A Guide To The Australian Pandemic - The Last One And This One

What To Expect In An Australian Pandemic: Villages, Towns, Cities Quarantined...Churches, Schools, Workplaces Shut Down...Social Chaos...Food And Medical Shortages...Normal Life Ceases...100,000+ Australians Dead...Mobile Healthcheck Teams...Die In Your Homes

By Darryl Mason

Tony Abbott was Australia's Health Minister when Avian Flu threatened to become a global pandemic, in late 2005. The Howard Govt took the threat, and the advice of the World Health Organisation, seriously enough. They prepared. They had plans, and made them public. There was a Influenza Pandemic Worst Case Scenario and Tony Abbott was one of the ministers dispatched to the media to Get The Message Out.

Which he did. In some nighmarish late night TV interviews about "The Biological Tsunami", Tony Abbott stepped his way through the "inevitable" and very deadly influenza pandemic Australians would have to eventually face, and deal with.

If you thought he was rough as guts as Prime Minister, in 2005 Health Minister Tony Abbott was even more raw. He spilled on his knowledge from briefings on what The Worse Case Pandemic Scenario would look like in a kind of shocked awe. The scope of how daily life would be transformed in Australia during the "inevitable" influenza pandemic in the 21st century seemed to overload his mind.

"We don't know when a pandemic might happen, but if one does happen it will be a public health disaster, the magnitude of which this country has not seen at least since 1919 when we had the last flu pandemic."

Abbott expected a new, more virulent influenza pandemic in Australia to become a "Public Health Disaster" when he was Health Minister. He admitted to this, on TV. How prepared is the Morrison Govt today, in 2020, for a COVID-19 pandemic? 

On 'Australia During A Pandemic', Tony Abbott in 2005 blurted a The Scenario the Americans had put together (presumably via the Centre for Disease Control) and on which he said he'd been thoroughly briefed:

"(in the scenario) medical facilities couldn't cope and there was widespread social breakdown, as people abandoned their posts concerned about their health. 

"Now this is a pretty scary scenario, and just so people don't think it is entirely in the realm of science fiction - back in 1919, Australia had a Spanish flu pandemic outbreak and that killed some 13,000 Australians, in a then population of about 4 million and at different times in the first half of 1919, schools were closed, churches were closed, places of public gathering were off limits. Normal life had pretty much ceased in large parts of Australia. We have little folk memory of this though..."

The actual Australian death toll may have been closer to 25,000, by the time the virus seemed to have faded away in the early 1920s, as human immune systems adapted.

In 1919, when at least 15,000 Australians died from the virus, the annual death rate of the nation jumped by 25%.

But Abbott was right about the rest. Most Australian families have no, or little generational memory, of 'The Great Influenza/Spanish Flu' Australian Pandemic 100 years ago. It was never up for much discussion around the dinner tables.

When 'The Great Influenza' reached Australia in 1919, schools, churches, concert halls, theatres, train stations, public squares, pubs, were all locked down. Farms, factories and city business districts ground to a halt as people fled to the country to escape the pandemic. They only succeeded in transporting the virus to rural Australia, where it killed as effortlessly as it had in heavily populated city centres.

What did "abandoning their posts" actually mean in 1919? It meant police, soldiers, firefighters, ambulance drivers, nurses, medical professionals eventually having to choose between caring for sick family members at home, or those in public care. Or leaving when they themselves became sick.

Abbott raised this the 'abandonment of posts' in 2005 because the American Worst Case Scenario proposed the same would happen in the 21st Century, in the United States and Australia.

'The Great Influenza' or falsely named 'Spanish Flu', swept the globe from 1918 to early 1920. Quarantine systems in Australia did delay the arrival of a vast spread of the new virus for a few months.

More than 300 Australian soldiers who had somehow survived the European slaughter fields of World War I died from the influenza pandemic within weeks or months of finally making it home.

The extraordinary global death toll as more than one-third of the world's population became infected, killing some 80 million or more people, saw the loss of so many essential workers, doctors, hospital workers, nurses, police, public servants, teachers, production line workers, welders, craftspeople and children, the impacts rapidly transformed 20th century society in the West, and saw the surviving workers in the industrialised world become, suddenly, very valuable and not so disposable anymore. The politics of all Western countries were impacted by The Great Influenza, not only because of the death tolls, economic impacts, but because politicians, their advisers, their donors, died along with the rest of the people.

There was little warning before The Great Influenza exploded into reality. Unlike most flu epidemics in the 1800s, this one killed without discrimination. It laid waste to infants, old people, healthy young men.

Here's how The Times of London dealt with the rising panic about the spread of The Great Influenza in early 1919, shortly before the virus rapidly killed 200,000+ across the United Kingdom:

If you caught The Great Influenza H1N1 virus, death could come within a matter of days. Your lungs filled with fluid, as your immune system battled the invader and overdid the defences. Survivors described H1N1-affected lungs as 'like trying to breathe through wet sand.' There was no cure.

