Motes, beams and political implications
The two are hardly unrelated. The link I make is a very practical one – as John Major found out to his cost in the UK.
In general, family and politicians’ private lives are off limits. Not totally: and if family are involved in criminal wrong-doing, then they become fair game.
Back in the ‘90’s, John Major started banging on about “family values”, at which point, personal morality became an issue…and a number of his MP’s suddenly got outed as serial cads and sleaze-bounders.
Now fast forward to Australia. If things had gone differently and, electorally speaking, Ms Gillard was now in bed with Fiona Patten of the Australia Sex Party…. If the Labor Party advocated minimal net censorship…then stories about politicians surfing for smut would be mostly irrelevant.
However, in a system where the government advocates a clean net and keeps having to do deals with far right independents and the likes of Family First (which I know they haven’t just done…but the principle remains), personal political morality is very much in the frame.
The story of the rev Nile is merely a cautionary tale…but with implications for national politics should any of Julie’s 75 parliamentary supporters have smut-gobbling tendencies. A warning of things to come.
Paris...cause she'd have no probs dealing with smut-goblins of any tendency. :)