Does anyone here want to talk about Australian politics?

I would start a thread if I thought anyone else cared enough to use it.

so i know v. little of australian politics but was that a surprise? i thought rudd was doing fine?

You could have used a joke title like "The Member for North Sydney has gone out to lunch" or something.

the other thread seemed to be a useful enough place

Wasn't there something in the news about the first female woman being elected prime minister?

oh Phil has got internets at home again? and they say Gillard hasn't done anything to improve the country yet.

Wasn't there something in the news about the first female woman being elected prime minister?

no

BUT THE AUSTYRALIAN PEOPLES DIDN'T ELECT HER TEH UNION BULLYBOYS DID OMG

NO I DO NOT KNOW WHAT A WEST MINSTER SYSTEM IS

the other thread seemed to be a useful enough place

― how much can a koala ˁ˚ᴥ˚ˀ (sic), Sunday, 27 June 2010 10:41 (43 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Other thread?

In all the hullaballalullabaloo about the union scum staging a union scum campaign to install a union scum PM, the nutbars seem to have forgotten that the ALP's bad polling universally pointed to Rudd being the only problem they had. Abbott's rating barely changed and the ALP's reduced, but Rudd's personal rating was rubbish in every measure.

The dying days of the Fourth Reich: it's the 2007 AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION

nutbars be dissemblin'

The only reason why it was down is because a large percentage of Queensland and Western Australia are populated by selfish morons too moronic that they're minor bit characters in the play that ends with shareholders walking away with a wheelbarrow full of money while these morons don't realise that they only reason they get paid $100,000 a year to drive a truck in the middle of nowhere is that it is in the middle of nowhere.

Also, racists.

The dying days of the Fourth Reich: it's the 2007 AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION

― how much can a koala ˁ˚ᴥ˚ˀ (sic), Sunday, 27 June 2010 11:37 (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

o fuc sorry, I didn't know that thread was still going. CLOSE THIS THREAD plz

uh but it's a thread from 2007 guys

maybe a pre-emptive 2010 election thread instead?

Why not. Maybe someone wants to rename this thread and make it relevant to 2010 and/or witty.

REDZ UNDER THE BEDZ: Australia besieged by communists in 2010

Better Dead Than Redhead iirc

btw I don't think Tony Abbott "gets" irony after listening to him brag about how the Libs have got rid of one Labor leader

Dude the ALP is totally unstable. Abbott is setting an example by overseeing a party which has been kept stable under one leader for at least 12 minutes.

RED HEAD REDEMPTION 2010

i understand there was a solid zing by labor

Labor Bloc Zing Crew

In the Lower House she shook hands with Tony Biggott and said 'game on'. The 'moll' was implicit.

Former editor of the National Indigenous Times explains in full why Rudd failed Indigenous people, and touches on one facet of Howard's racism. Vital reading.

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2937488.htm

Gillzo refuses to be religious

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/06/29/2939879.htm

Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she has no intention of pretending to believe in God to attract religiously-inclined voters.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was a regular at Canberra church services and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is known as a devout Catholic.

In contrast, Ms Gillard says that while she greatly respects other people's religious views, she does not believe in God.

THAT'S what I'm talkin' 'bout

greens mp in melbourne ftw

love the huge posters of b4ndt on swanston st

Ace.

Drove past Tanner's office on Saturday. Looked as glum as ever.

Did anyone read this shit?

http://www.watoday.com.au/opinion/politics/shacking-up-is-hard-to-do-why-gillard-may-be-leery-of-the-lodge-20100628-zexr.html

OK it is less to do with politics and more with value judgements but fuck me, was Bettina Arndt always this much of an A-grade cuntbubble?

The gist: Gillard is a bad rolemodel for women BECAUSE SHE ISNT MARRIED TO HER MAN.

What in the everloving FUCK.

wow what a moron

Only just read it. She also claims Pat Rafter was bad choice for Australian of the Year because he was not married and therefore an uncommitted father. Moments like this I have second thoughts about freedom of speech.

morelike bettina arsendt, amirite

bettina arsebandt

bettina ardnthole

bettenalady cumstain

buttina hurdt

^^

http://inside.org.au/shoulder-deep-in-the-entrails/

i liked this

parents dragging children through a succession of chaotic ''blended'' families
parents dragging children through a succession of chaotic ''blended'' families
parents dragging children through a succession of chaotic ''blended'' families
parents dragging children through a succession of chaotic ''blended'' families
parents dragging children through a succession of chaotic ''blended'' families

i think bettina arnottsscotchfingeruptheanus has confused real life with saturday kitchen

bettina beats us all at our own game

http://bettinaarndt.com.au/aboutbettina.php

Bit of a Bettina Arndt

Her brand new book - What Men Want – is being published in August, 2010.

oh this will be fascinating

http://inside.org.au/shoulder-deep-in-the-entrails/

i liked this

― assiest boy in america (haitch), Tuesday, 29 June 2010 13:57 (6 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Michelle Grattan and Paul Kelly join the crowd, waxy and wrinkled as exhibits in some glass case at Madame Tussauds.