Back then, for the first year, they didn't even know what exactly was killing millions of people. Was it a virus? Many experts thought it was a bacterium. A conspiracy theory raged in the the Allied nations of World War I that the Germans had invented a biological bomb in revenge for losing 'The Great War'.

In 1919-1920, doctors, hospitals, morgues and graveyards were overwhelmed by the endless casualties. In the US city of Philadelphia, 5000 people died in one week. Mass rioting broke out, whole streets full of cramped dwellings were torched and corpses were piled in mounds a dozen bodies high. They were tossed into carts and transported to mass burial sites. This was the United States in the age of cinema and radio.

In some European cities, entire towns were burned to the ground, with the dying still in their homes, to try and contain the spread of the virulent flu. Ships at sea were blocked from entering ports and became "floating caskets." Other ships were torched in harbours before passengers could get to land.

'The Great Influenza' is believed now to have originated in animals (chickens and/or pigs) but mutated quickly and crossed over into humans. A Kansas farm next to a military base is now often cited as The Great Influenza's Ground Zero.

The influenza virus mutating, plus a lack of capable medical facilities, unsanitary hospitals, towns and cities, a shortage of doctors and nurses, also helped the 1918-19 death toll to move into the tens of millions, globally.

And yet, there are few countries in the world today that can honestly claim to have a universal public health system that could cope with a full-blown influenza pandemic, like COVID-19. There aren't enough hospital beds, or isolation wards.

In Australia in 1918-1920, after hospitals were overwhelmed, as was common around the world, the infected were quarantined in their homes and left to live or die. You were either going to make it, or not.

The way govts of 2020 will cope with a COVID-19 Pandemic are not so distant from 100 years ago. As we've already seen in China, Japan, Korea and Iran, the United States and Italy, and other countries, by mid-February, 2020. Home quarantines and 1000s isolated in 'Medical Care Camps' outside of major cities has quickly became normal, as they did in 1919. And now, as back then, deaths outside of hospitals or medical facilities are forgotten, missed or ignored, left off the official numbers.

In one late night, chilling interview, in 2005, Health Minister Tony Abbott revealed the federal govt expected and feared a 'beyond normal' flu pandemic could kill more than 100,000 Australians: 

"A pandemic if it hits Australia and it is of the severity of the 1918 outbreak, will potentially kill many thousands of people and it's hard to imagine any terrorist attack - short of a nuclear bomb in a major city - that would have a comparable impact. 

"Back in the time of the Spanish flu there was much less international travel, people coming to Australia had to arrive by ship. Thanks to the then Commonwealth quarantine authorities we were quite effectively protected for many months. Certainly New Zealand, which put a much less stringent system of quarantine in place, was impacted very early and had about double the death rate of the flu outbreak in Australia, which is why in New Zealand they have a stronger folk memory of this than we do. 

"We have plans for an escalating health response, including mobile teams, home quarantine, home treatment, so that only the very serious cases have to go to public hospitals. We would certainly be alerting people to the potential dangers of doing certain sorts of things. Whether we needed to close down public institutions would depend upon the virulence of the virus and who was most susceptible to it."

In 2020, it's become a bit more obvious the limits to which the spread of a highly contagious new influenza virus can be contained, by any method, particularly when it can hide away inside a new human host for up to a month, rendering the host infectious before symptoms begin to show, like the COVID-19 strain is now believed to do. And this is all before the new virus has undergone any dramatic mutation. 'The Great Influenza' began its killing spree in 1918. The vast majority of deaths came in 1919, after the H1N1 virus had mutated.

If it feels like some govts are already in a 'Hey Man, Flu's Gonna Do What The Flu's Gotta Do' headspace, that may not be far wrong. 

Maybe the biggest cities in the US, Europe, Australia, the UK are planning to shut down for a month or two or more, and are prepared to take a massive economic hit, like China has. Maybe the 2020 Olympics will be cancelled. 

Or maybe these govts won't do that. Maybe they won't inflict extended mass disruption on their people and their economies.

Maybe our Western govts already at 'Flu's Gonna Do What Flu's Gotta Do.' because some of their experts and advisers are telling them that even shutting down cities is an an action that will, ultimately, have only a limited effect on stopping the new influenza strain eventually reaching most people on the planet.

As the COVID-19 influenza virus clearly intends to do. 

---------

Tony Abbott interview quotes, September, 2005:

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/lateline/tony-abbott-speaks-on-the-threat-of-avian-flu/2103424

"We're Being Governed By Idiots"

'Victory Day' front pages like this just look downright ridiculous now:

The Abbott Government disaster/fiasco (take your pick) drags on and on and on. The Australian Financial Review's Laura Tingle in absolutely scathing form:

"we don't seem to quite be able to take in the growing realisation that we actually are being governed by idiots and fools, or that this actually has real-world consequences.

We finish the week with a Prime Minister who has lost his bundle and is making policy and political calls that go beyond reckless in an increasingly panicked and desperate attempt to save himself; a government that has not just utterly lost its way but its authority; and important policy debates left either as smouldering wrecks or unprosecuted.

