The former prime minister, who died earlier this year, was famously discovered sans trousers in the foyer of a seedy Memphis, Tennessee hotel during a conference in 1986. Fraser appeared at 7am wearing only a towel, after losing his $10,000 Rolex watch, passport, wallet and $600 cash. 

He maintained he was drugged and not drunk, a story backed by his wife, Tamie.

“They were having him on. Poor old boy,” she said in 2007. “Someone must have slipped him a mickey finn as soon as he walked in. He rang me up and told me about it when he got back to his own hotel. There was this awful voice.”

According to veteran journalist Laurie Oakes, former prime minister John Gorton once boarded a VIP jet in Melbourne after a boozy official dinner, and:

He fell asleep, was woken a while later by the noise of the engines, and vomited. As a flight attendant cleaned up, the apologetic PM asked if she was surprised an old fighter pilot like him would still get airsick.

Yes, she said – particularly since the plane had not yet taken off.

In 2007, news broke that Kevin Rudd had visited Scores, a Manhattan strip club. He claimed to have been too drunk to remember the details of the night, spent with Labor MP Warren Snowdon and the editor of the New York Post, the Australian Col Allan.

“I have never tried to present myself as Captain Perfect,” Rudd said at the time. The night out, which occurred in 2003, was quickly parodied by other politicians who made even more ancient confessions.

“The last time I attended a strip place would have probably been in the 1970s, when I was a student,” then-Victorian premier John Brumby said. “I think if my memory’s correct it was probably in Sydney.”

In 2005, then-NSW opposition leader John Brogden “had a few drinks and let off some steam” following the resignation of longstanding NSW premier Bob Carr. After reportedly “propositioning” a journalist and pinching another, he made a “mail-order bride” joke about Carr’s Malaysian-born wife, Helena.

After initially dismissing the story as “a grubby Labor Party attack”, Brogden resigned the Liberal leadership and a day later was hospitalised after a self-harm attempt. He is now a chairman of Lifeline Australia.

Northern Territory MP Dave Tollner was accused of being drunk and “boorish” on a flight from Adelaide to Canberra in 2004 by South Australian Labor MP Rod Sawford. Tollner was reportedly “ruffling” Christopher Pyne’s hair, and did the same to Sawford.

“I think that’s one of the things a nancy boy in Adelaide would say,” Tollner said. “But I think this is a terrible beat-up.”

Sawford replied that Tollner was a goose, saying: “He ruffled my hair and I told him: ‘The last bloke who did that to me had his jaw broken.’”

Tollner was later appointed the NT’s minister for alcohol rehabilitation and policy, and loosened alcohol laws, saying Territorians were “made to feel like criminal suspects every time they went into a bottle shop”.

Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund Barton, was accused of drunkenness by Labor journalist and politician John Norton in 1902:

I myself have seen you [Barton] drunk in the legislative assembly of New South Wales ... I have seen you snoring drunk on several occasions ... you have addressed audiences while under the influence of drink ... when in Brisbane about a year ago you got so disgracefully drunk and incapable that medical aid had to be called in so that you could be ‘toned up’ in time to address a big public meeting. On that occasion your condition and demeanour, the result of your drinking, so shocked some of the audience nearest the platform that they left in shame and disgust ... 

Tony Abbott’s 2015 antics included shirtless post-coup partying, and chugging schooners with students in Sydney pubs. But in 2009 he reportedly missed the vote on the Rudd government’s $42bn stimulus package because he fell asleep in his office after a night of drinking with Peter Costello, Kevin Andrews and Peter Dutton. 

“That is an impertinent question,” Abbott said when asked by a journalist whether he had been drunk. He “wasn’t keeping count” of the bottles of wine that were consumed, but thought it was “maybe two”.

In 2003, Andrew Bartlett, then-leader of the Democrats, gate-crashed the Liberals’ Christmas party, making off with five bottles of wine.

According to reports in the Age, Bartlett returned four bottles at the request of Liberal senator Jeannie Ferris but kept the last.

Later that night, Bartlett abused Ferris during a Senate debate, followed her into the courtyard and allegedly grabbed her with “considerable strength”.

Bartlett took leave from his position as leader, and did not recontest it after the 2004 election. He left parliament in 2007. Ferris commented on his decision to abstain from alcohol that it’s “a difficult decision to take in the building in which we work”.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/dec/29/australian-politi...

And let's not mention the former GG Kerr who should have been drug tested before dismissing the Labor government...

Scott Morrison’s war on welfare is all about distracting us from climate chaos and a worsening economy, writes Ben Eltham.

According to Shakespeare, winter was the season of England’s discontent. But the Bard never got to visit Australia in the Anthropocene. 

It’s a mark of how radically our climate is changing that spring now seems pretty hostile too. Fires and drought ravage Queensland and New South Wales. Reefs die, rainforests burn, and rivers dry up. 

We are now used to the Coalition ignoring the science on climate change, and so further lies and denial can blend into the background. 

But consider that this week, while Queensland suffered devastating fires, the Queensland Nationals Minister for Water (and natural disasters) David Littleproud publicly stated that he didn’t know if climate change was caused by humans. Meanwhile, the New South Wales state government proposed an emergency ‘Noah’s Ark’ project to move fish from waterholes in the Darling basin. As the climate crisis intensifies, the reaction of pro-pollution conservative politicians looks increasingly risible, even bizarre.

Australia faces a climate crisis – now, today. But the government’s policy is not just to ignore it. The government’s policy – from backing Adani to ignoring the next global climate meeting – is actually to make climate change worse. 

And then there’s the economy. There’s no sugar-coating it: Australia’s economy is in trouble. Last week’s national accounts figures showed gross domestic product grew  just 1.4 per cent in the past year. Unemployment is trending up. Consumers have stopped spending. Wages are stagnant, living standards are flatlining, while business confidence is falling. Interest rate cuts and the government’s much-vaunted tax cuts haven’t worked. 

Growth of just 1.5 per cent a year is the slowest growth since the global financial crisis. With Australia’s population growing at around 1.6 per cent annually, the economy is actually shrinking in per capita terms.

The root cause of the malaise seems to be generally agreed: stagnant wages. Once adjusted for inflation, wages for Australian workers have gone nowhere for years. Static wages are eroding the foundations of the economy, some parts of which are in real trouble. Household consumption is anaemic, also at its lowest point since the GFC. Consumer sentiment is flat; retail spending and business confidence are both falling.

House prices in Sydney and Melbourne have bottomed out, which is good news for sellers (but bad news for buyers still locked out of the market). But it at least signals that there won’t be a housing crash in the short term – the true nightmare scenario for RBA governor Phillip Lowe.

And yet, despite the manifest weakness, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg refuses to follow Lowe’s advice, and open the fiscal spigots. Obsessed with the bragging rights of a government surplus, Frydenberg is doing nothing while the domestic economy slows.

Read more:

https://newmatilda.com/2019/09/12/the-climate-is-heating-the-economy-is-...

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