Editor: Originally published October 17, 2017. This article has been getting quite a few hits recently, especially considering the recent failure of conservatives to retake the Liberal Party.
As if I needed any other reason to dislike Christopher Pyne.
Now it turns out he tried to use the odious organisation GetUp! as an attack dog against people supposedly on his own side.
The problem with first impressions is that you really only get one chance to make them. The Hon Mr. Pyne has sidestepped this delicate problem by being consistently obnoxious over the entire course of his career in public life.
Watching him speak, be it during a formal address or a morning television interview, immediately brings to mind a small excited yapping dog with a bad case of incontinence hopping about frantically while soiling the carpet.
Possibly the only positive contribution by former Prime Minister Julia Gillard to the national consciousness was when she dubbed the short statured, slimy little creature from South Australia a “mincing poodle”. The label fits him perfectly.
Poodle or not it is undeniable that Christopher is a remarkable man.
Who else would use their position as Minister for Defence Industry to commission a French nuclear submarine modified to run with a diesel engine? Forget that such a thing has never been done before and that the company involved is not entirely sure that it can be done now. Forget that judging from the 50 Billion dollar price tag these new vessels will be constructed entirely from hundred dollar bills. Forget that defence experts have described the designs as “Billion Dollar Coffins”. Forget that the Germans offered us arguably better versions of the same thing for less than half the price.
Something far more important was on the line.
Our tax dollars were needed to buy votes to save Christopher’s oily skin. One estimate is that this massive dump of taxpayer dollars into a possibly useless defence project that just happened to be near the seat of the minister responsible cost taxpayers as much as $490,000 for every vote.
But I’m sure it was worth it. After all, would our nation even be worth defending if Christopher Pyne wasn’t an MP in it?
Sure his seat that we paid so much to save looks to be abolished in the next redistricting, prompting Pyne to start trying to bully or steal another seat from one of his more junior colleagues. But that extra couple of years of Chris was certainly worth the 50 billion dollar price tag.
After all, who else would openly boast during a speech that leftists like himself had taken over the Liberal party and would soon implement Gay marriage and other progressive priorities whether they were wanted or not?
Yet this week poor Chris may have come a bit of a cropper.
You see, the MP from Sturt started publicly attacking the leftist front group GetUp!
Chris denounced the well-funded fellows from that overly punctuated and well known organisation as:
“For all intents and purposes an associated entity of the Labor Party.”
This is a serious issue. If this allegation could be proven then donations to the group take on a whole new legal bent. Since GetUp! has pumped oodles of money into trying to unseat anyone even vaguely conservative left in the Liberals, attacking their source of funding would have been a rare good move by the party of the leftists in light blue.
But they probably shouldn’t have chosen Christopher to spearhead this particular assault.
The clues were in Pyne’s denunciation.
He declared:
“I think the disappointing thing about GetUp! is that it started with very good intentions and a lot of young people believing it was an agent of change,” Mr Pyne told Sky News.
“Of course the left can’t help themselves. They had to take it over and run it and use it as a weapon against the non Labor side of politics and I think that is a pity.”
Er what?
GetUp! was started with good intentions?
The organisation whose original National Director was [ALP member] Simon Sheikh, who was succeeded by Sam Maclean [now a staffer for Bill Shorten], which was founded with seed money both from the Australian Union movement [at the time under Bill Shorten] and George Soros? The same GetUp! that this year added to its board Daniel Stone, Labor’s former digital director who worked on last year’s federal election campaign, and has as its chairman Phil Ireland, an active Labor Party member and NSW convenor of the party’s environmental action network?
The same GetUp! that had current ALP opposition leader and probable next Prime minister Bill Shorten on its original board?
In what universe did that group start with any intention other than to support the cultural, social and electoral efforts of the ALP?
Why on earth would Pyne think otherwise?
Well, it seems there was a reason.
GetUp! it appears, was a little miffed that Chris had spoken so harshly about them and was even threatening to stem the flow of lovely money into their coffers. In a stunning turn of events GetUp!-friendly journalist Mike Seccombe at Morry Schwartz’s very GetUp!-friendly outlet The Saturday Paper suddenly got a scoop revealing some very interesting facts.
Back in 2009 our current Prime minister Lord Malcolm of Wentworthia was only a humble opposition leader, and boy was he in trouble.
You see, he had responded to the then soaring popularity of PM Kevin Rudd by more or less rolling over on his stomach and whimpering on the issue of a Carbon Tax. Rudd had his Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme ready to roll and Malcolm, being the good global citizen that he is, was all for it.
Sadly for him most of his party was slightly less enthusiastic. Their enthusiasm did not increase when Turnbull wrongly accused Rudd and then treasurer Wayne Swan of corruption over the Ozcar scandal based on the word of a single unhinged public servant.
Turnbull was in trouble and Pyne was then as now his loyal lapdog. Christopher, in order to aid his master, got in touch with GetUp! and whined about how the evil right-wing bigots of the Australian Christian Lobby were ringing around the grassroots to drum up support for a challenge from Tony Abbott. Chris begged the leftist group to do likewise for Malcolm Turnbull, and even supplied a list of ten MPs whom he thought could be scared into docile submission by a mass left-wing email and phone campaign within their electorates.
That’s right. You read correctly. Christopher Pyne attempted to work with the most prominent and well-funded leftist activist organisation in Australia to target his fellow Liberal MPs.
In a party worth voting for this act alone would get the Hon Mr Pyne removed from his ministerial office with great rapidity, and metaphorically dropped from a great height onto an unforgiving surface.
But Pyne is in the dominant leftist faction of the Liberal party and will receive no serious censure as a result of any of these revelations. Christopher, disgusting human being that he may be, is the new normal in the Liberal party. The factional war has been won and the good guys lost.
Not only is there is no point to voting for the Liberal party, all patriotic Australians should be fervently praying for its destruction. The shell stumbles on but the substance has long departed.
If you want to know why our country is a mess, if you want to know why Bill Shorten will be the next Prime minister, if you want to know why progress seems impossible and every step forwards seems accompanied by a dozen steps backwards, then you could do no better than to point to a portrait of Christopher Pyne.
Then maybe set it on fire.
Photo by Policy Exchange 