Keeping it holy

Marking the sabbath with a compendium of federal preselection news, the most notable relating to the looming by-election in Groom.

Queensland’s Liberal National Party will take a break from electioneering tomorrow to determine its candidate for Groom,who is all but assured of a quick passage to parliament after the by-election on November 24. This contest has been enlivened by reports that David van Gend, an unsuccessful past nominee with unorthodox views on social issues, has emerged as the front-runner. Van Gend reportedly enjoys well-organised backing from religious conservatives, and Crikey reports he bears endorsement Eric Abetz, Matt Canavan, Miranda Devine and Howard-era Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson. As The Guardian notes, this comes at a time when conservative state MPs are making life difficult for their leadership by conjuring controversies around abortion at the sharp end of an election campaign. The LNP’s deep state would evidently prefer it if locals favoured Toowoomba councillor Rebecca Vonhoff or Australian Lot Feeders president Bryce Camm.

Other preselection news:

• In other Queensland federal preselection news, a gossip column in the Cairns Post reports Cairns regional councillor Brett Olds will seek preselection to succeed Warren Entsch in the far north Queensland seat of Leichhardt, and suggests Olds has the support of Entsch. The 70-year-old Entsch said before the last election that this term would be his last.

• The Western Australian Greens have preselected Dorinda Cox, an anti-domestic violence campaigner and former police office of Yamatji Noongar background, to lead the party’s Senate ticket at the next election, in place of the retiring Rachel Siewert. It is often the practice in the Greens for outgoing Senators to retire before the election and allow their preselected successor to fill their vacancy, but it is unclear if this is the idea on this occasion.

• The Australian Capital Territory election would seem to have been decided with a result of Labor 10 (down two), Liberal nine (down two) and Greens six (up four), which you can read all about here.

Author: William Bowe

William Bowe is a Perth-based election analyst and occasional teacher of political science. His blog, The Poll Bludger, has existed in one form or another since 2004, and is one of the most heavily trafficked websites on Australian politics.

879 comments on “Keeping it holy”

Comments Page 2 of 18
1 2 3 … 18

  2. Perhaps we need to measure LNP corruption in units of Auspost gold watches. Sports rorts national = 5,000 Auspost watches.

  3. We will stop trying to please the inner city “elites*” and aim to please the only elites that count – those who control the money.

    * in what way are they “elite”? Are they recognising certain demographic groups who live in inner city areas as a cultural and/or intellectual elite?

  4. ItzaDream @ #31 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 5:19 am

    sprocket_ @ #26 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 8:14 am

    Barack Obama stumping it for Joe Biden in Miami is a sight to behold…

    https://twitter.com/thehill/status/1320098910694756354?s=21

    Yeah. He’s nailing Trump. I love the horns and tooting. Go Florida. I posted on the USA thread that more people have voted early in Florida than voted for Trump in 2016.

    Obama is and always was a star.

  5. Re KJ @7:52

    ” Why not simply change the date to 1953 and the RW arseholes may just go away.”

    It’s a bit more complicated than that. Socially, 1953 would be just fine, but economically the time was characterised by strong unions, affordable housing, increasing regulation, increasing equality, increasing Government spending. In an economic sense, they want to return to the pre-war era, perhaps even late Victorian times (maybe socially as well, come to that).

  6. Auspost board member, Bruce McIver, former QLD LNP President (on the right in image below), is no stranger to watches…has just changed brands #insiders

  8. Lizzie
    “The investigation is looking into why the Australian Border Force, in late 2015 and early 2016, disregarded internal advice that it should not pay Austal part of a $44.6 million success fee for delivering patrol boats used to target people and contraband smugglers and illegal fishing.”

    That’s a bit over 9,000 Watches.

  9. Morning all. Thanks BK. Victoria highlighted what I was going to say about the farcical listing of the Olympic Dam mine as a “project of national significance” when BHP just cancelled it this week. Obviously, there is no process to determine what is on the list. Also, obviously, private project sponsors were not consulted.

    Olympic Dam has been replaced by the Morrison family cubby-house. Here is the assessment team making the adjustment.
    [insert photo of Utopia cast here].

  11. There’s Real World, and then there’s Trump World.

    Manu Raju@mkraju·
    39m
    “It is going away,” Trump says at rally about covid – despite all evidence to the contrary, praised his team for doing “an incredible job” dealing with a virus that has killed more than 220,000 people in the US

  12. Karen Andrews is obviously a star in the government. She can produce long sentences of explanation (which make my brain glaze over) and is not deterred by Speers interrupting.

  13. Confessions @ #62 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 9:32 am

    There’s Real World, and then there’s Trump World.

    Manu Raju@mkraju·
    39m
    “It is going away,” Trump says at rally about covid – despite all evidence to the contrary, praised his team for doing “an incredible job” dealing with a virus that has killed more than 220,000 people in the US

    Yep. The COVID Response Team are doing a heckuva job:

    Lincoln’s Bible
    @LincolnsBible

    When you realize that herd immunity IS Jared’s plan, then it makes sense. “Rounding the turn” = crossing the point of no return for unstoppable mass death.

  14. lizzie @ #63 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 9:36 am

    Karen Andrews is obviously a star in the government. She can produce long sentences of explanation (which make my brain glaze over) and is not deterred by Speers interrupting.

    Whilst saying NOTHING of substance. I turned her off as soon as she came up with her response to Speer’s first question. 100% pablum.