At issue is not just whether Tony Abbott loses his leadership, or whether the budget bottom line deteriorates even further, but signs that our political system really is in deep trouble – not as a polemic point, but in a very real sense. 

............................

"Idiot" is the word that comes most often in Labor's focus groups when voters are asked about the Prime Minister. And lest you're thinking this is just what Labor would spin isn't it, we had a confirmation this week from focus group polling conducted for Fairfax by one of Australia's most respected focus group pollsters, Visibility's Tony Mitchelmore, with the small caveat being that these voters didn't describe Tony Abbott as an idiot but a fool.

Tony Abbott has already lost Western Sydney. And after Rupert Murdoch's Daily Telegraph and right wing radio ranters worked so hard in 2013 to help win the area for him:

Voters in Western Sydney – selected because they had switched their vote from Labor to Liberal at the 2011 NSW election – described the Prime Minister as "incompetent, an international embarrassment and a fool".

These perceptions are not just a problem for Tony Abbott and his future, but for the broader Coalition, given that the government's conduct in the last couple of weeks can only leave voters with the idea that the idiocy stretches well beyond the Prime Minister's office.

 Worth A Full Read

WHAT WAS HE THINKING? PM Abbott Instructs Terrorists Where To Strike

Tony Abbott, Parliament, October 2014 (image via Twitter)

Australia still hasn't suffered a terrorist attack on our soil, and everybody agrees that is both fortunate and a very good thing indeed. But in the wake of a 'lone wolf' attack on Canada's parliament, PM Tony Abbott has been ramping up The Fear, with his near constant curious smirk, trumpeting, 'We Could Be Next.'

This morning on 3AW radio, Abbott made a clear and direct suggestion to potential terrorists where they could strike in Australia, for both impact and lack of security. Does he want terror to happen here? What the hell was he thinking? Was he even thinking at all?

PM Tony Abbott, 3AW, Oct 24, 2014:

"I suppose to extremist fanatics (the Canberra War Memorial) could therefore be a target. There's the Last Post at our War Memorial every day and I guess if someone wanted to do something gruesome that's the kind of thing that could be looked at." 

 He finished the interview by stating as prime minister he was the minister responsible for National Security.

Now that is scary.

Turnbull: Bolt Is "Unhinged" And "Demented"

The Herald Sun is now trying to recast extremist Andrew Bolt as a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Good luck

By Darryl Mason

Finally, Malcolm Turnbull has said out loud what I've been writing here on this blog for almost eight years.

Murdoch's Andrew Bolt is "unhinged" and "demented."

Tell us something we don't know.

Turnbull: 

“...it borders on the demented to string together a dinner with Clive Palmer and my attending as the Communications Minister the launch by a cross-party group of friends of the ABC and say that that amounts to some kind of threat or challenge to the Prime Minister.

“It is quite unhinged. Now, Mr Bolt is fond of attacking what he regards as the government’s enemies in the media, principal amongst whom of course he numbers the ABC. I don’t think you would see anything as crazy as that on the ABC.

“Mr Bolt, he proclaims loudly that he is a friend of the government. Well with friends like Bolt, we don’t need any enemies.’

A split within the Liberal Party has been rumbling for months, as PM Abbott continues to plummet in the polls, and he and Treasurer Joe Hockey's extremist Budget 2014-2015 is rejected by an ever growing number of Australians.

Abbott has taken the right wing extremism of Andrew Bolt, The Australian and turd basket lobby group The IPA to the Australian public, has acted on their demands, has echoed their rhetoric, and the Australian public has been repulsed. Not all Australians, but certainly enough to cause the non-right wing nutters of the Liberal Party and their Nationals coalition partners to get nervous indeed. Many Liberal Party backbenchers, for example, are now wondering if Toxic Tony is going to lose them their seats at the next federal election in 2016, or even sooner.

Turnbull well knows that he doesn't need Murdoch media, or Bolt's support, to become prime minister, or to become a popular prime minister. Murdoch's media blew their wad going all out to get Tony Abbott elected PM, and Bolt is seriously tainted by his declared friendship with Abbott. How can anyone trust anything he has to say about Abbott, or Abbott's agenda, when he is known as a serial defender of his pal?

Turnbull's outburst against Andrew Bolt was sparked by a Bolt column today linking Turnbull to Clive Palmer, after their 'secret meeting' dinner in Canberra, and Bolt painted the pair as united against Bolt's buddy Tony Abbott:

Bolt smells the stench of Abbott's impending political death in the air and is trying to head Turnbull off at the pass, questioning his loyalty and trying to rally Abbott supporters in the Coalition against Turnbull and Palmer.

MegaFail.

Turnbull responded to Bolt's conspiracy theory in the stunning doorstop, quoted at the top, with the media a few hours ago. And everything exploded.


Fairfax media, rivals to Murdoch's NewsCorp, home of Bolt, unleashed with obvious glee.

