Three batches of poll results, plus relevant news on the Indigenous Voice referendum and Victoria’s Warrandyte state by-election:
• The Guardian reports the latest fortnightly Essential Research poll has Anthony Albanese’s approval rating below half for the first time since the election, dropping six points in its monthly reading to 48%, with disapproval up six to 41%. Peter Dutton is up one on approval to 37% and down two on disapproval to 43%. The report does not provide the poll’s voting intention numbers, which should be with us later today. In other findings, 41% approved and 36% disapproved of the Victorian government’s cancellation of the Commonwealth Games, with support at 44% from the poll’s modest sample of Victorian respondents. The poll had a sample of 1150 and was presumably conducted as per usual from Wednesday to Sunday. UPDATE: The voting intention numbers are Labor 31% (down one), Coalition 32% (steady), Greens 14% (steady) and One Nation 7% (down one), with undecided up one to 6%. This is the first time the Coalition has led on the primary vote in this series since the election, and the 2PP+ lead of Labor 50% (down one) to Coalition 45% (up one), with undecided on 6% (up one), is equal narrowest. Full report here.
• The West Australian today brings further results from the Utting Research poll that credited the state Liberals with a 54-46 lead, finding 58% planning to vote no on the Indigenous Voice compared with 29% for yes and 13% undecided. With the latter excluded, the result is exactly two-thirds yes and one-third no. Since other recent polling from Western Australia has tended to suggest only a modest leaning towards no, it’s tempting to regard this as evidence that the poll struck a heavily conservative rogue sample, and to interpret the voting intention numbers accordingly. The poll further records 54% saying the state’s Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act had made them less likely to vote for the Voice, compared with 16% for more likely, 23% for neither and 7% for unsure.
• The Age/Herald had yet more results from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll on Sunday, showing 31% in favour of increased support for Ukraine, 45% support for retaining it at its current level and only 9% support for decreasing or withdrawing support.
• Tom McIlroy of the Financial Review reports 60,000 Indigenous voters have been added to the electoral roll since the end of last year, increasing the enrolment rate from 84.5% to 94.1%. This followed “sustained work” by the Australian Electoral Commission encompassing “special enrolment strategies, direct enrolment rules for remote communities, and changes to allow voters to enrol a Medicare card”. As noted here previously, the Indigenous enrolment surge has led to a proposed redistribution for the Northern Territory parliament being scrapped and started again.
• Tom Cowie of The Age reports Labor “looks increasingly unlikely to field a contender” at the Victorian state by-election for Warrandyte on August 26. The Greens have endorsed Manningham deputy mayor Tomas Lightbody. Other candidates include independent Maya Tesa, a past Liberal Democrats candidate who polled 7.0% as an independent at the Aston by-election on April 1.
The Home Affairs Department handed a multimillion-dollar offshore detention contract to an Australian businessman just one month after federal police told then minister Peter Dutton that the man was under investigation for bribery.
Documents tabled in federal parliament reveal that the AFP’s acting commissioner told Dutton in July 2018 that Sydney-based Mozammil Bhojani was under investigation over suspected bribes to Nauruan politicians. The payments were made to secure preferential access to millions of dollars worth of phosphate for his company Radiance International.
But despite the verbal police warning to Dutton, documents obtained by this masthead show that the following month – August 2018 – the Department of Home Affairs entered into a fresh contract with Radiance. The contract, signed by Bhojani, was to provide accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers at a particular location. That contract ultimately paid the company $9.3 million in taxpayer money.
Just one month after the contract was signed, police arrested Bhojani and charged him with paying more than $100,000 in bribes to two Nauruan officials. Bhojani pleaded guilty and was convicted in 2020.
Bhojani and his companies first came under AFP scrutiny in 2015, when it began investigating bribery of Nauru officials. But despite this, documents produced in answers to questions on notice show that his company was a large contractor to Home Affairs from 2016 onwards.
https://archive.md/UxrPl#selection-3015.0-3059.271
#weatheronPB
Cold light steals inside.
Under the thin grey cover,
waking birds call out.
