the labs have proven themselves every bit as noxiously egregious in govt as the liebs & nuts, wrt #foi [& ofc, so soooo much else], so here's a thought experiment. when the day comes that #TheGreens form govt, will they remain a party of principle & morality, or will they then just transform into the same types of scumbags as have plagued straya for all these decades? 🤔🤷

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies

everything rudd had said about the repugnant orange oaf was correct & justified. more strayan pollies should have loudly agreed & magnified.

hearing of rudd now repeatedly apologising to the repugnant orange oaf is simply stomach-turning, & frankly infuriating. straya's ongoing intense political obeisance & servility to merka is fucken near treasonous, & unambiguously craven. will we ever grow up?

😡🤢🤮

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch

https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-0-energy-storage-for-one-cent-per-person-per-day/

Thank you Andrew Blakers [professor of engineering, Australian National University] ✅ Personally i remain excited by the huge prospects availed by Strayan #PumpedHydro, not least ofc being #SnowyHydro2, & i am so thoroughly sick of the MSM pointscoring superficiality of cheap potshots at transient project difficulties. It's a major engineering project, you fuckheads, & by definition involves many uncertainties that could only be quantified & resolved on the job... just like ALL major engineering projects. It's what we engineers do, ffs... scope designs, build in contingencies, but well aware that unforeseen problems are inevitable & grist to our mill. The point is that the final objective is so massively important for our decarbonised future, decade after decade, long after the temporary construction challenges were overcome.

Fuck off, pig-ignorant naysayers. 🤬🖕

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

Elbow just sickens me now. Such a hollow hypocritical man.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/why-it-will-take-a-battle-royal-to-revive-the-australian-republic-20251003-p5mzvj.html?ref=rss

QUOTE BEGINS

Anthony Albanese came away from his visit to the King’s Scottish pile at Balmoral conceding he would become the fifth successive republican Labor prime minister who has failed to advance the republican cause. This did not appear to outwardly trouble him.

Maybe this one-time tribune of the Labor left was seduced by the magic of the monarchy. Or simply cowed by its sheer magnitude, given how it sits at the pinnacle of global celebrity culture. Maybe in King Charles he eyes a left-wing kindred spirit, who, probably like him, would prefer to speak more passionately on progressive issues but opts instead for self-censorship so as not to scare the horses. The joke in royal circles is that King Charles is more radical even than George Monbiot, one of The Guardian’s more leftist columnists. Almost certainly, the King of Australia is more radical than the prime minister of Australia on issues such as global warming.

Rather than mimicking Menzies-style deference, Albanese’s shelving of republicanism stems primarily from an understandable aversion to referenda. Losing the Voice referendum marked the low point of his tenure, and one from which he did not fully recover until election day in 2025. In an interview with David Speers on ABC’s Insiders, he announced the country would not be asked another referendum question for the duration of his prime ministership. “I think I’ve made it clear that I wanted to hold one referendum while I was prime minister, and we did that,” he said. Then he twice reaffirmed the phrase “we did that”, to shut down further discussion.

In America, the US Senate has long been the graveyard of much-needed reform – a body which up until the mid-1960s killed off civil rights bills aimed at ending Jim Crow segregation and which this century has blocked stricter gun controls. In Australia, referenda have become the burial ground for reformers’ dreams: the Voice in 2023, a republic in 1999, and a commonsense change urged upon voters by Bob Hawke in 1988 lengthening parliamentary terms to four years rather than three, which would have made politics less of a permanent campaign.

Of the 45 nationwide referenda, only eight have been carried. No prime minister – even one with a whopping parliamentary majority – wants to suffer back-to-back defeats. So “we did that” has become his fatalistic mantra.

This is the same prime minister, of course, who has championed “progressive patriotism” as a counterpoint to nationalistic populism. It provided the overarching theme of his speech in June to the National Press Club in which he sought to vest his election victory with larger meaning. In his speech last month to the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, he spoke again of “embracing patriotism as a truly progressive cause.”

That’s become a common refrain on the centre-left as it confronts an insurgent far and hard right. Keir Starmer, facing a threat from Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, has called for “patriotic renewal”. During his own Labour Party conference speech, he urged compatriots to wave their flags with pride. Beforehand, his audience had been handed national ensigns to create a sea of flags, much like the Last Night of the Proms.

