Judah’s Limerick

Are there new ways of storing wisdom you wonder
And Abbot responds in what seems like a blunder
Thinking repository
He said suppository
But where else actually, for everything there goes just Down Under!

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Backgroud Story (Sydney Morning Herald 12 August 2013)

Liberals squirm as Abbott refers to ‘the suppository of wisdom’

“No one,” Tony Abbott told a Melbourne gathering of Liberal Party faithful, “however smart, however well-educated, however experienced … is the suppository of all wisdom”.

The Opposition Leader’s travelling mentor, Philip Ruddock, squirmed and the Victorian MP Josh Frydenberg took a few seconds to register what his leader had said.

“Suppository?” Mr Frydenberg mouthed to a grey-haired man standing next to him. The man nodded gravely, perhaps recognising that Mr Abbott intended to say repository, a place where things are stored.

As so often happens these days with political gaffes, within 30 minutes the hashtag #suppository was trending on Twitter, accompanied by photo-shopped images of Mr Abbott with suppository-inspired captions (“know your enema”, “squeezing out a policy”, etc).

It didn’t help that Mr Abbott’s slip-up reminded people of Tony Windsor’s claim that the Opposition Leader told him he would do anything to secure a minority government during negotiations after the last election, except “sell my arse”.

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