Would it be too early to concluded that the Yes campaign has stumbled and fallen before it has even gotten properly started?
For those who haven’t caught up with it yet, Kevin Bonham’s exasperated post from late last night is instructive.
https://kevinbonham.blogspot.com/
As Kevin suggests, the Albanese Government might soon find itself in the situation of either seeing the referendum defeated – with unmeasurably deleterious consequences for Indigenous people – or else experiencing the humiliation of being forced to postpone/abandon it.
If Bob Hawke were still with us, I know what he would say (strictly behind closed doors, because he was always an unwaveringly loyal party man in public): you can’t get anything done in politics if you can’t take the people with you. (Not an original idea, of course: Machiavelli said much the same in the early 16th century. But Hawke was a great exponent and practitioner of the concept.)
The Albanese Government has never seriously tried to take the Australian people with them re the Voice. They have been consistently evasive about how it would function and initially spent a lot of time trying to reassure us that it will be effectively toothless and thereby not represent any sort of a threat, which I suspect just made voters more suspicious of the proposal, as did all the sporting codes and other private organisations telling them they should support it. The Government and the proponents of a Yes vote have finally woken up to the negative effect of the “don’t worry, it’s harmless” line and are now trying to run a more positive campaign: but I fear it’s too little too late.
If the process of ever-declining poll numbers doesn’t suddely turn around (and Bonham seems to be suggesting that this is seriously unlikely), I think the Government will end up being forced to “defer” the referendum as the lesser of two evils.
What would then need to do is not clear IMO. They will be tempted to lash out at the people for being a bunch of racists, but that will only make things worse.
Better still would be for Albo to admit humbly that he got it all wrong, and then suggest that Dutton joins him in some sort of dialogue with Indigenous leaders on what could reasonably be done: eg, establish some version of the Voice without constitutional backing. I think the Coalition would play ball to a certain extent, and if they refused to do so, Labor could probably get a proposal through Parliament anyway, while simultaneously re-establishing itself on the moral high ground.
But it’s quite a mess.
Dr Doolittle @ Monday, July 24, 2023 at 10:01 pm (last thread):
“See what Biden was advised to do by Gen Milley if Putin invaded Ukraine. This advice provides the clear framework of US policy. The quote is at pp 143-4 of Plokhy’s book, The Russo-Ukrainian War:
“No. 1: ‘Don’t have a kinetic conflict between the US military and NATO with Russia’. No. 2: ‘Contain war inside the geographical boundaries of Ukraine.’ No. 3: ‘Strengthen and maintain NATO unity.’ No. 4: ‘Empower Ukraine and give them the means to fight’.”
The advice was so important that it was “entrusted to the note cards”, presumably for Biden to read.”
===========================
Dr Doolittle, this set of American military objectives has, indeed, been followed diligently by them this whole war. Of course, the US, Ukraine and Russia all know these objectives, and they all know everyone else knows them. I think it follows that if the US in fact always follow it, Moscow can always thwart objective 4 by credibly threatening either or all of objectives 1-3 if the US actually looks like implementing objective 4 in full. In other words, if the Biden administration were to follow only Gen Milley’s military advice, and not any alternative advice from its own State Department or from any of its allies, this set of objectives is a certain recipe for a lengthy conflict with an eventual Russian victory. I think only time will tell what mix of policy advice the Biden administration will be shown to have been following in this war.
Meher,
Good comment. I also have grave fears for the voice at the moment, the yes campaign isn’t getting any traction and Linda Burney (who I have enormous respect for) just isn’t an effective advocate. I’m wondering whether the government would be better off legislating the voice now and deferring the referendum until the next federal election. It would negate the whole ‘show us the detail’ argument that the liberal party is running, and the electorate would have seen that the sky hadn’t fallen in and I think would be much more inclined to support it
Unfortunately though I think that would require leadership and courage, which I don’t think Albo has really demonstrated thus far
PageBoi: “Unfortunately though I think that would require leadership and courage, which I don’t think Albo has really demonstrated thus far”
I would assess Albo as a reasonably-good political leader, but he does suffer from the defect of wanting to be loved: or, as he would perhaps put it, wanting everyone (including world leaders) to think of him as a good, , old-fashioned, ordinary Aussie bloke. This persona has served him well up to now, but he will eventually need to toughen it up a bit.
