Tony Abbott Has Discovered Books

Here is a fact: in 2013, Australia elected the weirdest unit in the country as our Prime Minister. Not just the weirdest unit in politics – a crowded field, obviously – but straight up the strangest person to ever set foot on the soil of the Australian continent. The onion-eating was obviously bizarre, but it is just one event in a lifetime of being an oddball of almost celestial proportions.

Normally, that strangeness is confined to Canberra, where he can only be compared with the rest of the freaks who populate our capital. But now that Tony is facing an actual electoral challenge, he’s forced to do something he’s barely needed to indulge since he entered Parliament in 1994: actually talk to the hoi polloi of his electorate and pretend to be a normal guy.

It’s not going super well on that front. Here’s a video his team willingly uploaded of Tony being deeply inspired by a bog standard neighbourhood street library:

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Tony says, of a program which has existed in some form for decades. “You read a book, you put it in here, and you take a book out.”

He then went on to expound on the value of books generally:

Reading is such a wonderful way of broadening the mind. It’s such a wonderful way of exploring parts of the world that you can never personally see. And you know, isn’t it a great comment on the people of Warringah, something like this, which is an exercise in self-help; an exercise in building social capital is happening right here on Tango Avenue.

Amazing! Thank you Tony!

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