BUT as Steve noted last night, their warbling didn’t deter Josh Frydenberg from arriving with a baseball bat of truth and throwing it around like Babe Ruth – or perhaps like Al Capone in The Untouchables. Teamwork. Well said, Treasurer. Of all the putrid acts of official thuggery and dishonesty witnessed this year, the attempt by the Labor Party and its cock-a-hoop journalistic sentinels over the past 48 hours to celebrate the Victorian Premier as a hero is the most revolting of all. It is one of the sickest shindigs in our political history.
Were it not for Daniel Andrews and his dirty, flyblown government, only 88 Australians would have succumbed to coronavirus. That’s 11 for each state and territory. Our small population and island polity were always going to make COVID an easybeat epidemiologically. Governments of both persuasions – including Mr Frydenberg’s – were going to claim credit for this to excuse their panic, then package an economic disaster as a triumph for their respective re-election campaigns. I even remember when that was the amoral sham most rational critics were lamenting. Yes, that was bad enough. But then came the hotel quarantines, the lies, the mates, the cover-up and the carnage. The Premier responsible said yesterday he intended to reward himself not with a beer but a pricier tipple. ‘To me,’ was the presumed toast. You could forgive Scott Morrison for Hawaiian shirt flashbacks and a visceral loathing for the commentary class.
AFP, ICAC old boys say it’s time to spy on the Coalition
It has no power to investigate unless there is already evidence of a crime. That would mean none of the current problems could be investigated — it would virtually mean that no inquiry could ever be commenced.”
– Former NSW ICAC counsel Geoffrey Watson is appalled that a federal anti-corruption body would be hamstrung by… evidence. Once described (by a barrister) as a “a lying c..t,” Mr Watson’s false accusation of corruption against NSW Liberal police minister Mike Gallacher led to the latter’s resignation. Watson himself was officially reprimanded in a parliamentary report as a “hectoring”, “sneering”, “contemptuous”, “bullying”, er, so-and-so.
Watson and former long-serving AFP officer Chris Douglas have explained their interest in a Commonwealth Integrity Commission to the ABC – which publishes stolen classified documents to defame war heroes when it isn’t lying about Catholic Cardinals using the bogus testimony of convicted criminals. Here’s how the ABC itself explains the sudden importance of a “federal ICAC”:
Calls for a federal ICAC have grown louder this year in the wake of a series of explosive revelations at a state level.
The NSW Independent Liquor and Gaming Authority’s inquiry investigating allegations of money laundering at Crown Casino has embroiled former Commonwealth officials who sit on the company’s board.
Most sensational was the recent grilling of NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian by the state ICAC over what she knew about the business dealings of her secret ex-boyfriend, disgraced former MP Daryl Maguire.
No mention of Victoria – the most corrupt state in the Commonwealth – where the hotel quarantine cash-for-knuckleheads affair killed several hundred people; where the police refuse to investigate a mysterious transfer of nearly two million stolen euros in alleged connection to the rigged prosecution of George Pell.
A set-up is underway here and if the Coalition falls for it, they will rue the day. The goal is to create a left-wing spy agency, staff it with zealots and bring down as many LNP governments as possible. The Prime Minister and the Attorney-General should instead push for an inquiry into the ABC’s taxpayer-funded war on its ideological enemies and the extent to which this unending and utterly illegal campaign has been abetted by bodies like – hypothetically – the AFP and Victoria Police.