On the other hand, he isn’t facing much serious competition at the moment.
I asked the other day what could be done for the Voice from here. My suggestions:
– defer the referendum and hold it at the next federal election.
– reveal the legislation that the No case keeps fear mongering on.
It can still be done.
This is what happens when you don’t have women as equals among your peers. Which other men in the Liberal party are behaving like this and think that it’s okay to do so so long as the woman being bullied doesn’t speak out about it?
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/revealed-the-demeaning-degrading-and-highly-abusive-texts-a-nsw-politician-sent-to-a-federal-mp-20230721-p5dqb5.html
Cronus says:
Tuesday, July 25, 2023 at 6:46 am
Douglas and Milko 9:18pm
“ And, I have said this here before – should have kept my old post, because it requires a few paragraphs of explanation: Around 2/3rds of current climate change was “baked in” decades ago. There is an immediate effect that stopping all fossil fuels today would have relatively quickly, but we would still be looking at a warming climate for decades, and that needs to be planned for.
So, by all means, argue that no new gas should come on line in Australia – I am fully supportive of this – but do it in a way that does no lead to opposing three word bumper statements from the “stop burning fossil fuels today” compared to “A great new tax on everything”. Neither of these simplistic positions is helping.
And this is where we need genuine world action and cooperation between all countries. The refugee problem is at least in part caused by climate change, and this will accelerate. So, we need to be bears with big brains. We need to help the world see the positive side of helping refugees.
And by all means, argue, with facts, about when the world can feasibly get to net zero, and what Australia can do to help.
But stop with taking one tweet or one fact from an article, or an article poorly written from a science perspective, and saying: “See we need to stop burning follis fuels today.” It is adding to the problem.
——————————————
Excellent post IMHO, absolutely nailed it.
fess, I fear that it’s too late to try to solve the problem by publicly revealing the proposed legislation, or any other details of how the Voice might work.
Indeed, it might make things far worse, because I am almost certain that it will demonstrate that there is nothing in the existing Constitution that would prevent the establishment of the Voice in the way that the Government and Indigenous leaders want it to function. And that will provide opponents with an even greater opportunity to talk about hidden agendas and unintended consequences, etc, etc.
I guess the root cause of the dilemma is that – in constitutional terms – the Yes case is weak and unpersuasive. ATSIC was far more powerful than the Voice is intended to be, and its establishment didn’t require any constitutional changes. Recognition in the Constitution of Indigenous people as the original inhabitants of Australia is a great idea that even the Coalition has sometimes supported, but this doesn’t require us to enshrine the Voice there.
The proponents of enshrining the Voice in the Constitution seem to be motivated by a desire to make it extremely difficult for future governments to modify/abolish it. “Here, sign this contract and please note that it doesn’t have any sort of an escape clause” is always going to be a difficult sell, but it might have been possible if there had been a serious attempt to explain the purpose and functioning of the Voice to the Australian people in a detailed and transparent way. But instead we just got lots of the “don’t worry, it’s only an advisory body, just a matter of politeness” nonsense.
Even unengaged voters probably have enough understanding of the Constitution to know that governments don’t try to change it lightly, and that a government wouldn’t bother going to all the trouble of trying to do so just to set up a toothless advisory body.
Giving Indigenous people a stronger role in our Constitution and more power to influence government decision-making are terrific ideas IMO. But the Voice proposal has been badly designed and ineptly – arguably disingenuously – sold to the people.
The VTP isn’t a can to be kicked down the road. For better or worse we are about to arrive at a point in time, a destination, that was humbly requested back in Turnbull’s PM’ship. My personal fear if the referendum fails is that Australia will begin to hate itself. Perhaps this has already begun. Play our national anthem back in your mind as you think about the simple request being made.
meher:
Yes, I agree the selling of the Yes case has been badly handled. The public spats by Yes proponents (Mick Gooda and Noel Pearson) was for my mind the single most damaging aspect of the campaign, and looking back, when the polling started to turn.
