Your mate? No? Cool.
Tony Abbott has crossed the post to start peddling the same messages that got his ass kicked out of the PM‘s chair, warning Europe it’s heading for a “catastrophe” unless it turns back asylum seekers.
In his first major speech since we kicked his ass to the kerb his removal from office, Tone appeared before every big name in British conservative politics at a gala banquet to honour his political ~hero~ Margaret Thatcher.
A great honour to deliver this year’s Thatcher Lecture in London – Margie and I are delighted to be here pic.twitter.com/s6RjoxyRf2
— Tony Abbott (@TonyAbbottMHR) October 27, 2015
The majority of his speech was dedicated to his favourite line – how he “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats”, “stopped the boats” x 100,000,000 – back home.
“It’s now nearly 18 months since a single illegal boat has made it to Australia,” he boasted. “While prime minister, I was loathe to give public advice to other countries whose situations are different; but because people smuggling is a global problem, and because Australia is the only country which has successfully defeated it — twice — our experience should be studied.”
He went further, encouraging Europe’s leaders to stop people coming “for a better life.”
“Our moral obligation is to receive people fleeing for their lives. It’s not to provide permanent residency to anyone who would rather live in a prosperous Western country than their own. That’s why the countries of Europe, while absolutely obliged to support the countries neighbouring the Syrian conflict, are more than entitled to control their borders against those who are no longer fleeing a conflict but seeking a better life. This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go.”
To have compassion is to lead your country into “catastrophic error”, he said.
“All countries that say ‘anyone who gets here can stay here’ are now in peril, given the scale of the population movements that are starting to be seen. There are tens — perhaps hundreds — of millions of people, living in poverty and danger, who might readily seek to enter a Western country if the opportunity is there. “And who could blame them? Yet no country or continent can open its borders to all comers without fundamentally weakening itself. This is the risk that the countries of Europe now run through misguided altruism.”
Not even God has it right, according to Tone:
“The imperative to ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is at the heart of every Western polity … but right now this wholesome instinct is leading much of Europe into catastrophic error.”
One final kick in the guts for ya: people paid $500 per head to listen to this drivel.
Europe, want to adopt him? He slobbers a lot but, if you can successfully muzzle him, is mostly harmless.
Lead image via ABC.
