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Julia Gillard was roundly criticised in the media for deciding to announce that she would be revealing the “real” Julia to the nation. In hindsight, I believe this was one of the shrewdest political moves of her entire campaign. After all, one thing we have not seen is the “real” Tony Abbott. The media has completely and utterly failed to illuminate the public as to just who this man is, what he stands for, and what has made him the man that he is today.
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Well, ladies and gentlemen, may I present you with some light reading before you head off to the polls to cast your vote today. Tony Abbott is a child of Sydney’s leafy North Shore. His father a dentist, his mother a science graduate. He attended St Ignatius, Riverview (a Jesuit college). Tony Abbott found a mentor there in Father Emmet Costello, who instilled in him that politics was “a vocation, a way of giving glory to God in the human realm”. Aged 15, Tony became a great admirer of Santamaria, the founder of the off-shoot DLP (right-wing Catholic splinter group from the Labor party). Santamaria was someone who had doubts about liberal democracy, and wished to return to traditional Catholic values. He has been characterised as having “a touch of the Taliban about him”.
Tony Abbott had a brief sojourn in Oxford and returned home (not without some controversy). He then entered St. Patrick’s seminary in Manly. According Louis Nowra, a respected writer:
..instead of finding a form of Catholicism that featured social engagement, poverty and service to the community, he ( Abbott) found himself surrounded by a strongly homosexual fraternity. A Catholic friend of mine who mixed with St Patrick’s priests said, still with surprise in his voice, that they were ‘the most effeminate men I had ever seen. And this was when the Church unconditionally condemned homosexuality. …like half of the young seminarians, he left before becoming a priest.
I have received some unpublishable information surrounding why he left the seminary.
Later in his political life, Tony Abbott turned to spiritual guidance from Cardinal Pell. Nowra writes:
Like all his mentors, from Santamaria onwards, he hero-worshipped him uncritically. To Abbott, Cardinal Pell is ‘one of the greatest churchmen that Australia has seen.’
Pell is the type of Catholic Abbott likes- someone who excelled at sports, is not introspective and takes a close interest in politics. He is a divisive man who was at the centre of a controversy over his maladroit dealings with victims of sexual abuse by priests…Pell acts as Abbott’s personal confessor.
Indeed, the reason that Abbott has likely been touchy about his close personal friendship with Pell is because the Cardinal pushes hard, like Santamaria did, for Catholic intervention in politics. Abbott has said in the past:
A Minister of the crown is scarcely supposed to abandon his principles simple because he is a minister of the crown. You don’t become an ethnical-free zone just because you are a minister.
Louis Nowra concludes:
the institution that has made him, the Catholic Church has also shaped his principles, so that he finds it difficult to disentangle his religious convictions from his political agenda. Like all his mentors he loathes abortion, IVF, the morning-after-pill and RYU486. He sees abortion as a national tragedy, as he does no-fault divorce…
Throughout his life , Abbott has needed the Church and its teachings sometimes to a desperate degree, because he realizes that without it he would be morally and even psychologically lost. He knows he has personal demons to quell. Between his belfry-bat ears is a coil of such saturnine weirdness that no one, not even his closest friends, would want to unravel it…
I don’t pretend that I can substantiate all of what is said here. Much of this relies on the essay written by Louis Nowra in the journal, “The Monthly” (subscription required). Another article on Tony Abbott’s links to Santamaria can be found in the Jesuit publication, Eureka Street as well as Guy Rundle here, quoting Rundle:
Santa’s little helpers run the Right these days, because they’re the “Last Men” standing. The Protestant liberal-conservative tradition has all but died out as a self-possessed political intellectual strand or dwindled down to Peter Coleman and Alexander Downer, which is the same thing and the mitteleuropean anti-communist phalanx never took any exercise, and checked out early. Tony Abbott, Greg Sheridan, Dennis Shanalamadingdong, Gerard Henderson keep on going, Duracell anti-modernists.
Santa’s little helpers have been assiduous in waging the war by all means necessary. You can get an idea of the worldview by recalling that Sheridan once remarked that his life had meaning because he believed God wanted him to live in Australia and do his work.
As for the controversial elements of Abbott’s past that I have alluded to, obviously there are contentious things I cannot publish for fear of defamation recriminations. However, there are many recent examples which establish Abbott’s entrenched misogyny, including his claim that for Julia Gillard “no doesn’t mean no”. Let’s not forget his charge (later acquitted on lack of evidence) for indecent assault against a 29 year old woman who was trying to give a speech, and I quote:
Helen Elizabeth Wilson, whose age was given as 29, a former student teacher, claimed she was assaulted in October 1977 when she was addressing students at Ku-ring-gai College of Advanced Education in a debate about whether the college should withdraw from the Australian Union of Students (AUS).
