If you’re unfamiliar with Australia‘s extremely sophisticated and highly respectable political system, allow me to break it down for you: a bunch of adult babies in suits smugly try to euphemistically call each other a huge bitch as much as possible without contravening a set of arbitrary laws about insulting language invented in circa 1160 AD by a weird priest.
While, ostensibly, you might think parliament is about passing or modifying legislation in the best interests of the country, it’s actually mostly about scoring very weird, thinly-veiled owns against your opposite number.
If you’re having trouble spotting these owns on account of how they have to be extremely subtle to get past the Speaker, you can recognise them from the well-rehearsed delivery, shit-eating grin of the politician delivering the own, and the chorus of hooting and hollering that it elicits from their colleagues.
If you’re to believe how red in the face Barnaby Joyce went, one of these owns occurred today when Turnbull had a go at Shorten during a debate over the Government’s proposed welfare reforms.
I’m sure there’s a case to be made that this is just a series of coincidences, but it definitely seems like Turnbull was making a bunch of weird, borderline-homophobic blowjob jokes at Shorten’s expense:
“There was never a union leader in Melbourne that tucked his knees under more billionaire’s tables than the leader of the opposition. He lapped it up, yes, he lapped it up.[…]“This sycophant, blowing hard in the House of Representatives, sucking hard in the living rooms of Melbourne, what a hypocrite.[…]“He likes harbourside mansions, he is yearning for one, he is yearning to get into Kirribilli House. Because somebody else pays for it. Just like he loved knocking back Dick Pratt‘s Cristal and looked forward to living at the expense of the taxpayer, this man is a parasite and has no respect for the taxpayer.”
Look, maybe I’m seeing things that aren’t there, but people on the internet seem to agree with me.
i’m being very charitable with my reading of this line but it is only parsing one way for me https://t.co/hpnAxl4NXM
— j.r. hennessy (@jrhennessy) February 8, 2017
Turnbull just yelled homophobic insults at Shorten for doing the same things the libs do, and right wing commentators are extremely wet 4 it
— pooper (@lonelydandruff) February 8, 2017
You can watch it for yourself below – keep an eye on Barnaby, who at all times looks like he is about to explode:
“Simpering sycophant” and “parasite” were Turnbull’s words for Shorten during Question Time #auspol https://t.co/UP90SjP1r3 pic.twitter.com/40pOG2Uuaq
— ABC News (@abcnews) February 8, 2017
Politics, huh.
Source: SBS.
Photo: Getty Images / Stefan Postles.
