Peter Dutton Joking About Pacific Island Nations Drowning, Set To The ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Theme
"Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to, you know, have water lapping at your door."
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton isn’t the sharpest tool in the government shed, which is really saying something if you think about it. His complaint a couple of weeks ago that Fairfax is running “a bit of a jihad” against the government prompted the kind of response that bizarre sentiment deserves, and he’s so widely disliked that a poor American guy named Peter Dutton routinely gets hate-mail from angry Australians who don’t know how to tweet properly.
But if you found him on the nose before, that’s nothing compared to what you’re about to see. The intrepid, government-hating bastards at the ABC have managed to catch Dutton joking to the Prime Minister about the existential threat of climate change faced by Pacific Island nations vulnerable to rising sea levels.
In the aftermath of a press conference yesterday, Abbott mentioned that a meeting he attended in Port Moresby, the capital of Papua New Guinea, ran a little behind schedule. Dutton responded with the following: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to be, you know, have water lapping at your door.”
Abbott laughs along, but Social Services Minister Scott Morrison is quick to shut the merriment down, muttering “there’s a boom up there”. “Boom,” of course, referring to the giant microphone hanging over their heads which picked up the entire conversation, because of course it did you literally just finished a press conference. At that point all three senior leaders in the government of Australia made these “oh shit I hope we’re not in trouble” faces:
“uh”
Like saying something that idiotic directly below a news outlet-grade boom mike isn’t brain-dead enough, Dutton and co. somehow forgot about the television camera pointed directly at them, which is how we can bring you this Olympian piece of governmental fuckuppery in the first place.
freeze frame of peter dutton's face when he realizes he's on mic pic.twitter.com/5bpJoDABai
— thomas violence (@thomas_violence) September 11, 2015
Just to add some context to this, that meeting Abbott mentions in the video was the Pacific Islands Forum — a summit where, despite pressure from low-lying island nations like Kiribati, Australia refused to do more to combat climate change. Obviously the government has a deplorable record on the environment, but it takes a special kind of gronkdom to joke about places like Tuvalu and Vanuatu being swallowed by the fucking ocean the day after you meet with representatives of those countries about that exact issue.
For bonus points, some internet patriot has added the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme to the end of the original video, which almost manages to turn footage of a senior government minister joking about the prospect of small island nations being swamped by the sea into a thing of beauty.
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