  15. “A cabinet colleague of mine recently told me he’d had a call from [the head of a large media company] who said that one of his editors had put together all this personal information on him, but he was calling the minister just to let him know that he had instructed the editor under no circumstances was the personal information ever to be published.”
    From Eric Beecher’s article in Crikey.

  16. C@t
    I knew I was going to be late getting to Insiders so I set it to record. This was fortunate, because I was able to quickly skip through Karen Andrews’ empty diatribe.

  21. BK

    Karvelas has been anti-lockdown from the beginning. She apparently couldn’t cope with the early working from home/home schooling shtick. Been whinging ever since.

  35. Pukka @ 8:07

    “The Queensland Resources Council (QRC) is running adverts claiming the resources sector in Queensland employs 375,000 people.”

    There’s the “rule of 10” again. The real number is about 36,000.

    But even without knowing the ABS figure, the claim is clearly absurd. The population of Queensland is a bit over 5 million, the size of the work force is about 2.5 million. The QRC is saying that the highly automated resources sector employs 15% of Queenslanders. These jobs will be mostly in regional Qld, so allowing for some Brisbane-based management / admin jobs, it supposedly accounts for over 25% of regional Qld jobs. That doesn’t ring true.

    Maybe they are counting “indirect jobs”. Well, the “multiplier” can be set to whatever value suits the propaganda point being made.

    File under B for Bullshit.

  36. Danama Papers @ #80 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 10:02 am

    Confessions @ #74 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 6:53 am

    Why does Team Trump keep using Village People music at his rallies? Are they the only artists who haven’t threatened to sue him over it?

    https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1320132529274408960

    The Village People may not actually be the copyright owners. The actual owners may well be Trump supporters.

    Yeah nah. It was written by one of their own:

    Victor Willis
    In the lucrative world of music copyright, it may be something of a watershed moment: on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/arts/music/a-copyright-victory-35-years-later.html#:~:text=In%20the%20lucrative%20world%20of%20music%20copyright%2C%20it,of%20the%201970s%20disco%20group%20the%20Village%20People.

  44. Marieke Hardy
    @mariekehardy
    ·
    8m
    Really enjoying the Federal Government’s current strategy of wheeling out their biggest flog to give a sniping, pass-agg tepid excuse for a presser in the exact half hour before everybody in Victoria is waiting for news about their actual lives.

    😆 😆 😆

  45. C@t

    Because repeating the same message for weeks is vital information? 😆
    But of course, anything said by a fed minister is more important than anything else.

  46. C@tmomma @ #86 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 7:05 am

    Danama Papers @ #80 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 10:02 am

    Confessions @ #74 Sunday, October 25th, 2020 – 6:53 am

    Why does Team Trump keep using Village People music at his rallies? Are they the only artists who haven’t threatened to sue him over it?

    https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1320132529274408960

    The Village People may not actually be the copyright owners. The actual owners may well be Trump supporters.

    Yeah nah. It was written by one of their own:

    Victor Willis
    In the lucrative world of music copyright, it may be something of a watershed moment: on Friday, after six years of legal wrangling and decades after he wrote the lyrics to the hit song “YMCA,” Victor Willis will gain control of his share of the copyright to that song and others he wrote when he was the lead singer of the 1970s disco group the Village People.

    https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/11/arts/music/a-copyright-victory-35-years-later.html#:~:text=In the lucrative world of music copyright, it,of the 1970s disco group the Village People.

    Well, there you go. My comment was based on the fact that a lot of “pop” groups are merely performers of other people’s songs.

    You’re old enough to remember Suzi Quatro. A fleet of hit songs to her name and not a single royalty cheque for any of them. She made her fortune (such as it is) from touring and playing live, and bugger all from royalties.

    As the VP were a “manufactured” band. I naturally assumed they were performers of someone else’s songs (a la The Monkees).

    On this assumption I was wrong. So be it. I have learned something new today.

    Carry on. As you were.

  49. Important points to keep in mind re Victoria’s decision to use Private Security (from Oct 4):

    That “creeping assumptions” of senior bureaucrats were behind their choice of private security staff guarding returned travellers in Victorian hotel quarantine was suggested by counsel assisting the Coate inquiry. But there is another possibility: the assumptions were not “creeping” and there was no active choice.

    Rather, the employment of security guards was the outcome of “cast-iron” assumptions, making it so inevitable that no discussion about choice was needed. Private security guards were less a choice between different options than a given certainty. It was a non-decision that became a fateful decision – strange as this may seem to the general public.

    Contracting out became central to the playbook of bureaucracies after the new public management (NPM) theories in the 1990s gripped Australian public services. NPM was the handmaiden of the neoliberal economics that marked the advent of Jeff Kennett’s and John Howard’s leaderships.

    The idea was that the private sector – profit-making firms and NGOs – could run things more efficiently and cheaply than governments.

    It was also an indirect way of breaking up those pesky, unionised workforces within governments, such as the Commonwealth Employment Service or the tramways employees.

    So throughout the Kennett and Howard eras, most public services, from electricity to prisons, from childcare to aged care, were privatised, often through contracting-out processes.

    According to the gurus of the NPM movement, government’s new role in service delivery was to “steer not row”. And when Labor governments – Rudd in Canberra and Bracks in Victoria – were returned, they apparently saw no reason to abandon NPM.

    Contracting out went hand in hand with the use of another less well-known but very powerful strategy, the elevation of the content-free manager.

    https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/quarantine-non-decision-stemmed-from-flawed-bureaucratic-philosophy-20201002-p561er.html

Comments Page 2 of 18
1 2 3 … 18

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *