Ever since being dumped from the Prime Ministership, Tony Abbott initially harboured a desire to become prime minister again, but only had to be satisfied with the demise of the prime ministership of Malcolm Turnbull. Losing his seat of Warringah at the last election seems to have made him realise that the prime ministership is forever out of his grasp. As a consequence of that and the demise of his marriage, he seems to be suffering what many in the public eye undergo when they are finally ejected from the front pages or screens of the media, and that is relevance deficit disorder. It is a common problem, with perhaps the worst and most obvious recent cases of this ailment being Bettina Arndt1  and Mark Latham2. All are prone to making contrarian statements in an attempt  to shock people and create a frenzy of annoyance, thereby getting the required media attention.

Abbott has railed against “health dictatorships”, saying politicians need to balance the economic costs of an extreme lockdown against allowing more elderly Covid-19 patients to die by letting ‘nature’ take its course. He said it was costing the Australian government as much as $200,000 to give an elderly person an extra year’s life, substantially beyond what governments would usually pay for life-saving drugs. He said not enough politicians were “behaving like health economists trained to pose uncomfortable questions about the level of deaths we might have to live with”3. In this speech, Abbott effectively claimed that some lives are worth less than others, and that those lives should be allowed to end earlier than they otherwise would, because of the cost to the economy.

Tiergartenstrasse is a street in the Tiergarten area of Berlin. In the 1930s and 1940s, Number 4 on this street was the site of offices of the Chancellery of the Führer. In a directive issued in October 1939, Adolf Hitler empowered his personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt, and the chief of the Chancellery, Philipp Bouhler, to kill people considered unworthy of living. In this directive, the doctor and the Chancellery chief were ‘charged with responsibility for expanding the authority of physicians…so that patients considered incurable, according to the best available human judgment of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing’. The people targeted in this program were the incurably ill, physically or mentally disabled, emotionally upset, and the elderly. This program was termed Aktion T4, the T4 coming from the address of the Chancellery from where it was directed4.

Within a few months this T4 Program involved virtually the entire German psychiatric community. A new bureaucracy, headed by physicians, was established with a mandate to kill anyone deemed to have a “life unworthy of living.” The criteria for inclusion in this program were not exclusively genetic, nor were they necessarily based on infirmity. An important criterion was economic. Nazi officials assigned people to this program largely based on their economic productivity. The Nazis referred to the program’s victims as “burdensome lives” and “useless eaters”4.

While Abbott does not advocate murder, he does advocate neglect, and uses similar reasoning as those involved in Aktion T4, and that reasoning is much more common than you would hope among members of the Coalition parties5  and Murdoch’s verminous ‘ruperters’6, many of whom constantly rail against the lockdown in Victoria.

Research from the Burnet Institute recently published in the Medical Journal of Australia, shows that Victoria’s response to the resurgence of Covid-19 averted between 9000 and 37,000 cases between July 2 and July 30. Based on a mortality rate of 3.4% estimated by the World Health Organisation, that means the restrictions may have potentially saved 1258 lives7. If Abbott had been in a position of power to stop this life-saving lockdown, and did so, how would he differ from any other mass-murderer?

Sources

  1. http://www.blotreport.com/2018/09/27/more-drivel-from-switzer/
  2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/aug/25/mark-latham-the-labor-leader-who-crashed-burned-then-exploded-again
  3. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/sep/01/tony-abbott-some-elderly-covid-patients-could-be-left-to-die-naturally?CMP=share_btn_tw
  4. https://www.britannica.com/event/T4-Program
  5. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-14/tim-smith-defends-tweets-attacking-daniel-andrews-coronavirus/12248286
  6. http://www.blotreport.com/2018/01/01/reporting-and-ruperting/
  7. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/victorias-stage-3-lockdown-may-have-saved-hundreds-of-lives/news-story/95b3d51242555381db5db033f4cc3aa0

15 Comments

  • Warren says:

    Abbott should donate his body to science. While still alive.This should involve voluntary work in age care homes and virus hotspots. I don’t think we have leper colonies in Oz? May his God go with him.

    Basically Rabbott is a total waste of space. An oxygen thief. A true leaner.

  • Keryn booker says:

    He is such a despicable low form of human life , he makes my skin crawl . To have been a prime minister is such great shame for Australia . Now he’s touting himself back where he came from , I hope to god he stays there . But it will be only matter of time before they wake up to him . The world is a funny place .

  • Russell says:

    The verminous Ruperters now include one which helped our beloved Tony closely (and I do mean “intimately”) to create an amazing PMship, chock with positive aktion. They put an end to dirty coal usage and got big renewables going fast. Within days they told the mineral grabbing corporations a super tax was to be implemented to permit Australia to build a huge Sovereign Wealth Fund preserving billions for future generations. Don’t like it? Leave the stuff in our ground. That far-sighted team inspired a collective effort from public servants treated with utmost respect. Ask Niki Savva, who knew the lovely inside doingsof the PMs office. The First Lady – no, not Witch – welcomed all shades of opinion to pipe up without fear or favour, and was responsible for much policy regardless of those interfering Ministers in Parliament. Prince Phillip was appointed a trade commissioner, and what a boon to Oz. Dukes of Budget Hazard, Hockey and Cormann dropped the GST on cigars, and raised a new tax on all sales of1980s vehicles to help battlers. What a progressive, aktion-filled period which, but for dastardly Mr Silvertail’s usurping of the throne, would have brought paradise to refugees, wind power companies, the aged in care and indigenous Australians.

  • Jon says:

    Abbott’s very worst flaw – and there are many as we know including misogyny, eschewing of science etc – is his hypocritical religious zealotry. His attitudes and actions are completely at odds with most of the christian teachings he was instilled with. I read recently about yet another of Abbott’s delusions – he now claims he always believed in climate change and human contribution to it, he just didn’t think we were capable of controlling it.

    • admin says:

      Jon,
      Abbott is a lot like Trump: he will say whatever he thinks will make him look better. The only real difference is that Trump is losing his marbles at a faster rate than Abbott.

  • Russell says:

    Jon, was that a typo in your first sentence (“Abbott’s very worst flaw – and their are many…”). I must hope against hope you know “their” is for ownership and “there” is a different preposition for different meaning. Sorry, I was concerned, as you clearly know the meaning of uncommon word “eschew”!

    • admin says:

      Russell,
      It’s night time, so Jon would have had a couple of sherbets, and would be in auto-rant! So, I fixed it for him!

  • Jon says:

    I’ve noticed I seem to be making that mistake quite often lately Russell in my haste to dash off a comment, but usually I notice and fix it. Apologies because I know how it grates – like he’s for his etc. I also made a couple of errors on the other thread through poor editing prior to posting.

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