Counting of below-the-line votes in the 2022 Federal Election has confirmed that Tasmanian Liberal Senator Eric Abetz will not be returned to his seat. The Liberal Party will retain two Senators, the Labor Party two, the Greens one. When preferences are finally distributed, Jacqui Lambie Network candidate Tammy Tyrell will pick up the last seat.
Vale Erich
I have been asked by the Editor of Tasmanian Times to write an obituary for the too-long-lived political career of Senator Erich Abetz.
That Erich.
The Keeper of the Liberal dirt files. As the domain may well disappear, read the full URL and decide for yourself if material has been removed: https://abetz.com.au/ir-shame-file.
The hit man and later simply fanboi for the onion-eating, ‘climate change is crap’ chump Abbott.
The leash holder to the Godwin Grech attack dog who brought down Malcom Turnbull back in the day.
The man who delivered Damien Mantach to steal Liberal Party funds (see box).
The logging supremo who watched 6 million tonnes of Tasmanian native forests going to woodchips each year while serving – and we use the term loosely – as the federal Liberal Minister for Forests. At the time he branded the campaign to prevent this waste of a public asset as ‘akin to treason’.
The protector and promoter of plantation Managed Investment Schemes that cost the nation billions, schemes so calamitous that even his foppish protegé Jonathon Duniam admitted they ‘had terrible outcomes’.
The capital gains tax and land development rorter, whose shady Channel Highway dealings have never been properly investigated.
The once Leader of the Government in the Senate, the chamber where he voted against the marriage equality legislation and thus deliberately betrayed the majority of Tasmanians and indeed Australians who voted for it in the plebiscite.
These antics made him the most-hated and yet most-protected pollie produced by this true blue state. A state in which you can buy an election over poker machine licences. A state which saw fit to keep him for over twenty years as number one on the Liberal Party ticket.
This much-abridged Life of Erich is suggestive of his true character as finally even his fellow Liberals could take no more, demoting him to the third spot on their ticket.
The third spot was not unwinnable, but it was the first real test of Abetz’s electability ever. He originally entered the Senate in 1993 as the party’s choice to fill a casual vacancy, and thereafter sat prætor-like atop the numero uno sedan chair at the 1998, 2004, 2010 and 2016 elections.
But out there, actually facing the people for the first time ever, he was lost. Finally he was accountable for the decades of hate he hawked. And no-one was buying.
There he flailed like a drowning man, sinking his – originally ours, of course – dollars into a shrill campaign about him being a big noise in Canberra we needed to keep.
To be defeated for the Senate by a name unknown, a member of the Lambie Party, and female to boot, is a fitting end to the Abetzian dream.
Erich the slut-shamer is no below the line hitter like Lisa Singh!
As there is a god, I must now investigate if Erich is entitled to his pension for the 16 years that he sat in the Senate illegally as a dual national, established by his own hand when he renounced his German citizenship in 2010 before I took him to the High Court, hence I had to withdraw, and he had to pay his own costs. You cannot renounce a citizenship you do not have.
Editor, if I proceed with my court case against this has been, it may indeed put the final nail in his coffin.
It would be sad if he is taken from us with an apoplectic fit.
Vale Erich.
John Hawkins is a long-time critic of Eric Abetz, claiming that he sat in the Senate illegally as a foreign citizen.
Check our Abetz’s voting record for yourself at They Vote For You.
