Skolling a beer: Bob Hawke and Bill Shorten good, Tony Abbott bad, from Andrew Bolt. Blatant media bias.
Tony Abbott downs a beer to the cheers of drinkers. Journalists complain he’s setting a terrible example for drunks, sexists and wife bashers.
SMH, April 2015, Judith Ireland critical of Tony Abbott:
And yet there’s something about the skol that doesn’t sit quite right. It’s not just that the Prime Minister is supposed to be a vocal advocate against binge drinking.
Or that our culture has (supposedly) moved on from Hawkie’s glory days, when being able to drink beer very quickly made you really awesome.
Perhaps it is that it was an unmistakably and assertively macho act – amid a chanting group of hyped-up dudes. And that it came from a Prime Minister who has been trying for the last 18 months to convince us that he is also the Minister for Women.
The Guardian, April 2015, Melissa Davey critical of Tony Abbott:
The director of the McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth, Professor Mike Daube, was scathing of the video. He said it showed alcohol reform was “just not on the government’s radar”.
“I think it’s quite bizarre – extraordinarily poor judgement,” Daube said. “If we are going to change the binge drinking culture, the last thing we need is prime ministers role modelling skolling. It’s the kind of behaviour you might expect from boozy 20-year-olds, not 57-year-old prime ministers.”
SMH, January 2015, praises Bob Hawke:
The former prime minister Bob Hawke has turned back time, captured on video skoling a beer handed to him as he walked among the crowd at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
In the footage uploaded onto YouTube, Mr Hawke is handed the plastic cup by a spectator and at the same time a voice in the crowd is heard shouting: ”One for the country, Robert”
Without hesitation the 82-year-old downed the beer in one go – taking about 11 seconds to finish it.
That is the same amount of time he is said to have taken to drink 2½ pints of beer when he set a world speed drinking record during his time as a student at University College, Oxford in 1955.
SMH, January 2015, Georgina Mitchell praises Bob Hawke:
With just one song, Bob Hawke has cemented his status as the most patriotic man in Australia – again.
The title won three years ago, when he was filmed skolling a beer at the cricket, was reinforced on Saturday afternoon in Sydney’s west when he took to the stage to deliver a rousing rendition of Waltzing Matilda, just one year on after he surprised organisers and guests at the same event the previous year.
Huffington Post, April 2017, Luke Cooper is only critical that Bill Shorten was so slow:
If there’s one thing about Labor Party leader Bill Shorten and the various gimmicks that tend to come out of Australian politics — from chomping down on Democracy Sausages to downing beers — it’s that he always gives them a red hot go.
But sometimes, plans go slightly awry and Shorten’s left to bear the brunt of laughter that follows. This time it was the Federal Opposition leader’s attempt to skull a beer as quick as he could — the problem was that he just wasn’t very quick at it.
As George Orwell already commented, seventy years earlier in Animal Farm:
All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.