Britain would suffer a nervous breakdown without its monarchy. Jeremy Corbyn is the only Labour leader to have been openly republican, making him unelectable. In the Australian context, however, “progressive patriotism” is intellectually incoherent without republicanism. Albanese’s abandonment of republicanism feels more like regressive patriotism. Or maybe we should call it “pusillanimous progressive patriotism.”

It is all a far cry from “the three Rs” of Paul Keating’s version of progressive patriotism: republicanism, reconciliation and a reorientation towards Asian neighbours. Under Albanese, it is hard to see a grand gesture of reconciliation equivalent to the Indigenous Voice to parliament. Under Albanese, the 76-year-old monarch will remain head of state. Under Albanese, AUKUS remains the sine qua non of foreign policy – a pact the Chinese deride as an “Anglo-Saxon bloc”.

AUKUS and the monarchy raise obvious questions about Australian sovereignty and independence, while reconciliation goes to the heart of national identity: fertile ground, you would think, for a patriotic progressive. Looking through a narrow aperture solely at these three pillars of national policy, someone unaware of the political backstories of the two prime ministers might struggle to differentiate Albaneseism from Howardism.

More than a quarter-century on, the failure of the republican referendum continues to exert a deadening effect on the Republican movement, which was always John Howard’s intention. The “no” vote in 1999 can also be seen as the day the reform era came to an end. True, the GST, the last major durable economic reform, came into effect on July 1, 2000. But the legislation passed parliament a year beforehand in June 1999. The Republican referendum came more than four months later.

Since then, the failure of Australian republicanism has become more broadly emblematic. The Australian crown has become a symbol of Australia’s 21st-century inertia; a dormancy when it comes to national renewal.

So much, then, for the long-awaited Charles moment, when Elizabethan republicans, unwilling to agitate against a popular queen, would push again for a home-grown head of state. If anything, King Charles is enjoying a purple patch. An irony of the rise of authoritarians such as Donald Trump is that a constitutional monarch, with limited symbolic powers, is widely regarded as a safer bet than a kingly president. Likewise, at this time of angry polarisation, a head of state who transcends partisanship becomes a more attractive proposition. At times this year, when mounting a doughty defence of Canadian independence from America and Ukrainian independence from Russia, the King has almost assumed the mantle of leader of the free world.

The indifference of the Australian people has long been “the monarchy’s strong point”, as Malcolm Knox argued in these pages ahead of last year’s royal visit. Now its position in Australia looks even stronger because of the seeming indifference of a republican Labor prime minister.

QUOTE ENDS

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #RepublicNow #fuckallroyalty #fuckthemonarchy

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9081189/kenny-nigel-farages-uk-influence-and-its-australian-implications/

QUOTE BEGINS

If the rise of Britain's Nigel Farage is to be understood, significant parliamentary representation is no longer needed to dominate media coverage, nor be considered ready for government.

Farage's flatulent micro-party, Reform (nee UKIP of Brexit-fanning fame) secured just five seats in the 650 House of Commons in 2024.

Farage himself was one of the newcomers - previous electoral rejections forcing him to make ends meet on the humble salary of an MEP ($233K). That's right, the fulminating "Mr Brexit" was simultaneously anti-Europe and a 20-year member of the European Parliament.

More front than Harrods, you might say. Not that his ballooning base cares. As Donald Trump demonstrates daily, such glaring hypocrisies are mere water off a duck's back.

Just a year after Keir Starmer rode to Number 10 with a record majority, polls suggest Reform, which has never governed anything, would win an election (if held now) with north of 300 seats. Labour could go from 401 currently to as few as 80 or 90.

This epochal shift is occurring within one electoral cycle.

And it is structural. The beleaguered Starmer now explicitly regards Farage as his chief threat and even many Tories believe their party, the oldest and most institutional mainstay of British politics, is toast (kippers optional).

What's all this got to do with Australia? Well, quite a bit, really.

While the contrast between the fortunes of Starmer Labour and Albanese Labor seems sharp right now, that could change. Albanese, who addressed the British Labour conference in Liverpool last week, has long provided counsel and inspiration to his UK counterparts.

His model of small target opposition, underpinned by a back-to-basics emphasis on working people, provided a formula for British Labour's recrudescence.

And the Australian had more encouragement for them in Liverpool. Remember the workers. Defend democracy and do it conspicuously. Be optimistic. Reclaim the notion of patriotic pride in Britain from the relentlessly negative, flag-waving extremes - populists selling fear and fanning divisions.

