Conservative Catholic university student (Mr A) has a sexual relationship with a woman, and beluieves he fathers a child.
Before the birth of the child, the relationship breaks up. But he (and the mother) don’t believe in abortion, and the child is given up for adoption.
Fast forward to 25 years later, when Mr A is now federal Health Minister, promoting conservative moral values, and the son (Mr O) starts working in the federal parliamentary press gallery. (Mr A not knowing that the man who may be his son now works in the same building as him).
Mr O gets in touch with his birth mother, who tells Mr A (who still believes that Mr O is his child).
Mr A goes public with the story, promoting as an example of why abortion is wrong.
But a DNA test proves that Mr O is in fact the son of another man.
I don’t like Abbott or his politics or the way he span the story (niiiiiiice coincidence that he found his son right at the time he was telling women to surrender babies to adoption instead of aborting eh?) but, damn, you have to feel sorry for the poor bastard.
The politician in question Tony Abbott, is a possible candidate for the deputy leadership of the Liberal (conservative) Party if there is a reshuffle due to Prime Minister Howard retiring from politics sometimes soon. So who will be the likely leader that Tony Abbott will be deputy to? Why, Peter Costello, of course. I kid you not.
To continue TLD’s clarification/slight hijack:
And the real question is, will this Abbott and Costello be as entertaining as the original duo? (Or just a re-run of “Who’s on first?”) [/slight hijack]
Re: the OP - Nice to have something to distract us from current US headline obsessions. Sounds like a classic.
The only problem with all of the “won’t it be funny when Abbot & Costello are in charge” jokes is that if Peter Costello is the leader and Tony Abbott is his deputy, then the references will presumably be to **Costello & Abbott ** - which doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.
You seriously reckon that’d stop the press? The only people insisting on calling them Costello and Abbott will be the coalition. The rest of Australia will be too busy collectively cacking itself laughing.
The other funny things is that it does not seem to have hurt Tony Abbott at all. In Australia, it’s considered normal for a university student to have unmarried sex, leading to an unwanted pregnancy, and break up with the girlfriend before the birth – and acceptable for a conservative politician to try to make a bit of capital about it 27 years later. If anything, I suspect people are feeling a bit sorry for Tony – and very sorry for Danial O’Connor to have been dragged into this mess. In this country (the US), I think a story like this would be political death, or at least need some very serious damage control.
We’re not really worried about it (well… partly because we’re not very worried about anything) because now we simply have prof of what we’ve always known: he’s just crapping on and saying whatever he thinks we’ll believe.
All good fun.
BTW, (for the above reason) unmarried sex (and pretty much anything else) is normal here.
