As media scrambles to catch up on Kathy’s explosive allegations of rape against Bill Shorten, first exposed this week in the Pickering Post, the ALP is casting a line into an almost empty talent pool for a more reputable fish.
Newspapers and TV programs are now vying for “exclusives” in a race to get the story legalled and pumping ratings. It’s a story they had previously refused to confront during eight months of swirling imputations.
Shorten is copping a daily hammering in the Royal Commission into Unions and his recent unhinged attack on the Japanese has left Labor reeling.
The choice of Shorten as leader over the rank-and-file’s preference for Albanese appears to be an extension of Labor’s leadership woes.
Rudd, Gillard, Rudd and now Shorten will not make good reading in ALP archives and the whole seven years will likely go missing from the file.
Separating the Siamese twins of Labor and unions will be a surgical operation made more difficult while Shorten remains. His fingerprints are all over the dirty dealings of Victoria’s Centre Right faction and his close association with Bill Ludwig’s AWU and the NSW Right’s long line of crooks augers poorly for Bill’s future.
His failed attempts to have the Gillard/Wilson fraud and jailed ALP President, Michael Williamson’s $20 million HSU East branch scam shut down have left him exposed as just another union thug and the stench of union corruption will follow him into history.
And his record of ruthlessly knifing two sitting Labor Prime Ministers in a bloody battle for his own future does not compare well with his hero Bob Hawke’s drinking record.
We saw the real Bill Shorten for the first time in a long time, in his element, on the back of that truck in Adelaide screaming anti Japanese slogans to a handful of adoring unionists. It was as un-prime ministerial as any hopeful could get.
Now the man with the wandering appendage has made the mistake of calling Kathy a liar (“it didn’t happen”) after police decided there was insufficient evidence to charge him with raping her.
Shorten has tried to paper over his murky past by planting a foot in the pretentious vice-regal establishment, but it hasn’t worked... and Kathy’s compelling story is just one of many, far too many.
Kevin Rudd has made it nigh impossible for a repeat of his ignominious dumping as leader but Labor cannot go to the next election with Shorten and they have started to realise that.
Albanese is their only hope in a shortlist of longshots and the sooner he is installed the better Labor’s chances of re-election.
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