^^ perfect sentence

Her brand new book - What Men Want – is being published in August, 2010.

oh this will be fascinating

― jo jo zeppelin (electricsound), Tuesday, 29 June 2010 14:04 (29 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Ways to promote a forthcoming book:

1. Write a controversial column two months earlier

buttina hurdt

A+ lol

Guessing that Bettina's "Sex Diaries" features the not-having kind of sex.

Also...WTF??!!! Cannot believe she's sagely using Whitlam/Greer to bring her stupid argument "home". Yes, Bettina and while we're at let's examine this new trend of women wearing mens trousers and driving their own cars.

Gaaaaaaaahhh!

Love that Shane Maloney piece btw...

My mum went to school with ButtArndt.

Actually, come to think of it that explains a lot.

Yeah the nuclear thing baffled me. That was a discussion to be having in the 80s, not now, given how long plants apparently take to fire up? And it'll always have bad optics thanks to Chernobyl and Fukushima.

It’s just what some aging pricks from Queensland come up with when they want to throw a bone to those concerned with climate but protect their coal and gas interests. It was just so blatant it didn’t land unlike all the anti renewables and anti transmission Astro turfing that’s going on. Sadly that seems to be working.

We’re one clapped out mud burning turbine failure in the Latrobe valley away from being utterly fucked next summer. We are most summers but it could be really bad this year.

Excited to watch the libs begin their journey of renewal by totally ignoring the messages being sent to them by the Australian public

It’s just what some aging pricks from Queensland come up with when they want to throw a bone to those concerned with climate but protect their coal and gas interests

yeah it was more about resolving the internal conflicts within the party than any sort of serious policy - it kept both sides of the party happy, the denialists who do the resources lobby's bidding and the section who believe in climate change and want actual action taken. they spent the last decade tearing themselves apart over that so this was a convenient way to paper over that but it wasn't a remotely serious offering

lol

I know right!

Are you laughing at the social media id laws, hate speech laws that simultaneously broke the coalition and free speech rights, or the country joining the Board of "Peace"?

All are very lol worthy when coupled with tears. And I'm here right now. No one I know is talking about much of any of this...

Ha! I quite like that emsworth didn't specify as, yeah, a rolling, perpetually renewed 'lol' is generally warranted. But I was faaairly confident that a 'lol' late on Thursday AEST would have been elicited principally by the second matter! :)

yeah was posting in wonder at the coalition shitting the bed (again)

which is not to say those other matters are not lol/cry-worthy

i have a 13 year old kid who doesn’t seem to have been affected in the slightest by the social media ban

should i be worried about Hastie? unelectable far right headbanger? or the acceptably smooth face of palatable fascist vibes for a restive electorate?

I for one will miss feigned outrage at Joy Division t-shirts, etc, amidst the time-honoured ranting about migrants and renewable energy.

Haha, belatedly tuned into Angus Taylor's speech and immediately hear about immigrants with bad values and the unaffordability of renewable energy.

To paraphrase Turnbull earlier: "Sky News is the best thing to have ever happened to the Labor party."

Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus

Sussan Ley identifying as a keeper of the punk rock spirit will never not be laugh out loud funny to me

but, but she added another “s” to her name! Just like Siouxsie!

i like that taylor's saying the libs need to change or die when he's just offering a mix of howard and abbott

LOL. Everyone OTM.

I have to say the Aus politics thing I most want to comment on is the police brutality and racism at the Sydney rally against Herzog's visit. I was genuinely shocked at the wanton violence and aggression, it was like a unit of ICE had crossed the Pacific.

Ley’s greatest gift to Angus will be loosing her seat to the nats, one nation or a helen Haines style independent.

On the protests, minna clearly let/encouraged the cops to go all ice on people protesting genocide.

I would almost have put money on Vic police going insanely thuggish at some point this week. That they managed to look -- by comparison, in parallel circumstances -- like the model of restraint for once is pretty impressive NSW!

In a week noted for ridiculous speeches I did enjoy that the esteemed visitor rose to the occasion with some juicy disingenuousness and A+ whataboutery:

It’s obscure and odd that we need to have so many incredible police officers protecting us for the inherent right of us to gather here as proud Jews, to host the President of the only Jewish state on Earth without any harassment and disturbance. I say to all those protesters outside, go protest in front of the Iranian embassy.

do we need to talk about this

fckn idiot spews idiocy, let off the hook by right wing media? I’m tired of talking about that.

I wondered whether this thread may have been revived!

