, the real reasons for which you will not articulate. If I am wrong, your capacity for discerning just one lie in a sea of them speaks to a truly blinkered view of things.
Thank you.
Sorry about that, Cuppa (and to others caught up in Spam). The Spam Filter has been a bit sensitive over the last couple of days. 😳
#PorkyPyne …
Not only that Howard lied about the GST during his multi-million dollar tax payer funded campaign that introduced it.
So for them to argue Howard didn’t lie and openly took the GST to an election is disingenuous or at least specious. Yes he took a GST to an election in a whirlwind campaign, but the core tenet of that campaign and subsequent introduction of the GST was that no one, and no one was iterated many times, would be worse off.
That was a blatant lie and it was pointed out at the time that goods and services taxes are regressive and by their nature leave whole swaths of demographics worse off. Howard drowned out that reality in a sea of misinformation.
The other big lie was from Costello who said the way they would implement the GST would kill the black economy, something the Germans laughed at at the time by the way. The black economy thrived bigger and better than ever under Costello’s stewardship.
If you look back at Howard’s entire GST campaign and marketing of it you will find embedded a lot of deliberate lies and deceits, so to say Howard didn’t lie over it is a lie.
For some of us, we can’t watch the ABC link as we have slow internet, something Tony Abbott thinks is fine for us in rural Australia. I missed the 7.30 report, so what was the lie and Lee’s response?
Personally, I think Pyne was owned. It wouldn’t be hard. Who knows, perhaps even by Rudd.
I think my comment has also disappeared, something along the lines : Howard did not lie, he merely gave new meaning to the words ‘never ever”
Here you go Norally:
Full transcript is here: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/
@Cuppa,
You can spin it anyway you like, but Howard took the GST to an election and won. Nobody was deceived. No promise was broken. If the Australian electorate thought “Sorry Howard, we don’t like your new GST position” then they would have voted him out and the GST would never have come into existence. But he won.
As an analogy, famously Paul Keating’s early parliamentary speeches when he was elected in the late 60s were about the ‘tragedy’ of housewives being forced to enter the workforce. This is a position that today would be considered chauvinist and sexist (dare I say misogynist!). It’s also a position Keating never espoused in his later years. Does this make Keating a liar? No. It just means his position evolved. The crucial difference between “adopting a new position” and “lying to the people” is whether the politican respects the Australian electorate enough to let them vote on the new position before implementing it.
@Mobius Echo – Howard campaigned for the GST continuously for 1 year and 2 months (from August 1997 to October 1998). It’s farcical for you to try and pretend that that was a “whirlwind” campaign. Every Australian knew what his policy was and voted accordingly. (Ironically, I was one of those who voted against it at the time – in hindsight, god knows why it bothered me – but even then, I had the maturity to recognize that he had won fair and square.)
@George Mitchell
In regard to the carbon tax specifically, I tend to refer to it as a ‘broken promise’ rather than a ‘lie’ as it cannot be conclusively proven that it was pre-meditated. But the broken promise part is undisputable.
And ironically, she broke three additional related promises even though the media focuses on the high-profile interview one (the other three were – to build consensus, to hold a ‘Citizen’s Assembly’, and that the carbon-tax legislation if implemented earlier would not take effect until after 2013 election.)
But no matter which way you slice it, the Australian people are well within their right to regard her as unreliable and untrustworthy.
The funny part is that ALP+boosters have told far more actual lies trying to cover up the initial broken promise. Talk about digging yourself deeper into a hole!
(You should read some of TruthSeeker’s and Kate Aherne’s comments. Their hobby is to pretend that an interview witnessed by millions of people, and the original is still freely available in unedited form, has been ‘doctored’ as part of a some vague “Murdoch conspiracy”. Real tinfoil hat stuff.)
Well, they do say “it’s always the cover-up that kills you.”
Another saying that comes to mind is the American one – “Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining”. If breaking the “no carbon tax” promise was ‘pissing on Australia’s leg’, then the BS, lies and abuse trying to cover it up are the ‘telling us it’s just rain’…
I’ll leave the cystal balls and tarot cards to you, George.
Nonsense. At best, Gillard is just an appallingly clueless negotiater. At least in politics. Perhaps she had more skill in her Industrial Relations career.
She was was completely clueless about the relative bargain strength/motivations of her, Abbott, and the Greens, Independents.
The trick to successful negotiation is “being willing to say no and walk away”. Abbott knew this. Gillard didn’t.
Amusingly, ALP boosters seem to think getting the deal done “at any cost” equals “success”. (If you guys really believe that, I have a Datsun 180B for sale at $100,000. But it’s cool, we can “negotiate”… 😉 )
If Gillard knew what she was doing, she would have:
– firmly told the Greens “no carbon tax this term, but I will campaign hard for it throught the term and it will be ALP-platform at the following election”.
