Culture

Tony Abbott Said That There Was “A Holocaust Of Jobs” Under Labor In Question Time Today And People Are Very Angry

Today, in "Stories of Good Government":

by Alex McKinnon  12 February 2015

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Question Time came back for the first time in the new year this week, in case you were wondering where you can go to watch grown men get paid six-figure salaries to shriek insults at each other. Four days in and the Prime Minister has already provided some stellar moments of political oratory, including trashing a Human Rights Commission report on children in detention as “blatantly partisan” and raising the prospect of dead North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il building Australia’s submarines.

But Tony Abbott somehow managed to raise the tone of debate even higher this afternoon, when he claimed job losses in the Defence industry under the former Labor government amounted to a “Holocaust of jobs”.

Even Christopher Pyne looks kind of unsure at that one; his head is nodding, but his face is doing something altogether more complex. Understandably there was an instant and overwhelmingly negative reaction to Abbott’s comparing of Defence job losses to the Holocaust, because, y’know…the Holocaust. Touchy subject.

As more than a few people have pointed out, the Era of Good Government that started on Monday seems to have been extremely short-lived, confined to roughly between 2:14 and 2:18AM early on Tuesday morning.

There’s also a point to be made somewhere on the irony of Abbott’s flapping the word “Holocaust” around on the same day a federal Parliamentarian pushes for him to be tried by the International Criminal Court for crimes against asylum seekers, but for the life of me I can’t think what it might be.