The Australian Financial Review:

Philip Coorey in AFR:

Malcolm Turnbull has labelled columnist Andrew Bolt demented and unhinged after the leading conservative cheerleader suggested the Communications Minister was undermining Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Mr Turnbull told journalists in Parliament on Monday that Mr Bolt’s theories were damaging the government.

Mr Turnbull was incensed on Sunday when Mr Bolt, while interviewing Mr Abbott on his weekly TV show, asked the Prime Minister: “Now, why is Malcolm Turnbull wooing Clive Palmer on his own? It looks like he’s got his eye on your job.”

This was a reference to a casual dinner in Canberra last week with Mr Turnbull, Mr Palmer, Treasurer Secretary Martin Parkinson and businessmen John Fast and Tom Harley.

The participants all claimed it was a spontaneous and harmless gathering but it spiked paranoia inside the Coalition because Mr Palmer has been refusing to even talk to anyone else in the Coalition until he is given what he considers ample resources.

In his newspaper column on Monday, Mr Bolt continued the attack on Mr Turnbull, saying the dinner sent “an unmistakeable message to Liberal MPs:

“Replace Abbott with Turnbull as prime minister and Maybe Palmer will play ball’’.

Mr Bolt further accused Mr Turnbull of giving comfort to the enemy by launching a new parliamentary group of friends of the ABC.

 The Sydney Morning Herald:

Matthew Knott:

News Corp commentator Andrew Bolt's leadership speculation "borders on the demented" and is ''quite unhinged", says Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Mr Turnbull's dinner with Mr Palmer sparked fears among some in the Coalition that he was attempting to destabilise Mr Abbott's leadership, according to reports.

"It borders on the demented to string together a dinner with Clive Palmer and my attending, as the Communications Minister, the launch by a cross-party group of friends of the ABC and say that that amounts to some kind of threat or challenge to the Prime Minister," Mr Turnbull told reporters on Monday.

"It is quite unhinged. Now, Mr Bolt is fond of attacking what he regards as the government's enemies in the media, principal amongst whom of course he numbers the ABC. I don't think you would see anything as crazy as that on the ABC.

"I just have to say to Mr Bolt, he proclaims loudly that he is a friend of the government. Well with friends like Bolt, we don't need any enemies."

On Monday, Mr Bolt told Fairfax Media: ''It's a great shame and quite telling that Malcolm Turnbull attacks someone he calls the government's media friend with far more vitriol than I can recall him ever attacking one of the government's media enemies.

''This fits a pattern. No doubt he [Turnbull] will expand on this in his next Q & A appearance with Tony Jones.''

What a prissy, sooky reply from Bolt. But then, what else could you expect?

Bolt's readership is dropping away, his blog comment count is a shadow of his glory days and his TV show just can't seem to find any new viewers.

What Abbott is realising, and Bolt probably already knew, is that there is an extremely limited audience and pool of voters in Australia for IPA-style extremism. Bolt can't find more viewers and readers because he's fully tapped the market available.

What Turnbull understands is that there are far more 'soft conservatives' than extremist conservatives, like Bolt, like the IPA, like The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell.

Turnbull knows he can win back a huge slab of Liberal Party voters who feel done over by Abbott since the 2013 election and are now rejecting Budget 2014-2015.

And Turnbull is right.

The action over Abbott's tenuous leadership will grow only more heated from here on in.

UPDATE: The Abboot-Turnbull-Bolt fiasco makes it to Parliament:




From The Orstrahyun Archive...



 2009: The Last Time Andrew Bolt Went To War On Turnbull To Save Abbott

Andrew Bolt: I Don't Know How Twitter Works, But Its Freedom Scares Me

Seriously, What A Fuckwit - Bolt's Biggest Shriek For Attention Yet

Bolt's Reality Meltdown Over Fukushima

Abbott On D-Day Anniversary: Now Can We Get Rid Of The Carbon And Mining Tax?

By Darryl Mason

Australia's PM Tony Abbott, or 'Toxic Tony' as he is becoming known, used the 70th anniversary of D-Day landings in Europe during World War 2 to talk up his agenda of cutting the carbon tax and mining tax. And he used images of Australian World War 2 veterans to do it.

This is a media release issued around midday on Sunday, June 1, 2014:

Here's the transcript of the above:

A Message From The Prime Minister - 70th Anniversary Of The D-Day Landings

June 1, 2014

"This week the world will commemorate the 70th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

The D-Day landings changed the course of human history.

As part of the commemoration, I will join join seven Australians who were there 70 years ago.

Over 5000 Australians were involved - including 2500 air force personnel who provided air support for the Allied landings.

Following the D-Day commemorations, I will be traveling to Canada and France and will be joined by Australian business leaders.

My message to overseas investors is that Australia is open for business.

The Government's Economic Action Strategy to lower tax, cut red tape and encourage trade will improve the competitiveness of business - so that we can build a stronger Australia.

We welcome investment and we are making investment more attractive by scrapping the carbon tax and the mining tax, cutting 50,000 pages of red tape, and ending the 'analysis paralysis' on major projects.

