Droppie [infosec] 🐨    ​2d ago

https://www.betootaadvocate.com/conservative-voters-teach-albo-a-lesson-by-destroying-his-only-realistic-opponent/

South Australian conservatives have sent a powerful message to the Albanese Government this weekend, by annihilating the only political party capable of removing it from office.

In what is being described as a devastating rebuke of Labor's agenda on immigration, cost of living and energy policy, right-leaning voters across the state turned out in record numbers to reduce the Liberal Party to drops off piss on Angus Taylor's moleskins.

"Anthony Albanese needs to understand that everyday Australians are fed up," explained Gawler retiree and newly-minted One Nation voter Rod Hassall, who successfully helped deliver Labor its largest ever majority in South Australian history.

"This is a wake-up call."

The Premier, who now commands a one-party system that would make Kim Jong-Un's pepperoni slice nipples stand on end like rough cut diamonds, is understood to be deeply rattled by the result.

"I think this really does send a message," said Premier Peter Malinauskas.

"Not a loud and clear one, though."

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson declared the result a "springboard" for the party's federal ambitions, noting that the strategy of splitting the conservative vote three ways while Labor preferences flow at 88 per cent was exactly the kind of bold thinking that would keep Anthony Albanese up at night.

"We've left landmines everywhere," Senator Hanson told supporters.

"Ones that not even Princess Diana could find and defuse."

Federal Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, who took over the Liberal leadership five weeks ago after the party's second coalition split in eight months, said the result was "not a reflection" of the federal party's direction.

"South Australia has always been its own beast," said Taylor.

"But as the rest of us know, they are pretty fucked in the head for a myriad of reasons. I don't think we need to worry about One Nation. They are pretty much the simple rural cousin of the inner city blue-haired greenie. Doing a preference deal with One Nation? Sorry, I'm a Howardist Menzite. I'm not about to destroy the soul of the Liberal Party. I'm not going to sully my own reputation. I mean, Fonterra would just be a footnote in my biography if I killed conservatism in Australia. But I might become Prime Minister?"

The Liberal Party is expected to begin a period of deep soul-searching, which insiders say will involve the same three factions blaming each other for the same structural problems they have been ignoring since 2018, before settling on a new leader who combines the worst qualities of all three.

More to come.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

Conservative Voters Teach Albo A Lesson By Destroying His Only Realistic Opponent

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact South Australian conservatives have sent a powerful message to the Albanese Government this weekend, by annihilating the only political party capable of removing it from office. In what is being described as a devastating rebuke of Labor's agenda on immigration, cost of living and energy policy,

The Betoota Advocate
Droppie [infosec] 🐨    ​3d ago

https://social.chinwag.org/@abc_bot/116274490583353266 yeah well, that might well be, but he is still a Shoppie, & he still demonises legitimate vital public protests against the absolute shitfuckery of govts & companies hand in hand to destroy climate + biodiversity, so fuck him!

#sapol #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance

Unofficial ABC News Bot (@[email protected])

Few leaders in Australia are as firmly entrenched in power than Peter Malinauskas https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-23/peter-malinauskas-place-in-labor/106484008 #StateandTerritoryGovernment #StateandTerritoryElections #ALP

Chinwag Social
Droppie [infosec] 🐨    ​3d ago

@MaxG oh this is fantastic! i absolutely love the vinegar of its overt disdain. nicely done!

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

Droppie [infosec] 🐨    ​3d ago

But unless One Nation’s voters also reckon with the consequences of where their preferences land, they’re not changing the system. They’re reinforcing it.

But in electoral terms it’s something else entirely: a very effective way to keep Labor in power.

clearly poorline is too dimwitted to intellectually grasp this. based on recent federal polling, & last night's result of #saelection, i have to assume that her supporters are equally stupid.

tis basically the main problem with #democracy... #TheGreatUnwashed 🙄🤦‍♀️

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/the-hanson-paradox-how-a-populist-surge-became-labor-s-best-friend-20260322-p5rmey.html?ref=rss

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

The Hanson paradox: How a populist surge became Labor’s best friend

Pauline Hanson is right that the electorate has had a “gutful,” but the arithmetic of the South Australian result proves that a fractured right is a gift for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

The Sydney Morning Herald
Droppie [infosec] 🐨    ​3d ago

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9204167/mark-kenny-now-were-more-worried-about-the-unthought-through/

Quote

At the ripe old age of 97, the death of the Cold War espionage writer, Len Deighton, just days ago, came as a different kind of shock.

