Amanda Vanstone and air travel!
Memories, memories. There was the time we were heading back from a
conference in Darwin where we’d had to deal with some really sh*tty
unemployment figures. We’d been, er, availing ourselves of business
class hospitality. We were enjoying it. Indeed, so, er, elated, were we
that during a brief stopover at Alice Springs airport we decided it
would be a good idea to buy the filthiest postcard we could find and
send it back to the electorate office staff. In a stroke of
extraordinarily bad timing, we were caught in the act by Alan Ramsey
and Laura Tingle who were returning to civilisation after a camping
holiday in Central Australia…

Anyway, what’s the hoo-ha all about? The real scandalous comments in the speech have nothing to do with airline safety.

Everybody
knows you need metal cutlery in business class as they give you so much
food the plastic knives go blunt. It also seems as if some of her
colleagues agree with her on the petty paranoia of airport security.

Her protege, Chris Pyne,
was railing against nail clipper bans on ABC Radio morning program in
Adelaide today. Plus Vanstone has been giving these sorts of speeches
for years where she ad libs and lands in the sh*t. I had the pleasure
of sponging her down on a number of occasions when she opened her mouth
and rather than pigs’ trotters, put her own foot in it.

But the
real comments that the Minister should be called to account over
concern Cornelia Rau. They only seem to have turned up in some of the
reports – like the Adelaide’s Sunday Mail:

She also expressed regret about Vivian Alvarez, the
Australian citizen wrongfully deported to the Philippines, but she felt
differently about the case of Cornelia Rau, another detained
Australian.

“There are some explanations why it took so long
to find out who she (Rau) was, not the least of which she kept
maintaining she was someone else and still apparently does.”

Has
the callous oaf heard of this thing called mental illness? Of course
not. She and her departmental droogs ignored Cornelia Rau’s condition –
and it appears that the incompetent Minister is still in denial about
the enormous wrong she has done.

So much for cultural change in
DIMIA. The $26,000 plus spent on the “People Are Our Business” water
bottles, screen savers, coffee mugs and jigsaw puzzles appears to have been wasted.