Something is seriously rotten in the politics of Australia and of the entire Western Hemisphere. The political class is either corrupt, incompetent or both. After the revelation today about Julie Bishop and Chinese donations to the Liberal Party in her own Hillary Clinton inspired “pay to play” scheme”, I was drawn back to this Quadrant article of a month ago. (link below) I’ve placed a cut and paste below but read the entire column but careful you don’t choke on your own vomit.
“…The latest give-away was $140 million, announcedby Abbott’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop in June, 2014. The $140 million pledge went to an amorphous, scandal-plagued US-based education and gender-parity charity chaired since February, 2104, by none other than our ex-PM Julia Gillard,[1] concurrently a prominent member of Hillary Clinton’s official Presidential campaign. The charity is called Global Partnership for Education (GPE).
Why Julie Bishop shifted taxpayers’ $140 million to Gillard’s GPE is a mystery. Was Bishop preparing the way for her own translation in due course to a well-remunerated international sinecure? She has as one template: ex-NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark stepping up to run the United Nations Development Program as Administrator in 2009. Clark was the first woman in that job, which she got a year after her nine years as PM. Many super-top jobs now have “Woman’s turn next” written on them in invisible ink.
Whatever was in Bishop’s mind, how did she get a tick from Abbott for such a huge gift to GPE? Abbott had a huge PM’s Department precisely to alert him against doing dumb stuff. And if his office watchdog Peta Credlin was so astute and all-controlling, why didn’t Credlin raise a literal red flag?[2] Even if Gillard’s on-going politicking in the US escaped Credlin’s attention, surely our Ambassador in Washington, Labor’s Kim Beazley, was taking note and sending home despatches about it?
And here’s the best bit: just as Australian governments (Labor and Coalition) donated $460m in total to the Global Partnership for Education, so also did Australian governments (Labor and Coalition) deliver $75m to the Clinton Foundation and its satellites in the past decade. That is, our political masters have shipped well over half-a-billion dollars of our foreign-aid money to a couple of high-living US charities run by the Democrat “progressive” set…” Cheque Mates: Gillard, Bishop & Hillary