TONY LEON: A parting shot from the hypocrite-in-chief
'The former finance minister, who demanded savage penalties from the taxpayer for the state plunder in which he was a leading light, is a perjurious liar'
FW de Klerk once said: "Australia's greatest problem is that it has no great problem - nobody can say that about South Africa." While South Africa in the past few days was busy living up to Lenin's aphorism that "there are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen", I found myself far away, Down Under.From Tasmania, I witnessed an update of the De Klerk reference. While South Africa was removing one president and installing another, the Australian media oxygen was consumed with the antics of its sexually incontinent deputy prime minister. Barnaby Joyce, a rum character who, like De Klerk once did, heads a "family values" National Party, was under huge pressure to resign due to impregnating a staffer while still married, and in fact has since quit as deputy prime minister. Hypocrisy, defined by Pieter-Dirk Uys as the Vaseline that greases all politics, is apparently universal. On Wednesday, I barely had time to rub away the jet lag before watching with wonder as our ...
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