I'm sick of thinking about, er, it myself but I'm now convinced that Vic will the first state with more than smattering of PHON MPs. And by November. (State parliament, obv.) Which is kinda hilarious given that we haven't shown all that much interest in that particular strain of populist jibber-jabber during its first 30 years.

It's unfortunate timing. Vic ALP, having been in power for zillions of years, is way beyond the "it's time" threshold in exactly the way the SA ALP *wasn't* a few months ago, and is surely doomed.

(Um, not 'unfortunate' that a further ~25% of the electorate have suddenly realised they can vote beyond ALP/NLP, but I suspect you know what I mean...)

I’m deeply irritated that Labor are running ads like “don’t let ON come to power! we are your only hope!” I long to take someone in the party aside and shout “how about not systematically betraying and dumping every core left value in your obsession with courting the Harvey Norman vote?” Federal and state Labor (here in Tas) are an unmitigated shitshow - green values? nah that’s for the greens, have your fossil fuel projects mates. Workers? nah we’d rather prioritise business and resource companies. Social justice? nah fuck it, we will preserve housing tax inequities in favour of boomers, but prevent the younger generations taking part while we’re at it. And call it reform.
Absolute shitshow, fundamental betrayal, Liberal Lite.

Meanwhile I can't help thinking that Lib/Nats should surely be be more skilled in differentiating themselves from PHON after all these decades. It's get hazy now, but even Howard genuinely seemed to view Hansonism as beneath contempt initially. Seems hopelessly naive at this point, but one can almost imagine an alternate reality where they maintained the gentlemanly post-"white Australia" agreement that exploiting fear about refugees would be unstatemanlike. But no, they made "stop the boats" (and then "climate scientists are stoopid") central to their very identity for an entire generation as though there wasn't always an orange-haired ning-nong in the wings prepared to be even more unhinged and outflank them.

Now we get Angus Taylor telling us that "mass immigration" has been a failure ffs. And an NLP dude on Outsiders this morning, when asked why they'd recommend preferences to PHON at ballot time, can only really come up with "well it's better than the Greens" lol.

"It's getting hazy now"

- - -

It occurs to me that for the L/NP to *not* seriously think PHON an actual existential threat for 30 years -- a group you can casually mimic with little fear of them actually replacing you -- does suggest a really high level of faith in NLP/ALP's own bullshit over recent generations.

Namely: voting for anything other than a Major Party, whatever that is, is somehow a 'wasted' vote, despite an electoral system that actually caters for such situations rather well.

It’s a system set up to keep
minor parties down as long as they stay minor. PHON is looking that way.

As an immigrant I am very sensitive to the rhetoric, it’s vile.

Not helped by the nine newspaper moving to the right of Newscorp. Fairfax was hardly a bastion of progressive thought but the nine takeover has reduced the diversity of Australian media by a lot.

I worry about the Vic elections, ALP are tired, Jacinta seems hopeless. Victorian Liberals seem to be the worst liberals both in terms of crazy and competence. I worry PHON can make a big position. I’m hoping that their inability to work together without splitting, and the incompetence of the modern fash does for them.

On the plus side I live in a green-red marginal and all of the roads are getting resurfaced all at once. Cycling has never been so smooth in inner Melbourne.

If the price of having not to ride over tree roots on langridge street is the loss of Gabrielle di Vertri (she’s lovely and a good local member) and some kind of technicolour yawn coalition…

^ Hahaha.

One thing I've already pretty much taken for granted is some sort of smug ceremony in celebration of the repeal the indigenous treaty/etc, about 3 weeks after the election. It'll surely be terribly urgent business whatever collection of freaks we end up with.

even Howard genuinely seemed to view Hansonism as beneath contempt initially

my understanding (being too young to have been aware at the time) is that howard initially wanted to take a more conciliatory approach to one nation but iirc costello convinced him that they needed to be taken seriously as a threat, leading to the coalition adopting their successful strategy of denouncing one nation as beyond the pale while adopting just enough anti-immigration rhetoric to try to keep their base from defecting. of course howard also oversaw larger immigration increases despite his rhetoric so it wasn't exactly a sustainable strategy in the long-term and that contradiction has finally caught up to them. then howard called an early election and made the gst the focus of the campaign, which helped draw attention away from immigration and instead to hanson's tax policies which were complete nonsense. one nation of course also were even more of a mess then than they are today.

this time the libs seem to be stuck in various delusions - either denying that they're in trouble or trying to bargain with one nation instead of recognising that one nation are an existential threat to them. taylor's strategy seems to be to just becoming one nation except slightly less racist, which is well proven to be about as bad of an approach as possible for the centre-right when dealing with a far-right insurgency. i shouldn't let ley off the hook either though, one nation's surge is probably her fault more than anyone else's - as opposition leader she completely failed to offer any leadership, instead trying to build 'consensus' in a party that didn't have any, which just meant that the party descended into open infighting and looked like a train wreck to observers. between the libs being a train wreck and ley being nominally a 'moderate' (despite having the party move even further to the right across the board under her leadership) there wasn't really much reason for the right of their base who've been radicalised by sky news etc. to stay within the tent any more.