I do however believe that it isn’t too late to turn around. The Yes case needs a convincing front person. Unfortunately Linda Burney just isn’t that person.
Mueller prosecutor predicts Trump indictment will come ‘tomorrow or Thursday at the latest’
Former senior prosecutor for Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, said on Monday he believes there’s “a distinct possibility” that Donald Trump’s legal team has met with the Department of Justice to appeal against their client’s possible indictment, and that charges involving Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation could be unsealed imminently.
“Seems like a distinct possibility that we will learn today that the Trump defense team has presented appeal to DOJ re the Jan. 6 charges; and then upon the rejection of that appeal, Jack Smith will seek the indictment tomorrow or Thursday at the latest in DC,” Weissmann tweeted Monday afternoon.
i dont know what mike pezullo has to do to be sacked his department has handid some contracts over to some interesting people including some people with bad backgrounds
Late Riser: “Play our national anthem back in your mind as you think about the simple request being made.”
I don’t think the Government has done a good job at persuading voters that it is only a simple request.
Voters appear to sense a hidden agenda. And they are right about this to some extent: it would seem that the Government, presumably recalling the hay that the No case made of all the detailed amendments put forward in the Republic Referendum, have consciously opted for a somewhat vague, “big picture” approach with the VTP. Obviously the only poll that matters is the referendum itself, but so far the signs are that the strategy of playing down the details isn’t working too well.
Dawn Patrollers
For a variety of reasons I have arisen very late this morning and still have to tend to animal duties before getting ready to go down to the flatlands for the day. Consequently, I won’t have time to do justice to a patrol before leaving.
Sorry about that . . . again.
No problems BK, enjoy your day.
Holdenhillbilly says:
Tuesday, July 25, 2023 at 6:15 am
The Home Affairs Department handed a multimillion-dollar offshore detention contract to an Australian businessman just one month after federal police told then minister Peter Dutton that the man was under investigation for bribery.
——————
Add to the NACC list.
It’s not only men in the Liberal Party who are denigrating and abusing women via social media, it’s men on this blog who see an opinion voiced by a woman who disagrees with their own position as a nail and them as the heavy-handed hammer whose purpose is to beat them down into submission. Or to engage in condescending attempted humiliation.
One would hope that they would read that article and reflect on their own behaviour towards women here. And not simply and simplistically by saying, well, my wife has no complaints.
For too long now standards of behaviour have been slipping, at first among conservative men, but now even so-called Progressive men are forgetting, or not caring, that women on the other end of their social media ‘attention’ are not lifeless characters, or protagonists in the court room who they need to expend concerted energy on defeating.
Surely reasonable debate, keeping your undoubted ability to denigrate in check, is not beyond the capacity of intelligent people?
C@t!!!!!
A NSW politician sent a barrage of highly abusive and degrading text messages to a female federal MP, according to a detailed written complaint which has triggered an independent investigation and revived debate over the Liberal Party’s treatment of women.
The former member for the Central Coast seat of Robertson, Lucy Wicks, said NSW upper house MP Taylor Martin threatened to destroy her reputation if she spoke up about his behaviour, which she said involved demeaning and “highly aggressive” abuse.
A source who has been providing emotional support to Wicks and has seen hundreds of texts detailed in the complaint lodged with the NSW Liberal Party said they showed Martin repeatedly describing Wicks as a “dumb slut”, a “pig”, a “f—wit”, a “c—”, a “sicko” and a “f—ing idiot”.
One text seen by the Herald said: “Go stay in your world of f—ing make believe you f—ing pig ignorant bitch.”
Martin was revealed as the subject of the complaint over the weekend and has stood aside from the party room while the allegations are investigated.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/revealed-the-demeaning-degrading-and-highly-abusive-texts-a-nsw-politician-sent-to-a-federal-mp-20230721-p5dqb5.html
Re the Lucy Wicks-Taylor Martin brouhaha.
The thing that bothers me the most is the egregious and outrageous breach of privacy involved in the details of the matter being leaked to the media. Members/employees of any organisation have a right to have this sort of interpersonal dispute resolved by the management of that organisation behind closed doors. Publicly revealing such highly private matters is potentially highly harmful to people’s mental health.
