betootaadvocate.com/breaking-n…

In a show of wartime solidarity with the United States, Anthony Albanese has ordered the nation’s last flyable bomber to be readied for action. The aircraft in question is not a cowardly unmanned drone, or supersonic stealth platform but a Korean War-era English Electric Canberra, now operated by the RAAF’s ceremonial No. 100 Squadron.

Speaking from the flight line at RAAF Base Amberley, the Anthony Albanese told media the bomber has been given a good wash and vacuum, as well as a full tank of Avgas just in case America needs Australia to symbolically participate in the next illegal strike on a sovereign nation.

“We’ve got it, our only bomber, on standby,” said Albanese.

“We’ve emptied the ashtrays and filled up the overhead bins with empty Gatorade bottles for the crew to piss in. There’s a collection of Bulletins from 1995-1997. Few boxes of Jatz. Carton of Peter Suyvesant Classics. Soft packs. Esky full of Kirk’s lemonades. Yummy. Obviously we don’t have any, uh, munitions that actually fit the thing, so we’re thinking ah, a couple of 44-gallon drums full of cement, maybe, uh, some rocks and scrap iron, just to get a bit of weight behind it. It’ll make a hell of a noise if it hits something.”

The Canberra, first delivered during the Menzies Government, has not been used in real combat since the Vietnam War.

It is currently stored at Temora Aviation Museum and requires a team of volunteers and a week or two to get it moving. Defence officials admit the aircraft has a “limited role” in modern warfare but argue its availability proves Australia is “pulling its AUKUS weight.”

The announcement comes after the US deployed over 100 aircraft, including B2 stealth bombers, to flatten Iranian nuclear infrastructure over the weekend.

If called upon, the Canberra will fly with minimal support, no modern targeting systems, and a bomb load that poses more danger to the crew than the target.

More to come.

#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #TuckFrump #WhyMerkaWhy #USPol #OrangeOaf #FuckRWNJs #fuckALLreligion

Deliberately switched off clock radio just before 0730, to avoid hearing Sally Sara give Lieberal dickhead Andrew Hastie another chance to publicly fellate #OrangeOaf. Am so sick of ABC endlessly platforming these electorally irrelevant antediluvian idiots. Interview the Teals, the Greens, ffs.

#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #TuckFrump #WhyMerkaWhy #USPol #OrangeOaf #FuckRWNJs #fuckALLreligion

citynews.com.au/2025/no-easy-a…

AFAICT this is a very real looming problem, yet our cretinous AusPol lack-of-leadership bullshit shemozzle is either exacerbating this, or at the very least, not helping. Eg... each time i begin again to ponder if i could possibly overcome my personal demons to fully electrify my home [ie, endure all the intensive peopling needed] when our gas prices rise [ie, increasing the economic desire to convert], what happens? Yep, our fucken electricity prices rise as well, thus reducing or eliminating the economic incentive.

Ofc all the climate, & moral, reasons remain to more than justify converting, but so far, w/o also the strong economic reasons, my demons keep winning the day. For normal, non-me, peeps, sans my demons, the confused economic signals alone prolly entirely prevent them converting.

Fuckheads, our govt. 🙄🤦‍♀️

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/20/dorinda-cox-defection-greens-labor/

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After a disappointing showing in the federal election — in which the Greens lost three out of four of their lower house MPs, including leader Adam Bandt — the minor party this month lost its sole federal Indigenous representative, with WA Senator Dorinda Cox decamping, saying her “values and priorities are more aligned with Labor”.

There’s been no shortage of questions about Cox’s motives. The senator, previously a Labor Party member, faced multiple bullying allegations within the Greens — allegations that hadn’t been resolved, despite the prime minister’s attempts to sweep them under the rug. (Cox last week accused the Greens of racism; as the National Indigenous Times reports, at least three of the complaints lodged against Cox were made by First Nations women.) Such allegations were likely to affect Cox’s next preselection, with decamping to Labor suggested as her best shot at staying in parliament.

Just last month, Cox ran for Greens deputy leader and whip — curious, given her claim that the Greens no longer represented her values (weirdly, no journalists asked what those values were). Greens sources pointed to Cox’s very recent criticism of Labor on First Nations and fossil fuels issues, making it hard to believe her decision was one of principle. As Charlie Lewis notes regarding Labor defector Senator Fatima Payman, Anthony Albanese abruptly changed his tune on whether defecting senators should quit parliament. Funny that.