Not helped by the nine newspaper moving to the right of Newscorp.

have you read any of the newscorp papers lately? not to say that the nine papers are great (though brisbane times is generally pretty decent) but there's still a big gap between them and newscorp.

My reading of nine papers is limited to the notifications from the AFR app I have failed to turn off so I’m really just going on those.

the afr opinion page has long been terrible (i don't think this is a recent change) but it's still not to the right of news corp

On Wednesday, Hanson described her view of “monoculturalism” as an acceptance of Australian values such as a fair go, tolerance, rule of law, freedom of speech as well as irreverence and larrikinism.

She cited the actor Paul Hogan and comedian Norman Gunston as “essential features of Australian monoculture”.

Wondering whether Guardian writer and/or Hanson understands that Norman Gunston is not a real person.

Also fuck this idiot and the Rinehart-funded bots she rode in on.

I for one am willing to comply with a social media ban for Gen-X, for the good of the nation.

So monoculturalism = pop culture figures from the 1970s.

a boomer thinks the entirety of culture and the economy should reset to when they were 19??

With a median age of ~38, that's an awful lot of remedial culture classes, even before considering pesky migrants.

I guess 9 now joins the woke, leftist media, post-Stefanovic? (Alongside ABC, SBS and... er, 10, last time I read the ranting under Sky News Youtube videos.)

The local iteration of the far-right grifterverse about as dumb and cringeful as you would expect… Barnaby Karl Porline Tabbot urrrrrgh

I always thought Karl was a cock but buddying with Tommy Robinson is cunty even for him.

Anyone know anything about this class action on Fortescue for sexual harassment? Whilst I don’t doubt that some fucking awful behaviour goes on on mine sites including Fortescue’s and much of it is directed at women; I’m also wondering why it’s Twiggy’s shop and not Gina’s, Clive’s, BHP or Rio Tinto or any fully other fully paid up member of the Minerals Council of Australia.

I believe some not *wholly* dissimilar class action thingies against some of latter commenced a wee while back.

Incidentally, Radio National's The Minefield has been pretty decent for deeper contemplation of certain events. Two weeks in a row.

Speaking of the ABC (I fear I sound like I work there, such is the frequency with which I mention them) I'm really, really dreading this seemingly one-off National Forum with David Speers they've been promoting relentlessly. I mean, sensible discussion of migration is all well and good but this is surely be going to be a sub-Q&A atrocity with Barnaby Joyce ranting over the top of sensible voices that migrants don't want to integrate, greeted with cheers by a carefully selected audience of '15-minute city' conspiracy theorists and literal Nazis isn't it!?

^ I didn't actually know, the other day, that Joyce was going to be on this thing, but yep, of course he is. Helpfully explaining that the masses are fed up with proper scrutiny of things like Pauline's brain-farts by the likes of the parliamentary budget office, seemingly because they're not elected, or something.

On the other hand, some non-insane people like George Megalogenis were actually invited, thank Christ.

“Someone’s out there digging up whatever dirt that I said how many years ago,” she said. “Everything that’s happening through my office and other staffers (who have) worked in other political parties’ offices said we’ve never, ever, ever seen anything like this.”

It was last year, lol. Couldn't be that, you know, she's just that much more unsuited to public office than anyone ever, ever?

Not that any of it actually hurts her, obviously. A quarter of the nation merrily laps it up.

If had an obvious alternative I'd quit this moronic country without a moment's hesitation.

Sorry not to join in, but I’m glad to hear your thoughts. It’s not doing my mental health much good to watch a Labor government torching their supposed principles on climate, foreign policy, the arts, conservation etc. while middlebrow Aussies look at the Liberals and think yeah, not right-wing enough for us.

I know right. We can't be far from "they're eating the dogs" now.

Part of me now hopes the MRI I had this week looks dire enough to support a request for a lethal dose of barbiturates lol.

I'm now convinced there's a chance that I'm going to be represented by a PHON MP in the Vic legislative assembly from November 28th. I'm enrolled at an address barely 20km from Melb GPO but the electorate definitely stretches into the sort of socially-conservative-but-still-traditionally-ALP areas susceptible to race-baiting. Not least one vast suburb which recorded some of the more tepid referendum results in the metro area.

The candidate they've announced doesn't yet stand out as one of their "paracetamol causes autism" (or whatever) nutjobs, but we shall see...

But, of course, we're all somewhat likely be 'represented' by PHON in the upper house, whatever happens lol. Not sure *any* of the 8 legislative council regions will miss out, given current polling. (5 members per region = 16.7% quota, for interstate peeps.)