“Mr Smedley, do you know Joan Citizen?”
“Not really, we had a passing acquaintance…”
“Weren’t you married to her a few years ago?”
“Well yes, but I didn’t really know her… That’s probably why the marriage didn’t last.”
There has been some discussion on Twitter about how well the Governor-General knew Chris Hartley with Ronni Salt and others suggesting that there is evidence that – in spite of what the Governor-General’s secretary, Paul Singer, told Senate estimates – the pair had met on a number of occasions and that the description of “tangential, peripheral relationship” may have been slightly misleading.
Of course, this led to some arguing that just because there are photos of the two sitting next to each other at the odd dinner or two doesn’t mean that they were friends and anyway, who really knows another person? I mean, don’t we all feel that nobody really knows us and that…
Anyway, I’ve always been an odd sort of chap. Reading De Bono’s book on lateral thinking, I couldn’t understand what he was talking about: it seemed to me that he was just describing thinking, but then when he went on to describe how people usually thought. I went, “Really?”
For example, there was a headline about the Chris Dawson verdict which read “Dawson’s infatuation with babysitter led to the murder of his wife.” There were lots of comments about how it was outrageous to call it an infatuation when it was an exploitive older male taking advantage of a young girl. Now, I get that, but what seemed to me more outrageous was the idea that the inappropriate relationship led to the murder. It seems to me that even if one is inappropriately obsessed with another persons, there are many alternatives that don’t involve killing one’s partner..
And so with David Hurley the thing that strikes me isn’t that he knew Chris Hartley well, but that the claim is that he didn’t.
Now I’m not Governor-General so I don’t get to meet with important people every day, but if I happen to be talking to Dan Andrews I can’t imagine that I’d be doing the following:
- Mr Premier, have you got $18 million to spare for a charity?
- What’s the charity?
- It’s a leadership thing to develop the leadership potential of young leaders?
- Sounds good but where is it based?
- It doesn’t have an office yet.
- Well, what’s its charter. How is it going to use the money?
- That’s being worked out by the people setting it up.
- Oh. Well, who’s setting it up?
- A guy called John Smith.
- Right, and you think he’s worth risking $18 million on a charity that’s yet to be set up?
- Definitely!
- You must know him pretty well then?
- No, I only met him at a party and you’d call it a tangential, peripheral relationship.
- I see. Well, maybe get back to me when it’s actually up and running.
- But it’s an election year!
Yes, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be doing that.
And let me make it clear that I’m not suggesting that there’s anything dodgy about the charity or the Governor-General. I’m just saying that it seems a little careless for the government to hand over money on the basis that David Hurley says it looks like a worthwhile project. After all, the spokesman for the Governor-General told us that he didn’t “lobby” for this charity; he merely mentioned it in conversation with Scott Morrison.
But then we are talking about the same government that awarded $423 million to a company whose head office was a beach shack on Kangaroo Island. To be fair, when the Liberal government handed over the half billion dollars to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, Scott Morrison wasn’t PM, so that one isn’t his fault, but it does seem that the previous government did believe that it had to stop all the damage that Robin Hood had done by taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
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