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I have a vague kind of psychological attachment to Tony Abbot, having attended Sydney University in '76/77 when he was just about the sole barrier between sanity and leftist domination. Back in those days student politics was unbelievably more leftist than today. National Union of Students' annual meetings sometimes came to fisticuffs between the two leading political factions: the Maoists and the Trotskyites!
In 1977 the Sydney Uni student union, of which I was compulsorily a member, attempted to vote a few hundred dollars to the Gough Whitlam federal re-election campaign. The forces of the right actually deployed their shock troops (drunken students of the Faculty of Engineering, of which I was voluntarily a student) and defeated their proposal at the open air meeting.
I find myself at this juncture viscerally supportive of Brendan Nelson's plan to eliminate compulsory student unionism, and saddened for Tony Abbott who, despite being a politician, is also a human being.
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