Thanks to Smage chief
correspondent Paul McGeough in Kabul, we have discovered the alter ego
of both Amanda Vanstone and Philip Ruddock – Zoltan Karpathy. (For
those not entirely intimate with My Fair Lady, Karpathy was “a blaggard who uses the science of speech more to blackmail and swindle than teach”).

McGeough
has uncovered proof that the Afghan Government was satisfied that Mrs
Roqia Bakhtiari and her children were indeed Afghani. The investigation
was carried out by an Afghan Government unit paid for by Australia, but
obviously no longer wants to know about.

It was proof that was
coming to light just as the Vanstone/Ruddock double act were
celebrating last Christmas by rushing to deport the family to Pakistan.
They of course wanted to go to Afghanistan – where they are now living
– but Vanstone/Ruddock would have none of that embarrassment. Read
McGeough’s excellent report, a tribute to the effort and expense of having an experienced journalist digging at the source.

The
central plank of the Government’s case against the Bakhtiari family was
that they were Pakistanis trying to pass themselves off as Afghans to
acquire refugee status. The Government seems to have relied on speech
analysis it commissioned – analysis that experts called by the
Bakhtiaris’ lawyers disagreed with, but, hey, that’s redneck politics
for you.

So what chance the grubby deportation will be
reconsidered? Buckley’s. Attorney General Ruddock has already ruled
that out this morning and, in the increasingly worrying manner of the
regime, has attempted to rewrite a little history in the process. News.com.au reports the Ruddock line here (without giving deserved acknowledgement to McGeough or the Smage.)

Professor Higgins recounted Eliza’s episode with Zoltan thus:

He made it the devilish business of his
“To find out who this Miss Doolittle is.”
Ev’ry time we looked around
There he was, that hairy hound from Budapest.
Never leaving us alone,

Never have I ever known
A ruder pest

Fin’lly I decided it was foolish
Not to let him have his chance with her.
So I stepped aside and let him dance with her.
Oozing charm from ev’ry pore
He oiled his way around the floor.
Ev’ry trick that he could play,
He used to strip her mask away.
And when at last the dance was done,
He glowed as if he knew he’d won!
And with a voice too eager,
And a smile too broad,

He announced to the hostess
That she was a fraud!

Her English is too good, he said,
Which clearly indicates that she is foreign.
Whereas others are instructed in their native language
English people aren’t.
And although she may have studied with an expert
Di’lectician and grammarian, I can tell that she was born
Hungarian! Not only Hungarian, but of royal blood,
she is a princess!

No
such happy misreading for the Bakhtiari family. Perhaps the saddest
part of the report is the interview with the oldest of the Bakhtiari
children, the embittered and disillusioned Alamdar who turned on the
family’s supporters as well.

“They all used us. We don’t trust
anyone in Australia now…in Australia people just want to get their
names in the media,” he said.

Alamdar and Mark Latham both – but Alamdar has good reason to be bitter.