Source: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/06/04/1086203624912.html
So what’s the straight dope? Was this a “clerical error” in the game of politics or did the Aussies actually dispatch an F-111 to Kiwi Land? Was this a training flight? Was there an actual flight? The SMH is pretty well screwed up in the article.
Well, if you’d just RTFA, you’d see that it wasn’t a bombing.
Thank you and I read the article.
“It was actually only the release of airborne explosive ordnance in a downwards direction with Auckland underneath.” Sounds like a bomb to me. Is this the new political double-speak?
Sounds like doublespeak to me. However, the word “bombing” seems to imply intent. If an explosive ordnance were to be released by mechanical malfunction from a plane, would that be a “bombing”?
I think it was the sort of flight that makes a big “whooshing” sound as it passes overhead.
BTW, you can seach the entire parlimentary record for that day. There is no mention of Aukland. No other news organisation has this story. And as for
I think it pretty safe to assume that the article contains not one scrap of truth.
Are you suggesting that it would be hard to tell whether Auckland was destroyed?
The piece is, of course, humour.
The background is this: Various ministers, including the PM, stated in parliament and elsewhere, that they were essentially unaware of the prison abuses in Iraq until they read it in the papers. It turns out that an Australian army major had visited the prison, given presentations on the Geneva Conventions and written reports about the abuses. These reports found their way to various departments (including Defence, DFAT and the AG’s), but the ministers say they were not informed (and that they therefore cannot be blamed for misleading parliament and the public). The government has refused to allow the officer to appear in front of the Senate Committee asking the awkward questions. In some quarters it is believed that this is just a bit of a bureaucratic stuff up. In others, the ministers are assumed to be lying. Still others think that a pattern (this is not the first time) of not telling the mininster things that might be inconvenient has been established and is being deliberately used to evade sheeting home ministerial responsiblity.
The piece touches on some other aspects of public life here, but that’s what it’s mainly about.
News story in opinion section = parody.
It is indeed satire.
The author of the piece, Mike Carlton, is a fairly well-known liberal humorist and satirist in Australia, and anyone who regularly reads his Sydney Morning Herald articles would recognize Carlton’s ironic wit.
The problem, of course, is that it is so easy to find something like this on the internet and, if you don’t know who Carlton is or how he writes, to mistake it for real news.
Duckster <---------- :smack:
Yes. That’s exactly what it was.
looks furtive
Humour. We would NEVER want to attack the freedom loving peoples of New Zealand.
muttertheyknowtoomuchmutter
There have been several incidents recently in which the Prime Minister has denied, in parliament, a particular occurence, then when the truth has come out claimed to have been kept in the dark by his own advisers about the occurence in question.
Two classic single sentence letters to the editor I saw last week (paraphrasing):
1/ “Could someone please tell tell the Prime Minister what the hell is going on?”
2/ “There are few things more comical than hearing politicians pretending to be angry about being kept ignorant of facts that it would have been politically damaging for them to have known.”
The classic Aus reply to this sort of situation is “It’s a joke, Joyce”..
Maybe IAJJ could join Whoosh?
Oh, and if you’re sitting there trying to remember who originated it, 'twas Graham Kennedy.
It’s okay, nothing happened. I think we got to the bomb shelters just in time, though. waves from Auckland
The Aussies don’t have F-111’s as far as I know, that’s what tipped me off about the joke 
Oh wait they do, ignore me 