Found a Heart Somewhere, tones? (Yeah, Right . . .) Friday

Fiona Uncategorized

Was that a quadruple back somersault with seven twists that we saw this week from Our Dear Leader?

Or was he simply dragged from the tender arms of corgi and george xtiansen and forced to look over the brink by those on the Government benches who actually retain some vestigial grains of compassion (or, in the cases of Craig Laundy and Tim Jones, rather more than that)?

Was he told that if he didn’t make some sort of pro-humanitarian gesture, it was all over, red rover?

Whatever, it has indeed been an interesting week (again).

* * * * * * *

Anyway, whatever his motives, and however quickly the 12,000 come to abbotistan, let’s kick back for the moment and mark the end of yet another interesting week.

As I wrote this morning, it’s a glorious day in Melbourne (still), and I’ve finally realised why my dry, itchy cough became worse today. Derr, it’s spring, the air is full of pollen, and this is Melbourne, allergy capital of Australia.

So I’ll go easy on the drinks, unless there’s some bottled Claratyne in the Secret Cellar.

774 thoughts on “Found a Heart Somewhere, tones? (Yeah, Right . . .) Friday”

  2. Where’s Tony ..?

    jaycee@jaycee ‏@trulyjaycee 17s18 seconds ago Adelaide, South Australia

    Tony gets home after spill, sees letter:” Dear Tony..Brian and I have gone for a reconcilliation weekend..will call..oh ;Margy rang…Peta”.

  5. Abbott hasn’t made a statement yet? Yeesh, bad loser there.

    I wonder if he’ll even turn up at the GG’s house to resign? Or will he do what Adam Giles did and refuse?

  6. Gravel,

    Not to mention his “complete selflessness” – particularly where his expense account was/is concerned.

  7. Oh and Shorten will be gone by the end of the year. So I’m still waiting for Toxic to front the media. After not being able to watch news and political shows for over two years so I couldn’t see him, he has wimped out on fronting.

  9. Gravel,

    Bilson was carrying on about “selflessness”. Kroger was also somewhat OTT with regard to humanity, generosity, always putting others first . . .

    I still can’t get over Kennett’s rants yesterday evening!

  10. Where is Tony? Simple. He’s in a locked room, deep in the bowels of Parliament House, with his close allies Dutton and Andrews, busy planning a coup.

    How it works –

    Tony is in cahoots with the AFP. If he slept at all last night it was in his room at the AFP hostel.
    Dutton is still in charge of Border Farce, and those troops are now a paramilitary force, armed and trained.
    Andrews is still Defence minister, and he’s mad as hell over being spurned as deputy.

    Between them they control a large force of armed, well-trained troops.

    Then there’s the GG, known for somewhat reckless behaviour in his soldiering days in Vietnam, who, no doubt, would love to be back in command.

    And there’s Handy Andy, with his SAS links who last night seemed to think he was still a serving officer.

    The AFP could dolly up some evidence and arrest Turnbull f(and anyone else Tony doesn’t really like this morning) for suspected terrorist activities, links to ISIS, whatever. The military could move in and take control of Parliament House and install Abbott as Supreme Leader.

    We could be under military control by lunch-time.

  13. Gravel,

    I’m about to head into work. I have a class at 4:15 to 6:15, and need to do some preparation for that, plus marking assignments. But I will be checking into The Pub every so often (10 minutes???) to check on things.

  14. I woke up this morning with a nice sense of calm that Abbott had gone. And I’m not too worried about Turnbull.

    Unless Turnbull cuts a big swathe through the Abbottistas, and their policies, he won’t succeed. He’ll just be the caretaker Prime Minister.

    Turnbull made his money with a serendipitous investment in Ozemail. Hey, good luck to him. He had $500k to spare, put it all on the internet, and won.

    I still have an Ozemail account, one with “ozemail.com.au” in it. I must be one of the few left from the old days where all you had to do was pick up a free Ozemail CD at a trade show (or, as in my case, have a mate who brought you one saying, “D’ya know what this is for?”), a phone modem, and five minutes to spare, and you were on-line.

    It was a brilliant marketing scheme and Turnbull made a killing, selling out to the ill-fated Tyco (who went broke in one of the bigger Dot.Com crashes a few years later). You only need one Ozemail investment in your life to live the rest of it on Easy street. That’s what I would have done. Malcolm chose to “further his career in public life”.

    He had the savoir faire and the connections, and made the best of them. I don’t think you needed to be a business genius to get yourself shoe-horned into a merchant bank and turn over money, with a decent amount of it falling into your pocket each time the investment merry-go-round completed a cycle. If you had the money to start with, making more was easy. Once again, good luck to him. I can only wish…

    I guess what I’m saying is that Turnbull had a lot of luck in amassing his pile, not particularly a lot of business savvy. He DID have style, though, which is important… once you’re in the driver’s seat.

    As for his career as a lawyer, it’s only based on winning one case, the local franchise version of Spy Catcher, not the big game in the UK. Another serendipitous win that stood Malcolm in good stead.

