[First filed: February 16, 2009 @ 14:28]
In today’s SMH Paul Sheehan is tying in events from the wildly successful Underbelly 2 show on TV to our very own, very expensive statue of Al Grassby here in Canberra.
- “And yet we have, in the foyer of a public gallery in Civic Centre, Canberra, a life-sized bronze image of a smiling Grassby, paid for by the taxpayers, via the ACT Labor Government, at a cost of about $72,000. It commemorates Grassby’s role as the “father of multiculturalism” in Australia.
When the Chief Minister of the ACT, John Stanhope, successfully championed this statue, the evidence of Grassby’s corruption and treachery was both abundant and widely known. For many years, Grassby had acted as an agent of influence for the Calabrian criminal network known as the ‘ndrangheta, which continues to thrive in Australia’s illicit drug trade.
In the report of the Nagle special commission of inquiry in 1986, John Nagle, QC, found that Grassby had engaged in a smear campaign to protect the real murderers of Donald Mackay. He wrote that “no decent man” could have propagated “the scurrilous lies” that Grassby distributed about the Mackay family. He described Grassby’s performance as a witness as “long-winded, dissembling, and unconvincing, constantly driven to uneasy claims of defective memory”.”
The photo above is from the website of Canberra’s very own Member for Fraser, Bob McMullan. That’s Bob on the far right.
UPDATED: In the Canberra Times Mr Hargreaves has railed against the pygmies who question the wisdom of his beloved sculpture. The Minister is at pains to point out that no court ever convicted Mr Grassby of anything. By which standard almost no federal politician has ever done anything wrong.
There is, at the very end, a slight admission that an appreciation of Al Grassby needs to be selective:
- ”We have celebrated a certain segment of Al Grassby’s life as the father of multiculturalism.”
