Well, the man of steel has capitulated and decided to accept Labor’s proposed amendments to the FTA enabling legislation, in order to tie up the FTA before parliament takes a break for a couple of weeks.

Sedgewick has described it quite aptly as a non-core back flip in the comments section of this thread over at Back Pages. This is because of the man of steel’s attempt to dress up any problems as “all labor’s fault”.

In fact, a quick survey of the transcript, the PM has this to say:

[the amendments] could however have adverse affects on Australian companies and that has been pointed out to the Labor Party
…
it will be on the Labor Party’s head and nobody else’s head if a difficulty in finally implementing the agreement arises
…
I have communicated these concerns to the Labor Party
…
it would be entirely the fault of the Labor Party and nobody else’s
…
if in the final analysis the insertion of the amendments presents a problem well that will be the exclusive fault of the Labor Party, not my fault
…
if in the final analysis the acceptance of these amendments does cause a problem it will be the fault of the Labor Party and nobody else
…
if it does cause a problem then the Labor Party will be to blame and nobody else
…
I therefore want it to be fully understood by everybody that if a problem does arise it will be exclusively the fault of the Labor Party
…
the undermining has been done by the Labor Party
…
So if there is a problem, it will be exclusively the fault of the Labor Party

These are all separate statements in one press conference. D’you think he had a particular point he wanted to communicate? A particular soundbite he would be happy to get out?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 12th, 2004 at 12:53 pm by dan and is filed under campaign 2004. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.