Abbott's slush (fund)

Is it ground hog day and nobody told me? Or is my brain stuck in a 3 year loop? I'm referring to the blathering ravings assaulting my eyeballs from the Coalition and cohorts springing forth in the lead up to the federal election next year. We've seen it all before, so WTF makes them think this shit is actually going to work this time? Didn't they learn any lessons at all from their pitiful election strategies in 2007, finger pointing and dragging the Rudd name through the dirt? Didn't they hear the bored yawns from the real world? 

Firstly, they've dragged out that old fossil Peter Reith again, banging the drums of war against those dastardly evil, terrible, unions and their union bosses. Exactly like 2007. Reith of course was that revolting Howard gov workplace relations minister back early on in the Howard gov reign of terror, against any who dared to be a union member and act accordingly. Most notably, Reith organised the waterfront dispute against the MUA here in Sydney after travelling to New Zealand and studying how the unions had been broken over there (it had started with the breaking of the wharfies). Here in Sydney him and Howard fully supported this:

In the middle of the night on April 7th 1998, security guards, some in balaclavas, emerged from rubber dinghies and buses with dogs and barbed wire, entered Patrick Stevedoring terminals across the country and escorted the night shift from the wharves.

Between 1400 and 2000 wharfies, all members of the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA), were abruptly sacked. “We were loading a ship, two gangs of workers, when security guards jumped on the moving cranes and grabbed the keys out of the ignition. The place was crawling with them, about 100 men and dogs,” said job delegate Jake Haub. more

BTW it ended up in court with the court ruling the sacked workers should be reinstated. And now he's back again, chucking some union bashing fit about what should be done about unions if Abbott wins:

FORMER workplace relations minister Peter Reith has called for a Coalition government to set up a broad inquiry into behaviour and governance in the trade union movement and not just into the Australian Workers Union slush fund affair.

He said one issue it should look at was the practice of unions setting up other entities. Read more

I see where this is all going.....  Oh joy, my union will get a thorough examination ordered by a partisan gov who is against unions, just wonderful. A pity the same couldn't be said for the large corporations who dragged the world into the GFC. Nah, they're fine, it's those unions with their union funds and all.... they gotta be clobbered because they have different political beliefs than a Coalition gov.

Not to be outdone, Abbott is trying to build up his own little narrative for the coming election, it's looking something like this at the moment: Unions are evil, they have slush funds, Gillard organised a slush fund and therefore is an evil unionist. Or something akin to that. Abbott has now gone into some kind of self imposed psychotic state, apparently thinking that by promising another enquiry (if he gains gov) into Julia Gillard herself, an enquiry about something from last century (20 years ago), that this will aid in his bid for The Lodge.

Ms Gillard was referring to the terms of reference associated with the inquiry Mr Abbott has promised to hold into Ms Gillard's role as a lawyer for Slater & Gordon in the early 1990s. The terms largely target Ms Gillard's alleged actions.

Should she lose the next federal election, Ms Gillard will either be an opposition frontbencher or a private citizen and she believes continuing what has already been a 20-year ''witch-hunt'' against her would be beyond the pale for a newly elected government.

''Mr Abbott is now going to ask the Australian people in 2013 to vote for him on the basis that the centre of his prime ministership would be continuing with this personal campaign of sleaze and smear,'' Ms Gillard told the Ten Network's Meet the Press program on Sunday. '

'The driving purpose of his prime ministership would be to continue a fight against me, rather than a fight for the Australian people.

''Well, I think Australians are heartily sick of this.'' Read more

Fuck, what a fuckin moron man. Abbott has lost a huge amount of ground in the last 6 months and he seems incapable of seeing why. Is this supposed to be part of his new policy platform? To promise to spend public money on a gov witch hunt? Fuck I hated Howard and personally think he should face war crimes, but an enquiry into someone about bits of paper that far back? It's completely meaningless. I don't vote Labor, but Abbott isn't PM material at all, he's obsessed with the minutia of petty little arguments based on fallacies. Hasn't a clue about running the place. I can't imagine him at all mixing it on the world stage at the UN or some such thing.

Even now he's not conscious of how much this strategy is going to backfire on him. He's walking right into the leading role in the Gillard gov's election narrative. I know voters can be pretty fuckin dumb, but this is simply beyond even voter dumbness. This shit belongs back in the kindergarten playground.

There's one more thing Abbott should consider if he's going to continue this pathetic playground behaviour. Just a small little thing that has been a touch overlooked in his ferver to nail Gillard to the cross baying for blood; the fact that he has his own slush fund questions to answer from 1998 (less time ago than Gillards version).

In 1998 Abbott gave a signed personal guarantee to Terry Sharples, who'd fallen out with One Nation, that he would not be out of pocket for legal action to stop One Nation receiving $500,000 in public funding. 

Soon after, Abbott denied to the ABC that funds had been offered to Sharples. 

Abbott, about to become a minister, then set up the Australians for Honest Politics Trust. He responded to the Australian Electoral Commission's request for disclosure by writing: ''I spoke with one of Australia's leading electoral lawyers who assured me that the trust would not be covered by disclosure provisions''. The commission accepted that. 

But later Abbott told Kingston he had only sought the legal advice after being queried by the AEC. When the discrepancy was put to him, he said he had had more than one conversation with the lawyer. 

Despite claiming he'd be happy to disclose donors if the AEC wanted him to do so, after the AEC took a new position in 2004, seeking the information, Abbott maintained he should not have to provide it after so long and did not give it over. 

In a 2003 interview with Kerry O'Brien, Abbott was confronted with a 1998 untruth, when he had told Tony Jones that he had not promised Sharples any money. His rationalisation was Jesuit-ical. ''There is a difference between telling someone he won't be out of pocket and telling someone that you're going to have to pay him money''. In an earlier newspaper interview. Abbott had said: ''Misleading the ABC is not quite the same as misleading the Parliament.''. Read more 

Maybe that was non-core slush?