- Posted by Ad astra on April 27, 2009
Remember what a hub-hub there was over Joel Fitzgibbon. First, without any help from Defence Department bureaucracy, he managed to foul up the Department’s pay system, targeting specifically SAS personnel on active duty, arranging for them to receive pay slips that indicated they were to receive no pay, leaving them distraught that their families back home faced destitution. If only he had had the sense to ask the bureaucrats to fix this, it would have been done in an instant. The Shadow Minister said he could have fixed the problem in four hours.
Sensing that a ministerial scalp was in the offing the Coalition went ballistic, demanding an explanation, and when Fitzgibbon made a fumbling response at Question Time they smelt blood and went in for the kill, like hunting a vulnerable wildebeest as Dennis Shanahan put it. Fitzgibbon looked stunned, but survived. More...