I found myself in a most astonishing Twitter exchange with the Federal Member for Paterson yesterday evening, Bob Baldwin. An exchange in which he asserted that “respect for people” is in fact “a load of rubbish”.<\/p>\n
It started with Baldwin accusing @HyperBrendan<\/a> of being an “ALP hack<\/a>” after being called out on his position in regards to the National Broadband Network<\/a> (NBN), something that Baldwin is passionately against.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Now, it’s is perfectly fine for Baldwin to be against the NBN – (after all, this is a democracy) – but labelling someone who does believe in the NBN an “ALP hack” simply for having a different view is just disrespectful.<\/p>\n I tried to point this out with a fairly – (at least I thought) – honest statement in regards to politicians showing respect for the public they serve. I wasn’t necessarily singling Baldwin out in my tweet, but it was his tweet that prompted mine<\/a>:<\/p>\n “Politicians would serve themselves better to not be so disrespectful to people too, public or not!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n This seemed to get the irk of Baldwin, who labelled it a “load of rubbish<\/a>”:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Apparently, the “honourable member” feels that showing respect to people is not a priority, and is in fact “rubbish”.<\/p>\n Say what?<\/p>\n There were a number of tweets fired back and forth between myself, Baldwin, HyperBrendan and @bernietb<\/a> – (and a number of others who joined in) – calling him out on his declaration that showing respect was a “load of rubbish”, with the eventual retort<\/a>:<\/p>\n “If you don’t like it, then don’t serve it. Simple as that!”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n <\/p>\n Seems Baldwin is of the opinion that we shouldn’t “serve it” if we don’t like the response, yet if he “serves it”, we should just accept it.<\/p>\n You know what Bob?<\/p>\n Respect should be a core value in our society, and you shouldn’t disrespect people and unfairly label them, just because your views are different to theirs.<\/p>\n Such unfettered attack comes only from those with a position of weakness.<\/p>\n Your behaviour last night was a disgrace – and you should be man enough to admit it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I found myself in a most astonishing Twitter exchange with the Federal Member for Paterson yesterday evening, Bob Baldwin. An exchange in which he asserted that “respect for people” is in fact “a load of rubbish”. It started with Baldwin accusing @HyperBrendan of being an “ALP hack” after being called out on his position in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[100,368,375],"class_list":["post-5204","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings","tag-auspol","tag-nbn","tag-newparadigm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5204\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelwyres.com.au\/mwdc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}