Here’s a correction from today’s Oz.
That’s a pity – but the weekend yarn, complete with pics (see below) was still fun.
“Malcolm Turnbull has been unmasked as a former archivist of the student union battles that shaped our leaders,” Samantha Maiden wrote.
During his law school days, Turnbull also worked as a journo for The Bulletin. And back then, in the seventies, off at an AUS conference, he met two lads from the Labor right, Peter Costello and Tony Abbott.
“Turnbull claimed this week he could not recall when he first met the Treasurer,” Maiden reported. “However, Health Minister Tony Abbott pointed out this week the millionaire MP in 1978 wrote about meeting Costello in The Vicious World of Student Politics.
“It’s no surprise Abbott can remember, after what 24-year-old Turnbull wrote about him. ‘The leading light of the right-wingers in NSW is a twenty-year-old Tony Abbott. He has written a number of articles on AUS for The Australian and his press coverage has accordingly given him a stature his rather boisterous and immature rhetoric doesn’t really deserve.’ ”
N-i-c-e. And Turnbull showed he still has a way with words.
“‘This is young Malcolm, trying to be Norman Mailer, I think,’ he told The Weekend Australian. It’s not quite The Naked and the Dead, but Turnbull uncharacteristically admitted it was ‘rather good’.”
But if you really must compare yourself with Mailer, Malcolm, at least get the point of reference right. Not The Naked and the Dead. Try Advertisements for Myself.
In return, we promise not to make any Harlot’s Ghost gags.
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