She told the North Sydney court that someone had called out: “Why don’t you smile, honey?” Then a youth had touched her on the upper part of her leg.
Mr Abbott, then 20, pleaded not guilty.
The Daily Telegraph report said: “Miss Wilson said as she approached the microphone . . . two youths moved up behind her.
“She said: ‘I had just commenced speaking when I felt a hand between my legs on my lower buttocks. I was wearing jeans. I jumped back, turned around, and saw Tony Abbott laughing about two feet away. The people in the audience began laughing and jeering’, Miss Wilson said.”
I expect to receive some harsh criticism for publishing all of this, but I think this story needs to be told. The media simply hasn’t done its job. If you haven’t already, please peruse this list of 10 Reasons Why You Shouldn’t Vote for Tony Abbott (all supported with primary sources).
Barrie Cassidy, ABC, 10 June 2010:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/10/2923180.htm?site=thedrum
Glenn Milne, ABC, 28 July 2010:
Link …
How the taxpayer helped Tony Abbott flog Battlelines
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2965933.htm
JJ,
Here is an even better video of the Mad Monk caught out lying about meeting with George Pell.
Note the death stare he gives to Tony Jones. Note also how he goes into the ‘cone of silence’ when confronted by the Chaser boys.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvYzLIywCiA
Wow, grasping at straws,
The whispering campaign really is unseemly.
As a former Surry Hills (sydney) resident during the 80s and 90s, when brothels were as prolific as restaurants are now, I am surprised some of the former sex workers haven’t popped up during this election. That people wish to frequent these establishments is their business, but Mr Rabbit was a heterosexual regular including during his stint as NSW Family Services Minister. Which is a matter of public interest.
There is a lot about the person we do not know, except I do know this: he is a lying
hypocrit, no wonder he’s done so well in politics.
Come on DG, all political allegiances aside surely you don’t think for one moment that Abbott deserves to lead the Liberals, let alone the nation. His elevation to Liberal leader is cynicism of the highest order; just as the downing of Rudd and the emplacement of Gillard is. The entire campaign can hardly be described in any positive terms other than the purely opportunistic and political; though the Greens do come out of it looking at least a little more calm and rational, a little more equable against the accusation and counter accusation the two major parties have thrown at one another, not unlike monkeys throwing shit at one another in some dreadfully dysfunctional monkey house. I’m off to find to find that bloke in the barrel with a candle. See if he’s had any luck yet.
Of course you’re right, and I thought the same thing when on again off again on again Johny How de doodie was eventually elected leader of the Libs and then got voted in by a general public who seemed to feel sorry for him getting rejected so many times. As I’ve said before I’m personally not happy with Abbott, at all, but I’m equally unhappy with Gillard, it’s such a dilemma.
Worse the party system is not giving voters the best candidates in a lot of seats, e.g. LNP putting up Wyat Roy, a lazy kid that just doesn’t want to go to work, has no experience in either life or career and has no idea of what the community expects out of a representative or for that matter what the party needs.
The greens do “look” more collected and I think their candidates are more dedicated as a rule to the core values of what they believe the Party stands for than the two major parties which seem for all intents and purposes to be full of career political ladder climbers looking for personal gain using the system to fund and back them.
It’s an election where people just have no real choice in many cases, probably the worst of any election I’ve ever seen.
Its a howler of a mistake putting up Wyatt Roy as a candidates in one of gods waiting rooms isn’t it. As a Liberal mate of mine in Queensland said that you only require an IQ of 90 to be a candidate for the Liberal party in Queensland and that reduces the further north you go.
The kid described Abbott as “authentic”, the use of this BS marketing slogan showing himself to be simply another Liberal mantra-chanter.
If a mantra-chanter is all the people of his electorate want, that’s all they’ve got. They won’t be disappointed. Another conservative empty vessel – making lots of noise, but no sincerity, and basically standing for nothing except making the rich richer at the expense of everyone else.
Well done. Hold your heads high, idiots.
I once knew a lady who had gone to Primary School with George Pell in Ballarat. When he became Cardinal she said ‘oh, dear George, he’s not very bright’.
But he’s goodlooking and speaks well!