grodscorp@grods.comDeleting the evidence
 | Posted by Scott on Tuesday 20 March 2007, 7:55 am Categories: Politics, The Internet Tags: Tags: AgedCare, JamesPaterson, Liberal, RussellEgan, SantoSantoro, TheNeoCon |
On The 7.30 Report last night John Howard announced an investigation into the relationship between disgraced Senator Santo Santoro’s relationship with Queensland Liberal Party branch chairman Russell Egan Jr., after Egan was controversially awarded aged care bed licenses by the government. Some may remember the story from late last year, with Egan writing on his Blogger blog that the licenses were a “massive asset to receive from taxpayers. I hit the jackpot with my block of land… Keep in mind that these places can be on sold on the free market for up to $40,000 each.” This morning Santo was still happy to prominently display a picture of himself and Russell Egan Junior opening an aged care facility on his website:
GrodsCorp’s sources have known Russell Egan for some time and his political ambitions have never been a secret. He lists his interests on his flickr profile thus: bacardi, house music, company of heroes, liberal party. The general consensus around the traps was that it was only a matter of time before Russ Egan was preselected to contest a federal seat in Queensland, but one must conclude that Egan will never get a crack at parliament after the Santoro scandal.
Egan has learned the hard way that anything one writes on the internet will inevitably come back to haunt them if they try to enter politics or another sphere of public life. Since the scandal erupted Egan has restricted access to his blog, but not before The Courier Mail and GrodsCorp got to read long, vitriolic posts about why Asians should not be allowed to drive and “how to make money in aged care”.
Teenage political aspirant James Paterson, of The Neo-Con fame, has started working his way through the ranks of the Victorian Young Liberals and has wisely removed his blog from the internet tubes. Who wants to be preselected for the seat of Higgins (after Costello retires frustrated) and have political opponents stumble across this on their blog archive?
Just in case you hadn’t guessed from the title - I’m right wing.
In Australia this makes me a Liberal - but don’t worry American readers, not your pansy left-wing liberals, in Australia the Liberal party is the mainstream conservative political party. Sure, there is ‘One Nation’ but they are a little nutty and located on the fringe, and Family First is just not my cup of tea. In other words, if I was in America, I’d be a member of the Republican Party.
Our equivalent of the Democrats is called the Labor party. Yes it’s true; they cannot spell, as they are the party of the trade union - or labour - movement. We do have a Democrat party, but they have like four federal Senators and aren’t even recognised constitutionally as a ‘party’ because of their low representation. They are stuck somewhere around and in between Labor and the dreaded Greens, but its hard to pin them down on a scale more accuratley than that, because no one really knows what they stand for.
It can be safely assumed that The Editor will never run for parliament.
UPDATE (21 March): Russell Egan tells me that he’s had no interest in running for parliament for some time.