Our international partners can see that our Budget is again under control, we are tackling debt and deficits and we are serious about building a strong and prosperous economy.

This year Australia hosts the G20 summit to encourage growth around the world and I will be advancing that cause during this trip.

The United States, Canada and France are long standing friends. We stood together at D-Day, we trade every day and we have always shared a commitment to democracy, to enterprise and to people's right to be free."

See the way Abbott has used World War 2 bravery and sacrifice to set up the next part of the media release? This is called 'activating emotional triggers.' Mention World War 2, trigger emotions, then deliver your political agenda.

It's demented.

And this is the re-issued press release....

....note it has backdated to May 31, to give the impression that this was the intended media release, to fit in with Abbott government MPs now trying to claim the 'D-Day To Carbon Tax' release was "just a draft." The reissue has been stripped of his blatant anti-carbon tax and anti-mining tax agenda items and business-related rhetoric.

The original media release was not "just a draft", it was issued to 1000s of journalists and other media around the world, direct from the Prime Minister's Office.

The other proof it wasn't "just a draft" is the fact that PM Abbott actually recorded a YouTube video of his media release, and it included historic photos of World War 2 veterans, before switching over to his political agenda and right-wing propaganda.

That video, also titled 'A Message From The Prime Minister - The 70th Anniversary Of The D-Day Landings' was posted and made public, and links publicising it were sent out on Twitter and Facebook. It was only after Twitter lit up in shock and disgust, the video was retitled and then finally pulled.

The title was changed to 'A Visit To France...' but the original title remained the redo, as seen above, and in Google search, and archives. Here's a copy of that original video:



The original media release is a perfect example of tawdry, cheap and cynical exploitation of World War 2 and its veterans by the prime minister. Our Australian veterans. That the Prime Minister's Office is trying to spin Abbott's way out of this disgusting use of veterans to push his political agenda just makes the whole thing even worse.

I spent every Saturday for almost three years, with a wonderful, kind man who was at the D-Day landings, and all this makes me feel extremely ill. He's gone now, but I can only imagine his reaction at seeing Australia's prime minister exploit his sacrifice and the sacrifice of his friends and colleagues in this crude, tacky way.

If you still don't get it, Abbott was using words and imagery of brave men from World War 2 to trigger an emotional reaction in the reader, and viewer, of his written and video media release.

This is an ugly, utterly cynical PR technique to soften you up with emotional triggers, so that what follows - his agenda relating to the axing of the carbon and mining taxes, cutting of red tape and "open for business" propaganda - will lock into your emotions, will etch his messages into your thoughts and memory. This is why the 'D-Day To The Carbon Tax' media release begins and ends with lines about the D-Day landings and World War 2.

The veterans got 5 lines, his right wing, IPA think-tank propaganda got six paragraphs, in a release headlined '70th Anniversary Of The D-Day Landings.'

It was an attempt to purposely link events from World War 2 with his current agenda, and make you feel less opposed to his plans, and his Budget. And also to pressure his political opponents to dropping their opposition to his policies.

It wasn't a "blunder."

It was extremely purposeful.

They did exactly what they intended to do, Abbott read it all aloud in a video, and his office only changed it all around when people were literally repulsed and sickened.

Think about the political agenda, the PR techniques, the emotional triggering, behind all this the next time a politician tries to use past wars to ram through whatever the people are currently opposed to. It's a foul, odious and downright dirty trick. Exploiting war veterans to push unpopular political agendas has been used before, and no doubt it will be used again, as long as politicians aren't held to account and made to pay for this kind of emotional abuse.

It's hard to believe Tony Abbott hasn't announced his resignation.

Instead, he's going to tour World War 2 cemeteries and memorials in Europe, and pose with veterans for photos and hold media conferences to cash-in further, to further plunder the D-Day anniversary for his political ends.

'This is the way it's always been,' some might say, 'this is what politicians do.' That doesn't make it right.

They will stop doing it, when the public says, "Enough."

(Images and screengrabs via Twitter)


From The Orstrahyun Archive....

Tony Abbott's Gruesome Attack On A Dying Man

Tony Abbott: What A Scumbag Part One

Tony Abbott: What A Scumbag Part Two

Abbott Threatens "Very Dire Consequences" For Australians If They Don't Vote Howard

Abbott Attacks Australians For Demanding The Very Best From Their Politicians

Stop The Hysteria, Demands Hysterical Murdoch Media

By Darryl Mason

Across Rupert Murdoch's Australian newspaper and online news empire, panic is taking hold.

After campaigning so hard, so furiously, so absurdly for the Abbott government to win last September's election - to the point where even Liberal voters were saying, "I've had enough of this biased crap" - many of Murdoch's political commentators are now desperately trying to stem the terminal decline of the Abbott government in order to salvage what's left of their own reputations.

There's so many examples to choose from....

First, a quick refresher. After shredding prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd for almost 30 straight months on every mistake, misstep and triviality they could find,  or invent, most of Murdoch's newspapers ran front pages like the one below just before polling day:

Considering this front page was also a poster on display outside of hundreds of newspapers, it was more like Liberal Party bunting.

