Craig Thomson is right about one thing: A Current Affair’s pursuit of a prostitute who claims she slept with the embattled MP seven years ago is most certainly “gutter journalism”.
But there’s plenty of others wallowing in the bottom of the barrel. Editors, journalists and MPs and their staffers. We don’t necessarily exclude ourselves. It’s ugly, putrid stuff. Should we keep following it? How can we not?
The opposition has new-found concern for his welfare. He’s a man under “enormous pressure”, Tony Abbott now says, calling on Labor to put the needs of their MP and his family first:
“The Prime Minister is the one who is clinging to his vote and his Labor colleagues are the ones who are insisting that he should stay in the Parliament.”
The whiff of political desperation almost overpowers the sordid saga itself, certainly. But it’s Thomson standing defiant. And for what? To save a political career that only has 18 months to run regardless? To save a rotten government in the same position?
It’s just not worth it.
“To save a rotten government in the same position?”
hmm, passing important but difficult and unpopular legislation on numerous occasions while
maintaining the delicate balance of a hung parliament.
I can only guess at what you’d call ‘good’ government.
I agree with Drovers Cat
How is the current Australian Government rotten? Even the worst allegation against Thomson isn’t about his behaviour in Government but about his behaviour years before.
And were even that conceded, how does the misbehaviour of a single member make a whole government rotten?
To stop Abbott getting in the lodge is worth anything – he deserves a full pardon. Oops, he hasn’t been found guilty of anything yet by the people who matter, the courts.
Lucky all Liberal MPs are pure as the driven slush, Imean snow, so this will never happen to them.
It is also noteworthy that the Coalition has never relied on a ‘tainted’ vote such as Mal Colston’s.