As we are talking about a political party here, I suspect that the leaks – which I can’t see as being anything other than detrimental to Ms Wicks and Mr Martin – are tied to various factional and preselection disputes. If so, then 2GB should be deeply ashamed of its role in this: there was once a time when the media would refrain from publishing such information about the entirely private behaviour of politicians.
I can’t help feeling that it’s a shame that we do not have c@t here to provide us with a bit of local perspective on the story.
(And while I was writing this post, up she pops! Welcome back c@t!)
Stephen Koukoulas: What a strange notion. After 15 years of massive deficits, fantastic policy & a little luck have delivered a surplus under 1% of GDP and there is talk to piss it up against he wall.
Thankfully we have sensible economic managers in power rejecting this.
C@t:
Nice to see you commenting again.
Yes you are right that it is men in all spaces behaving appallingly. I used to think it was men of a certain age raised in a time when women were seen as lesser, but the reports we’ve seen in the news of late just shows it is men of all ages who appear to have lost the plot and forgotten that we are humans.
I wonder how much of men’s behaviour can be attributed to the online culture of today’s society. Where you can fire off texts or comments or social media posts without having to actually see or experience the reaction of the person you’re addressing?
Whichever it is, men today have got to lift their game.
Douglas and Milko +1
C@t +1
As I posted yesterday, suddenly the support for Labour party at federal level and across the States fell sharply.
That’s the least of the bother for me! What bothers me the most is that:
a) someone feels justified in (according to the news article) allegedly barraging a woman with vile text message abuse for 5 years.
b) that someone would even reportedly communicate to someone else like that.
c) that a major Australian political party feels it is okay to appoint someone who reportedly behaved like that to a state parliament!
Plenty of No voters applying camouflage and makeup to justify their intention to oppose the Voice.
Fear does that.
Dutton has been schooled by the best and ably supported by an unrepresentative press to achieve some sort of veneer win for what is now a totally disgraced and dishonest coalition.
The “bullshit” was always coming with Linda Burney now being targeted by the anti-Voice brigade.
The list is extensive.
Barnaby Joyce from the Nationals “crying” discrimination says it all about “colonisers”, the murderers, and the racists as they promote their prejudices in “fancy dress’.
The No vote is another “atrocity” being arranged so the No voters can ‘kick the can” further down the road.
The ousted Morrison government had Australia planted in the third world with its dishonesty, lack of transparency, nepotism, sexism, racism and disregard for anything remotely resembling integrity.
The opposition to the Voice, as is being presented by the No voters, is attempting to “cement” Australia’s place in the third world.
Any rejection of the Voice condemns the “divide” in Australia that now exists on so many levels and will remain a deepening scar upon the short white history of “the wide brown land”.
Trailblazing NASA “Hidden Figure” and Black mathematician, Evelyn Boyd Granville, has died at the age of 99. Granville was one of the first two Black women in the United States to earn a Ph.D in mathematics. Her degree, despite hardships, led to positions working on NASA’s early human spaceflight missions and a long career in education.
As shown in the group of Black women featured in the book and 2016 film “Hidden Figures,” Granville rose up, despite racial adversity, to contribute significantly to NASA’s early human spaceflight missions, including the Mercury and Apollo programs.
Not just a voice to parliament, but now an appointed voice to the executive branch! These voices are not black voices therefore they are ok.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/iemma-to-remain-lobbyist-despite-being-named-new-stadiums-boss-20230724-p5dqud.html
C@t ………
A soon-to-be “ex” social media platform.
X marks … what? Elon Musk proves once again he’s incredibly bad at naming things — Andrew Lawrence
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/commentisfree/2023/jul/24/elon-musk-twitter-x-rebrand
Pueo @ #32 Tuesday, July 25th, 2023 – 8:09 am
If you key into the conspiracies, this is exactly what Musk was after. If the term Xperts gets picked up watch that get weaponized against real experts. When spoken it’ll have a very heavy accent on the X.
Xplorers, Xpressers, and Xclusives will soon be a thing.
