“Good afternoon, joining us for the afternoon is the only Liberal we could get to join us. While he’s not a minister, or even an MP, he insists that he knows just as little as any of them about anything that could be held against him.. Good afternoon, Mr Not Your Real Name.”
“Hang on, didn’t we say we weren’t to use my real name.”
“Yes, I didn’t. If we can just start by talking about the refugees…”
“Now let’s be clear here, these people are a distraction to what’s really important which is the bias you people at the ABC constantly show…”
“Sorry, I’m not from the ABC…”
“And you’re sorry about that? Of course, that’s just typical of the way you people stick together. Did you see that interview that the ABC did last week? It was appalling, there were no interruptions, they just let the minister ramble on and bore everyone senseless. They don’t do that with Albanese. They cut him off before anyone has a chance to get bored. It’s shocking bias.”
“I saw them interview Matt Canavan and he was interrupted several times…”
“Exactly. Have you noticed how often they give Canavan a platform? If that’s not designed to make the Coalition look ridiculous, I don’t know…”
“The refugees?”
“Look, it’s just like the PM said: some of them may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and…”
“Sorry, but the PM’s denying that he said that they weren’t refugees today.”
“Well, that’s right.”
“But you just said that he said that they weren’t refugees!”
“We can play he said, she said, they said, I didn’t say, you didn’t say all day if you like, but the fact remains that what he said is that they may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee which means that they also may not have done that and the fact that people chose to make false inferences from a perfectly clear statement of fact about these illegals…”
“Again, it’s not illegal to seek asylum.”
“No, but they entered the country illegally, just like that tennis player.”
“But he had a valid visa… No, I’m not going down that rabbit hole. Look, do you agree that Christian Porter is an innocent man?”
“Well, of course, the PM made it perfectly clear. He wasn’t convicted in a court of law and is therefore entitled to the presumption of innocence.”
“So when were these illegals charged with the crime of ‘illegal entry’ into Australia?”
“They weren’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because some of them were stopped before they got here thanks to our strong border policies.”
“So they are guilty without being charged of something that they didn’t do and they’re being held indefinitely when any conviction of whatever it is they’re supposed to have done wouldn’t have led to a sentence of more than nine years?”
“Are you suggesting that we just open the borders? If a country loses control of…”
“I’m not suggesting any such thing, I’m just pointing out that these people which you’re calling illegal have never been convicted but it was fine for the Prime Minister to assert that Christian Porter was definitely innocent because he hadn’t faced any charges.”
“Yes, but the two things are very different.”
“How so?”
“Well, Porter wasn’t given the opportunity to clear himself at trial whereas the illegals face trials every day and… Oh, did you notice that the PM is offering a two for one deal on visas for overseas students and tourists so we can make up for worker shortages and…”
“Can we stick to the subject?”
“We sure can. Isn’t the economy doing well and…”
“Yes, but the government has run up a trillion-dollar debt…”
“Which is another reason to vote against Labor. How would they cope with such an enormous debt? I mean, the Liberals are the ones who know how to manage money.”
“But they’re the ones who ran up the enormous debt!”
“No, that depends on how you look at it.”
“Ok, what’s a way of looking at it that doesn’t suggest that they were the ones who did it?”
“Obviously it was Covid which ran up the debt and as a result, Covid should be stared in the face and told it’s about time you got back to work and paid off your debt and if any workers join militant unions who want to keep their members safe, well, can I just paraphrase Josh Frydenberg here and tell you all that a pandemic isn’t the time to worry about safety because if the government worried about safety do you think so many ministers would be expecting additions to their families or going to rehab?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sorry, that last bit was off the record… Can I just claim that I wasn’t given the correct information? Or that you misheard… if you repeat that it could ruin my chances for avoiding preselection until we have a reasonable chance of winning…”
“Every mike is an open mike…”
“So which Mike is it? Anyway, if you don’t print that last bit, I can give you some great stuff, much better than Mike whoever he is. I mean, really, you think what’s appearing in the media is shocking. You wait till I tell you about…”
“Sorry, but I have my integrity.”
“Ok, can we buy that from you? How much would it cost?”
