On Monday, Four Corners will air a program called House of Cards highlighting how precarious Tony Abbott’s position remains.
After the failed spill motion, the party rallied, promising to give Tony “clean air” but since then, the whirling dervish has been bouncing off walls, offending one group after another.
Despite his promise of no ill will, Tony immediately blamed and sacked chief whip, Philip Ruddock, for not letting him know that anyone was upset with him.
He then prevaricated about his promise to let South Australia bid to build our submarines after he had secured the vote of those unwitting enough to trust him.
He slapped down party room criticism of his continued vitriolic attack on Gillian Triggs regarding the Forgotten Children report.
Abbott rejected a scathing United Nations ruling by the 18-member UN Human Rights Committee against Australia’s “cruel and degrading” practice of locking up refugees indefinitely on the basis of secret ASIO assessments and then criticised another report by the independent special rapporteur on torture for not praising him for stopping the boats.
This is despite the first academic analysis of Australia’s “turning back” of asylum seeker boats by University of Queensland concluding that the policy is a fatally risky, moral and legal failure that is “severely damaging” the country’s reputation.
Tony’s hamfisted approach to the case of the imminent executions, reminding Indonesia of the disaster relief assistance we gave after the tsunami, saw them respond by saying if he continued to interfere they would release a tsunami of asylum seekers to head for Australia.
Tony copped another round when the executive director of the Green Climate Fund (that he had disparaged as an “international Bob Brown Bank” that he would not be contributing to, and then changed his mind to give $200 million stating it would be spent how he said) contradicted Tony and Greg Hunt, categorically stating that governments cannot stipulate how money is spent.
We also learned that it has been “Tony Abbott’s preference (edict) not to reappoint board members selected by former Labor government.” This is leading to the loss of very experienced well-qualified people.
On International Women’s Day, Tony tried to convince us that allowing women to enter a men’s only club for the day for a Liberal Party meeting (bring a plate and look pretty while you do it) was smashing down the glass ceiling.
He then informed us that we would no longer support the “lifestyle choice” of Aboriginal people living in remote communities on their traditional land.
For the man who crowned himself Prime Minister for Women and for Aboriginal people, he just doesn’t seem to understand it takes more than photo shoots and lunches.
Despite leaked emails from the Liberal Party executive exposing concern about the positions of Peta Credlin and Brian Loughnane and opaque financial records, Tony continues to cling to his chief of staff (see the 4 corners promo for the prototype sleazy wink).
Today it was the turn of the Irish to be belittled with a wooden scripted performance that Tony no doubt meant to be folksy.
Giving Tony free reign is NOT a good idea as he daily goes about fouling up the ‘clean air’ he demanded.
How long are we to be subjected to this?
