Abbott gets the dirt wrong

I think it goes like this. The Abbott opposition claims that about twenty years ago, Gillard (when she was working in a law company or something) set up a rather run of the mill boring sort of union fund at the request of two people in the union that was to use the fund. That was it. Later, unbeknownst to her, those two people misused those funds for their own purposes other than union business. Now the Abbott opposition has been banging on endlessly saying that Gillard was associated with a union "slush" fund, with what appears to be not a shred of evidence. I think that that's about the gist of it.

However it becomes incredibly involved and complicated when the opposition starts pouring over endless legal documents from that long ago, looking for some minutia, some straw to grasp, showing a connection with Gillard and this "slush" fund. The whole thing gets bogged down in legal jargon and so hard for a lay person to follow that most of them wouldn't bother. I watched about half of the live press conference yesterday just before question time, and although I consider myself of average intelligence I found myself just completely lost in most of the questioning, not having the faintest idea WTF they were talking about. I did note though, that despite my complete ignorance, Gillard certainly had the subject matter in hand and was giving very forthright and intelligent replies.

If the press gallery thinks this is a story they've got it wrong. If Abbott thinks this is a killer blow, then he's got it wrong too. It's a pathetic lame assed attempt, a lurching at straws, in the idiotic hope that people in the community are going to give the slightest fuck about what happened 20 years ago when Gillard was a lawyer. And really, they're trying to trip up a bloody lawyer? She's just going to make them all look like a bunch of buffoons FFS! WTF are they thinking?

What's more, Abbott by doing this is feeding right into this narrative the Gillard gov is trying to get out there, that Abbott has no policies and the only thing he can do is be negative. Try and bring down the gov by some crap from last century long forgotten. People just don't care about that. I certainly don't. Every time I hear some more shit about the so called slush fund I groan, it's tedious, boring, and completely irrelevant to Australia in 2012.

You know it does make me wonder. The Coalition did this when Rudd was leading the charge to defeat them in 2007, they threw everything at him including I think the kitchen sink as well. There was some "scandal" about drinks at a club in the US somewhere, and nobody cared in the end. It made no difference to the polls at all, and Rudd went on to win a decisive victory bringing Labor to power after 11 years of Howard. Could it be Abbott is trying the same failed strategy again?  

It now comes down to how the public sees this battle. The opposition thinks that tarnishing Gillard will work to its longer-term advantage. The huge file that Tony Abbott's chief of staff Peta Credlin had when she was pictured with Bishop said it all. 

Gillard is banking on ordinary people being turned off by the rehashing of matters ''re-recycled over 20 years.'' 

Putting the knife in, she told voters Abbott, unlike John Howard, did not have ideas for the nation's future - hence the ''sleaze and smears''. Read more

But her accusers need to be building up to something, and quickly, because in the court of public opinion the Prime Minister is likely to be getting a few head nods when she says people are getting very sick of stories from 17 years ago about allegations they don't understand. Read more