Now, as PM Abbott racks up popularity poll numbers below that of Toronto's crack smoking mayor, Rob Ford (this is actually true), Murdoch political commentators are screeching foul because other journalists are exposing all manner of apparently dodgy dealings and 'thanks for your support' favours and questionable fundraising adventures from the Liberal Party.

And Abbott critics and non-Murdoch media also have the damn hide to republish the endless quotes of Tony Abbott proclaiming variations of 'No New Taxes' and 'No Cuts To Pensions' and every other grinning lie he told to help get himself over the line, and win just that little bit of extra support he needed in a handful of electorates to become prime minister.

How dare they! How bloody dare they hold him to account.

And Murdoch columnists, or Liberal Party support team members, or whatever they're called now days, are plenty outraged that anyone would even think to ask if Tony Abbott's daughters might have somehow benefited from their father's Murdoch media-sponsored rise to The Lodge.

'Don't bring my family into politics,' Tony Abbott responded to claims one daughter may have scored a choice $60,000 design study scholarship, and job, thanks to a key supporter, and friendly donor, of the prime minister.

Do not bring Tony's family into politics.

Only he may he do that. As we saw for countless days during the 2013 election campaign when his daughters became almost permanent fixtures by his side.

All this being held to account stuff, and being asked the tough questions, and trivia-based mockery, has gone too far. Not to mention the Budget 2014 disaster. No, really, don't mention it. A budget bonanza of cruelty and misery so extreme that even Clive Palmer's suggestion to junk the whole thing and start again is looking like a smart move.

All in all, Sunday 'Australia Needs Tony' Telegraph political columnist Samantha Maiden has had just about enough, thank you very much:

image via @NewsAustralia

Let's take a closer look at that 'story':

“The question is, is everyone contributing equally,” Emma Alberici kept asking on ABC Lateline Friday night.

Who says that’s the question?

The budget is not meant to be a utopian wealth redistribution program.

Well, certainly not a conservative party budget anyway.

“Poorest families pay most in budget,” screamed the headlines. “How the budget pain is unfairly shared.” “Abbott budget to make Australia more unequal.”

Never mind how fatuous the idea of a budget of “equality” when the aim is to rescue the economy from a death spiral which includes $1billion a month in interest payments.

A 'Budget Of Equality'. Where the hell did Australians get that stupid idea? Time to come clean:

Admittedly, the equality meme was fuelled by the government’s own claim that its deficit reduction levy on high income earners was an “equity” measure, to “share the pain”.

So it was the Abbott government's fault. Abbott and Hockey talked about equality and equity and sharing the pain. They did it.

It was a threadbare argument, and opened a savage line of attack

OK, so the Abbott government is to blame for Australians thinking the budget would be about equality and 'sharing the pain', plus they're also responsible for 'opening the savage line of attack' they're now drowning in and which Maiden is so outraged by.


What these Murdoch columnists are bleating, in short, is:

LEAVE TONY ABBOTT ALONE!

And we all know that isn't going to happen.

The Murdoch media made its mission to obliterate any remaining respect the general public might have bad for the office of prime minister when Gillard and Rudd were taking turns as PM, and they set the new rules for just how petty and absurd and ridiculous media attacks on a prime minister could be. Just how low they could sink.

Like raising holy hell because Julia Gillard was photographed knitting, for a feature in a women's magazine. That hysteria-tinged knitting coverage in the Murdoch media lasted for days.

Now they want everyone to lay off.

They want the rest of the media to turn down the heat on Abbott and Hockey and their miserable budget.

It's not going to happen.

They know it's not going to happen.

So they'll just whine and plead, presumably, for what remains of Abbott's time as prime minister (gone by August, 2014 perhaps?), and haughtily demand everyone else stop stooping to the levels they did. On a daily basis. For years.


There's a lot of pressure on Murdoch's Sydney Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph these days, let alone the rest of the shuddering empire. Advertisers are jumping ship, and they've been forced to plug all-too-obvious ad gaps in the newspapers with double page spreads advertising their own online news subscription offerings. Not just here and there, almost every single day.

The fact is, many Murdoch columnists, besides the obvious ones like Andrew Bolt, have trashed their reputations barracking openly for Abbott for the past two years. And now they're paying the price. And their newspapers are paying the price, literally. Sales of the Daily Telegraph have plunged by some 60,000 copies a day since they became Abbott's support team.

And now their hero is going down in flames.

This Newspoll box sits on the front page of The Australian's website like a flaming bag of turds.

And tweets like this shocker, showing Labor's Bill Shorten leading Abbott as preferred prime minister....

....are distributed heavily across Twitter and Facebook and other social media. Even people who voted Liberal at the 2013 election share this info with their friends as they rail furiously in Facebook updates against Abbott, laugh bitterly over #MorePopularThanAbbott memes and tweets and sigh, bitterly, about how betrayed by the budget they now feel. The vast majority of Australians clearly feel betrayed:

The Murdoch media can't hide this stuff, they can't write it off as "polling trivia" or make it go away anymore.

