Strippers no big deal

Sydney

Labor Party leader Kevin Rudd, the man widely expected to become Australia’s prime minister before the year is out, admitted this week that he went to a strip club during a taxpayer-funded trip to the U.N. headquarters. Rudd confirmed a newspaper story that when he was shadow foreign minister, in 2003, he hung out at Scores, a New York City strip club, adding that he was so drunk he couldn’t remember whether the women performing there were naked. The revelation has not hurt his election chances. “You can’t condemn somebody for getting on the piss,” said Eva Cox of the feminist Women’s Electoral Lobby. “We would never have elected Bob Hawke in that case.” (Hawke, premier from 1983 to 1991, once set a world speed record for drinking a yard-glass of beer.) Even the Christian Lobby was unfazed. The group’s leader, Jim Wallace, said, “I think it’s a case of, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

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