The botoxed, far-right narcissist and obedient Murdoch minion, ‘Liberal leader’ tony abbott, shares his master’s dubious taste in despotic politicians of the recent past…

“They all left their countries, including Australia, stronger and prouder for their work in government. John Howard left our country stronger and more confident.  Margaret Thatcher left Britain stronger and more confident. And Ronald Reagan, he won the cold war, helped to make the world much safer for democracy and for the universal decencies of humanity”

 (the Guardian Australia: 26/08/13)

abbott has a revisionists pair of rose-coloured spectacles that blind him to the gritty + shitty realities of Junta power…for according to earlier interpretOr posts…the real Ronald Reagan was a right-wing, ironed-bible, helmet-haired murderer who moved in to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a mere 30 odd years ago and hatched a foul and cunning plot to raise slush funds to finance his favourite Central American fascist death squads, the Contras –

A Human Rights Watch report found that the Contras were guilty of targeting health care clinics and health care workers for assassination; kidnapping civilians; torturing and executing civilians, including children, who were captured in combat; raping women; indiscriminately attacking civilians and civilian homes; seizing civilian property; and burning civilian houses in captured towns.

As truth is sadly stranger than fiction, abbott’s hero embarked upon his reign of terror by covertly selling arms to…IRAN…and the relatively new and archly religious fundamentalist regime of …Ayatollah Khomeini…

As to ‘heroes’ Howard and Thatcher, we say ‘TAMPA’ and the ‘General Belgrano’!

more below on Iran-Contra from Wikipedia:

The Iran–Contra affair (Persian: ایران-کنترا‎, Spanish: caso Irán-contras), also referred to as Irangate, Contragate or the Iran-Contra scandal, was a political scandal in the United States that came to light in November 1986. During the Reagan administration, senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, the subject of an arms embargo.[1] Some U.S. officials also hoped that the arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow U.S. intelligence agencies to fund the NicaraguanContras. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress....members of the executive branch sold weapons to Iran in exchange for the release of the American hostages.[2][3] Large modifications to the plan were devised by Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council in late 1985, in which a portion of the proceeds from the weapon sales was diverted to fund anti-Sandinista and anti-communist rebels, or Contras, in Nicaragua.[4][5]