Every now and then a Member of the Australian Parliament behaves so badly he degrades his fellow colleagues. Senior correspondent Barry Everingham comments.
Christopher Pyne is, to put it mildly, a pain in the arse.
As the manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives, he is one of the Parliament’s most visible members, but certainly one who is hardly taken seriously by the more professional members of his party and who is nothing more or less than a pompous buffoon.
He is a nuisance and a thorn in the side of the Speaker, who more often than not tosses him out of the Chamber for an hour under one of the Standing Orders.
In the past 24 hours he sunk to depths even marginally lower than those plunged by Tony Abbott.
By linking those who Julia Gillard brands as “climate change deniers” to those who deny the Holocaust, Pyne can now no longer be taken seriously.
The man is an absolute disgrace.
Gillard is one of those MP’s who is a friend of Israel’s and last year was in the Jewish state as a member of a delegation of Australian opinion makers, including that arch-denier of climate change, Andrew Bolt.
Now Bolt is many things, much of which many people despise — but his abhorrence of Holocaust deniers is on record and he is to be applauded for his unerring stand on that matter.
So, in Pyne’s book, Bolt can somehow be tarred with the Holocaust denier label!
Now — just what does Abbott think of the Pyne gaff? Abbott, as Malcolm Turnbull so correctly remarked, swings on issues like a weather vane. Will Abbott pull Pyne into line?
After all Abbott believes climate change is crap.
Abbott’s record of standing by the Party troglodytes – Bernardi, Andrews, Mirabella, Morrison at al –more than likely means that Pyne will get away with it.
In the Liberal Party anyway.
How the Jewish community will react is another matter.
