No Rudd gaffe for the ABC’s Insiders
Where’s the gaffe? A series of clips on ABC1’s Insiders
today omitted PM Rudd’s “history wars” gaffe. But
Gerard Henderson commented on it.
On Thursday, former prime minister John Howard highlighted the amazing “history wars” error PM Kevin Rudd had made in a speech the day before.
Rudd said that the country needed to “go beyond the so-called ‘black armband’ view that refused to confront some hard truths about our past, as if our forebears were all men and women of absolute nobility, without spot or blemish.”
The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Mr Howard pointed out:
Mr Rudd had misunderstood the meaning of the term. “It’s the opposite of what he said it was,” Mr Howard said. ”The black armband view was that our past was filled with unutterable shame.”
The PM’s gaffe was conspicuously absent from the edited clips the Insiders put to air on the program today. Mr Rudd would have appreciated that. It proves again that helping Kevin is as easy as you know what.
If any member of the Howard Government had made such a blunder, the mistake would have been the story.
But panellist Gerard Henderson made sure the gaffe did get a mention. The executive director of the Sydney Institute also had a good line about another war:
“If we have to end the economic debate wars, I mean is the Prime Minister going to stop writing 6,000-word article for The Monthly on economic history?”
Perhaps another observation to be made here is that, when you watch the clips and see the PM’s absolute dependence on the script, perhaps Australian history is an uncomfortable topic for Rudd the Sinophile.