The Greens are right to feel aggrieved at someone who recently ran for deputy leader jumping ship, though arguably it saves them the trouble of deselecting Cox ahead of the next election, something politically difficult to do. The minor party still holds a balance of power in the upcoming Senate, with the support of its 10 remaining senators enough for the government to pass progressive legislation.

Cox’s defection also opens a goat track for Labor, now on 29 senators, to pass legislation with the other 10 crossbenchers (if it can somehow align One Nation, Pocock, Lambie, Tyrrell, Babet, Payman and Thorpe on a single issue), while working with the Coalition remains the alternative.

Senate numbers aside, the Greens have now lost two Indigenous senators within two terms, admittedly under very different circumstances (Lidia Thorpe left over the party’s position on the Voice referendum, a far more clear-cut reason than Cox’s). It’s an embarrassing outcome for the Greens, who have worked to increase their Indigenous representation but now yet again find themselves unable to field a First Nations spokesperson with lived experience — despite “a bevy of grassroots First Nations members”, as leader Larissa Waters put it.

There also remain questions about what direction the minor party should now take. While many voters still approve of the party’s approach (the Greens primary ended up unchanged on 12.2%, while it won its usual six Senate spots), it’s been a dispiriting few years of failing to make gains, even amid the coming of age of the left-leaning gen Z.

Is there something to Cox’s parting claim, however dubious her motives, that change is made not from the crossbench but from within the government? Is that what older progressives increasingly think, given Labor’s thumping majority, with three Greens MPs replaced with Labor ones?

One of the media’s key arguments for Waters’ leadership is that she comes off as “nice” — less bolshy and aggressive than the party has been painted in recent years, fairly or unfairly. Speaking on Triple J’s Hack yesterday, an upbeat Waters made it clear that the assertive Greens were here to stay, noting their vote remained steady, despite everything thrown at them in the campaign.

Waters rejected repeated suggestions that the Greens were too “obstructive”, saying they were tough negotiators whenever they had “good reason to be”.

“We’re not just being dicks for the sake of it; we dig our heels in when we think the point really matters,” Waters told host David Marchese, adding that the party sought to be constructive without being pushovers. “That’s why people vote Green; they don’t just want us to smile and be nice, they do want us actually to fight for them.”

Indeed, 12.2% of the population approved of the balance the Greens are striking between constructive and obstructive, despite ongoing efforts from many corners to argue the election outcome said the opposite — enough that the minor party still holds major Senate negotiating power.

Unfortunately for the Greens, Cox’s defection gives them one less senator with which to do that.

But fortunately for Team Waters, it doesn’t much matter, with 10 senators still plenty with which to dig their heels in when the point really does.

• Rachel Withers is a freelance writer with an unfortunate penchant for Australian politics. She is the former editor of The Politics and currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.

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#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #TheGreens #WomensRepresentation

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/20/australian-opposition-politics-liberals-labor/

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In part 1, Crikey began its breakdown of the sorry state of Australian opposition parties — the electoral wipeouts, the public recriminations, and the open disunity. Here we look at some of the concrete effects of this internal dysfunction.

Step 5: Unstable leadership

The leadership of the WA Liberals has changed six times since 2017. NSW Labor had eight leaders (including interims) between 2011 and 2021. Tasmanian Labor, meanwhile, faced the opposite problem. Tasmanian Labor leader David O’Byrne had to resign after just three weeks when decade-old sexual harassment allegations were made public, meaning Rebecca White was returned to a role she’d vacated just weeks earlier. In 2024, after the party’s state administrative committee ruled out the possibility of Labor governing in minority — guaranteeing Labor a fourth consecutive loss and a third under White — she resigned again.

When John Pesutto was replaced as Victorian Liberal leader by Brad Battin, after his long, messy legal battle with now-readmitted Liberal party first-termer Moira Deeming, it was the party’s fourth change of leadership since it was last in office. Most tragicomic was the interregnum overseen by Michael O’Brien, sandwiched between Matthew Guy’s two stints. O’Brien survived a spill in March 2021, one that had been fairly openly planned in the nation’s papers since the previous August, and hilariously only didn’t suffer another that July because of COVID-era health restrictions banning large gatherings at Parliament House.

Current leader Battin, for his part, continues to be trapped by the schism between the factions supporting Deeming and Pesutto.

