Abbott tells Europeans how to run the world

The Sydney Morning Herald tells us that former PM Tony Abbott addressed an Alliance of European Conservatives and Reformists in Prague on Saturday night. If you want to see everything he said, don’t hesitate to click here. Otherwise, I can give you the gist of his words, which didn’t impress me greatly… to say the least. He expressed his opinions concerning Europe's treatment of unwanted immigration… as if all European nations were looking upon this phenomenon in the same way. He said that it looked like “a peaceful invasion”. I wonder what Abbott really suggests by his juxtaposition of those two unrelated terms. It's murky Down Under English, along the lines of his rough-and-ready "Look, I'm going to shirtfront Mr Putin ... you bet I am."

France is happy to have earned a lot of cash by selling submarines to Australia. We’re grateful for that business, of course. And we don’t expect Australia to be more generous towards France by telling us (or any other European nation) how to handle the delicate and difficult problem of out-of-hand immigration. If France wanted to put a brutal end to such immigrants, Tony Abbott surely knows that the French navy could use one of our submarines. So, why doesn't he simply shut up?