Treasurer highlights plight of adult ADHD sufferers

While former Victorian premier Jeff Kennett may have adopted the cause of depressed people through his Beyond Blue foundation, Peter Costello has adopted the plight of adult sufferers of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Costello used an address to a Christian lobby group in Canberra today to provide an example as to how this crippling illness can affect people from all walks of life. Even, it seems, treasurers of Commonwealth governments.

“It’s a debilitating illness,” Costello told Satirical Muslim. “I just can’t help myself. Whenever I see John Howard grabbing the political limelight by attacking, say, Muslim failure to integrate, something just seems to take over my body and I find myself doing the same thing but on a much larger scale.”

“I’m like the guy that comes to a party and when he sees everyone else is getting more laughs, I do something really, really crass or lewd that embarasses everyone but makes me the centre of attention. You know, like climbing on the dining table whilst everyone is eating and doing the ‘Macarena’ or waiting for the host to speak and then belting out the Abba song, ‘Money, Money, Money’.”

In his address to the Australian Christian Lobby, Costello said Muslims have a model in the form of Kemal Ataturk and they should implement what he did for Turkey. “I decided to tell the Christians this,” he said. “Because I was worried that if I said these things in front of Muslims they would humiliate me.”

Although suffering from ADHD, Costello is one of the estimated 25 per cent of sufferers that still retain an aversion to appearing stupid even when enduring an episode of the illness.

“I chose Ataturk because when I was looking at Wikipedia in the section on ‘Muslim reformers’, he was the first name listed in the alphabetic listing. I don’t know much about him but thankfully neither did the Christians that I was addressing.”

Ataturk, however, gave birth to a violently anti-religious secular regime that resulted in the oppression of countless Muslims. “You have to break a few human rights eggs in order to make a secular democratic omelette,” the Treasurer smirked in his trademark style.

“I know Ataturk was a controversial character but, you can say what you like about him, at least he stopped women wearing headscarfs in university and forced people to pray in Turkish.

“He also made it illegal to wear a fez too. As you know, experts say there is a correlation between fez-wearing and Islamic militancy. It’s no secret, for example, that British comedian turned al-Qaeda suicide bomber Tommy Cooper wore a fez. And, did you know that when the 9/11 suicide bombers attacked London’s tube system they were listening to Steely Dan’s The Fez on their iPods?”

In his speech, Costello told the Christan audience that the lack of technological progress in the Muslim world was because they were not secular. “Just look at Saddam’s Iraq,” he said. “They were a secular country and they had one of the highest rates of literacy in the Middle East. Now, the country is less secular but look at all the killing and mayhem that is going on.”