Posted: Dec 07, 2018 6:46 am
Hamster wrote:Hermit wrote:
Anyway, back to Tones. He is not the only cause to make Australians feel embarrassed. On the other side of parliament we have the erstwhile leader of the Labor Party, fulltime psycho Mark "break an arm" Latham, and on the crossbenches we have Pauline "please explain" Pantsdown, whose party latham has recently joined in order to provide irrefutable proof that there is no spec of sanity left in him. I kind of wonder if he had any sanity at all to begin with. The embarrassment is not so much that they exist. It's that we vote for them as much as we do. We did vote Tony Abbott into prime ministership. We almost did the same with Latham, and Pauline Hanson attracts up to 20% of the vote in some seats. For crying out loud, not only is she a fucking Senator, but there is another one of her party sitting in the same chamber, one state member in Queensland and three in Western Australia. I want to hide somewhere.
I would contend that Tony largely got in because Labor had made themselves un-electable through the Kevin-Julia-Kevin debacle.
That, I would say, was a drover's dog election - though Tony was effective in opposition, the real enemy of the government was Kevin in exile.
[Latham was always has been a loon but losing to Howard seemed to render him certifiable.
I will always blame the (ill-named) Liberal party for Pauline. She only became infamous by winning Oxley back in 1996 because she had been a Liberal candidate who was dis-endorsed (for racist comments) too close to the election to be backfilled, so she became the only "conservative" with a profile on the ticket. Polls never seem to reflect the actual votes her "team" gets in actual elections which most recently was 4.29% in the senate and 13.7%. She has way too high a profile for her actual "popularity"].
...just sayin...
Yeah, voters don't like party putsches, as the so called Liberals will rediscover by March next year. Too much instability.
As for Pauline, her ride on the coattails of the so called Libs has ended years ago. 22 years after her expulsion she is winning and losing votes all on her own. She and her party have attracted enough of them for two senatorial seats federally and four seats in Queensland's and Western Australia's state parliaments.
The Gillard-Rudd fight was - to say the least - most unfortunate. I regard Rudd's terms as PM as the best we had in decades, and Gillard's was not far behind. That is despite the fact that both were unforgivably reticent about doing anything to fix our offshore concentration camps. Rudd in fact started them. As for Gillard, I will never forgive her kowtowing to the Christian Lobby and increasing funding for the School Chaplain Project when she should have axed it altogether. It was a brazen power grab. South Australia's Labor extremely conservative numbers man, Senator Don Farrell would not have permitted her to become Prime Minister, had she done the right thing. She sacrificed principle for power.
Fixed your quote tags, by the way.