To be fair, we’ve been doing more than our fair share of Tony Abbott bashing here at Pedestrian.tv over the past few months. But to be even fairer, if there weren’t such a constant and unending smorgasbord of material to work with, we wouldn’t have to do it. For a supposedly intelligent man – God help us if we ever dare forget he’s a Rhodes Bloody Scholar – he sure as shit has a knack for saying incredibly stupid things on a regular basis.
The latest episode in the saga of “Shit Our Prime Minister Says” comes from a speech delivered as the keynote address overnight at The Australian-Melbourne Institute Conference on the topic of foreign investment in residential real estate. Predictably, he went way off topic, and veered into that old familiar well of nonsensical, vaguely racist bullshit that for some mystifying reason allowed him to ride into Canberra in the first place.
For starters, on the issue of foreign investment, Abbott stated, “If I want to sell my place [then] foreign investment might make sense, but if my neighbour wants to sell his place [then] foreign investment might be the last thing we want.“
Cue everyone:
But oh no, sports fans. Tone Loc wasn’t done there. Not content to simply drop that nugget of bewildering rhetoric, he veered into territory that even you might think he wasn’t capable of.
“As a general principle we support foreign investment. Always have and always will. Our country is unimaginable without foreign investment.”
“I guess our country owes its existence to a form of foreign investment by the British government in the then unsettled or, um, scarcely settled, Great South Land.“
Come again? Beg your pardon? Run that past me one more time? Australia was unsettled prior to white arrival? You’ve got to be FREAKING KIDDING ME. And that “kind” of foreign investment from the British that he refers to was boatloads of convicts, coupled with the slaughter and enslavement of the indigenous population. Make no mistake about it, there’s been some dumb – and I mean profoundly fucking dumb – sentences that have come out of the mouth of Tonald R Abbott, Minister of Prime. But this just about tops the lot.
Having read that, it’ll probably come as little shock to any of you that later on in the address he spoke the following words in succession:
“In most things I would regard John Howard as the supreme teacher.“
Tony pls.
Photo: Scott Barbour via Getty Images.
