There’s something about New Zealand that plainly irks Julie Bishop. The Foreign Minister did her block on Twitter last night as she received snipes from all and sundry about the embarrassing reality that she’d have to deal with a New Zealand Labour government.
Bishop is in this embarrassing mess because back in August, it looked for all the world like Bill English and the Nationals would coast to victory in the general election there, despite the Jacindamania that had greeted the elevation of new Labour leader Jacinda Ardern. “I would find it very hard to build trust with those involved in allegations designed to undermine the government of Australia,” she piously intoned on August 15, in an effort to blame NZ Labour for exposing the fact that Barnaby Joyce was a Kiwi (inconveniently, the relevant National minister said that it was inquiries from journalists that prompted it).
Plainly at that stage Bishop assumed that it was extremely unlikely she would ever have to deal with Ardern, so intervening so clumsily in the internal affairs of a close ally was fairly risk-free.
Turns out, not so much. Ardern is now PM. So Bishop is trying to pretend she never attacked New Zealand Labour. “Rubbish,” she angrily tweeted at Fairfax’s Peter Martin when he pointed out her attack. “Also rubbish,” she tweeted at ABC’s The Drum. “Why not refer to what I actually said?” she threw at the Courier-Mail’s Dennis Atkins. Presumably her staff wrestled the phone off her before she could start tweeting “fake news!” and “sad” at the rest of the press gallery.
Fighting with journalists on Twitter isn’t merely a bad look, it suggests that lingering, long-term sense that Bishop’s judgement isn’t all it should be is a valid one. That lack of judgement led her into picking a fight with New Zealand in an effort to distract from the debacle of Barnaby Joyce in the first place. For a minister whose mates in the press gallery like to suggest she shouldn’t be overlooked as a possible replacement for Malcolm Turnbull, it makes you wonder how she’d go handling serious domestic issues, rather than attending polo matches and international fashion shows.
It’s not often you cause keyboard destruction at chez Paddy Bernard. But… “Presumably her staff wrestled the phone off her before she could start tweeting “fake news!” and “sad” at the rest of the press gallery.”
…did the trick. Kudos!
Making a complete goose of yourself by saying stupid things about the NZ election result seems to be an affliction shared by a number of female Liberal Party ‘Leaders’.
This was Gladys Berejiklian’s response posted within minutes of the confirmation of Jacinda’s elevation to PM.
https://twitter.com/GladysB/status/920907521958621184
“Why not refer to what I actually said?”
Its on record, possibly even Youtube, Julie. Let’s see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXoVWd5zxUs
1:00 in
And some lovely NZ newsreader accents.
‘…those involved in allegations designed to undermine the government of Australia’.
Surely Bishop should be more mindful of Tony Abbott undermining the Oz government rather than cite the NZ Labour Party…
I have just read Bishop’s speech, the 28th Fullerton Lecture, delivered in Singapore on 13 March 2017. In the speech, remarkable for its vacuity, she said: “Russia’s annexation of Crimea is the first attempt at redrawing Europe’s international borders since Hitler annexed Czechoslovakia and subsequently invaded Poland in 1939”. So to add to her foot in mouth comments about NZ’s Labour Party, one must add a remarkable inability to understand history, and not just Crimea (given by Khrushchev to Ukraine in 1954 without consulting either Russians or Crimeans; but also the reunification of Germany in 1989; the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia; the separation of the Czech and Slovak republics; the forced (by NATO) creation of Kosovo and of course the breakup of the USSR itself. All of which is presumably a mystery to Bishop who is an embarrassment to say the least.