Some media in Australia were highly critical of the Australian PM for speaking in a party-political forum while representing Australia as Prime Minister. These complaints were both shortsighted and pedantic, ignoring the perilous British context and the clear national interests at stake. These include that Australia, already reeling from America's shambolic descent from global leadership and strategic reliability, would be seriously exposed if its other chief ally, Britain, succumbed to the racist intolerances of Farage and the violence of ex-football hooligan Tommy Robinson.

The opposition here either regards this risk as inconsequential or it simply lacks the maturity to see it. Shadow foreign minister Michaelia Cash railed against Albanese to Sky News: "This wasn't diplomacy. It wasn't advancing Australia's interests. It was pure partisanship. The Prime Minister of Australia inserting himself into another nation's domestic politics."

Is that what this was? Simply a vanity project?

A more plausible explanation is that Albanese believes the British Labour faithful need a reality check and the Starmer government needs to rise to the urgent task of deflating Farage's illusory promise.

A veteran of politics, Albanese can see what is coming for British Labour if these things are not understood - an inward collapse through leadership challenges and open brawling.

A measured and perceptive opposition might ponder that risk and its implications for Australia - especially in light of Trump's mercurial tendencies. For example, what do Farage and his band of who-knows-whom from the political fringes think of AUKUS? Even before that, what might be the views of a more left-wing Labour PM about AUKUS, America, Ukraine and Israel?

In fact, a serious, responsible Australian opposition might even follow the example of centre-right mainstreamers in the Commons, like former Tory leadership contender and ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt, who observed in a Horizons Talk last month that he genuinely wanted Starmer to succeed.

That success turns first on survival. Like Albanese in his first term, Starmer's small target strategy in opposition has proved an albatross in government, particularly in the straitjacket he set for himself through harsh fiscal rules more in tune with the austerity policies of the conservatives.

The lesson from the rise of hardline populists from Italy, Germany and France to our Anglophone "parents" the US and UK, is that when living standards for working people are not maintained, xenophobes flourish and the centre, no matter how long it has held, fails.

It seems obvious now, but when Trump won in 2016 - considered unthinkable until it happened - blue-collar Americans had not received a real wage increase, basically since the 1970s, all while billionaires multiplied. The Democrats sat on their hands.

Labor's support for minimum wage increases recognises this truth.

Contrary to the depictions of Albanese's speech as some sort of global victory lap, the constant thrust of his speech was actually about unity.

"I want to finish with an old truth that both our movements know ... Unity of labour is the hope of the world. That has always been labour at our best. Unity of party - and unity of purpose ... Unity of labour reflects the power of solidarity to drive change. And it reflects the responsibility of labour to promote unity."

Unity, unity, unity. Got it? Put another way, division would be very good for Farage but very bad for Australia.

QUOTE ENDS

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/9079857/jenna-price-boomers-should-house-their-millennial-children/

QUOTE BEGINS

For the love of god, can we please just fix the housing, ah, issue. I am no longer allowed to call it a crisis. Nope. It's not a crisis.

Who said? A bloke I speak to every time the housing c-word comes up. Poor old Michael Fotheringham. I've been interviewing him for at least 10 years in his gig as managing director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. He is the full bottle.

And why isn't it a crisis? He says it's not an earthquake, a flood, a drought. It's not time-limited.

"This is much broader, it's a generational problem. We have spent 40 years creating the housing problem we have and now we need to spend decades fixing it for all households and work towards fixing that."

Our current conversation is sparked by the federal government's rebranded 5 per cent deposit scheme which launched this week. It allows eligible (and that's just about everyone) first-home buyers to get a mortgage with that tiny deposit (plus! Hurray! No bloody expensive lenders mortgage insurance which protects the bank but not the borrower).

There's been a lot of chat about whether it will cause the cost of housing to soar. The Insurance Council says yes - and up to 10 per cent a year (oh, sad, are they missing out on their members' sale of lenders' mortgage insurance? Poor babies). The folks without any vested interest (that is, Treasury) predict just 0.5 per cent over six years.

I know who I believe and it's not the people who represent insurers, the folks who withhold payments from flood and fire victims.

Anyhoo, I'd like to propose - yet again - a short-term solution for Millennials whose parents own their own homes. I'm not being paid to make this suggestion. In fact, my own Millennials would like me to STFU about anything to do with them or anyone adjacent to them.

Also, before you write angry comments about how Boomers deserve their own space, let me just say: No. You. Don't.