News of his passing felt somehow subsidiary to a bigger revelation - until last week, Deighton had still been among us.

You knew with John le Carre because he had continued publishing. His last title, Silverview, was released posthumously in 2021.

Deighton, though, the breakthrough author of the Ipcress File (1962), among many, had stopped writing spy fiction three decades ago, retreating to quietude. Apparently, he took a holiday and decided he liked it.

Fame wasn't his thing. He was everything Donald Trump isn't. Talented, studious, restrained, and impeccably subtle.

These qualities infused his characters - espionage being a secret, thankless business - ruthlessly so. It despises headlines and shuns recognition of any kind. Deighton leaned into that (mostly) observing once that nothing destroys a writer like praise.

His work evinced his principles, too. He had what these days would be an unfashionable distaste for violence and decided it would only appear in his stories where required and never as the answer to his characters' problems.

Both authors wrote about human beings by juxtaposing their quotidian struggles with relationships and secrecy and bureaucracy, against big forces, genuine personal danger and crippling moral choices.

Each author knew that the space between their paragraphs was vital - it was where the reader did their end of the work. This, too, matched the atmosphere and tradecraft central to the spy genre where information was invariably thin, dubious and old.

In hindsight we can see the period, both in its fictional evocation and in its history, as marked by profound existential peril, balanced off, albeit, by a useful degree of inertia.

Fractious Cold War crises (Berlin Wall, 1961, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962) were survived through reluctance, back-channel diplomacy, self-preservation and luck.

It was an era when what "could" happen was both known and unthinkable.

Compare that to today when the "unthinkable" is so quickly superseded by the unthought-through.

Again, we live in time of deep global instability and portentous violence.

Gone now though is the institutional inertia. It's been replaced by impulsiveness and the preference for shallow stagecraft over longer-term statecraft.

Or, as recent UK secretary of state for defence Ben Wallace wrote midweek in Britain's The Telegraph, "This is what you get when a superpower with the most powerful armed forces in the world, is run by a collection of TV pundits and golf buddies: pure chaos".

The former Tory minister and ex-British Army officer also observed that one didn't need to be a defence expert to predict what Iran would do when attacked.

"Iran's leaders have always played the only three cards they hold: proxies, hostage taking, and shutting down the Strait of Hormuz."

People who have seen combat tend to know a dud plan when they see one, even if Australia's political class has been blind to it.

It took another plain-speaking ex-commando MP to break ranks, skewering a Trump social media rant against Australia and others for not joining his escapade.

"I thought it was a petulant post from a president under immense pressure," Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie told the ABC.

"Yesterday, he said he didn't expect the Strait of Hormuz to be closed for this long - well, as I like to quote Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face".

I've often wondered what the great historical fiction writers of the Cold War and the lead-up to World War II, would make of the belligerent miscalculations reshaping the world currently.

How would they render the craven appeasement of a lawless US by its allies? How would they characterise the willingness of longstanding democracies to accommodate the aggressive right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu and its extraordinary sway over the Trump White House?

Among the greatest of these writers is the Jewish American Francophile, Alan Furst, 85, whose unfailingly human novels occur against the backdrop of a Europe succumbing to fascism and war. Furst's characters read the signs of German militarisation and see the writing on the wall as Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland and Hungary are incorporated, overrun, or captured by local fascists.

Furst's ordinary heroes take huge risks in smuggling downed airmen back to Britain or obtaining fragmentary intel about German armaments manufacture - tiny scraps of information such as the production orders of a particular aviation wire or what grade of gun oil is being issued to Wehrmacht divisions. The former to guess at the number of bombers being built, the latter to determine if weapons are being prepared to operate in an invasion of France or the frozen East.

Underneath such story lines, runs a truth so present as to never require mention - that democracy and tolerance and culture and human rights offer the only way forward.

Of course, we know where Europe's journey led. But what about now? If the US didn't countenance a regionalised war, the closure of a vital sea lane, and a calamitous oil shock, what hope the rest of us?

And don't forget, before calling NATO allies "cowards," Trump announced he would have the honour of "taking Cuba". You wouldn't read about it.

  • Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.

Unquote

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch

We used to fear the unthinkable. Now we're more worried about the unthought-through

It's a different world we now live in.