Further, knitting together support from a reduced (and, as time in opposition drags on, increasingly inexperienced) pool of talent means a leader can’t afford to be too choosy when putting together a frontbench.

Which contributes to…

Step 6: No ability to form serious policy alternatives

Over 2020 and 2021, Melbourne spent as much time locked down as any other city in the world, a pregnant woman was raided by the cops on account of a Facebook post, and the state Labor government was hit with a series of grubby revelations at the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission. Throughout this time, the Liberals’ loudest contribution to the public square involved calling then premier Dan Andrews a “friendless loser”, making anatomical art out of doughnuts, and press releases based on online conspiracy theories about Andrews’ serious back injury in March 2021.

Meanwhile, after being solidly defeated in 2018 — with a great deal of help from vengeful gaming interests — Tasmanian Labor promptly abandoned its policy to remove poker machines from pubs and clubs. The handbrake on minimising gambling harm in the state has remained firmly in place ever since.

With diminished policy-making resources, it may suit a leader to avoid particularly forensic media scrutiny and try to ensure their public image is crafted in friendlier surrounds. Take Peter Dutton, who appeared on Sky News more times than he faced the ABC and Canberra press gallery combined in his time as federal opposition leader. Easier in the short term, it leaves a politician out of practice explaining or defending policy.

And then, before you know it, it’s time to prepare for another election…

Step 7: Campaign infrastructure wiped out

During the federal election in 2022, West Australian experts described to Crikey the effect of the state-level 2021 wipeout on the Liberal Party’s campaigning ground game.

“Campaigns are effectively run by professional staffers in politicians’ offices,” senior lecturer in politics and international relations at Notre Dame University, Martin Drum, said. “Paid staffers work on volunteer coordinating, media messaging, advertising strategy, social media. So that core of the campaign has been ripped out. The Liberal Party has two lower house MPs at state level — and one of those is in Busselton. So that’s one metropolitan seat where they would usually have, say, 30.”

Which leads to…

Step 8: Inept campaigns

Everything we’ve discussed — an above-average number of weirdos, limited talent pools, diminished infrastructure, public disunity, neutered leadership — clusters together and catches fire under the magnifying glass of an election campaign. Inadequately vetted candidates have to quit or are suddenly dumped, often making factional cleaves even more public.

Policies are adopted and discarded. Candidates in key seats don’t seem to know their lines. The leader can’t keep internal division under wraps, and media speculation about who might do a better job never seems to cease. The pressure starts to show. As a result, the opposition is rarely, if ever, able to set the terms of debate for the coming poll.

The incumbent merely needs to stay disciplined, avoid any major gaffes, offer voters the odd bribe and let the risk of voting for the opposition speak for itself.

Which leads to…

Step 9/Step 1: Electoral wipeout(s)

To quote Bob Dylan, “when you think you’ve lost everything, you’ll find out you can always lose a little more”. In politics, there is always further to fall.

As we alluded to above, the 2022 state election in Victoria followed several years of hardly ideal governance, not to mention some of the most openly partisan election reporting the country has ever seen. In this context, the Victorian Liberals managed to perform even worse than four years earlier, losing another two seats. Thanks to the Nationals, the Coalition gained a seat, which was cancelled out regardless by the same improvement for Labor’s representation.

In Western Australia, the party expected the modest success of getting enough of a swing to return the Liberals to double figures in the lower house. It was a low bar, and the party proceeded to limbo straight under it.

And then the leader resigns (assuming their colleagues or the electorate gives them the option). The public blood-letting begins. New quarrels emerge for the new leadership. The snake coils, sinks its fangs into its tail, and the cycle starts over.

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#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #WomensRights #WomensRepresentation

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8996707/jenna-price-medicares-future-can-bulk-billing-be-saved/

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My GP bulk bills me. My status has been grandmothered. It's a bloody miracle and I'm grateful.

I'd personally like to thank former prime minister Gough Whitlam. Medibank, the forerunner to Medicare, was his brainchild. It began in July 1975. But after the Whitlam government was dismissed, the Fraser government buggered it up. Levies on incomes unless you were privately insured.

Nine years later, former prime minister Bob Hawke (the National Museum of Australia calls him Robert. Way too formal) established Medicare.

He said: "With this historic initiative, all Australians now have a new, simpler and fairer health insurance system." Well, kind of.