– STILL gotten Greens support (it’s inconceivable a hard-left party would support a centre-right party over a fellow party of the left)
– STILL gotten the support of the other Independents (with her pledges on poker-machine reform and NBN.)
She could have still scraped in, completely avoid the “Juliar” moniker, and right now be in a competitive position to run an honest pro-carbon-tax campaign.
But she stuffed it up completely. And much of what she’s tried to implement will be reversed (to my pleasure and your pain).
That’s the difference between short-term thinkers and long-term thinkers. Gillard is most definitely the former.
Thanks for that, Bacchus. I too had a bit of trouble with the link. But now that I’ve seen it, I can only be amazed at Pyne’s stupidity and of course, the lack of scrutiny his stupidity has attracted.
God CS you pull out others that no matter how they spin it and then go on to rant the greatest load of spin.
The old furphy that Abbott was smart because he walked away when that’s blatant bullshit.
And Gillard isn’t a great negotiator. Please what reality do you live in.
Then to pull out Gillard’s lies, and she did backflip more than once, yet not pick up on Abbott’s or the opposition’s great string of backflips, lies, deceits and hypocrisy.
As to the GST. Did or did not Howard say no one would be worse off and was that not a core of his selling the GST campaign in a whirlwind. That was not the only bit he mislead the people on in regards to the GST.
Dear CS still censored,
I’m pleased that you read the article to which you refer, but less than pleased that you didn’t read it properly. But, FYI, it seems that there were two interviews on that day. It seems that the one that people have been quoting ever since in support of the Prime Minister, was on Channel 7. It was later taken down from YouTube for ‘copyright’ reasons. That, apparently, is why nobody can now find it. It has been ‘disappeared’. And you conveniently ignore the interview I quoted from The Australian. Who’s a liar?
Here’s the relevant comment on that article.
Shane hurford
June 4, 2013 at 8:26 pm (Edit)
I believe the quote you are looking for was on channel 7 , not 10. It was the same morning as the channel 10 interview which is why she is wearing the same outfit and same backdrop, she was doing the ’rounds’ of the bteakfast tv on that day.
I can recall koshie butting in to clarify ‘so you’re ruling out a carbon tax?’ and the Gillard makes the quote.
Channel 7, i believe, put a copywrite claim into youtube and had all evidence magically removed.
Reply
Wow Gee, that’s some argument. You must have a lot of time on your hands. Your concern for truth and worry over broken promises is admirable and would be more so if you were willing to hold the opposition to similar standards. Your must have been beside yourself during the Howard years. If the PM is an appallingly bad negotiator, but managed to negotiate her way into office, it says little for Mr Abbott’s skills. The people who made the decision, who saw him at close quarters, judged him to be untrustworthy and irresponsible. If you believe he walked away you’ll believe anything. He was desperate to gain power, and walked away from nothing, he was denied what he wanted and has behaved like a spoilt child ever since.
Do you seriously believe that anything the PM did would have spared her the Juliar moniker? You have to be kidding, the Murdoch press would have carried on exactly as they have regardless.
You are right, much of what she tried to implement probably will be reversed. It’s not much of a policy platform though, is it? To offer nothing but the undoing of worthwhile reforms. I expect you’ll be very happy in a few months and I expect that when you see broken promises and lies you will call them out.
The only short-term thinker, I’m afraid, is Mr Abbott. If you can explain what his long term plan is, I’d be interested. But I’m not sure that a couple of slogans and a pledge to reverse pretty much everything the Govt. has done constitutes long-term thinking. I am not holding my breath for your answer.
CS still censored
You can spin it anyway you like
Now hang on just one minute. You’ve accused me of spinning. But I didn’t say anything. I wrote one sentence (a question) in my own words. A question. Followed by a quote from John Howard himself.
If your first words to me are to accuse me of “spinning” when all I wrote was one short question, then you are not off to an honest start in this dialogue. You are off to a dishonest start – which I’m beginning to think is unavoidable for apologists of non-core John and the Lieberals.
but Howard took the GST to an election and won. Nobody was deceived. No promise was broken.
And there is where you are wrong. There is where YOU are spinning. This is what Howard said, and I will ask you AGAIN, what did Howard mean by the following:
Now answer the question this time, please, without spin and Right Wing Projection-founded accusations. What did Howard mean by that, and did was a “promise broken”?
Julia Gillard is a woman.
And a woman of substance at that.
No what she is, is a selfish woman who is killing the ALP all because she is too proud and selfish to relinquish a title and power.
Helen…what does that make you then if Julia is a selfish woman? A stupid troll? A badly out of touch MSM reader? Or a Liberal party hack?
Helen….Heather….whatever your name is…..