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Of all the current crop of politicians, Tony Dumb Dumb stands out among them for a number of reasons. He has one of the longest and most publicised records: for 'foot in mouth' disease, for dishonesty, for doing whatever it takes, and saying whatever will get him ahead politically. Whatever he actually believes, he has shown again and again that he is willing at the drop of a hat to hold the exact opposite view if it will win him political points.
If we are all honest, we'd admit that we have know all this for some time.
In his recent Quarterly Essay, David Marr described Abbott's ascension to the post of leader of the opposition thus - The loudmouth bigot of his university days, the homophobe, the blinkered Vatican warrior, the rugger-bugger, the white Australian and the junkyard dog of parliament are all, he would have us believe, consigned to the past.
His subsequent record lays this bare as yet another Abbott lie, even if it was one unspoken.
Marr goes on to say: What he’s about is destroying a government. Looking like a prime minister in waiting is a second-order consideration. The work isn’t pretty.
But Abbott's political record goes back a long way, past his time as Opposition leader, past his time as a minister and a backbencher.. all the way back to University. Back further than the Rhodes Scholarship that Tony Dumb Dumb's boosters keep mentioning.
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Prior to trying to intimidate Ramjan (according to Marr) Abbott entered student politics with the sole aim of gutting the SRC (Student Representative Council) and the AUS (Australian Union of Students).
Following his election defeat the plan was to create mayhem in the SRC while Ramjan (a woman who beat him in a political contest) was the leader. The plan was then that he would then stand up and take control, restore order to the SRC (as if the Adults were now in charge), and then go about bankrupting and dismantling the SRC.
It's pattern that sounds familiar doesn't it?
In university politics Abbott was not liked, other than by his close circle of friends. Malcolm Turnbull, then a student writing on the AUS conference for the Bulletin, said at the time:
The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is twenty year old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS in the Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn't really deserve.
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Abbott succeeded in getting himself elected to the presidency of the SRC. Marr describes his tenure this way:
He was president, but almost alone. On a council of thirty members, he had no more than three or four supporters. He didn't build alliances; he fell out with the moderates; he created and dramatised division. He didn't like the SRC and made no secret of wanting to see it bankrupt. 'I can't recall a constructive policy for the benefit of the student body that he ever put forward,' says a distinguished Sydney lawyer active in university politics then. 'My lasting impression is of negativity and destruction. For those he did get on with, he was well liked. He also generated an enormous amount of hostility verging on vitriolic hatred from those who were his political opponents'.
That assessment sounds alarmingly similar to his current political performance.
Tony Dumb Dumb clearly hasn't changed. He obviously doesn't have the character or the ability to provide positive leadership, and he never did. Abbott was always a partisan player and will likely always be.
While Tony Dumb Dumb is a university graduate... Looking at his academic capacity, the Mad Monk also comes up short.
In a recent assessment on The Conversation website by Tony Taylor, adjunct Professor at UTS , he questions Abbott's ability to move beyond early influences in his life and his thinking... namely the Jesuits, and Bob Sanatmaria.
Apparently Abbott is not bereft of ideas, but the ideas he does have clearly belong to someone else.
Or perhaps, as suggested by First Dog on the Moon, he will start work on a piece of musical theatre titled - 'Tony Abbott's Lies - The Musical'.
In the itnerim, perhaps Abbott's long term plans of destruction are actually working. He seems to have succeeded in destroying a lot of people's faith in democracy.