Stephen Duckett, the absolute full-bottle on Medicare over decades, tells me that bulk-billing is crucial. We had a peak five years ago and it's been downhill from there.

"There are good grounds not to have out-of-pocket payments for GPs. And right now, it's a lottery," he says.

Duckett's right. When you front up at your GP, you don't automatically know whether you will be in the lucky group to be bulk billed.

"You might be asking when you front up," he says. But it's the uncertainty, the possible embarrassment of signing up to pay money you don't have.

He commends any government's attempt to get practices to be 100 per cent bulk-billing because then patients get 100 per cent certainty.

And getting that 100 per cent certainty about your healthcare matters.

Too many of us are not that lucky. News this week that Canberrans are now paying out an average of just over $62 in out-of-pocket fees to see their GPs is unnerving. If you don't have the sixty-odd bucks, you don't go. And that's extremely risky. British research shows us (and Australian research backs it up) that continuity of care is associated with higher life expectancy.

If you don't get that care, you die.

Well, we all die - but without regular contact with a regular GP, you have a shorter life expectancy. Good access, lower cost, the necessary number of GPs per head of population - these are all associated with longer lives.

The cost of visiting the GP is putting many of us off from getting essential health care. Late last year, the ABS reported a rise in the number of people who reported not visiting the GP because of cost-of-living pressures. In the financial year ending June 22, 3.5 per cent of people either put off or didn't see a GP when they needed to because of the cost. Three years later, that number had risen to 8.8 per cent.

In February, the gentle warming-up period of the election before everyone got stroppy and out of control, Labor pledged $8.5 billion for Medicare, so all of us would have access to bulk billing by 2030. The plan, according to Labor, would produce patient savings of up to $859 million a year by 2030. It's Medicare's 41st birthday and this investment, if the bulk billing strategy works, is a huge birthday gift to those of us who benefit from universal health care. That is, all of us. In 1984, the annual GP bulk-billing rate was 51 per cent. It hit a 40-year high of 94 per cent in April 2020, under a Coalition government. Of course, some of that was due to special COVID items. Don't want to go back there if COVID is what it takes.

But what can we do to make sure our GPs are protected too? They need to be properly remunerated for what is often grinding work with long hours. Good thing I never ended up as a GP. Imagine having to be patient with patients for hours at a time. Having to be kind to the miserable. Just doing that with your own kids is quite enough, let alone with anyone else's.

Now we also have to get to work on specialist fees. I've written elsewhere about the insanity of those fees. This week, the Grattan Institute revealed more than one in five Australians who saw a specialist in 2023 was charged an extreme fee at least once. It also said one in 10 Australians who saw a psychiatrist ended up paying $400 in out-of-pocket costs for their initial consultation alone. It also had a list of recommendations. My vengeful self enjoyed some of those, such as stripping Medicare rebates from specialists charging excessive fees, more than others.

And I love the idea of the Medical Cost Finder website, designed so people can compare out-of-pocket fees doctors charge for specialist procedures. But last year it was revealed that five years after the site launched, just 20 doctors out of the 36,000 specialists nationwide provided their fees for listing.

There are some useful bits, though. For example, your first specialist appointment will see you pay just under $200, and on average, $117 out of pocket. The rest is paid by Medicare. That's across the country. The most expensive is the ACT where the typical specialist fee is $285. Patients will find themselves two hundred bucks out of pocket.

I am not entirely sure how the government will sort this out but we urgently need an overhaul of what we pay for our health. Jim Chalmers is talking tax reform and maybe we need some kind of a sliding scale for people whose super balances are above $3 million, more than he's proposing right now.

Universities have a part to play too. Maybe they should let more students into medical schools. Maybe free tuition but then bond students to rural and regional areas for 10 years? Are specialist colleges acting in the best interests of Australians? Or in their own financial best interest?

I dunno. But whatever we are doing isn't working. May the government's plans work - and once GPs are sorted, let's start working on the rest of the health industry.

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#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #Medicare #BulkBilling

https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/06/19/australian-politics-opposition-parties-disarray/

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The opposition parties of Australia are in a dire position at both state and federal levels. Here’s how a party spirals into chaos, and what the impact is on our politics.

The Liberal Party has suffered back-to-back drubbings at the federal level, while opposition parties in Victoria and Western Australia endured wipeouts at three consecutive state election. Meanwhile Tasmanian Labor will have lost five times in a row if July goes badly for them.