My proposal is that Millennials should move back in with their parents. They should bring their partners with them. And also, their offspring. Too inconvenient for those poor Boomers?

I'll tell you what's freaking inconvenient and that's spending a grand a week on someone else's mortgage (also known as rent) and not being able to get the oven fixed, the mould removed, little possibility of solar energy and near zero maintenance. That is what I call inconvenient.

Let me say, I know living with Boomers can be hard. We are old, tired, often inflexible of mind and of body. We are not fans of the takeaway meal. We think we are tech-savvy but not yet entranced by AI. We worked hard for everything we have and some of us do not want to share. I have no science here to share, just lived experience.

And as for living with Millennials? My god, they have so much energy. They have a Millennial pause. They are, as one might have said 40 years ago, very full of themselves, maybe even a teensy bit narcissistic. Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author, has said Millennials are optimistic, support same-sex marriage at a higher rate than other generations. And, blessedly, they have a more egalitarian view of gender roles.

Also, many (OK, some) Millennials now have children.

Back to my proposal. Every Boomer who owns their own home should insist their Millennial children, even those who have children, should move back in with them. Stop forcing your children to spend money on rent when they don't need to. Allow them to keep that money they spend on someone else's mortgage to save for their own.

Are you a Boomer with no children? Very peaceful. Still own your own home? OK, allow complete Millennial strangers to move in with you (sure, do all the checking of their credentials first but no amount of Google will help you understand why these people want to use UberEats when they could rustle up something cheaper, quicker and less salty than any of that home-delivered yuck). In fact, you could share your cooking skills. Number one boomer cooking tip. Do not slice and dice garlic. Use a grater. Your life will change forever.

Yes, of course you can charge them rent - but it needs to be teeny, tiny, inconsequential. Why should you subsidise someone you aren't even related to? We are all brothers and sisters under the skin. And your work will ease the housing, ahem, issue for those you help. You are doing God's work.

Now there are Boomers who own their own homes but claim not to have enough room for Millennials of any kind. I'll tell you where you don't have enough room and that's in your heart. And if you really don't have enough room, take out a freaking reverse mortgage, give those kids their deposit and move on.

Now, I'm sure I'll get some tedious correspondence which tells me that this won't solve the housing, ahem, issue. Who says? Everything and anything will help.

Fotheringham says the government's scheme will not push up house prices and I trust him to know what he's talking about. But he also says the same things he's been saying for ages. Can the government please cap negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions? And then? Gradually reduce the size of the cap over an extended period. That, says Fotheringham, would allow removal of a problematic policy setting without triggering market disruption.

"At state level, gradual transition from stamp duty to annual land taxes would reduce one of the key barriers to mobility and downsizing," Fotheringham told me earlier this year.

And while we wait for a political miracle, open up your doors. And your heart. Now working on the book: Surviving Life with Millennials. Joke. I wouldn't dare.

QUOTE ENDS

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #HousingCrisis

What Hastie quitting means for Sussan Ley
ABC Politics Now [incl. The Party Room]
1 hour ago

Senior Liberal Andrew Hastie has spectacularly quit the Coalition frontbench, saying he could not maintain cabinet solidarity due to disagreements over immigration policy.

And while the Liberal MP was emphatic there was "no challenge" to Sussan Ley and the move was "done in good faith", he suggested the centre right was "fractured."

It comes just weeks after the Western Australia MP suggested he would be forced to quit the frontbench if the Coalition stuck with its commitment to net zero by 2050 — and follows a series of social media posts including one that suggested Australians were becoming "strangers" in their own country due to immigration.

So, does the move still destablise Sussan Ley's hold on the leadership? And what does it mean for the future of the Liberal party?

Brett Worthington and David Speers break it all down on this emergency episode of Politics Now.

Read Brett's analysis here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-04/andrew-hastie-resignation-bad-timing-for-sussan-ley/105852022

Read David's latest analysis here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-01/australia-and-turkiye-negotiate-over-cop31-hosting-rights/105837208 Catch today's Insiders on Background ep by scrolling back in the feed, or here: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/politics-now/trump-peace-plan-insiders-on-background/105851006

Got a burning question?

Got a burning political query? Send a short voice recording to Brett and Mel for Question Time at [email protected]That's the full quote from this hot new #RSS feed entry just received. Anyone else note, then gag about, the unbalanced absurdist pomposity of Speers' characterisation? Here is is:this emergency episodeFar fooken out 😡🖕 🤢🤮

#AusPol #WhyIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #ABCBias