John Howard and his minions continue to bray about Kevin Rudd. He isn't honest, etc. etc. Coming from John Howard - he who faced an electoral campaign last election directly challenging his honesty [remember Not Happy John?] - it's all a bit rich and hypocritical.
In her blog in The Australian Caroline Overington hits the nail on the head:
"It is too easy to get cynical about politics in an election year but, from time to time, you read something in the papers that is so hideously hypocritical it makes the toast fall out of your mouth.
Yesterday’s newspapers carried the news that John Howard had “sacrificed” a cabinet minister, Ian Campbell, for - get this - having a 20-minute meeting with a man called Brian Burke.
Now Burke is a dodgy dude, no doubt about it. He’s a former premier of Western Australia who spent time in the slammer, he clearly eats too much and he wears bad hats. The Labor Party once banned all contact with him by any of its members - but he has been out of jail for 10 years and the Liberal Party never had a ban on meeting him.
Still, Campbell, the human services minister, got the boot for seeing him for less than 30 minutes on a matter of some importance to his then environment portfolio. Let’s make the obvious comparison: as far as we know, Burke doesn’t send money to odious regimes. He doesn’t do deals with countries - like, say, Iraq - that Australia is about to invade. We know who did that - it was Australia’s wheat exporter, AWB. They’ve admitted it and apologised for it.
Two of John Howard’s most senior colleagues, Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile, had ministerial responsibility for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at the time of the Iraq kickback scandal. They admit that they were told and told - and told again - that AWB was up to its neck in corruption."
In her blog in The Australian Caroline Overington hits the nail on the head:
"It is too easy to get cynical about politics in an election year but, from time to time, you read something in the papers that is so hideously hypocritical it makes the toast fall out of your mouth.
Yesterday’s newspapers carried the news that John Howard had “sacrificed” a cabinet minister, Ian Campbell, for - get this - having a 20-minute meeting with a man called Brian Burke.
Now Burke is a dodgy dude, no doubt about it. He’s a former premier of Western Australia who spent time in the slammer, he clearly eats too much and he wears bad hats. The Labor Party once banned all contact with him by any of its members - but he has been out of jail for 10 years and the Liberal Party never had a ban on meeting him.
Still, Campbell, the human services minister, got the boot for seeing him for less than 30 minutes on a matter of some importance to his then environment portfolio. Let’s make the obvious comparison: as far as we know, Burke doesn’t send money to odious regimes. He doesn’t do deals with countries - like, say, Iraq - that Australia is about to invade. We know who did that - it was Australia’s wheat exporter, AWB. They’ve admitted it and apologised for it.
Two of John Howard’s most senior colleagues, Alexander Downer and Mark Vaile, had ministerial responsibility for the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade at the time of the Iraq kickback scandal. They admit that they were told and told - and told again - that AWB was up to its neck in corruption."
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