Tony Abbott's Tangled Web Over Paying People Smugglers ~ THE 5TH ESTATE ASIA

Monday, June 15, 2015

Tony Abbott's Tangled Web Over Paying People Smugglers

Monday, June 15, 2015

Moronic, elephant-eared PM hallucinating like a spider on LSD

SYDNEY MORNING HERALD
By Mark Kenny
06/15/2015

Tony Abbott must have concluded that voters will accept anything - that they are so anxious about "porous" borders that the most hard-won principles of our democracy will be surrendered without a whimper.

The dogs are on to Abbott

Even as the government contrives to assume ministerial powers to arbitrarily cancel citizenship – an expansion of executive reach for which both sides of politics will stand condemned if they become law – the Prime Minister dissembles over the most fundamental accountability owed by any government to its people. That of truth.

Asked repeatedly if Australian officials had paid taxpayer funds to criminal syndicates to turn boats around and return to Indonesia, the Prime Minister simply refused to say.

This is not acceptable.

Time and again he reframed the subject, telling reporters that the only question was whether he had stopped-the-boats.

To that mind-numbing reduction now can be added the dangerously slippery enablers: "whatever it takes"; and the even more insidious, "by hook, or by crook."

Abbott continues to attempt old, worn out lies and failed U.S. political strategies, falsely believing that they will somehow miraculously work for him - such as imitating Karl Rove and his illegal refusal to testify before Congress

Perhaps this was a new form of embedded honesty because it seems, "by crook" may be the new official low of border policy. Or is it?

Like Rove, Abbott now thumbs his nose at

Australians

Three cabinet ministers, Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, and now the Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, have denied the allegation that Australia has paid criminals.

But Abbott has pointedly refused to confirm their certainty, implicitly rebuking them for being so definitive. Would he rather the rumour abounded In Indonesia that we did pay them?

And if so, how does that help in the previously sacrosanct imperative to ensure there were no Australian policy "incentives" for people smugglers or refugees?

The secrecy at the heart of Operation Sovereign Borders should never have been allowed because, as critics complained, it inevitably invites a loss of confidence and the suspicion of official malfeasance.

That suspicion has just become a material claim and one that demands immediate examination.

The opposition, late to the party on this as well as the above-mentioned citizenship denial, is now pushing for an Auditor-General's inquiry.

Bring it on. Australians want answers. Indonesians deserve them too.

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