{"id":176,"date":"2013-01-05T02:18:56","date_gmt":"2013-01-05T02:18:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/australiansforhonestpolitics.wordpress.com\/?p=176"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:24:26","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:24:26","slug":"the-dishonest-politics-club","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/the-dishonest-politics-club\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Tony Abbott should never be PM."},"content":{"rendered":"

By Margo Kingston
\n<\/a> Source: Independent Australia<\/a>
\n<\/em>January 3rd , 2013<\/p>\n

\"Still<\/a><\/p>\n

AFTER THE PUBLICATION of my book Not Happy, John!<\/em> in 2004, former Liberal Party staffer Christian Kerr, then political correspondent for Crikey<\/a>, told me the \u02bbAustralians for Honest Politics\u02bc chapter was dynamite, \u02bbthe most important\u02bc in the book.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut it won\u02bct get followed up,\u201d I asked him, \u201cwill it?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cNo,\u201d he replied.<\/p>\n

Christian did his best in \u02bbTony Abbott\u2019s unholy dealings with the AEC<\/a>\u2019 \u2014 but Abbott is something of a protected species in Australian politics. When push comes to shove, press gallery heavies circle the wagons around Tony and our supposed electoral watchdogs file him away in the bottom drawer.<\/p>\n

As recently as December 17 last year, The Monthly aptly described<\/a><\/em> \u02bba scandalous lack of curiosity\u02bc in the media about the Ashby scandal \u2014 just the latest attempt by Liberal Party players to use the courts to destroy their political opponents.<\/p>\n

Abbott has relentlessly pursued Prime Minister Gillard over what is, in the end, an allegedly misleading letter she sent \u2013 before entering politics, as a lawyer \u2013 to the Western Australian corporate watchdog. He said she had committed the crime of misleading a government body, while failing to produce the evidence or to refer his allegation to the police. Instead, he demanded that she prove her innocence and promised a judicial inquiry \u2014 once he had taken her job.<\/p>\n

Yet he has not called a press conference \u2013 or even agreed to an interview \u2013 to discuss and answer serious questions about the involvement of senior liberal figures in the Ashby case, and has assiduously avoided accounting for his actions and knowledge about the affair. Last week, for instance, he almost ran from a press conference<\/a> that was ostensibly about the surplus when someone asked him a question about Ashby.<\/p>\n

The Liberals have a long history of using the courts to destroy their political rivals, as Mike Seccombe reported in his \u02bbTricks of the trade<\/a>\u02bc article in the Sydney Morning Herald<\/em> in 2003. They nearly wrecked the Western Australian Democrats, and Abbott\u02bcs backers funded the beginning of the case that would eventually see Hanson sent to jail \u2014 until her harsh conviction was quashed on appeal.<\/p>\n

There are many similarities between the Abbott\/Hanson scandal and the Ashby affair. Both involved moles in the camps of opponents. Both see the use of these moles to take court action designed to financially and politically ruin those rivals. The funding for both stings remains shrouded in mystery. As Party leaders, Howard and Abbott fobbed off questions about what they knew; and as protagonists, Abbott and Brough initially lied about their involvement. And the media, as a whole, does not want to investigate.<\/p>\n

The two chapters of my book about Tony Abbott\u02bcs inaptly named Australians for Honest Politics Trust<\/em> are a character study of the alternative Prime Minister, which I hope Australians of all political stripes will take the time to read. They show he is a serial liar, thinks nothing of misleading a government watchdog, holds ordinary Australians in contempt, and believes his financial backers should remain a secret from the Australian people.<\/p>\n

There are several Liberal frontbenchers, \u201csmall l\u201d liberal and \u201cbig C\u201d conservative, who are strong, ethical, open and worthy of asking the Australian people to lead them. I hope that the Liberal Party will ensure that Abbott is removed as leader, and replaced with one of these women or men, for the sake of all of us.<\/p>\n

Thank you to Penguin for giving Independent Australia<\/em> permission to publish two chapters of Still Not Happy, John! Defending our Democracy<\/em> (2007). For now, we are publishing the PDF\u2019s. IA hopes to have these chapters in e-book format soon. Penguin will also be publishing the entire book as an e-book in the near future.<\/p>\n

\"AbbottLetterToAEC\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Abbott\u2019s initial letter to the AEC about the Australians for Dishonest Politics Trust. Did he mislead a Government agency, and therefore commit a crime, by saying he obtained legal advice before setting up the Trust?
\nCLICK ON THE IMAGE TO READ EXTENSIVE DOCUMENTATION FROM AEC.<\/p>\n

\"AbbottLetterToSharples\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Abbott\u2019s promise to Terry Sharples that he would not be left out of pocket did not, according to him later, entail any promise of monetary compensation.
\nCLICK ON THE IMAGE TO READ MORE DOCUMENTATION RELEASED BY AEC.<\/p>\n

Margo Kingston\u2018s book \u2018Still Not Happy, John!<\/a>\u2019 <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Margo Kingston Source: Independent Australia January 3rd , 2013 AFTER THE PUBLICATION of my book Not Happy, John! in 2004, former Liberal Party staffer Christian Kerr, then political correspondent for Crikey, told me the \u02bbAustralians for Honest Politics\u02bc chapter was dynamite, \u02bbthe most important\u02bc in the book. \u201cBut it won\u02bct get followed up,\u201d I asked him, \u201cwill it?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,3402,59,26,49],"tags":[83,95,124,129,247,2565,358,470],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-2Q","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=176"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/176\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}