Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are both fronting up at Western Sydney’s iconic (ahem) Rooty Hill RSL for an event tonight which is not quite a debate – at the Opposition Leader’s insistence, it will be two separate town hall meetings. Held simultaneously. Or something.
Additionally, there’s controversy over the fact that it’s effectively a privatised campaign forum. Sky News is refusing to provide a clean feed to other tv stations. So it won’t be shown on ABC News 24, thus not reaching a much wider audience with access to a digital signal. Apparently, it will be streamed at the News Limited’s Daily Telegraph from 6pm.
So I’m not going to bother with it.
No doubt there will be lots of chat on Twitter, unified under the hashtag #rooty.
Update: The Drum has a Cover It Live feature enabled on its website.
Kind of like the great mass debate @ Rooty Hill, eh?… whatevs.
This just about hits rock bottom in this campaign in the absurd stakes, appropriately at the Rooty Hill RSL. A plague on both their halls, simultaneously.
Unfortunately Malcolm Farr right now on the preview show is trying to talk up Abbott’s credentials with women.
appropriately at the Rooty Hill RSL
Settle pablo, my Mum was a member of the RHRSL – and it’s a fine establishment. Mind you, as boy scouts of 1st Blacktown troop, we always chuckled at the scouts from rooty hill.
I checked Wiki: Rooty Hill was named after a hill on Norfolk Island. The origin of this name puzzled historians for many years because the clue lay not in Blacktown City but on Norfolk Island. Governor Philip Gidley King had been in charge of the first settlement there in early 1788 and had noted that the hillside where he had built his Government House had been difficult to dig owing to the amount of tree roots beneath the surface. The hill on Norfolk became known as the rooty hill and the name is now official.
How sickening this buildup is. So much negative generalising of Labor & Gillard. And pumping up of Abbott. It’s all Murdochracy people.
Malcolm Farr is such a “tricky dick” and Abbott apologist.
It seems that as far as the Murdoch types are concerned real Australians are nuclear families…who have no real understanding of broadband…so Tony can be forgiven for his ignorance.
And why is Abbott hiding, skulking about in the shadows until Julia’s been grilled? Sounds like a setup to me…and downright gutlessness on his part.
And didn’t he reckon he didn’t have time on the campaign trail to participate in another debate? Yet, he has time to sit back & prepare answers based on Julia’s brave fronting up.
The man is truly pathetic. Once again, the kinda crap that Bush and his sneaky cohorts would pull. More friends of the Murdochracy.
N’
And didn’t he reckon he didn’t have time on the campaign trail to participate in another debate?
He challenged Julia to three debates – and was rebuffed. Did you ask about Julia’s schedule when that happened?
I have more than a few relatives in the Rooty Hill area, doctors, radiologists and various other professionals.
Sky News obviously thought they had selected the epicentre of the “Kingswood Country” populace.
How wrong they were.
I’m getting an increasing feeling that Tony Abbot needs to shy away from any form of public engagement where he doesn’t have very close control over the content. He could have been reasonably confident that Kerry O’Brien would ask him about broadband and Hockey’s comments on the GFC but he handled himself very poorly – how is he going to handle any kind of town hall style meeting where he has to address unexpected questions on any of his policies if he can’t even prepare adequately for the big ones?
His Q&A appearance is going to be a disaster; we have confirmation that JG attracted a huge audience for both of the last two appearances she did. I suspect she’ll ace it tonight and Tony – even with the advantage of coming on 2nd – will puff and bluster and fail.
My guess is that by the last week of the campaign he’s going to have to be put on a very, very tight leash.
Bronwyn Bishop: “Tony is disciplined…you get a straight answer”.
gospel truth
no means no
health debate w/ Roxon swearing
“premonition”
homosexuals threatening
wary of debating women
yep, very disciplined…like in the 07 election.
the list goes on…when does “straight answer” mean “curve ball” or “screw-up”?
N’
Will Tone be able to avoid a smirking reference to the place name?
CMMC, the epicentre of Kingswood Country is, fittingly, Kingswood, several stops up the line.
PeterTB said:
I didn’t. Clearly, the one wanting debates is the one who thinks they will profit most from them and the one who declines thinks them marginal losses. AT the start of the campaign, Abbott thought the three in his interest and Gillard thought them contrary. Personally, I thought she was mistaken, but that’s as maybe.
Now it is clear that Abbott thinks he’d lose out of them and Gillard thinks she’d win out of them. This time I think both are right.
I also think that is what most of the public think. That in itself can’t help Abbott.
In any event, the public deserves the three debates. This ought not to be about who wants to do it, and I say that as someone who will not be preferencing either major.
Update: The Drum has a Cover It Live feature enabled on its website.
I agree Fran. Tonight’s meetings are a sign that Abbott has given up on his public persona. Q&A is going to be a disaster. If he gets asked a thorny broadband question by a young hipster leftist woman, I think he’s going to lose his rag. And the election.
For those not on Twitter it turns out that “Joel” who was a single guy offering to watch DVDs with Tony Abbott is both a Young Liberals member and a Big Brother contestant in 2007. He is the son of SA Libs candidate Joe Stanzi. It was the Big Brother appearance that gave this away.
Big problems here for Galaxy/Sky/Daily Tele in explaining how they got the 200 “undecided” voters.
http://www.news.com.au/joel/story-e6frf9ho-1111113384703
More than a few Dixers being thrown at TA. I’m expecting someone to ask him why he’s just so darn wonderful next.
Give the LibNats their due, they’re damn good at organising seats for the faithful to these events.
Well, JG has courage, that’s for sure. What a great communicator compared to Mr Abbott. Can anyone seriously imagine this guy as PM, after what he said about our Asian neighbours in his book, Battle Lines.
