Andrew Bolt: Elected MPs shouldn’t need a lesson on treating people with respect

Why must we pay for Liberal MP Andrew Laming to take time off to learn basic manners that most of us adhere to?

Federal Member for Bowman Andrew Laming will leave politics at the next election.

What barbarians are we electing to parliament? And why must we pay them while they take time off to learn basic manners?

After all the other sleazy claims this month, federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming now admits he photographed the bottom of a woman in a shop as she bent over and revealed her underwear.

Laming at first defended his photo as “funny” and called the furious reaction of the woman’s male colleagues “awkward”.

So already we know the men in this garden supplies shop have higher moral standards than the politician representing them. Who’s also a doctor.

And get this: Now that he’s been outed for also bullying two women online, Laming is taking time off, still on our dime, to get “clinical counselling”.

This was after Prime Minister Scott Morrison ordered him to take an “empathy course” — “a private course, to build his understanding and awareness about his actions”.

Federal Member for Bowman Andrew Laming.

Not good enough. The Prime Minister should fire this idiot from his party, and it was only after Liberal MPs bagged Laming that Laming let it be known he’d quit politics at the next election.

But when did it become unclear to even a doctor that he shouldn’t photograph a young shop assistant, without her consent, in a pose a creep would drool over?

Was it after millions of Australians stopped going to their weekly “empathy course” in churches every Sunday, to be instructed in the “golden rule” — to “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”?

I haven’t had a sheltered life. I’ve worked as a labourer, been to a war zone and interviewed paedophiles locked up in Thailand.

I know people can be cruel, selfish and stupid. Yet I assumed we’d get a better class of people elected to — and working in — our parliament. More civilised and more on their best behaviour.

But last week we also heard NSW Nationals MP Michael Johnsen was accused of raping a prostitute at a lookout after paying her $200 for oral sex. Not guilty, he insists.

We also learned that gay Liberal staffers photographed themselves masturbating or having sex in parliament. Before that, a Liberal staffer was accused of raping a colleague in the Defence Minister’s office.

Do these people also need “clinical counselling” to teach them to act less like animals and more like a human, grown-up? Scary.