A fairfax report has today announced that certain speeches delivered by Prime Minister Tony Abbott have disappeared from his website, an action that has prompted concern and attention, considering that the speeches in question, according to The Age, are categorically of the “more controversial” variety.
Evidently, the move that we mere non-politicians have undoubtedly practiced in the past – culling facebook selfies from 2007 with reckless abandon, deleting whiny, thinly veiled Tumblr poetry and revelling in the satisfaction that the internet brings, of allowing one to simply delete an unglamorous point of personal history – has not been taken as lightly as some innocent Myspace era virtual burning we’ve all done before.
The Age today reports that since Mr Abbott’s election in September this year, tonyabbott.com.au has redirected users to liberal.org.au, subsequently losing content from Mr Abbott’s previous site. While chunks of the archives appear to have remained on liberal.org.au, The Age raised concern that certain speeches, including one from 2009 in which Mr Abbott vocalised support for a carbon tax, and another from 2004 in which Abbott claimed abortion was “a question of the mother’s convenience” can no longer be found on the Liberal Party website. A spokesperson for Mr Abbott told The Age that, “The Liberal Party website is being updated to provide a single website to access media releases, speeches and policy documents released prior to the election of the Coalition government.”
However, The Age reports that the website only archived material from July 2010 onwards, which may explain the omissions of the two aforementioned speeches; despite that, it has been reported that two recent speeches from 2013 have been removed – in March, Tony Abbott was interviewed by Sky’s Chris Kenny, and notably claimed the coalition government would aim “to lift foreign aid to 0.5 per cent of gross national [income]…” a commitment that has since been reversed, with the Coalition government announcing they would cut foreign aid growth, according to The Age. Hmmmm.
Via The Age.
