Celebrated vigneron Nick Di Girolamo has excelled himself with this rare and striking Premier Grand Cru.
Selected from old grapes of wrath vines at the Obeid family’s Mt Corruption vineyard in NSW and cellared in Rum Corps oak casks, the wine reveals hidden gifts of subtle complexity. The brown nose offers a concentrated aroma of decaying cattle dung, complexed by persistent spice notes of rotten fish and more than a hint of unsavoury greased palm. An intense palate of bitter fruits displays weak backbone and piss-in-pocket acidity, with a lingering after-palate heightened by a signed “thank you” note of unmistakeable provenance.
Has Prime Minister Abbott and his office been misleading the public about his decision to restore imperial honours, compromising – and also offending – the Queen. Senior correspondent Barry Everingham suggests they have.
Yesterday, Jonathan Swan and Peter Hartcher threw doubt over Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s dealings with the Queen over the knights and dames issue in a piece published in the Sydney Morning Herald.
At the same time they were investigating this topic, I was also independently looking into this same issue and can now provide more information.
In summary, it doesn’t look good for Abbott.
Swan and Hartcher summarised the background as follows:
Tony Abbott announced last week that Quentin Bryce had been made a dame and Peter Cosgrove a knight. But had they really?
The Prime Minister’s surprise statement began: “On my recommendation, Her Majesty the Queen has amended the Letters Patent constituting the Order of Australia.”
Letters Patent are the official instrument, the parchment signed by the Queen’s own hand with her distinctive “Elizabeth R”, that give force to her decisions.
But, mysteriously, although they are public documents published in the Government Gazette, no one has been able to provide evidence that one was signed.
Or show that the Queen had signed the parchment at the time of the Prime Minister’s declaration.
This raises an awkward question. When Mr Abbott publicly pronounced Ms Bryce a dame in time for her official reception on March 25, was she? General Cosgrove started using the title Sir on March 28 after his swearing-in as Governor-General, but again was he officially allowed to claim that title?
The PM seemed to imply by his statement he had conferred directly with the Queen, however when Abbott called the Palace, my sources say he did not speak to the Queen but rather to one of her senior aides.
Abbott allegedly advised the aide that he was “restoring” a “truncated” (his words) part of the Order of Australia.
And, despite Abbott’s announcement, the subject of the Letters Patent was apparently not mentioned at that time but arose later, when the legality of his unilateral decision had time to sink in.
When I contacted the PM’s press office – the most arrogant, secretive and insulting PM’s office I have ever had the misfortune to deal with in my several decades as a journalist – they refused to comment and, indeed, slammed their phone down in my ear.
Hartcher and Swan did manage to speak the PM’s office:
After repeated requests over several days, neither the Prime Minister’s office nor Buckingham Palace would give Fairfax Media the exact date on which the monarch signed the official instrument.
On Wednesday afternoon – after Fairfax Media published this story online – a spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said “the documents” had been signed by the Queen on March 19.
But the Prime Minister’s office continued to refuse to release the signed parchment, saying the Letters Patent, which are public documents, would be published “in due course”.
Government House was unable to shed any light on the mystery. An official said Government House had not seen the Letters Patent or any copy of them.
My enquiries strongly suggest Tony Abbott bypassed the usual channels when he announced he had decided to reinstate imperial titles in the Order of Australia.
The normal accepted practise in such matters is that a joint announcement would come from the PM’s office and the Palace and they would issue a simultaneous release.
This would be followed up by a confirming announcement in the Government Gazette, which it did, but in this case no one seems to know if the Queen signed the necessary papers — and, if she did, when did she sign and where is the original?
When I called Government House, they refused to comment. In my experience, this means they were left totally out of the loop.
I then called the Palace to ask about Abbott’s decision. I received a similar response — though the anger in the royal aide’s voice was palpable.
I asked the Palace whether the titles conferred by Abbott were legal at the time he made his announcement.
I was coldly told that Abbott doesn’t confer titles, the Queen does, so I should ask Mr Abbott whether everything was legal.
Swan and Hartcher’s enquiries suggest it was not legal:
The spokeswoman had earlier said that an “electronic version” had been sent and signed in mid-March and that the signing of the paper version was “under way”.
However, there is no electronic version of Letters Patent, according to people familiar with Palace workings, and only the parchment bearing the monarch’s signature has any force.
An email exchange, in other words, may be no substitute, nor carry any official weight.
According to my sources, when the Prime Minister Tony Abbott grandly announced he was restoring knights and dames on 25 March, nothing was set in stone. In short, he lied about the Letters Patent.
And there is no such thing as an “electronic” Letters Patent — like the honours themselves, the “Letters” are a relic of another day and age.