It simply won't go away.

They are not "in control of the narrative" anymore.

Facebook and Twitter is. And these forums can't be controlled. Or tamed.
 
Hard times.

I'll leave it at that for now, but I just want to include two more images that billboard just how quickly the Abbott government has self-immolated.

First the 'We Won!' front page from Murdoch's Courier Mail front page after Election Day, Sept 2013.

And this image from today's Murdoch Adelaide Advertiser:

The political Circus Isn't Over after all, it would seem, there's just a bunch of different clowns in control of the careening clown car. For a short while anyway.


Talk of who could replace Tony Abbott as leader of the Liberal Party, and prime minister of Australia, has already begun to filter through the Australian media. Only eight months into his prime ministership. It's hard to think of another prime minister who has fallen so fast and so hard.

Does anyone really believe Tony Abbott will still be prime minister when Federal Election 2016 hurls into view?
 
Didn't think so.

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 Barnaby Joyce: Tony Abbott Is Like Kennedy, Churchill

Barnaby Joyce: Abbott Is Like Churchill, Kennedy

Nationals comedy relief Barnaby Joyce has claimed prime minister Tony Abbott is a lot like Winston Churchill and John F Kennedy. Sorry if that made you spit coffee all over your screen.

The Australian Financial Review treats this claim by Joyce with the respect it deserves, by running the Winky Abbott pic on the story:

From the Australian Financial Review:

"I'm not going to get too grandiose about the budgetary situation, but if you look back through history to the people we admire, they're not the ones who were initially popular but the ones who foresaw a problem and dealt with it," Mr Joyce said.

"You look at the Churchills or if you look at the Kennedys, you look at the people ... as people of great worth.

"They're the people who made hard decisions ... not the people who sort of oscillated and sort of rolled around in the paddock like political tumbleweed."

A 'political tumbleweed'. He's probably going to regret putting that image in peoples' minds when they think of Tony Abbott.

'Abbott like Kennedy' is almost as absurd as the time Andrew Bolt declared Peter Costello was "the people's Messiah".

Almost.

Meanwhile, Abbott has demanded Liberal Party MPs get out there and do a better job of selling the most hated Budget in four decades. Good luck with that:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has called on his coalition colleagues to step up their defence of the budget.

The government has faced public demonstrations, angry talkback callers and a drop in opinion poll support since the release of its first budget last week.
Coalition MPs have also publicly and privately expressed concerns about aspects of it.

"It is the job of every coalition member and senator to level with the Australian people and listen to them," Mr Abbott told reporters in Sydney on Friday.

Rumours abound that Treasurer Joe Hockey hates his own budget, and that many of the harsher financial attacks on pensioners, the elderly, the disabled and the unemployed were 'forced on him.' Well, of course he would want people to think that. He still believes he could be Liberal Party leader, or even prime minister, one day.

But it is interesting that most Australians, and the media in general, seem to refer to Budget 2014, as 'Abbott's Budget' not 'Hockey's Budget'.

Hockey is no doubt very happy that is the case.

Howard Faced Gun Owners, Abbott Hides From Students

Foreign minister Julie Bishop confronted by student protestors in Sydney last week

 When prime minister John Howard introduced new laws to restrict ownership of certain firearms, in the wake of the Port Phillip massacre, he at least had the guts to stand his ground and face down protestors. Even if he did wear a bullet proof vest at a public event where protestors converged.

John Howard faces protestors in 1996, pic by Ray Strange

Prime minister Tony Abbott is pushing a budget that will force students to incur huge debts (with compounded interest) for even the most basic degrees, laying the ground for the eventual near full privatisation of Australia's universities. But Abbott cuts and runs when he has to face students unhappy with this decision.

The Prime Minister cancelling his trip to Geelong over security fears was a ploy to make students look like spoiled brats, the National Union of Students said.

Tony Abbott and Education Minister Christopher Pyne were due to visit a research facility at Deakin University today -- but cancelled on advice from the Australian Federal Police.
“I think the Prime Minister and Minister Pyne are trying to make it look like students are violent rabble rousers who are out to cause trouble and that’s absolutely not the case at all,” said NUS president Deanna Taylor.

Ms Taylor said Mr Abbott was “obviously scared of facing up to students” over the Budget.

A tiny minority of allegedly violent protestors is the excuse for Abbott and Pyne cutting and running. 

Ms Taylor said students protesting today did not have access to the corridors of power and were making it clear they were upset and fearful over the government’s plans.

She said Mr Abbott and Mr Pyne had a “hidden agenda and vested interest in making (students) look like spoiled brats who don’t know how good they’ve got it”.

Greens senator Richard Di Natale said the security fears were a furphy.

“He was a bully in opposition and now he has shown himself to be a coward in government,” he said last night.

“If you’re going to wield the axe so brutally you owe it to the people to front up and explain yourself. The least he can do is put up with a few noisy protesters.”

