Monday, March 29, 2004
Brendan Demidenko, Minister for Education.
Nelson refuses to apologise over 'fake' letter.
(Nature imitates previous blog post.)
In a bid to highlight what he said was a Labor double standard, the Education Minister Brendan Nelson last week described a family from Green Valley writing to their local member Mark Latham about the costs of sending their two children to a University and a TAFE college. (See ABC's "PM" report.)
But as it turned out, this attempt to strike at Mr Latham's heartland was based on a family that never existed.
Now he has admitted there is no such letter.
"It is an illustrative case of many families throughout Australia who are finding it very, very difficult to get their children into TAFE at the moment," he said. But that has not satisfied Mr Latham.
"Surely the Australian people have got the right to have a minister for education who actually tells the truth, who uses factual case studies, who's in touch with reality," he said.
"This is a Minister who wants to moralise about having a brave heart, a Minister who wants to moralise time after time about his integrity.
"If this minister had a brave heart and decent mind, he'd apologise right now."
But Dr Nelson has refused to apologise, saying Labor has much more to be sorry for.
"It is quite clear to any fair-minded person and I thought it was actually quite obvious that it's an illustrative case," he said.
"Back in 1996, Amanda Vanstone got into exactly the same kind of trouble as Nelson when she "exposed" an imaginary family which was rorting welfare entitlements even though they were millionaires.
Only later did it emerge that the family - she called them the Wrights - did not exist." (SOURCE)
I can't relay how disappointed we inmates of Robben Island are with young Brendan. Caught with his sticky little light-fingers in a non existent cookie jar! Sadly some of the lad's anecdotes so enjoyed by Lady Livia and ourself might have to come under some heavy duty vice regal scrutiny. We had no inkling that the lad was such a serial sexing-upperer.
Here at Robben Island we have always viewed pork-barrelling the electorate around election time as an undignified practice. It now appears that in the run up to this election Nelson minor has upped the ante and is barrelling the Leader of the the Opposition with porkies. The sooner we get our passport back from the PM's department the sooner we can return and give that boy a damn good military clip round the ears.
UPDATE: The Minister for Education has made a personal submission to the Ministry of Context and Misquotation for "illustrative" to be added to "out of context" and "misquotation" as a first line of defence. The Minister advised the department that he has received many letters from his own constituents urging an expeditious and favorable consideration of his submission.
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