If there’s one thing in Australian political life that can be absolutely guaranteed in 2016, it is that Tony Abbott will use whatever airtime he can get to enact totally unsubtle revenge on Malcolm Turnbull, the man who knifed him as PM. Unfortunately, people tend to get caught in the crossfire. Today, it’s Indigenous Australians.
Abbott showed up on The Bolt Report with everyone’s favourite loon Andrew Bolt last night. Also appearing was Mark Latham, so you know it’d be an absolute hive for thoughtful opinion.
Bolta was raging against Turnbull’s acceptance that the arrival of white settlers in Australia could be construed as an ‘invasion’, and he brought Abbott along for the fun. Nothing Turnbull said was particularly radical, but Bolt was still pissed off, because any assertion that colonialism beget any rotten fruit tends to rub him the wrong way.
.@TonyAbbottMHR disagrees with @TurnbullMalcolm in saying British Settlement was an ‘invasion’ https://t.co/dUG9ClvSNh
— The Bolt Report (@theboltreport) June 22, 2016
Basically, Tony rejects the label of ‘invasion’, and prefers ‘settlement’ or ‘occupation’. His reasoning for his break with Turnbull on this issue was the somewhat bizarre “different people use different phrases at different times” which conveys precisely nothing.
He also describes Australia’s white settlement as being ‘a big change’ which strikes us as a particularly interesting understatement, but likely one that Bolt would agree on. A legacy of (continuing) colonial violence is, by any objective standard, ‘a big change’. Good one fellas.
Abbott also took some time to deny that he was fanging for the Defence Minister portfolio. “You’ve got to be content with serving the electorate,” Abbott says, clearly with the fire of lust in his eye as he absolutely stings for the Defence portfolio.
.@TonyAbbottMHR has brushed aside claims he hopes to become Defence Minister #theboltreport https://t.co/WFC2Y9roWy
— The Bolt Report (@theboltreport) June 22, 2016
In other, completely unrelated news, Bolt’s Sky News show pulls in less than a quarter of the viewers he got on Ten. Hmm. Interesting.
Source: Sky News.
