Piss off Alby

Alby Schultz was a NSW MP who made himself look good and did bugger-all for anyone else, undermining a NSW Premier of his own party without having the necessary guts, brains and character to step forward and show how it's done. Now he's a Federal MP, and no better. The old bludger has been siphoning the public purse for 21 years now and it's high time he left.

I meant what I said earlier about getting rid of duds, and included Schultz then - every Prime Minister has had to shirtfront their party in order to win and Turnbull should target him. Politicians love a morals crusade, and keeping Alby Schultz hanging around makes it that much harder. Seriously, think of the problems that beset our nation - economically, environmentally, whatever - if we all went around grabbing people who taunted us, we'd be stuffed. Alby Schultz is not a leader of our community and should not be a representative. He just can't help us, he can't help himself.

Piss off, Alby.

As a State MP he'd pooh-pooh every one of the many reform ideas that the Greiner and Fahey governments put up. The cosseted fug of protections and demarcations and penalties that Labor put in place in NSW, which enabled mediocrities like Schultz to thrive and which has caused the massive infrastructure problems that the state now faces, was the status quo that he sought to preserve. He was against the Olympics because a dollar spent in Homebush was a dollar not spent on road culverts, footy grounds and subsidies in his electorate. He thought that anyone with more than the rudimentary education he had was overeducated. He sniped and backgrounded and whinged, and would start screaming when ministers were reluctant to hand over large slabs of public largesse to his electorate. When it came time to ask him to contribute ideas or do some work, all he could offer was: bugger the rest of you, I'm looking out for myself.

Piss off, Alby.

Having helped the NSW Liberals out of office he shuffled off to Canberra, hoping to repeat his triumph there, but John Howard could see him coming and kept him in his box. In a fit of pique at one point he went to the press and told Howard to step down, saying he was too old (ya srsly) and encouraging Costello to challenge him. It was probably the most important thing Alby Schultz ever said, did or achieved, and it had precisely no effect whatsoever.

Piss off Alby.

He began shrieking when a State seat within his Federal one was being contested by a woman, a spring chicken in her fifties, one with achievements and energy and an intellect that he found enormously threatening (why? Did he want to reserve the State seat for himself so that he could make sure the Libs never got back into office ever again?). He allows the far right to stack his branches so that anyone in that area who wants to make a contribution is so repulsed that they have to build their own political platform to take him on, and to use the office that he occupies to benefit people other than Alby Schultz. The reason why he hates the Nationals is because they are bigger bludgers than he is: he once used to boast that he was a financial member of both Coalition parties, and it reflects poorly on the Liberal Party that their standards were so low as to preselect him.

Piss off, Alby.

He always had a temper on him and he's now degenerated to the point where he can't even control that. You know it's a sad situation when you're a foil for an unctuous outburst from Wilson Tuckey. Even sadder was the sheer waste of public resources and time after he went the sook on Andrew Stoner, who like most public servants has done more for the community than Alby Schultz has, will or can. It's hard to have any sympathy for Chris Pearce, who is no less of a limpet than Schultz, but I think I can manage it just this once.

Piss off, Alby.

He is on the old-school parliamentary pension, which maxes out after 18 years. The area he represents is hardly flush with pelf from the Treasury as you'd find from active and engaged local members. He's never been one for the hard work of public policy, and nor is he much of a campaigner or a fundraiser for any contest where his own damn name isn't on the ballot. Any journalist who quotes him is perpetrating a fraud, the very idea that this man might say something the nation might need to hear is sheer rubbish. The Alby Schultz story: from obscurity to decline without any intervening period of achievement. It's time to ...

Piss off, Alby.