At the territory level, the Liberals haven’t held government in the Australian Capital Territory for just shy of a quarter of a century, while last year in the NT Labor was obliterated by the Country Liberal Party.

Here is Crikey‘s step-by-step guide to how Australia’s flailing opposition parties have thrown themselves into a death spiral. We’ll get to the impact this has in part two. But firstly — how does it happen?

Step 1: Electoral wipeout(s)

Labor had a modest but solid majority after the Victorian state election of 2014. But it was in 2018, in the shadow of Liberal chaos at a federal level and state leader Matthew Guy’s disastrous law and order campaign, that we saw an unexpected “Dan-slide”.

The “it’s time” factor may have delivered a WA Labor victory over a tired three-term Liberal government in 2017, but it ended up being an unprecedented thumping after the Liberals burnt through a great deal of credibility by preferencing an electorally resurgent but even more dysfunctional than usual One Nation.

In 2021, in the midst of COVID-19, WA delivered Labor a victory that made the world “landslide” seem insufficient. Under cultishly adored state daddy Mark McGowan, Labor took 53 lower house seats and reduced the Libs to a lower house presence of two.

This leads to…

Step 2: Public recriminations

Who could forget the aftermath of the 2022 federal election, which featured an anonymous MP saying of departing leader Scott Morrison’s support for Warringah candidate Katherine Deves: “The transphobe thing was an absolute disaster … [Morrison] fucked us and his fingerprints are absolutely fuckin’ everywhere on that. The bloke thinks he is a master strategist. He is a fuckwit.”

To go back a little further, between its wipeout in 2011 and its eventual return in 2023, NSW Labor was the gold standard for terrible standards, one of the most purely unelectable parties this country has ever had to honour to claim. In the years that followed NSW Labor’s expulsion from office, it had a relationship with scandal much like medieval Europe had with the black death. In 2013, then Labor PM Kevin Rudd launched a federal intervention into the branch, by which time the party had already expelled former members Ian MacDonald and Eddie Obeid on account of the NSW ICAC investigations into their property dealings. The whole saga would continue to play out, in public, for an impressive length of time.

The 2021 WA election result necessitated an internal review so scathing that one of its subjects threatened to sue his own party for defamation, causing sections to be removed. The shellacking also made clearer the powerful behind-the-scenes role of the ominously-named “Clan”, centred on the party’s right wing and described by one prominent conservative as an “offbeat religious group” that was to blame for the Liberals’ woes in WA.

Which illustrates…

Step 3: A higher proportion of weirdos or shonks

Another outcome of an electoral hammering is that a fading appeal to mainstream candidates then leads to more extreme elements having a disproportionate impact on the party’s platform and thus its image with voters.

In the Victorian Liberals, wrote Bernard Keane, it was “initially Christian fundamentalists who effortlessly signalled how badly out of touch the party was with ordinary Victorians”, followed in recent years by “Trump-inspired elements prone to peddling conspiracy theories about Andrews, threatening violence, abusing LGBTQIA+ people and Indigenous peoples, and attacking abortion rights”.

Which results in…

Step four: Public disunity

John Pesutto had pledged that the Victorian Liberals under his leadership would look to “reach the broadest possible audience of Victorians” when he took over the leadership. On March 18, 2023, neo-Nazis showed up as uninvited but supportive attendees of the “Let Women Speak” rally organised by anti-trans-rights campaigners Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull and Angela Jones, as well as first-term Liberal MP Moira Deeming. Pesutto moved to expel Deeming. It led to protracted wrangling, messy compromises and eventually a defamation case against Pesutto with Deeming alleging he falsely portrayed her as a Nazi sympathiser. The case, inevitably, made even more disunity and dysfunction public.

Deeming won the case and Pesutto lost the leadership; he’s now facing bankruptcy and maybe expulsion from parliament altogether. And even that wasn’t the end of it. It came to light that Deeming had offered to delay the bankruptcy proceedings against Pesutto if the Liberals were to (bypassing its own rules) guarantee her preselection for next year’s state election. Cue reams more coverage of Liberal dysfunction and ultimately a referral to the state’s anti-corruption body for Deeming.

Stay tuned for part two, on how the above impacts party leadership, policy formulation and campaign infrastructure.

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#AusPol #HahahahaLiebs #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #ClimateCrisis #WeAreTotallyFscked #GreensYeah #WomensRights #WomensRepresentation