Show threadDroppie [infosec] 🐨    ​4d ago

little better that good government could not be a reason for preferring Labor.

Labor's embrace of the national security state has made it highly illiberal and authoritarian about civil liberties, and about using legislation as a blunderbuss against behaviour of which it, or one of its police or security officials, disapproves. In some fields, as with the Australian ISIS brides, Albanese was mean-minded, bigoted, and incapable of seeing where a statesman should stand.

Labor assumes that Greens will be virtually automatic in supporting its legislation - again on the theory that bad as they are, they are preferable to the Coalition, or worse, Pauline Hanson. But Albanese misses no opportunity to attack the Greens, to attack their motives and their practicality, and to limit the possibility of their declaring any sort of "win", even with good ideas.

His monolithic focus on Labor credit is more than disrespect for the individuals or ideologies involved: it disrespects those who voted for them. Among these are groups whose (two-party preferred) preference for Labor should be being treasured and celebrated: young people, women, the better educated, and migrants. None of Labor's charisma is being beamed in their direction. If they are forefront in Albanese's mind, it is far from obvious, in major part because he does not try to engage or connect.

Albanese's style distresses traditional Labor supporters as much as it does people now accustomed to voting for the Greens and progressive independents. Some think wearily that whatever happens, Labor will probably do a better job than the other side. For the moment, they might be right.

But a moment may come over Australia's un-Australian defence policies, its sheer awfulness on refugee issues, its mark-time on indigenous affairs and its limited visions for health and education where some will say enough! That Labor is not worth fighting for. Or crossing the road for. That's what the diehards should fear while preparing their winter quarters.

  • Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times.

Unquote

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies 2/2

DroppieMar 15
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/voters-are-angry-one-nation-s-support-is-real-rising-and-no-longer-surprising-20260315-p5oal2.html?ref=rss

imo a voter's intention to vote PHON in straya, MAGA in merka, Farage in pommyland, et al, is an acute IQ & morality test. such voters fail. abysmally. 🤬🖕

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance
Voters are angry. One Nation’s support is real, rising and no longer surprising

Crunched by high inflation and spiralling petrol prices, the electorate is in a bad mood and it’s starting to take it out on the government, not just the opposition.

The Sydney Morning Herald
DroppieMar 15
Amy!

https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/news/politics/australian-politics/2026/03/14/amy-remeikis-politics-leadership

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead
Lost, disconnected or just plain wrong? It's a leadership fail

The disconnect between what is and how this country’s political leaders respond has never seemed wider. Or to matter more.

DroppieMar 15
Quote

The National Party has lunged for the button marked 'break glass in emergency' by drafting the contrarian populist agitator, Matt Canavan, to its leadership.

The 45-year-old, coal-loving senator was an unusual choice suggesting that the party finally understands the clear and present danger on its right flank.

Its urgency is, at least, proportional.

Unlike the Liberals, the Nats recognise that things are dramatically shifting in Australian politics. As such, the continued dominance of the establishment parties can no longer be assumed.

The prime opponent now is Pauline Hanson's One Nation party with its uncomplicated nostalgia for a once perfect Australia - read: predominantly white - since ruined by woke cosmopolitans, and so-called "mass" immigration.

As the electoral bases of the right splinter and realign, Canavan has been tasked with a clear mission of neutralising the Nats' most famous former face, Barnaby Joyce.

It will be a fascinating match-up pitting the economic populist Canavan against the two politicians now so established in the electoral terrain that their surnames are superfluous: Barnaby and Pauline.

Since Joyce jumped ship, complaining of being sidelined under David Littleproud, a succession of opinion polls have put One Nation ahead of the Coalition and drawing closer to Labor's vote share.

Whatever his deficits in urban Australia, Joyce remains popular in the bush and was once lauded by Tony Abbott as the nation's best retail politician.

While Hanson might quibble, there is little doubt that her success in coaxing Joyce across has been a major factor in One Nation's flatulent rise. That will lead to ego-clashes and leadership tensions in the future but in the short-term, the sharpest pain is being felt in the Nats and by extension, the Liberal Party.

It is a sign of the perilousness now gripping the establishment parties of the right that across its combined leadership, none of the four leaders elected after the 2025 rout is in place.

Of the replacements installed in the last month, none holds a city-based lower house seat.