> I probably need to add that this is a complete work of fiction and any resemblance to any government is really hard to believe…
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Geez Rossleigh, you set a very high standard of political commentary. I thought you must have ”acquired” a policy statement from Beetrooter because Scummo has no policies to make statements about.
““So they are guilty without being charged of something that they didn’t do and they’re being held indefinitely when any conviction of whatever it is they’re supposed to have done wouldn’t have led to a sentence of more than nine years”
our continual shame
My disgust at scummo is he continually refuses to take up the generous kiwi offer of asylum for our detainees.
Where is there any scrap of xstian charity?
At the present time, the Oil Producing & Exporting Countries (OPEC) are manipulating production and supply of petroleum products for greater profits and we are paying for this at our petrol pumps.
Mr Morrison calls this Can Do Capitalism I call it extortion but that’s because, being of the Left, I don’t understand economics.
Roll on the introduction of Electric Vehicles even though Mr Morrison would have you believe they “won’t tow your trailer. It’s not going to tow your boat. It’s not going to get you out to your favourite camping spot with your family.”
Maybe Mr Morrison doesn’t know what he’s talking about and [to take a quote from another prime minister] is not the suppository of all wisdom that he thinks he is.
But Terence, the PM said that – just like the statement he didn’t make about people not being refugees – he never said what he said about electric vehicles and we can believe him because he told Ben Fordham that he’s never told a lie…
Wasn’t there that apocryphal story about George Washington and a cherry tree where he was spared punishment because he said to his father: “I cannot tell a lie, father, it was someone else who chopped down the tree because I don’t hold an axe!”?
No, this is what the “left” don’t understand (that is, they selectively choose not to understand) about illegal immigrants.
When John Howard was PM, he used handfuls of illegal immigrants as a stunt to distract from introducing extraordinarily high levels of legal migrants that voters didn’t want. Post COVID, Scott Morrison does the same. His widely published target for net migration is 235,000.
Kim Beazley betrayed Labor/labour and backed Howard to the hilt. Anthony Albanese is giving the same service to Morrison.
On reading this I soon found it being narrated in my head by Clarke and Dawe.
Nice work 🙂
Stephen S,
Exactly that.
Humanitarian refuge visas currently comprise less than 20% of overall immigration intake.
Most new arrivals come here seeking better educational or employment opportunities, through systems designed to profit corporate interests.
‘Unauthorised arrivals seeking refuge of asylum’ are a convenient chew-toy target for distraction by dog-whistle.
Thanks, Rossleigh. Lovely, as always.
We’ll never see a change to the shameful situation of refugees until either this government is subjected to such shaming that they simply must do the right thing about it, or until they are swept from office and the Labor Party steps up to deal with the situation, decently and legally. (I wish I was bursting with confidence about Labor doing the right thing about this and many other matters.)
Me “Hey Scotty, what’s your favourite lie?”
Scotty “I don’t lie mate”
Me “Yeah.. that’s my favourite too”
Maybe the world, especially the West, needs to cease interfering in countries, creating the grounds where refugees have been forced to flee.
Florence is correct, our meddling in the affairs of other nations on dubious grounds only serves to displace the people we purport to be protecting. We have an obligation to accept the refugees from those places as Malcolm Frazer rightly concluded.
Florence makes a good point.
After twenty years of foreign occupation we pulled out of Afghanistan and placed them under sanctions because we didn’t like the Taliban (who Trump had initiated dialogue with)
Because of these sanctions , Afghanistan is on the brink of a mass starvation that aid groups say threatens to kill a million children this winter — a toll that would dwarf the total number of Afghan civilians estimated to have been killed as a direct result of the war over the past 20 years.
Our Christian leaders in the US and Australia don’t think that we owe them anything !
What is it with these people – I’m not religious but I believe that these so called Christians who claim leadership are the same people who would, if they could, despatch Jesus to Guantanamo.
Terence Mills, it would be cute if we had a n empathy cut-off switch like them.
No more internal conflicts re right and wrong and such pesky peripheral question.
You could go through life never experiencing any of the stuff normal people experience.