I'll only link to the excellent pieces by Paul Bongiorno [It’s all over bar the voting] & John Hewson [Peter Dutton’s empty leadership], but i've fully quoted the Editorial, as i have such visceral hatred of the odious Lyle Shelton.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2025/04/25/its-all-over-bar-the-voting

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2025/04/24/peter-duttons-empty-leadership

Quote

Editorial
Sexual preferences

Lyle Shelton is the crab louse of Australian politics. He’s an itchy little man. In his entire career, the only thing he has won is a campaign not to drink recycled sewage. He finally found a cause more unpopular than himself and it was the consumption of human excrement.

Shelton led the unsuccessful campaign against same-sex marriage. He argued that anti-discrimination laws needed to be suspended so he could properly put his case. He likened the children of gay couples to the Stolen Generations.

Undeterred by his failure, he joined Cory Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives. He was on top of the Senate ticket in Queensland in 2019, where he won 5533 votes. The anti-fluoride party was more popular.

When the Australian Conservatives were deregistered, he switched his allegiance to the Christian Democratic Party. Fred Nile promised to make him leader but betrayed him after he moved to Sydney. This is a little like being tricked by a slow-growing mole.

The gay-hating 90-year-old said: “I had high hopes for Mr Shelton and am sorry it has come to this.”

Shelton is now leading Family First. He is running for the party in the Senate in New South Wales. He is still obsessed with sex and death. He describes himself as an advocate for life who “opposes abortion-on-demand and euthanasia”. He wants people to freely practise their faith and promises to “combat harmful gender ideologies and protect children from radical indoctrination in schools”.

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t matter. The only talent Shelton has shown is for losing. He runs as a husband and a failure. The difference this time is Liberal preferences. Peter Dutton’s Coalition is listing Family First and One Nation at the top of its how-to-vote cards.

For decades, the Liberal Party has avoided preferencing One Nation. When Pauline Hanson emerged as a racist force in the 1990s, senior Liberals worked hard to deprive her party of oxygen. There was a principled stand against her.

In the years since, the Liberal Party has changed. Rhetoric that appalled the country in 1996 is now commonplace. There is nothing Hanson said in her first speech that hasn’t since been repeated by a Liberal leader. She is the definition of the Overton window.

Dutton’s Liberal Party is not embarrassed to swap preferences with One Nation or Family First. They all live on the same fringe. There are differences on abortion and a few other policies, but the fundamentals are the same.

The Liberals who fought Hanson struggle to recognise the party now. Its values have been surrendered to its rightmost wing. It has forfeited its economic conservatism, giving in to reactionary policies. It is no longer conflicted over racism. It has no affection for institutions or plans to protect them.

When Lyle Shelton looks back at his life, squinting at all the failure and fantasy, it is this that will likely stand as his solitary achievement.

Unquote

#AusPol #Greens #VoteGreens #ProgIndies #WeAreTotallyFscked #WeAreSelfishCruelBastards #Misanthropy #FsckOffDutton! #ShitParty1 #ShitParty2 #ComeOnTanya! #WhyIsLabor #NatsAreNuts #NoNukes #racism #FuckRacists #OzElection2025 #IncludeAdam

It’s all over bar the voting

A trifecta of unmissable interruptions has made Peter Dutton’s task of winning the election in just seven days’ time a seemingly impossible mission. If the Easter holiday break followed by the Anzac Day holiday weren’t already obstacles to the late run home on which the Liberals were counting, the death on Monday of Pope Francis threw another giant spanner in the works. The wisdom is that the Liberals needed to make every day a winner in the final two weeks to capture voters’ attention and to woo the waverers over to their side.

The Saturday Paper
@MsDropbear42 how empty headed the Australian public are that Spud is even considered for his own seat, let alone Prime Minister

@MsDropbear42 @MorpheusB

a ripper article in the saturday paper — ty for sharing, Droppie
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pauline hanson was acceptable to the liberal party from the get go. when they disendorsed her, they were simply ensuring there would be <two> candidates on the paper with the same rancid views [let’s not call them <values>]

it’s the marketing principle of minimum differentiation — for years the reason lever and kitchen company had six <different> brands of laundry soap clogging up supermarket shelves. capture the market with a scattergun approach.

and it’s the same principle adopted by alp since it abandoned it’s <working class> rustadons like some demographic <safe seat>. the closer to lnp, the more chance of stealing their votes (and in the process, shifting australian politics to the right of attila the hun.)

it’s the same principle behind supermarket pricing — colesworths are not in collusion, per se, they are just so busy looking at the other lot they don’t stand for anything of their own.

in politics, this obsession with marketing has created an ideas and leadership void, where small minded, hateful, petty individuals flog bigotry like it’s a virtue — prolly cos they are shit-scared they might one day have to front sennalink themselves

#auspol #OneNation #ALP #MarketingNotDemocracy #LNP #LowestCommonDenominatorCandidates