THE Abbott Government was dishonestly and deliberately sabotaged by an angry Australian media after Prince Philip was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour in 2015.
The uncontained fury from Canberra’s pro-republic press gallery became so severe it laid bare their agenda to tear down the then Prime Minister.
These were the same reporters, remember, who had relentlessly mocked Tony Abbott for sampling an onion – a common salad ingredient – while they looked the other away as Labor’s Kevin Rudd publicly consumed his own ear wax.
It was the same activist media who had labelled Abbott a misogynist – for mentioning his wife ironed his shirts – while they whistled dixie at Rudd’s strip club antics.
This same partisan press gang knew full well the decision to honour Philip was out of Abbott’s hands. Nevertheless, they attacked the Prime Minister with all the venom they could muster.
SCANDAL
The real scandal was that many senior reporters in the gallery knew precisely what was going on but decided to keep quiet. The truth didn’t fit their anti-Abbott narrative, so they buried the facts.
At around the same time the ageing Prince was awarded his Knight of the Order of Australia, he also received four other top honours; two from Canada, one from New Zealand and one from the Queen herself.
Not a single person in the press gallery believed four nations had randomly decided to honour Philip all at the same time. But that’s what they would have the public think.
They deceptively portrayed, then demonised Abbott as being the key decision-maker initiating the Australian award. “Captain’s pick!” their headlines screamed.
EXTRAORDINARY
In June 2012, Philip received New Zealand’s top civilian honour, the Member of the Order of New Zealand.
Ten months later, on April 23, he received Canada’s second highest military honour, the Extraordinary Commander of the Order of Military Medal.
A few days after that, he was presented the Extraordinary Companion of the Order of Canada Medal, recognised as one of Canada’s highest civilian honours.
Abbott followed suit on Australia Day, 2015.
Finally, the Monarch honoured her long-serving husband with the Commonwealth’s highest honour.
Elizabeth bestowed on Philip the Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order, recognising distinguished personal service to the Monarch of the Commonwealth.
While these presentations were being celebrated elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Australia’s unhinged political reporters used them to weaponise their bias and to tear down a prime minister.
The first Party room spill to remove Abbott resulted on February 9, 2015, just 14 days after the Australia Day announcement. He was out of office by September.
HAWKE
It had been a quarter of a century since Prince Philip last received an Australian honour.
Back in 1988, then Labor Prime Minister Bob Hawke awarded him the Companion of the Order of Australia, which at the time was the highest civilian honour the nation could gift.
There wasn’t a peep from the Australian press back then. Not a whimper. The Leftist media always forgives its own.
SILENT
No one knows for certain, but it’s not difficult to guess who was behind the decision to bestow the five most recent honours on Prince Philip.
Regardless, Abbott was never able to correct the media’s “disinformation” because doing so would trigger a diplomatic storm. So he remained loyally silent – for years.
What is certain, though, was that neither Abbott nor the other three prime ministers had much say at all. And the Australian media was beyond negligent for pretending he did.PC
‘Abbott was never able to correct the media’s “disinformation” because doing so would trigger a diplomatic storm. So he remained loyally silent […]’
That’s not loyalty; it’s rank stupidity. If someone has the bare-faced cheek to unilaterally act on on behalf of an Australian Prime Minister without first consulting them and gaining their explicit permission to do so, they fully deserve to get called out for their presumption, and I personally wouldn’t give a rat’s who they were (or, more likely, who they *thought* they were).
We have a many serious problems in this country that have been longstanding, and our politicians should be spending their time and energy fixing them, because we pay them to do that – we don’t pay them to kowtow to foreign heads of state or to cosset their fragile egos.
And it seems these leftist media traitors keep getting away with their atrocities.
Various journalists including Piers Akerman and the late Larry Pickering wrote about the lowering of professional standards in journalism and indicated that schools of journalism employing left leaning staff were leading students astray. And as the victims (my word) grow older they fail to help the younger journalists to achieve excellence in reporting facts and avoiding spreading propaganda fed to them by spin doctors.
Once upon a time there were individual press secretaries on the staff of cabinet ministers, the Wran Labor NSW Government removed them from ministerial offices and created a media unit that not only monitored broadcasters, letters to editors etc., but who wrote media releases in a form ready for lazy journalists to claim as their own work. The Hawke Federal Labor Government adopted the media unit system.
Of course Coalition governments also have media departments copying the Labor initiative.
I recommend the book written by journalist Paul Sheehan: The Electronic Whorehouse … “Lies, fabrications, character assassinations, repetitional rapes, point scoring, axe grinding, sneering, smearing and generalised weaselling have become standard fare in the media.”
And in the Tony Abbott example – relentless negativity.
But then consider the inside Liberal Party faction that was behind this and that recruited Union controlled Labor’s imported activist organisation GetUp to help them spread the negativity.