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hollowman .....

hollowman .....

Tony Abbott today pointed to the premiere of the ABC's The Hollowmen as an indication of how the Rudd Government has performed in its first year in office. 

Mr Abbott was sentimental about the Howard legacy and quoted Margaret Thatcher as he spoke of his plans for a new book, to be released next year under the working title Conservatism After Howard, outlining his ideas for what he calls 'evolutionary conservatism'.

He said the book would not examine the entrails of the Liberal party in the wake of its electoral defeat last November. 

Rather, it would concentrate on issues such as climate change and a referendum to give the Federal Government more power over the states, as outlined in today's Herald.

He said it is important for the party to have a conversation about what it stands for and present an alternative to what he described as the Rudd Government's 'lack of substance'.

'I just thought The Hollowmen ... no one would have got it 12 months ago because the Howard Government didn't work like that,' he said. 'No Howard Government ministerial office was recognisable in the caricature we saw last night' 

Abbott cashes in on Hollowmen 

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Gus: I nearly fell off my perch!!! ''No Howard Government ministerial office was recognisable in the caricature we saw last night'. Sure Tony, there was only one big Hollowman in the Howard Government —Hollow Howardman himself — and all the others were hanging on to his skirts too frightened to say boo. And to mention the Rudd Government's 'lack of substance'? Brother! In less than six months, Rudd has done more on anything that Howard did in 11 years apart from hitting us on the head with some useless wars, the pestilence of the GST and the rape of working conditions... The collapse of the share market has been the result of Howard, Blair and especially their mate Bush's carelessness across board. Now we're paying for it.
Go back into your little hole... 'Evolutionary conservatism'? A vision of a cemetery from which wandering zombies rise from the graves to take over the night, would be less of a nightmare...

wasted airspace

From the Sydney Morning Herald letter page (11/07/08)

Abbott's logic has hollow ring Tony Abbott reckons The Hollowmen is a caricature of a Rudd Government office and "no one would have got it 12 months ago because the Howard government didn't work like that" ("Abbott cashes in on Hollowmen", smh.com.au, July 10). If true, this means Working Dog conceived, wrote, cast, filmed and edited a 10-episode series in seven months. Impressive.

Ian Waters Surry Hills

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Gus: I thought the show "Hollowmen" was disappointing. Maybe the aim of the show was to produce something shallow, unfunny and badly shot to give some actuality to the way the creators of the show think governments operate... Full marks then for the wasted space. The Rudd cardboard replica brought in parliament earlier this year had more to say than this TV show. I hope it will improve...

abbott's crap on the slab...

 

 

From David Marr

 

In Tony Abbott’s Australia, a young woman faces jail because word got out that one of his daughters was given a $60,000 scholarship to study at the Whitehouse Institute of Design. This scholarship was never advertised. Students at the college in Sydney had no idea such largesse was available. News of Frances Abbott’s win provoked a two-month investigation by the New South Wales Police and a charge of accessing restricted data without authorisation. Penalty: imprisonment for a maximum of two years.

How different it was all those years ago when young Tony won his Rhodes. Now that’s a scholarship. The win wasn’t a secret. No one faced jail when the news broke. But the young man and the prime minister have this in common: a most uncertain respect for free speech. Abbott had made his name at the University of Sydney as one of Bob Santamaria’s acolytes working to silence student unions by starving them of funds. The day the Rhodes was announced, in November 1980, he told the Sydney Morning Herald that John Kerr, Malcolm Fraser and the uranium industry were not “legitimate concerns” of student unions. “In my view, vast amounts of student money are being spent on extreme causes.”

Abbott never seemed the sort of man who would go out on a limb for liberty. In parliament he made a spectacle of himself early on by suing over a silly slur in Bob Ellis’ book Goodbye Jerusalem. He was up to his neck in the legal manoeuvring that landed Pauline Hanson in jail. He had the courage to demur when John Howard put WorkChoices before cabinet, but there is no record of him standing up to his patron when Howard prosecuted whistleblowers; stripped NGOs of funding; whipped museums into line; widened sedition laws; imprisoned the innocent Dr Mohamed Haneef without charge; and subjected the ABC to a decade of partisan abuse. When it came to liberty, Abbott was one of the Coalition pack.

Yet one morning in August 2012 he walked into the Amora Hotel in Sydney and pledged to take up arms in the Freedom Wars. “We are the freedom party,” he told an exuberant crowd gathered by the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).


We stand for the freedoms which Australians have a right to expect and which governments have a duty to uphold. We stand for freedom and will be freedom’s bulwark against the encroachments of an unworthy and dishonourable government.

 

No Coalition leader has ever talked freedom as Abbott did that morning. The passion, the rhetoric and the undertakings he gave were new in the politics of this country. He might have been an American on the stump. Angels sang and trumpets sounded. He was promising to do more than stop the boats, axe the tax and end the waste. As prime minister, he would restore our lost freedoms. A new Abbott had appeared from nowhere to join the others who jostle for our attention. Politics Abbott is the one who rules them all. Values Abbott has his commitment to faith and a unique political past. Intellectual Abbott can turn out opinion pieces on anything from reshaping the federation to the future of marriage. But here on the stage of this big city hotel was Freedom Abbott:


Without free speech, free debate is impossible and, without free debate, the democratic process cannot work properly nor can misgovernment and corruption be fully exposed. Freedom of speech is part of the compact between citizen and society on which democratic government rests. A threat to citizens’ freedom of speech is more than an error of political judgement. It reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the give and take between government and citizen on which a peaceful and harmonious society is based.

 

Two years later, I sit here writing Freedom Abbott’s obituary. I’ll honour the form with the story of his rise from nowhere, the hopes he raised in his brief life, his impact on the politics of the nation, and his sudden death in August in the same week the cops charged the supposed Whitehouse whistleblower. They were rough days for liberty. By the time the prime minister abandoned his crusade to gut the Racial Discrimination Act, promised new powers to ASIO and prepared to store our metadata for the use of intelligence agencies, Freedom Abbott was on the slab.

read more:http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/september/1409493600/david-marr/freedom-abbott