At its core however, the colossal challenge facing the Liberals on the one hand, and the Nationals on the other, is dangerously contradictory.

An illustration of this problem came in Littleproud's odd "I'm buggered" resignation press conference last Tuesday.

Boldly marking himself as the most effective Nationals leader since John "Black Jack" McEwen, Littleproud listed off a series of policies in which the Nats had dictated terms to the Liberals.

These included the junior partner's trenchant opposition to the Voice referendum, the Dutton Coalition's adoption of a nuclear power plant policy, the Liberals' agreement to a controversial "divestiture" power against the major supermarket duopoly, and finally the abandonment of a 2050 net zero emissions target.

You can see the problem right away if you're a city-based Liberal - not that there are many of these left.

The nominal achievements of Littleproud's leadership seem to align uncannily with the list of reasons that Liberals have been wiped out in urban Australia.

Which is to say, the outsize influence of the junior party within the Coalition may have saved Nationals' seats in regional-rural Australia, but they came at the expense of Liberal Party holdings in its leafy heartland.

So what now? If anything, it seems likely that this problem may deepen.

Newly installed shadow treasurer Tim Wilson - another high-risk, high-reward selection - believes Canavan's intention to mark out a more distinctive conservative identity could actually have an upside for the Liberals.

According to his somewhat heroic reasoning, the Nats being Nat's in turn, frees up the Liberals to be more distinctively liberal. What is less clear is why that hasn't worked to date.

This recalls the hilarious logic of HG and Roy who asked many years back that if the Australian fast bowler Merv Hughes could take so many wickets when he was overweight, imagine how much better he'd be if he was twice as fat?

A clear danger for Wilson and his Liberal colleagues is that economically populist and interventionist positions taken by the Nats under Canavan will either have to be adopted by the Liberals or actively disavowed.

What this means for Coalition unity is anyone's guess.

Nothing about Canavan's political style suggests he will give Liberal discomfort much thought. His pitch to colleagues was largely based around his determination to see off the threat from One Nation.

Presumably, this will involve matching or even outdoing Hanson's populism on some matters, while delineating a difference on others - such as her offensive remarks suggesting there are no good Muslims.

Hanson knows she is now in a more direct fight for the hearts and minds of regional Australians. You can tell that by her attempts to position Canavan as "woke". Other extreme policies and rhetoric will likely follow.

For the Liberals, all this angularity spells trouble. Already dragged to the right, Angus Taylor's leadership turns on developing a credible package of policies in the cities.

Yet so far, he has been even less clear in condemning Hanson's discriminatory rhetoric than has Canavan.

Paradoxically, weakness seems to be among the strongest forces in politics.

- Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.

Unquote


#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies
Show threadDroppieMar 13
@sister_ratched

Quote

The Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Oliver Cromwell, is not one of my favourite figures of history, but once gave one of my favourite pieces of advice to men convinced they had no alternative but to do something of which he did not approve. Writing to the General Assembly of the Kirk of Scotland, he said "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken."

I use this as my text as I prepare to admit that I must walk back on some of the unkind words I have said about people whose conduct in the robodebt disaster was said to be corrupt, disgraceful and blameworthy. The behaviour of six was said by a royal commission to possibly amount to corruption under the national anti-corruption legislation.

Four of these initially unnamed people - including Scott Morrison, one-time social security minister and later prime minister, and Kathryn Campbell, former secretary of human services and later social security - were found after an inquiry by a Deputy NACC Commissioner, Kiley Kilgour, to deserve exoneration from this allegation. Two others were found to have acted corruptly, but they will not be charged because the commissioner does not believe that criminal charges could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. They are thus as free as the other four, apart from the stain on their reputations.

I was gobsmacked by the result because I had expected that there was ample material capable of supporting the allegations. Indeed, I was angry that the anti-corruption commissioners, minus the one who conducted the hearings, had initially shied from holding hearings at all, on the quite false grounds that all matters had been dealt with already by the royal commission. That decision was overturned, and the Chief Commissioner Paul Brereton was found to have committed a NACC corruption offence after he recused himself on the ground of acquaintanceship with Ms Campbell but subsequently sought to involve himself in deliberations about how cases were to be investigated.

