The Whitlams

After Margaret’s attack on Janette Howard yesterday the Age carries a piece headed Margaret Whitlam refuses to apologise while the Australian carries a piece headed Janette maintains silence as Margaret retracts claws. Believe what you will, it matters little. The woman is mere just trying to sell her biography. Gough gets in the spirit of book selling and makes an equally contoversial statement as he denounces “politically contrived racism” against Australian Muslims and warned it could harm relations with Indonesia. This politically contrived racism must be different from the contrived racism in his 1975 statement to Cabinet along the lines of [his] not having hundreds of f*****g Vietnamese Balts coming into this country. Hang on, I get the difference.  The current contrived racism is politically based whereas Gough’s ’75 statement was ideologically based.  The thousands (hundreds of thousands actually) of Vietnamese were flooding the seas in an attempt to escape Gough’s mates in Communist Vietnam so I can almost understand where he’s coming from. Almost. As I said, this is just about selling Margaret’s biography but I do think they both should have chosen quotes that stood close scrutiny. I have categorised this post under ‘Humour’…what else?