Tony Abbott: The Finer Points of Idiocy in Public

With the approach of yet another Australian Federal election it becomes the right and privilege of bloggers around the country to bag out the candidates. In accordance, here is the sordid little history of Tony Abbott, and some of the highlights of the two decades he has spent ritualistically assassinating his own public credibility - seemingly without political repercussions bar being nominated as the Coalition candidate for (gulp) our next Prime Minister.

You're laughing already, aren't you, bitch?

Here is a collection of some of Tony's most memorable public statements, foibles, and episodes of apparently total public idiocy.

Back to your Ironing, Woman! (2010)

Tony was having a good old chin-wag with a country local dry-cleaner earlier this year about the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme. Being the sort of guy that he is, Tony thought he'd put in the terms of an ordinary person. This comment was taped:

What the housewives of Australia need to understand, when they're doing the ironing is if they get it done commercially it's going to go up in price, and their own power bills when they switch the iron on are going to go up.

When his comments were criticised for being old-fashioned and sexist, Tony did little to reassure angry women, standing by his comment and claiming that his wife did all the ironing in house. When the predictable backlash occurred, Tony organised a film crew to follow him to a laundromat, where he learned to use an iron for the first time in his life, at the tender age of 52.

The Dying Man is Pulling a Stunt (2007)

Specifically, this guy:

His name was Bernie Banton, and he was dying from advanced asbestosis and mesothelioma. Here's a visual aid to put that into perspective:

Banton was a social justice campaigner representing thousands of workers who had been exposed to asbestos and other dangerous building materials in previous decades. During the lead-up to the 2007 Federal Election, Banton had been compiling an enormous community petition to try to have a new mesothelioma medication added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme - in other words, so that those who needed the drug could afford to get it.

Understanding the delicacy of the situation, Tony accepted to meet Banton at his electoral office and receive the petition - and then basically blew the meeting off cause he was interstate. Rather than apologise, Tony labelled the event as a stunt, and stated;

I know Bernie is very sick, but just because a person is sick doesn't mean that he is necessarily pure of heart in all things.

For the record, Bernie died three days after the election.

Gay People Are Threatening (2010)

Tony has never made it a secret that he feels this way, repeatedly opposing gay marriage, access to IVF for gay couples, and generally any extension of social recognition to homosexual relationships. To this day he remains unashamed of his standpoint, as recently evidenced by the failure of his tongue to communicate with his brain in a 60 Minutes interview. Upon being asked how he felt about homosexuality, Tony replied;

I probably feel a bit threatened... as so many people do.

He "clarified" this comment the following day, stating that:

There is no doubt that (homosexuality) challenges, if you like, orthodox notions of the right order of things.

I suppose the one thing that the guy has going for him here is that he can actually admit he's a bigot. Unfortunately, he seems to think that everyone else is, too.

And it's a shame, cause he would fit in perfectly at Mardi Gras.

Tony Wins! (2002-present)

The Ernie Awards are to a political honour what the Razzies are to the Oscars. M0re specifically, the Ernies are annual awards for Australian men who make the most sexist, misogynistic, or otherwise unhelpful remarks about women. They've even compiled a book of this crap.

Tony, who seems to have a peculiar dislike for women's policy issues, was "honoured" with the 2002 Silver Ernie for Politics, for stating that a paid maternity leave scheme would happen "over this government's dead body!". He has been awarded four "Repeat Offender" Ernies in 2002 and 2005-7, and was also nominated for the Gold Ernie for his 2004 comment that "abortion in Australia has been reduced to a question of the mother's convenience."

There's a hot tip out there that he might well be re-nominated this year. If not for the ironing board remark, then for his bafflingly hypocritical statement to the Australian Women's Weekly that young women should consider their virginity to be a "precious gift" they should not give away lightly. Hypocritical? Well, yes, in light of...

The Phantom Love-Child (2004)

In 2004, a young man who had been adopted as a baby went in search of his biological parents. He found his mother, who directed him to the man she thought was the father - Tony Abbott, who it seemed had fathered a baby boy at the age of 19. Tony found himself in a peculiar and delicate situation - a son he had never met, a media pack swarming around his every door, and the need to reconcile the current scandal with his heavily self-promoted image as a Christian family man.

He ended up using his reconciliation with his son to promote his anti-abortion, pro-adoption stance - conveniently, in the run-up to the parliamentary vote on RU486. He published several mushy interviews expressing his delight in finally meeting his "long-lost son", and condemning how "callow" he was to put the child up for adoption in the first place.

In all the excitement, nobody bothered to wait for the results of the DNA test. By early 2005 it had become apparent that Tony bore no biological relationship to his widely publicised "son". Tony was left with a soiled reputation and no long-lost family members to show for it.

Don't Believe Me (2010)

As though in an attempt not to merely piss all over his credibility but actually stomp it into the ground and bulldoze it into submission, Tony came out with this purler on the ABC's 7:30 Report. Inexplicable failures of grammar and thought processing do little to mask the brilliance of this half-hearted admission to lying during interviews;

Politicians are going to be judged on everything they say, but sometimes, in the heat of discussion, you do go a bit further than you would if it was an absolutely, ah, calm, considered, prepared, scripted remark.

Which is one of the reasons why the, the the statements that need to be taken absolutely as, as gospel truth is those carefully prepared, scripted remarks.

You have it from the horse's mouth.