Friday, May 22, 2009

Sorry, What Was That Bob?

During a panel discussion on Q & A last night about group sex and the NRL, Bob Ellis dropped this clanger on Tony Abbott.
Bob Ellis : "You have at least the record of a rugby tour, comrade."
Tony Abbott fear grinned for a few seconds, and the conversation moved, awkwardly, onwards.

UPDATE : From the Q & A transcript :
TONY ABBOTT: I thought you were going to say raise the age of consent for going on a rugby tour. Maybe only let 40 year olds go on rugby tours.

BOB ELLIS: You have a track record of at least a rugby tour, comrade.
Ellis was not making a lot of sense :
BOB ELLIS: The logic of this whole argument is surely to raise the age of consent because most of these people are saying, "Look, she's only 19. How did she know what was going to happen?" I mean, if you're going to go that far, you're either going to say how important it is or, if you're not going to go that far, you're going to say how unimportant it is.
Err, yeah?

Or he was making too much sense....
BOB ELLIS: But Roy Master's view of it is that it is, for better or for worse, common practice."
There you go. You really do learn something new everyday. I didn't know using the older, more famous one as reassuring bait to lure in a teenager and then stand by while the girl is, arguably, being raped, or at least seriously and severely abused, by up to dozen football players, watching each other masturbate, that this was common practice amongst rugby league teams.
"...and if this one man (Mathew Johns) is guilty and should be punished, there are thousands so placed...."
Thousands of rugby league players have done this kind, have they?

And then no sense at all. Ellis' mind is just about fried :
"....and I think there is a question not just of consent, but of complaint. If there was not consent on the night there should have been complaint the following the morning or complaint a week later. And if the complaint takes seven years...

TONY JONES: Well, there was complaint, as it happens, within days to the police.

BOB ELLIS: Yes. Okay. All right.

TONY JONES: So let me hear from Penny Wong...

PENNY WONG: I'm sorry.

BOB ELLIS: Okay. I withdraw that.
Fade out.