At the time the NACC decision not to hold an inquiry was reversed, I urged that the NACC not be allowed to pick up on its mistake and visit again their initial predispositions on the matter. I said a new person should be chosen to do it, away from a commission which had already lost the confidence of the public. Kiley Kilgour, up to a point, fits that bill, and was assisted by former High Court justice Geoff Nettle. Kilgour comes from the Victorian broad-based commission against corruption, which operates secretively on NACC lines, and has a public profile and record like the NACC.
Fact finder extraordinarily naive in understanding of how govt works

We now have a 400-plus page "judgement" - the first from the NACC. Albeit after closed hearings so that no one could establish the zeal, if any, with which inquiries were pursued. Judging by the quotes in the judgment I doubt many witnesses were stretched.

I repent my rush to judgment, the more so because I now tend to agree with some of the commissioner's conclusions. At least based on the evidence that I now know. In general Ms Kilgour is more inclined to think the behaviour of the six (and another few dozen who appear equally blameworthy) was not dishonest and corrupt. Rather it was the product of a giant stuff-up in which the minds of various of the actors were not properly on their jobs. A complete stuff-up, not a provable conspiracy, in short.

So, should we treat the accused folk somewhat in the manner of folk acquitted of felony? Champagne all round after a horrible ordeal? Profuse apologies from people such as myself, and an entitlement by them to walk henceforth with heads held up high?

Not quite, because the source of doubts entertained by Ms Kilgour came mostly from the fact she was less than completely satisfied of corrupt purposes, even though there was evidence pointing to it. Her bar was very high.

But against such evidence were signs of incompetence, lack of attention to detail, a chain of correspondence and decision-making, stretching over years, that made following the evidence a bit confusing. And the stout denial of most of the parties that they ever had in mind the deception of the cabinet, the government, or the broader public. (Some of the denials were, by themselves, quite unconvincing, but that's a matter of impression.)

It was not straightforward. Sometimes (I suspect) deliberate ambiguity in thousands of emails and different motives on the part of some of the players complicated things. There was also a good deal of deliberate shorthand adverting, elliptically, to fears of senior officer retaliation. Some of the more junior public servants involved would go to almost any lengths to avoid conflict with them.

It is a judgment on even more senior public servants, including former secretaries of the prime minister's department and the Public Service Commission that such people were put up for leadership roles, and never brought to account, quite separately from the management of robodebt, for some of their tantrums, abuse and shocking misbehaviour.
Alleged bullying, tantrums, vindictive behaviour

Kathryn Campbell's unfortunate manner may have derived from her military "command and control" training and manner at the expense of the more woke inclusive style of most public service managers. (She was a major-general in the Army Reserve, like Paul Brereton.) I perfectly understand that running an army is about efficiently organising killing other people, not cuddling up to them. But I venture that no modern military leader as imperious, remote and unempathetic as Ms Campbell was alleged to be should ever be put in charge of soldiers. Anywhere.

One of the other management monsters was Malisa Golightly, a deputy secretary in Human Services, who had overall charge of the implementation of the robodebt project and was not much inclined to allow obstacles, including naysayers, to stand in the way of it. Nor to much respect the idea that public servants deserved some time off from time to time. Alas she died before the whole illegal and monstrous scheme fell apart. While she deserved her reputation as a bully, I have a cynical feeling that some of the blame has been foisted upon her.

The big problem standing in the way of the cock-up theory rather than conspiracy account is that there were guilty secrets influencing some players. The first was the consciousness that using taxation data to "average out" welfare income data was explicitly not authorised by the Social Security Act. This was pointed out firmly even before the robodebt scheme was put up before ministers for consideration by Kathryn Campbell. There was no way of getting around this: if the scheme was to work at all, such a system, which often produced unfair and false results, would have to be approved by legislation. Many thought they could deal with the problem by euphemism, lying about what occurred, or ignoring the nagging voices.

Ms Kilgour has accepted the assurances of Scott Morrison that he never indicated that he wanted the scheme to proceed without legislative changes, which, implicitly, might have (would have/should have) struck problems in the Senate. Be that as it may, no one in either of the departments ever put up legislation to their minister. Later, a false claim that legislation was not needed went before the cabinet expenditure review committee. Some of those who saw the documentation and should have noticed claim not to have done so. The royal commissioner said that Morrison, who had been told initially that the scheme contravened the law, was possibly corrupt for failing to notice this. It was certainly politically convenient for him.

1/2

Unquote


#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies
#CircumlocutionOffice #CharlesDickens #LittleDorrit #Robodebt