    He has an amazing head for detail There’s no doubt he’s very intelligent. I can still remember him going head-to-head with Tony Jones (no slouch in the quick-wittedness department) over something to do with coal industry, during an interview one evening on ABC TV. Jones had copious notes in front of him and quoted something that someone-or-other had said, or perhaps it was some statistic.

    Turnbull had only his memory, and contradicted Jones on the quote. Jones looked up his notes and conceded that Turnbull was right. Jones was wrong. Now, THAT is a good head for details from Turnbull, no risk about it.

    Unfortunately though, there’s the Turnbull ego. They say he doesn’t suffer fools gladly, and you can see it in the breezy, almost friendly, almost hesitant way he corrects people. It’s almost like he’s patting them on the head. Apparently in private he’s a little more pointed in his contradictions.

    There are a lot of fools in the ranks of the Liberal Party.

    They have had 5 years of slogans and total war. They gotten used to winning with sheer aggression and a veritable gale of media sycophancy behind them, with toadies waiting for them at every port, ready and willing to do anything to get them into and keep them in power.

    Policy? Who needs it? There was always a scandal that could be drummed up: Ipswich Inc, Godwin Grech, Thomson, Slipper,Pink Batts, School Halls, Gillard’s bathroom, Bill Shorten’s AWU days, and a hundred more. The shock jocks went feral and nasty, even feraler and nastier than they had ever been. A stench started to come up over the Australian polity as it laid waste to itself.

    It was so easy to cut someone down, so you could stand taller than them.

    The better way, of course, was to raise everyone up. You could still be taller, because they’d hoist you onto their shoulders and cheer you. But that was not the Liberal way. They had it too easy.

    Turnbull, like all his colleagues, fell for it and came a cropper on Gretch. If it hadn’t been Gretch, it would have been someone else who swindled him.

    Turnbull is the show pony who’s been forced to corral in with the pit ponies. There may be some among his colleagues he respectds and admires, but probably not too many. The others? They will want to continue playing dirty. It’s become a habit. It won’t suit Turnbull’s breezy “why-can’t-we-all-just-get-on” style. I think he’ll be torn down by the Liberal trogs simply because he has scruples, the last reserve of decency that Abbott did not have. Turnbull doesn’t have the killer instinct that the modern Liberal Party needs and has gotten used to having in Abbott. No-one should underestimate the capacity of today’s Liberal Party for stupidity and boorishness.

    Turnbull’s faith in his party is touching. But he’ll not only have to rewrite their policies to get some sense out of them. He’ll have to rewire their DNA as well, which will be a vastly bigger ask.

  15. I’m still getting over Mark Kenny last night saying Tony would not be out for revenge because that wasn’t his nature.

  16. I’ve always thought Lucy is the brains in the Turnbull family and was the mover and shaker behind Turnbull’s Qzemail wealth. She had the connections, she had the family money, Turnbull was nothing when they married. She made him rich.

  17. The country seems to be having a bit of fun this morning. Even my apolitical kids are in on the act. The youngest just sent me a picture of Bronny in a helicopter with the caption “Don’t worry Tony, I’ll give you a lift home”. Apparently facebook is full of it.

  20. Alan Jones the Church of the Adoration of Saint Tony the Wronged.

    ‘We’ve got a sh*t sandwich’: Alan Jones defends Tony Abbott after leadership spill

    Scores of furious talk-back callers flooded Jones’ conservative breakfast radio show on Tuesday morning to express their disgust at everything from Mr Turnbull and the “snakes of the Liberal Party” to the “traitorous” behaviour of deputy leader Julie Bishop.

    During one of many spirited defences of the ousted prime minister, Jones read out a message he had received from a caller.
    “As a caller just wrote to me, and forgive the language, but I mean we all talk the language of the playground, and he said: ‘People don’t want to vote for Turnbull, and they don’t want to vote for [Labor leader Bill] Shorten. We’ve got a shit sandwich.’ And I think that’s most probably it.”

    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/weve-got-a-sht-sandwhich-alan-jones-defends-tony-abbott-after-leadership-spill-20150914-gjmmm7.html

  21. 2gravel

    Razz could be right.

    Abbott is not following protocol.

    We have just been digging into the history books to work out the protocol for the resignation and swearing in. Usually, the vanquished goes out to the governor general to resign before the new PM is sworn in.

    In the case of Julia Gillard in 2013 for example, while she gave her famous press conference on the night of the coup, a staffer went out to tell the governor general Quentin Bryce of the events. Straight after that press conference, Gillard went to see Bryce. Job done, she had a glass of red.

    Prior to Gillard, Kevin Rudd also went straight to the GG after his press conference on the day of the change.

    We are still unclear when or if Tony Abbott will go out to see the current incumbent, Sir Peter Cosgrove. Presumably that job needs to be done before Turnbull can lead question time

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/live/2015/sep/15/malcolm-turnbull-pm-prime-minister-liberal-leadership-spill-politics-live?CMP=ema_1731

    Who will lead QT today is an interesting question.

    And exactly where is Tony?
    Abbott did not take his usual early morning bike ride today. I’m thinking he could well be heavily medicated/sedated and might not appear for quite some time.

    The normal Tuesday morning Coalition party room meeting has been postponed until 10.30. Surely Abbott will appear then,,,,,surely……

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