Friday, June 03, 2005
DARK PAST CONCEALED
Alan Ramsey makes his usual bold claims (most likely inaccurate), then becomes oddly coy:
John Howard does not use profanity. While many of the rest of us are regularly incensed enough to unload creative conjunctions of four-letter language on our Prime Minister’s behaviour, character and/or mendacity, Howard is known to his colleagues as a man pure of word, however dark of heart. I know of nobody, in his 30 years of public life, who admits to ever having heard him swear ...
Thus the shock - and I do mean shock - when an excited Liberal senator, in full flight in the sanctity of the Government party room this week, let fly with the “f” word in front of everyone, the Prime Minister included. Pass the smelling salts, quick! As somebody confided later, in hushed tones: “Nobody’s ever said f—- in front of Howard.”
Doubtful. Unbelievable, actually. Anyway, according to Ramsey, the sweary-mary was Queensland’s Brett Mason:
Others explained: “Philip Ruddock called out something as Brett was speaking, and he went right off. I mean it, right off. Brett gets these brain snaps. He shouted and yelled, and people were calling ‘sit down’. It was extraordinary. He didn’t support Petro’s bill but he said he had sympathy for what Petro was trying to do. However, we couldn’t wring our hands and let Labor off the hook on detention, and we should never let people forget that [back in the 1970s, a senior Labor figure Mason named] had said, ‘we don’t want any f—-ing yellow Balts’.”
Why isn’t the “senior Labor figure” identified? In fact, he has been, many times. Former Labor minister Clyde Cameron wrote about this 25 years ago. His recollections are quoted here:
“ ... Whitlam stuck out his jaw and, grinding his teeth, turned to Willesee and thundered, `I’m not having hundreds of fucking Vietnamese Balts coming into this country with their religious and political hatreds against us!”
Even Ramsey’s own newspaper has named St Gough as the obscene Viet-slammer. How come the sudden shyness, Al? Usually you’re so eager to expose our politicians’ dark pasts ...
(Via reader Tony S., who writes: “It wouldn’t do for Ramsey to demonise Gough Whitlam or Labor, but he can use Whitlam’s line to demonise the government. So that’s how a senior Fairfax political opinion-writer works.”)