Andrew Robb, Liberal Minister for Mudslinging, appears to be suffering from a political case of papal infallibility. Not content with making unsubstantiated allegations that twelve Labor candidates has not properly resigned from their 'offices of profit under the Crown', he has now attempted to bury the disgusting leaflet distributed by Liberal party operatives in Lindsay.
Robb has point blank refused to withdraw or apologise for his earlier allegations, which even the Herald Sun were a 'glitch' to the campaign. In fact, he even repeatedly demanded Penny Wong, Labor's campaign spokesperson, apologise for stating the widely reported suggestion that a member of the NSW Liberal executive was involved in the leaflet scandal. He does not seem to realise that his seat of Goldstein is mentioned in numerous dispatches as one reliant on true liberals maintaining their allegiance to his party. Even with a margin of 10.1% he is not safe. Just ask Joe Hockey and Michael Johnson.
If the false allegations which eleven of the candidates promptly refuted were not bad enough, Robb has two scandals to contend with. Both of them try to make political currency out of the Bali bombing.
In the Melbourne seat of La Trobe, the high profile Labor candidate, Rodney Cocks won the Medal of Conspicious Honour for acts in the aftermath of the Bali bombing. Anonymous Liberal sources contacted The Age to offer 'discrepancies' between Cocks' account and a journalist's report on his actions.
The extraordinarily inflammatory pamphlet distributed in Lindsay thanked Labor for supporting clemency for the Bali bombers. The lame defences of retiring MP, Jackie Kelly, suggest she either has an extremely nasty sense of humour or other intentions. Somehow I do not think that the Bali bombing is a source of humour.
It is blatantly obvious to anyone viewing the demographics and politics of Western/Southern Sydney seats such as Lindsay, Macarthur, Greenway, Banks and Hughes that they have low proportions of non-English speaking residents, high proportions of identified Christians, high votes for One Nation and swung higher than average behind Howard in 1996 and 2001. It is also known that there is currently a considerable controversy surrounding a proposed Islamic school in Camden. The area is under one of the highest levels of mortgage stress in the country and polling puts Lindsay as a lost Liberal cause and Macarthur and Greenway in Labor's sights.
It does not take Einstein to make the correlation that pushing an anti-Islamic barrow might be worth a few votes for a desperate government. After all, the loss of seats like Macarthur and Greenway would be a total repudiation of Howard's economic program and undermine the fostering of religious and cultural intolerance.
With the news that the Labor candidate for Dobell, Craig Thomson, is now being accused of being of bad character because of evidence he gave in an industrial hearing a decade ago, it seems that Robb is leading a counter-offensive, seeking to knock Labor's national issue-based campaign off-balance by putting local candidates on the defensive on dubious character grounds.
The question is whether any of the tarnishing of Labor candidates in marginal seats will be offset by a true liberal backlash of Robb's mendacious behaviour. Will he become the poster boy for sleazy attacks in the same way Joe Hockey is paying as the face of workchoices?
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