The Sport Of Would-be Kings

Here at Let’s Ask Elroy!, sport is not that high on our agenda of obsessions, but every few years we understand that its time to break out the rosettes and root for our team! And this is the sport of sports, a no-holds-barred, whack-‘em’down-and-drag-‘em-out, take-no-prisoners blood-fest guaranteed to curdle the veins of the most hardened offender. Yup, it’s election time down under!

We don’t know when exactly, but we can tell it’s in the air as that air, around Canberra, our fair nation’s capital, is thicker n’ the mud flying across the Great Void that is Parliament house.

Y'see, Honest John Howard, Australian Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party of Australia (for those of youse overseas, the Liberal Party are, paradoxically, the local neo-cons), is rattled, and Honest John doesn't get rattled. He's as cunning as a swarm of gold-toothed rats at the best of times and as this is, for him, the worst of times, I would be expecting him to become slipp'rier still, but he's been caught flat-footed more times than a squad of Plod.

He splutters, he makes mistakes, he talks total nonsense (no change there then) as he attempts to go Kevin 'That Nice Mr.' Rudd, the brand new leader of the opposition Australian Labor Party, and try to convince the Great Unwashed the Kev is a scurrilous, no-good lying protoplasm, that is, a politician, that is, just like the Liberals.

Their latest ploy is the time-honoured pants-on-fire approach to his, ahem, honesty via champion mudslingers Abbott and Costello (foreign readers ahoy, I kid you not, Tony Abbott is our Health Minister and Peter Costello the Treasurer, and how they ever get taken seriously is a constant mystery to us all).

But sadly for Honest John, the mud ain't sticking. In their latest attempt to make That Nice Mr. Rudd look shonky, the Libs sent the Foreign Minister, Little Master Alex (not even Abbott and Costello were going to touch this one) on the telly to claim that something That Nice Mr. Rudd said happened to him and his family in 1968 MIGHT NOT BE ENTIRLY TRUE!

Forget that That Nice Mr. Rudd's dad had just died in a horrific car crash, forget that he was going on what his mum had told him at the time, what's important to remember here is that someone else has CALLED THAT NICE MR. RUDD A LIAR!

Now, we all know that memories are fallible, God knows the government has a chronic amnesia that will, we say, in time prove terminal, but some are obviously more fallible than others. So, when discussing an event that happened forty, count 'em, forty years ago, whom are you going to believe? That Nice Mr. Rudd? Or the mob who have chosen right now to all of a sudden dispute his version of events?

The voters seem to understand that politics is, at times, a murky business, that politicians are going to occasionally meet the odd unsavoury character in the course of their activities and possibly indulge in the occasional terminological inexactitude; furthermore, they remember that during the republic referrendum it was Abbott reminding punters of this very fact as he yelled 'Don't trust politicians!' to whoever might care, and so placed himself ever so neatly in the epicentre of an 'Everything I say is lie!' conundrum. And it looks like the good citizens took Tony's advice, but with particular reference to, um, Tony.

That the Libs are trying so desperately to assassinate the character of That Nice Mr. Rudd based what happened when he was a newly bereaved eleven-year-old is merely indicative of the trouble the Liberal Party know they are in and, what’s more, such behavior will not tolerated by the family-friendly Australian electorate.

To compound our schadenfreude, the Liberals wail and gnash their teeth while that Nice Mr. Rudd just seems to rise above it all; he may not walk on water, but neither is he about to wallow in Liberal-generated mire, and the Liberals have plenty of mire to go around.

Having raised the bar of propriety to a grand new altitude, adding to the hilarity is the sight of Honest John’s ministers failing to clamber over it; they are falling like nine pins in an avalanche of petty financial frauds and conflicts of interests at such a rate that it is debatable whether Honest John will have any politicians to contest the next election with. It couldn’t happen to nicer Government.

Anything else you want to know? Just tell the kids – Let's Ask Elroy!