WHEN you’re prime minister, you’ve got to watch those old stagers, silly or otherwise.
Bob Hawke learned his lesson in 1989 from a run-in with Whyalla pensioner Bob Bell, who challenged the then PM about earning more in a week than he got in a year. “You silly old bugger,’’ Mr Hawke shot back, in a lapse that would dog him for the rest of his time in politics.
Now it’s Tony Abbott’s turn. Yet unlike his Labor predecessor, the Prime Minister has every right to feel aggrieved by the circumstances of his post-budget ambushing live on TV and radio respectively by Brisbane pensioner advocate Vilma Ward and part-time Victorian sex line worker Judith Power.
The feisty Mrs Ward, 85, has longstanding and easily verifiable links to the Queensland Labor Party that were not declared before Network Ten put her on air with Mr Abbott and gave her carte blanche to swing away.
Grandmother of three Ms Power, 67, is hooked into the political Left as a feminist activist and anarchist, and was alleged on Liberal Party twitter accounts to have been an ALP branch secretary. She denies this.
Mrs Ward insisted yesterday that she was “nobody’s stooge’’, and was only speaking her mind when she went after Mr Abbott for breaking election promises in the budget. But she admitted she was surprised that Ten’s Wake Up! program had been in the dark about her history with the ALP. “It’s no secret,’’ she said. “If Channel Ten in Sydney didn’t know, you would think that Channel Ten in Brisbane would have.’’
Mrs Ward says she quit the Queensland ALP in the 1970s after it tried to gag her from criticising then Labor Brisbane mayor Clem Jones.
For her part, Ms Power, of Warburton, east of Melbourne, said her phone hadn’t stopped ringing with congratulatory calls since Wednesday’s run-in with Mr Abbott, prompting the PM’s much-regretted wink about her side job.
Under her working name of Gloria, she was paid 50 cents a minute to have phone sex to “make ends meet’’; the average duration of calls was two minutes, she told Fairfax Media.
Entire Article Here
So which is worse, a wink or being called a "silly old bugger"?
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