It’s understandable if a busy union boss forgets his own words

Victorian Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union boss John Setka, yesterday:

My speech at Tuesday’s rally has been taken out of context and exploited by the Liberals who only want to attack workers’ rights … We’ve never gone to people’s homes or involved their families and never would.

Involving families. Setka addressing the rally on Tuesday:

You (Australian Building and Construction Commission) inspectors aren’t even on the electoral roll. They’ve got to lead these secret little lives because they’re ashamed of what they do … We’re going to expose them all. We will lobby their neighbourhoods, we will tell them who lives in that house and what he does for a living, or she, and we will go to their local footy club. We’ll go to their local shopping centre. They will not be able to show their faces anywhere. Their kids will be ashamed of who their parents are when we expose all these ABCC inspectors.

Nora Ephron in I Feel Bad About My Neck (2006):

Denial has been a way of life for me for many years. I actually believe in denial.

Taken out of context 2.0. Huffington Post on Thursday:

One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson has refused to apologise for her comments about removing autistic children from mainstream classrooms, claiming she was taken out of context by the Greens and Labor for “political pointscoring”.

It’s possible Hanson didn’t foresee where the defence would come from. Presenting … Guy Rundle in Crikey yesterday:

It could have been done more even-handedly. But to go by the news reports you’d think La Hanson wanted any kid who likes trainspotting and has impulse management issues to be consigned to the workhouse in calipers. Hanson is saying nothing of the sort. As I read it, she is suggesting that education would be better managed for special-needs kids and non-special needs kids alike with some degree of separate teaching. Her expression of the issue suggests a less than rigorous examination of the research, but let’s deal with that further down. The crucial point I want to make is that Hanson’s suggestion that both teachers and parents are anything from disturbed to at their wits’ end by increasing problems of classroom management is spot on and appears to be nowhere registered in the debate around Gonski and other programs. For reasons that are cultural and political, much of the debate has been conducted as the exact reverse of Hanson’s intervention: almost wholly from the perspective of special-needs children and their parents, and with an unexamined bias towards the doctrine of total inclusion.

Rundle continues:

Hanson’s statement about teachers and parents rings true to me, because I’ve been hearing it from state school teachers — especially primary teachers — for years, and in a way that has not been registered in the public debate. Many find themselves unable to teach because their attention, energy and focus is consumed by one, two or three students or more in each class with serious behaviour management issues. Such kids have extreme attention deficit problems, restlessness, poor impulse control, learning difficulties, anger management, extreme aggressiveness and other issues.

From The Economist’s obituary of Helmut Kohl yesterday:

Although he made Germany into ­Europe’s leader, he disliked the controversy it provoked. He later disowned his protegee Angela Merkel … “She is making my Europe kaputt,” he complained, with unfeigned proprietorial anguish.

Damned either way. The Sydney Morning Herald website yesterday:

Kombucha is just disgusting — no matter what it does for the gut.