This morning I started looking for a quote from Tony Abbott for this piece. Surprisingly, I came across many, many statements from him with which I wholeheartedly agree.
For example, “The great thing about the Coalition is you know exactly what you will get from the Coalition.”
Yep, he was pretty right on that one. I pretty much did know exactly what we’d get from the Coaltion…
And then I read the following:
“Let me just say of this government that it’s broken promises; that’s bad.”
“It’s the government that is faking things, fudging things and ultimately trying to deceive people.
“It’s my job between now and polling day to remind the Australian people just what a hopeless, unreliable, untrustworthy, dishonest, deceptive Government this has been. It just doesn’t get democracy.”
“A fake. An absolute fake, from start to finish.”
Unfortunately when I checked the dates, they were all made before the election and I realised that he wasn’t talking about his own government.
But I did find one interesting one made after the election.
TONY ABBOTT: “I think Christopher said ‘schools’ – plural – will get the same amount of money. The quantum will be the same.”
ANDREW BOLT: “I hear that. ‘Schools’, plural. People just saw the grab. They heard ‘school’, your ‘school’, singular, and I don’t understand why that promise was made. I would go a billion dollars into debt just to keep your promise. I don’t know why you don’t commit to it.”
TONY ABBOTT: “But Andrew, we are going to keep our promise. We are going to keep the promise that we actually made, not the promise that some people thought that we made or the promise that some people might have liked us to make. We’re going to keep the promise that we actually made.”
Which sounds fine, excerpt the promise to which he was referring was this:
Christopher Pyne: “You can vote Liberal or Labor and you will get exactly the same amount of funding for your school.” 2 August 2013
So that infamous “We are going to keep the promise that we actually made, not the promise that some people thought that we made or the promise that some people might have liked us to make,” should have actually read, “We’re keeping the promise I thought we made not the one we actually made.”
Which some pedantic people are sure to argue is the same thing as not keeping a promise at all, but, as Abe Lincoln said, you can’t please all of the people all of the time… Or was that “fool”?
Whatever, after Labor’s “back-flip” on the $20 Medicare cut, Mr Abbott cut short his holiday to do an interview. (By the way, Labor has apparently changed its mind because Shorten said that he’d “consider” the change… I can see how this can be considered a back-flip by the Liberals because when they say they’ll consider something – or pay one of their mates to hold an inquiry into the best course of action – they’ve already made up their mind!) And what started my search was this little snippet from Mr Abbott:
He called on his critics to provide their own budget savings if they continued to reject the government’s attempts to restore the budget to surplus and pay down the debt.
“We are serious about economic reform, we are serious about budget responsibility – is the Senate? That is the question; are they serious about economic reform and budget responsibility and if they don’t like what this governments doing tell us what their alternative is,” he said.
Now, I could be wrong, but I seem to remember that when he was Leader of the Opposition that he said something about Oppositions:
Oppositions are not there to get legislation through. Oppositions are there to hold the government to account. And unless we are confident that a piece of legislation is beyond reasonable doubt in the national interest, it is our duty as the Opposition to vote it down.
I also seem to remember that he said that it wasn’t his job as Opposition Leader to come up with ideas for the Government, but I can’t find any actual quote. As soon as you put in anything for a Google search for an Abbott quote, all you get is stuff about climate change being crap, or a paid parental leave scheme being introduced over his dead body, or a bad boss being like a bad father, or virginity, or “the phrase WorkChoices being dead and buried”, so it’s been a long, depressing search.
Although I did find quite a few about not being afraid of a Double Dissolution, and, if the Senate held up necessary legislation, then they’d go to the people straight away. But maybe that was another one where we only thought we heard something, when what he really said was: “I’m going to cling onto being Prime Minister as long as I can because there’s no way that I’d survive an election campaign as Leader”
P.S. In spite of their determination to be a strong government, I note that they’ve backed down on the $20 short consultation too. Is that a “back-flip”? Perhaps, I should start a petition: “Tony – Stand Up To The Senate And Call An Election!” Some of his supporters would be silly enough to sign it!
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