Abbott claims he didn't want to be part of "a riot":

Prime Minister Tony Abbott says he cancelled a visit to a university to avoid what he predicted would be a riot on national television...

Mr Abbott told Fairfax Radio it was about not giving the protesters what they wanted, “which is a riot on national television”.

He played down the protests pointing to his days as a student activist at Sydney University when protests and counter-protests were regarded as sport.
“I think they were looking forward to a big rumble today,” he said.

Labor frontbencher Richard Marles, whose electorate covers Geelong:

“security measures can always be managed”.

“At the end of the day this was a decision by the Prime Minister and it is a really disappointing decision that he is not taking up the opportunity of coming to Geelong today in order to tell the people of our city — the people at Deakin University — why he’s deregulated the university system, why he’s going to make fees higher for Geelong students who want to study at their university.”

The Prime Minister was advised by the Australian Federal Police to ditch his planned university visit today after other high-profile Coalition figures were targeted by protesters opposed to the deregulation of university fees.

“The visit to Deakin University has been postponed, based on security advice,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a rare statement about security matters.

Liberal frontbenchers scorned student protests as driven by “socialists” who are “intent on shutting down democracy in Australia”.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne told ABC’s Lateline last night: “The Prime Minister made the decision and his office that it would be wiser to not go and to create that tumult at Deakin University so students can get on with their studies unmolested by the Socialist Alternative, which seem quite intent on shutting down democracy in Australia.”

Deputy Leader of the federal Opposition Tanya Plibersek said students had a reason to protest.

The deregulation of university fees would mean poor kids wouldn’t make it to university and would be denied a successful career, she said.

“This will take us to a two-tier American-style university system where the best courses and the best universities are completely unaffordable to ordinary people,” she told ABC radio. But she condemned the protests against Ms Mirabella and Ms Bishop and said students should rally in a peaceful and democratic manner.

If PM Abbott is going to duck and run from every protest or public opposition to his extreme policies over the next few years, he won't be appearing at many public events.

Meanwhile, former popular Murdoch blogger Andrew Bolt first labels those exercising their democratic right to protest as "totalitarian", then suggests women who don't sympathise with Julie Bishop after she was confronted by students might need be more sympathetic if they were roughed up themselves. Astounding:

 

 Andrew Bolt is out of control.

Mass protest movements against de-funding of schools, universities, hospitals, and cutting incomes of families and elderly pensioners - protests that kicked off with 100,000 attending the peaceful national March In March, and grabbed media headlines with last Sunday's March In May -  are only just beginning.

Many are already likening the protests, that are bringing together Australians from almost every social and economic background, to something like the start of an 'Australia Spring.'

Daily Telegraph: "Revolting Ferals" Are Anyone Opposed To Abbott, Apparently

 

 By Darryl Mason
 
I find it absolutely bizarre that the Daily Telegraph would slam March In May protesters in Sydney as "revolting ferals." It's very clear what the headline and image is implying. Protest against PM Abbott, and you're nothing more than a Feral.

Uni students, and 'anarchists', or ferals if you want to go that far, made up a tiny percentage of the 15,000 to 20,000 marchers in Sydney last Sunday. 5 per cent at most, probably less.

I stood near the entrance to Victoria Park at the conclusion of the march and watched more than 10,000 people walk by over an hour. Families, elderly people, disabled people, 'Mosman Mum's', lots of people from western Sydney, it was more like a crowd at the Royal Easter Show than a traditional 'Lefty Students' protest. There were at least 1000 kids, many with signs they'd made themselves. And most of the protest signs I saw were funny, or heartbreaking, very few were insulting to Abbott in any way. Most just asked variations of 'Why Did You Lie To Us? Why Are You Punishing Us? What Did We Do?'

The Daily Telegraph's "Revolting Ferals" front page seems to have pissed off and disgusted many of the families who turned out for March In May. Not surprisingly.

Image via @NewsAustralia

And some more of the "ferals", as claimed by the Daily Telegraph:

Reaction on Facebook and Twitter is absolute disbelief, and disgust, and strong feelings of betrayal, that the Daily Telegraph would brand them as "revolting ferals" simply because they are opposed to Abbott government lies, budget cuts and backflips on very clear election promises. People were carrying copies of the Telegraph under their arm to read in the park. Then they get called "Ferals" on the front page the next day?

Seriously, talk about burning your readership.

Who does the Daily Telegraph think will buy the paper when they trash families from Western Sydney?

Just bizarre. But it does show just how out of touch the Daily Telegraph's editor Paul Whittaker is with his dwindling readership.

Here's Whittaker laughing it up with Tony Abbott on Budget Night, before his newspaper gave Budget 2014 mostly glowing coverage and headlines:

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker, Budget night 2014

Perhaps sucking up to the prime minister is more important to Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker than fairly representing his readership? Or putting into print their overwhelming shock and disgust at the deceptive way Abbott ran his election campaign, and the brutal punishment of families in his first budget.

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