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.