Re Holdenhillbilly @7:40.
”Stephen Koukoulas: What a strange notion. After 15 years of massive deficits, fantastic policy & a little luck have delivered a surplus under 1% of GDP and there is talk to piss it up against he wall.”
I think that needs some context.
Welcome back C@t.
BK – you deserve the odd day off at least. I don’t know how you do it.
Threads sees active users drop 70% in two weeks
Threads, Meta’s new social network, may have broken download records, but its success appears to be declining by the day. In fact, the number of daily active users has dropped by around 70% in two weeks.
[Aaron newtonsays:
Tuesday, July 25, 2023 at 7:26 am
i dont know what mike pezullo has to do to be sacked his department has handid some contracts over to some interesting people including some people with bad backgrounds]
Aaron
I suspect he knows much that if leaked could be very damaging to many politicians, so a smooth and mutually agreed exit will eventually occur when all parties are ready.
fess: “That’s the least of the bother for me! What bothers me the most is that:
a) someone feels justified in (according to the news article) allegedly barraging a woman with vile text message abuse for 5 years.
b) that someone would even reportedly communicate to someone else like that.
c) that a major Australian political party feels it is okay to appoint someone who reportedly behaved like that to a state parliament!”
Obviously there’s no excuse for the language of the text messages and, assuming he actually wrote them, Martin’s political career is now presumably over for good (or should be).
My impression is that the Liberal Party only found out about the content of the messages when Lucy Wicks lodged a complaint about them a few days ago. It then took what appears to have been a reasonable approach of suspending Martin’s membership and bringing in a lawyer to investigate the matter.
After this, somebody has decided it would be a good idea to leak the identity of the complainant and a range of other details to 2GB. Whoever did this – be it Martin himself or some other interested party – there should be serious consequences for them if they are found out. And 2GB also deserves a major serve: as I posted before, we are talking about people’s mental health here, and I can’t see that there was a powerful public interest in the information being made public at this time. Perhaps after the internal investigation was completed, but that’s a way off.
It’s gotten extremely ugly extremely quickly. It could go anywhere now.
C@tmomma! Welcome back!
Re Pezzulo. He’s cleverly turned himself into a brand: “I’m the one guy who will guarantee you a system that is tough on unauthorised arrivals.” The Libs love him (even though he used to be a Labor apparatchik) and Labor won’t dare touch him. So I reckon he can stay in the job for as long as he wants.
The path re the SftH is laid out and the Crown Govt need to stick with it come what may.
If the Voice is defeated all is certainly not lost as some are pathetically suggesting.
Legislating a ‘Voice’ is clearly the next step to truth/treaty. The Albanese Govt need to be strong and determined about that if they want to win majority public support for reconciliation.
Giving up would be the worst outcome of all.
Peter Dutton has many questions to answer re the ‘bribery’ reports today.
C@t
Hear hear!
Cronus @ #9 Tuesday, July 25th, 2023 – 6:46 am
Yes, everything in this post is true. Except that we really do need to stop burning fossil fuels ASAP. Today would be good. Yesterday would have been better. Tomorrow is not so good, but may be the best we can do. But after that it goes downhill fast.
There are no alternatives to this. None. Yes, it will take time to eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels, be expensive, difficult, unpopular and some people will suffer from doing so. But the alternatives are worse. And the longer we do not act, the worse the consequences become.
Do we really want to be remembered forever as the generation that absolutely knew the consequences, could have acted in time, but chose not to do so?
I don’t.
Bernie Kerik, the former NYPD commissioner who collected evidence of supposed election fraud for the Trump campaign in 2020, has cut a deal to turn over records to Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of the investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Smith previously sought the documents, which are related to Kerik’s role as the former president’s on-the-ground investigator looking into eventually disproven conspiracy theories about ballot stuffing and fake voters. However, Kerik’s legal team had refused to turn those documents over, citing attorney-client privilege stemming from the fact that Kerik was working on behalf of Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
But on Friday, Trump himself waived that privilege and agreed to have the documents turned over, according to Kerik’s defense lawyer, Timothy Parlatore. Smith is expected to now receive nearly 2,000 pages of material describing how Kerik looked into bogus fraud allegations. The records could prove pivotal for federal prosecutors, who are seeking evidence of Trump’s decision-making process as he relentlessly voiced baseless accusations that the 2020 election was “rigged,” even though top advisers had told him otherwise.