Abbott has second guessed the Queen, which would be, in the eyes of the Palace, simply unforgiveable.
His office is now spinning desperately to try to get him out of trouble, but this merely illustrates what a mess this impetuous prime minister creates by going it alone — as he so often does.
The damage he has wrought is significant.
Firstly, his arrogance in bypassing Government House in Canberra, which he obviously did, will cause unnecessary frostiness there.
As for his Liberal Party colleagues, some 40 per cent of whom are republicans, most are privately furious he did not consult them about this move.
Despite being an avowed – one may say, obsessed – monarchist, Abbott has caused major ripples in the Queen’s office. It is a brave – indeed insane – prime minister of any country who would try to second guess Queen Elizabeth II; when it does happen, the offending politician is usually soon put back in their box.
And as to whether former Governor-General Quentin Bryce is really now a dame and Peter Cosgrove a knight?
Resigning with Style, or Beware the Shonk bearing Plonk.
Of all the judgment calls political leaders make in their careers, the last one – how to quit – is the one they most regularly bungle.
Most of the time they stay around too long, their brains so encrusted with the scar tissue of blunt political trauma that – like broken-down boxers or creaking footy players – they demand to play on, incorrectly believing they’ve still got it in them.
This happens both in leaders who have genuinely aged (Howard) and those who have aged prematurely (Gillard, Rudd).
But every now and again, someone resigns. Resignations are a science all their own. There are thousands of variables intricately woven into the formula that determine whether a resignation will be a good one or a bad one.
Don’t get me wrong. A “good” resignation is still a career-ender. “Operation a complete success, patient still dead” is the best you can hope for in these circumstances, but legacy is important in politics. If you are young – like Barry O’Farrell – it’s much nicer, when later going about your business as a private citizen, to be slapped on the back by people who thought you went too soon than slapped in the face by people who still can’t forgive you for sticking around.
The first point in the discipline of successful resignation is deciding whether it’s absolutely necessary. The sweet spot you’re looking for here is the point at which it’s very nearly necessary, but not quite. That way, the element of heroic sacrifice is preserved: He resigned, as a matter of honour.
Here again, the elements are famously slippery. Was, for instance, Barry O’Farrell’s resignation necessary? Technically – no, not at all. Of all the public figures who have trooped through Sydney’s Independent Commission Against Corruption in recent months, Mr O’Farrell is firmly and obviously one of the good guys.
But in this field, the tiniest detail can throw you. A bottle of Grange from your birth year is a horribly memorable gift, and thus twice-cursed; not only is it hard for anyone to believe you can’t remember getting it, but it also makes it harder for anyone to forget that the whole thing happened. It’s as sticky as a Wiggles chorus, and Mr O’Farrell would be in much less trouble had the thoughtful Mr Girolamo just sent him a horrible print worth $3000 instead, or a framed Wallabies jersey, or any one of the other overpriced trinkets that people like Mr Di Girolamo regularly flog off at party fundraisers.
Plus, booze is troublesome; it just is. Whether you drank too much of it and drove into a gate, like former WA treasurer Troy Buswell, or stuck your willy in a glass of it, like the Queensland MP Peter Dowling, or nicked two bottles of the stuff like former Democrats leader Andrew Bartlett, liquor is a leading cause of politicians deciding to spend more time with their families.
Punctuation is important. In the thank-you note – written, damningly, in the Premier’s own corpulent hand – Mr O’Farrell thanks Mr Di Girolamo for “all” his help. To a later reader, that single pen-stroke conjures a multitude of further gifts, the dancing girls and Faberge eggs of the imagination sketched out in the sickeningly rich colours of the ICAC palette. Personally, I think the whole thing was survivable but for the underscore, but I am especially interested in punctuation and thus possibly an unreliable adjudicator.
The most important factor by far, though, in a successful resignation, is timing. You have to do it early; ideally, before anyone has called for it. A voluntary resignation is surprising, affecting and heroic. A resignation offered by a quarry who has been bailed up in their own home for three days by a crowd of angry people carrying torches made of petrol-soaked rags is less of a good look.
By these and most other standards, Mr O’Farrell has had a good resignation.
But that’s the tragedy of the week, too. The very fact that a spectacle like this is so rare and shocking – a public figure deciding not to give himself the benefit of the doubt – is in itself depressing. And the resultant cry for more regulation, a “crackdown” on lobbying and so on, ignores the basic, awful lesson of ICAC, Craig Thomson and all the collected murk of recent years.
Some people won’t take an ounce of responsibility even when caught absolutely bang to rights. Others will resign even when they could probably have got away with sticking around. It’s impossible to legislate for that kind of thing.
In fact, the answer more probably lies in less regulation. Less of the centralised party controls that kept Eddie Obeid and Craig Thomson in Parliament for so long, and nurtured operators like Nick Di Girolamo. More involvement from ordinary people who know a shonk when they see one. Especially if he’s a shonk bearing plonk.
“Abbott !” said the Queen sharply. “Off the sofa, please. Sit there by the fire with Thatcher and Blair.”
The corgi glared balefully at the monarch and gave a sullen little yap, but then waddled over to join the other dogs on the hearth. The Duke of Edinburgh raised his head from his customary breakfast fare of kippers and Horse & Hound magazine.
“Did I hear you call that dog Abbott?” he said. “I thought you named them after your prime ministers.”
“We’ve run out of British PMs, dear. Abbott is the new Australian Prime Minister. Terry Abbott. Or is it Tony? One or the other.”
Philip forked another fishy blob onto the ducal plate.
“Abbott,” he said. ” Abbott…..Abbott…..Abbott? Terry Abbott? Can’t say I’ve ever heard of him.”
The Queen gave a light sigh.
“Of course you have, Philip,” she said. ” We had him to lunch at Windsor last year. You said it was the most excruciatingly dull occasion you’d endured since the state dinner for George Bush.”
“Ah yes. He kept banging on about being a Rhodes scholar.”
“And told us some of the colleges at Oxford were very old and historic,” said the Queen with a wry smile. “Who’d have thought it ?”
She poured herself another cup of tea. Spode china, milk and one, a tinkle with the teaspoon. The Duke lowered Horse & Hound.
“I suppose he’s one of those Australian republican chappies, is he? Can’t wait to get rid of us.”
“Oh Lord no, ” said the Queen. “Quite the opposite. He’s more Tory than we are. He’s just asked me to reintroduce knighthoods. Sir This and Dame That in the Order of Australia. Ridiculous, but one had to go along with it, of course. ”
Philip snorted. “Some of your colonials still love the baubles,” he said. ” I suppose that means we’ll have to fly out there for another bloody tour. ”
“No dear. Been there, done that. Too old now. William and Kate are going out in a few weeks. Good practice for ’em.”
“Thank Christ for that.”
The Duke returned to his magazine. His wife selected a triangle of toast and spread it liberally with best Welsh butter and chunky Dundee marmalade.
“Here, Abbott,” she said. “Come to mummy.”
The dog stirred from the fireplace and positioned itself by the royal chair, eyeing the toast proffered in the royal hand.
“Now beg!”
The animal settled back on its haunches, front paws raised, mouth open. In went the morsel. Snap went the jaws.
“Good boy, Abbott,” said the Queen. “Good boy.” Source: Mike Carlton http://www.smh.com.au
George Brown is a decorated soldier and health professional and 40 year veteran in the field of emergency nursing and paramedical practice, both military and civilian areas. He has senior management positions in the delivery of paramedical services. Opinions expressed in these columns are solely those of the author and should not be construed as being those of any organization to which he may be connected.
He was born in the UK of Scottish ancestry from Aberdeen and a member of the Clan MacDougall. He is a member of the Macedonian community in Newcastle, and speaks fluent Macedonian. While this may seem a contradiction, it is his wife who is Macedonian, and as a result he embraced the Macedonian language and the Orthodox faith.
His interests include aviation and digital photography, and he always enjoys the opportunity to combine the two. Navigate to his Flickr site to see recent additions to his photo library.
Џорџ Браун е украсени војник и професионално здравствено лице и 40 годишен ветеран во областа на за итни случаи старечки и парамедицински пракса, двете воени и цивилни области. Тој има високи менаџерски позиции во испораката на парамедицински услуги. Мислењата изразени во овие колумни се исклучиво на авторот и не треба да се толкува како оние на било која организација тој може да биде поврзан.
Тој е роден во Велика Британија на шкотскиот потекло од Абердин и член на Kланот MacDougall. Тој е член на македонската заедница во Њукасл, и зборува течно македонски. Иако ова можеби изгледа контрадикција, тоа е неговата сопруга кој е македонски, и како резултат научил македонскиот јазик и ја примија православната вера.
Неговите интереси вклучуваат авијација и дигитална фотографија, и тој секогаш ужива во можност да се комбинираат двете. Отиди до неговиот Фликр сајт да видите последните дополнувања на неговата слика библиотека.
Discussion on the law that applies to or affects Australia's emergency services and emergency management, by Michael Eburn, PhD, Australian Lawyer. Email: meburn@australianemergencylaw.com
Oh, let's see...distinguished Gen-X'er, frustrated writer and mom living in the confines of a small town that thinks it's a big deal. And have I mentioned Walmart yet?
Words, By George! 