Sunday 27 October 2013

Will someone please tell Tony Abbott that the 2013 federal election campaign is over and it's time for the junkyard dog to turn into a statesman


The very unstatesman-like Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott speaking about the former Federal Labor Government, during a telephone interview with The Washington Post sometime between 20 to 24 October 2013:

I thought it was the most incompetent and untrustworthy government in modern Australian history. They made a whole lot of commitments, which they scandalously failed to honor. They did a lot of things that were scandalously wasteful and the actual conduct of government was a circus. They were untrustworthy in terms of the carbon tax. They were incompetent in terms of the national broadband network. They were a scandal when it came to their own internal disunity. They made a whole lot of grubby deals in order to try and perpetuate themselves in power. It was an embarrassing spectacle, and I think Australians are relieved they are gone.

UPDATE

The Sydney Morning Herald 28 October 2013:

Tony Abbott's use of a Washington Post interview to brand his Labor predecessors as ''wacko'' and ''embarrassing'' could set back his working relationship with the Obama adminstration, a leading US commentator says.
Norman Ornstein, an author and political scientist with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said he ''winced'' when he read the interview in which Mr Abbott put the boot into the Rudd-Gillard government in unusually strong language for a foreign interview.
''It really does violate a basic principle of diplomacy to drag in your domestic politics when you go abroad,'' Dr Ornstein said. ''It certainly can't help in building a bond of any sort with President Obama to rip into a party, government and, at least implicitly leader, with whom Obama has worked so closely.
''Perhaps you can chalk it up to a rookie mistake. But it is a pretty big one.''

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I find Tony Abbott truly unbelievable. Every time he opens his mouth he lies. Everything he said in that statement sounds like a spoilt brat trying to blame siomeone else for his own misdeeds.

Anonymous said...

"wacko" seems a pretty harmless adjective when compared to Paul Keating's recalcitrant Malaysian PM Mahathir?