Anyway, what kind of a title is Battle Lines? What a nutter.
Did they have the same audience for both?
Mark,
Yes.
It’s starting to get messier for Galaxy/Sky as well.
Presumably that makes them the story tomorrow, rather than anything that actually happened?
And please tell me Mark Latham wasn’t there!
This is so demoralising. This is really testing my belief in the Australian culture– maybe we are just a bunch of small time criminals and ill-bread vulgarians.
What does political power mean in Australia? Controlling the dialog via obscurity. This election, although in some ways a return to the past, will be a game changer if the Libs win. There is no honesty, no pride, no honour in the Liberal election campaign.
I asked my self when Bush was in power in the US, how a man like him could become the President of the US? Arguably the most powerful position in the world– and now it looks increasingly like we’re going to get Mr. Abbott. A conviction politician to be sure, but refracted through the many facets of the media crystal, he sparkles from each perspective anew. And nobody wonders why?
Hard times in little Australia.
Stuff all in-depth questioning of Abbott and his beliefs. Soft-ball questioning of him…plenty whistled as applause when he came out. Plenty of feeding/leading questions.
And sycophantic, apologist, complimentary stuff about him from a number of the “usual suspects”
As we expect from a Murdochracy forum.
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Tony doesn’t even know about this:
Australian attorneys-general are considering changes to the national computer game classification scheme but have not yet made a decision on whether an R-18+ rating will be introduced.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/05/07/2893648.htm
He just likes to knee-jerk response by saying that he “instinctively likes to protect us from filth”.
And then backflips in the space of a coupla minutes.
He was confused, and ill-informed…and showed his true Luddite side again.
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Tony admits that “wireless is not as good”.
So he admits he’s offering regional centres a second rate system.
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Tony reckons that: “All of us are against the big end of town”.
That’s why he praised Twiggy so enthusiastically today & has decided to dump the mining tax.
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Tony’s detailed response to “what his government would offer to improve on hospital care”:
“We just have to run them better George”.
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Tony’s so used to being in a totalitarian run cabinet in the previous government under King Howard that when asked by Speers “Do you go by majority” when making a decision in cabinet…Tony replied:
“In the end, the way a cabinet should work…
I suppose…is by consensus.”
The PM’s “sense of what is right”
Hmmm…”I suppose”…sounds like guesswork eh?
I guess Tony can only imagine what consensus must be like.
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Tony’s so concerned about patients that when asked what he’d do to help improve things for them in hospitals he bragged about knowing a top clinician…and how awful it was that this clinician couldn’t order a plate of sandwiches w/out getting permission.
Go the sandwiches.
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Tony reckons the NSW Right is crap:
“It might be the fault of the NSW Coalition that we haven’t got rid of them before. Perhaps if we were a better political outfit we would have won a couple of elections ago.”
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Tony gave refugees a good reason to come:
“If I was living in Afghanistan or Iran or perhaps Sri Lanka and I thought that there was a prospect of coming to Australia for a better life I would be inclined to grab it with both hands. Who wouldn’t?”
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Tony, a debacle…
N’
Genuinely undecided crowd there: Abbott – Great PM or GREATEST PM?
Bad look for Galaxy, then.
God how much more sickly sweet can the accolades get at news.com? Hooray for Abbott! Abbott does it best! and Who’s a great future PM then?
At least this shows that people can recognise bullshit when they see it – even when it comes from the audience. Makes me hold out some hope that such perspicuity will prevail when it comes to actually voting.
{Lisa Simpson voice}
Mr Abbott … your campaign seems to have the momentum of a runaway freight train. Tell me … why are you so popular?
{Monty Burns’s voice}
Oh, a tough question, but a fair one. Lisa, there’s no single answer. Some voters respond to my integrity. Others are more impressed by my incorruptibility. Still others like my determination to lower taxes and the bureaucrats in the state capital can put that in their pipes and smoke it!
I’ve just posted this in Spotlight the Spin, but it’s obviously on topic here as well: fair play to whoever was the PR person who spotted that a simple and powerful contrast to Gillard on stage at Rooty Hill could be made just by having Abbott come down onto the floor instead. That was a fucking clever move that made him look very relaxed by comparison.
But “man of the people instinct”? Please. Definitely somebody else’s clever idea.
I didn’t catch Julia Gillard’s part but watched Abbot live. I thought quite a few questions were softballs. The first question sounded especially like a plant, asking him what impact would ETS on everyday cost of living? What is the point of asking him a question of a policy that he opposed except to give him the chance the recite the long lists of price rise percentages he obviously took the effort to memorize? I thought Abbot was close to rambling a few times without a clue, for example on the leadership style.
“fair play to whoever was the PR person who spotted that a simple and powerful contrast to Gillard on stage at Rooty Hill could be made just by having Abbott come down onto the floor instead.”
It helps if your boy has the opportunity to take notes in the shadows beforehand whilst the other has to front up and cop the crap from a generally biased audience…
that whistle out applause as he walks out onto the stage after yer opponent has been shot at w/ specific questions to create awkward moments…
whilst he recieves generally dorothy-dixers…and even tho he makes plenty of dumb & ill-informed comments and tends to waffle…
it all makes for nice snippets, selectively edited out of context, put up thruout the next day to ensure public perception is manipulated to a degree…
because a tight, rollercoaster election race & controversy make useful hook-ins…and keep those readers/viewers rolling in…and the bills paid.
And Australia descends into the corporate maelstrom. Joining the likes of America & Italy & the UK.
N’
lol at Fran! (Or rather with Fran.)
It’s exactly how I pictured it in my mind.