[‘Former federal MP Lucy Wicks has come forward as the Liberal Party figure who made a complaint about the conduct of a NSW state MP, alleging she received “demeaning, degrading, and abusive” texts from the politician over a five-year period.
On Monday, Wicks, the former Robertson MP, said she was “distressed” to have been named as the person who made a “formal and confidential complaint” regarding alleged abuse by NSW Liberal MP Taylor Martin.
Wicks was named as the complainant by Sydney radio station 2GB, owned by Nine, the publisher of this masthead, after making an anonymous complaint to the Liberal Party.
“My complaint to the Liberal Party was in relation to serious concerns including behaviour in the workplace, in the party and in political interactions,” she said in a statement.
“It includes allegations that I … received hundreds of demeaning, degrading and abusive texts. During that five-year period, I was continually exposed to highly aggressive barrages of verbal abuse, which included threats to destroy my reputation if I spoke up.’] – SMH
‘While a senior legal counsel hired by the organisation investigates the matter…’, the texts speak for themselves. Martin has only one option.
Moreover, there appears to be an unwritten rule in that in order to avoid
political damage, these types matters should be dealt with in-house but they shouldn’t, the texts prima facie constituting a criminal offence.
”Peter Dutton has many questions to answer re the ‘bribery’ reports today.”
Unfortunately, few if any in the mainstream media will ask them.
Albanese’s approach (restrained in the best adjective I can come up with) to the Voice campaign baffles me, to the point where I wonder half-seriously if he actually wants to country to be ‘ready’ within itself for the coming together walking hand in hand toward healing that the Voice would begin. His initial appeal was, and continues to be, to our better selves. And therein worthy of such a mature righteous step. Or not, as seems to be becoming more evident.
I don’t think deferment is the right tactic. But not announcing the date seems unusually hesitant. Maybe that’s some time-playing manoeuvre.
If meta does indeed hold rights to X, what happens next…..
https://ca.sports.yahoo.com/news/meta-already-appears-hold-rights-204947881.html
Fadden by-election result seems like trigger of something resulting in a cascade of bad opinion polls for Labor across the board.
1. After watching the Robodebt scheme fallout and Stuart Robert roll in it and other government lobbying involving him, LNP PV, 2PP, Preference flows from other parties have increased in Fadden by-election. Bizzare to put it mildly.
2. Liberals in WA are in complete shambles. McGowan resigns, WA parliament passes (or about to pass) Heritage act relating First Nations people, Voila, all hell breaks loose in WA and now Liberals lead WA Labor 54-46. Again Bizzare to put it mildly.
3. Victorian Liberals are in shambles and are utter disgrace as a political party. Dan Andrews cancels 2026 Commonwealth games and a solid majority(58%) agree that it is good decision. Voila, Victorian Labor PV plummets to 32% and Victorian LNP PV increases to 37.5% and 2PP is 53-47 in Labor favour.
4. In QLD, LNP leads QLD Labor 52-48. QLD Labor seems to be moving towards defeat like a slow motion train wreck.
5. In NSW, Labor government doesn’t have majority in both houses to pass legislation. As I expected, Minns did not deliver anything till now other than wages package for Health care workers, which we are yet to know whether it will be accepted by its members.
6. Now look at Federal scene.
Albanese government has delivered everything it has promised to deliver. But slowly but surely he is becoming more unpopular by the day and Dutton is getting more popular (for crying out loud).
Voice vote is looking like it will fail.
All the ugly forces that brought this nation to its knees in 20 of last 27 years are raising the head again.
If the voice is defeated, we have illustrated just how racist we are to the whole world, given how much was watered down to try and get the voice past, compared to the national declaration of hate and racism that reflects lived reality, very little is lost.
I’d be interested to know if there would be a first nations appetite for an even more watered down legislative voice.