A lean period of polling awaits, given the interruption of Easter and the no doubt related fact that every single pollster in the business unloaded results last week. If you’re desperate, Nine Newspapers has further results from last week’s Resolve Strategic poll finding 56% support for “stronger laws to ban hate speech on the basis of religion and faith”, with 19% opposed; 74% in favour of criminal penalties for “doxxing”, with 4% opposed; and 57% saying there had been a rise in racism and religious intolerance “as a result of the Israel-Gaza conflit”, with 15% disagreeing.
Other news:
• Troy Dodds of the Western Weekender reports that Melissa McIntosh, the Liberal member for the marginal outer western Sydney seat of Lindsay, has secured preselection after the withdrawal of Penrith deputy mayor Mark Davies. The expectation that Davies would have the numbers in conservative-dominated local branches to topple McIntosh had been a source of consternation among the party leadership, with Paul Sakkal of the Sydney Morning Herald reporting earlier this month on “the prospect of a rare federal division intervention in the NSW branch” if the challenge went ahead. McIntosh was promoted from the shadow assistant ministry to outer shadow ministry status in a recent reshuffle.
• Tim Wilson won a Liberal preselection vote for Goldstein last week, setting up a rematch with teal independent Zoe Daniel, to whom he lost the seat he had held since 2016 in 2022. Wilson won the local party vote ahead of Colleen Harkin, research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, and Stephanie Hunt, lawyer and former staffer to Julie Bishop and Marise Payne. Paul Sakkal of The Age reports Wilson won a second round vote ahead of Harkin “by about 160-130”.
• Amelia Hamer, a former staffer to then Financial Services Minister Jane Hume who has more recently worked for financial technology start-up Airwallex, has won the Liberal preselection vote for the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, which teal independent Monique Ryan won from Josh Frydenberg in 2022. The Australian reports Hamer won the party vote by 233 to 59 ahead of Rochelle Pattison, director of an asset management and corporate finance firm and chair of Transgender Victoria.
• Former state government minister Andrew Constance has again won Liberal preselection for Gilmore, where he narrowly failed in a bid to unseat Labor’s Fiona Phillips in 2022. Constance won a party vote by 80 to 69 over Paul Ell, lawyer, Shoalhaven councillor and long-standing hopeful for the seat who was persuaded to stand aside in favour of Constance in 2022.
• The Australian’s Feeding the Chooks column reports that Margaret Forrest, a commercial and criminal law barrister, has been preselected as the Liberal National Party candidate for the Brisbane seat of Ryan, which the party lost to Elizabeth Watson-Brown of the Greens in 2022.
• Rowan Ramsey, who has held the regional South Australian seat of Grey for the Liberals since 2007, has announced he will retire at the next election.
• Tammy Tyrell, who won a second Senate seat for the Jacqui Lambie Network at the 2022 election, quit the party last week. Tyrell issued a statement saying the move was made on Lambie’s suggestion, saying it had “become clear to me that I no longer have the confidence” of the party.
• I have a page up for the Cook federal by-election, to be held on April 13.
What a wondrous week we’ve had in politics, we’ve had a stunted Labor (Vehicle emissions + immigration caving-in to dud glow-in-the-dark spud) a munted lnp (any day of the week really)
and the pure-as-the-driven-snow stunt bundt and shoetree green faeries…
With, Oh, the poor (economic) reffos let’s let all 80,000,000* of them settle in Australia. But big
Australia is a big no-no *heads nodding in unison*
bloody Marvellous 😡
* they’re opposed to boat turnbacks
A couple of observations from the Liberal pre-selections above:
‘Amelia Hamer won the party vote by 233 to 59 ahead of Rochelle Pattison, director of an asset management and corporate finance firm and chair of Transgender Victoria.’
That 59 shows that there is still a bit of social progressivism in the Kooyong branches of the Liberal Party, and also, probably, the number of Moderates. This may play out in the election, if they oppose the policies of Dutton, to a shift over to Monique Ryan.
The seat of Ryan will be an interesting contest to watch. The Greens MP has been very, very quiet and has made absolutely no impression at all compared to her Brisbane brother in hyphenated names, Max Chandler-Mather. Labor, if they pick a good candidate, may also be in with a shot.
Finally, note the lack of diversity in the candidates the Liberals have chosen. Melissa Mackintosh, Tim Wilson, Andrew Constance and Margaret Forrest. White guys and girls, one and all. It sure looks like the Liberal Party would shrivel up and die if they chose a Muslim candidate. And they seem to have gone off Asian-Australian candidates. Yet they want these socially-conservative demographics to vote for them.
#weatheronPB
Cool air raises bumps.
The quiet night slips away.
A soft grey dawn comes.
And speaking of Liberal policies, this Big Stick supermarket divestment policy has whiskers on it from the get-go. As the only groups I can see having the resources to replace Coles or Woolies are grocery companies from overseas. Is that what we want? Our home grown supermarket chains cut-off at the knees? Why don’t we just regulate them better? Or just let a ridgey didge Australian competitor take their place. Like Harris Farm Markets. I’m sure Labor wouldn’t object to that. 😉
Looking at it holistically though, it seems that the motivating factor behind most Coalition policy is to kill off home grown manufacturing industry and leave us as a dig-it-up and ship-it-out country, and attack the retail sector. Because, Kill the Unions! Ultimately.
Expert ‘shocked’ by Trump’s court conduct: ‘Gag orders are for hardcore criminals’
During an appearance on MSNBC, longtime Washington insider Jonathan Alter claimed that Donald Trump’s gag orders are especially important to watch.
Alter, a contributor for MSNBC , appeared on the network on Saturday. He was asked about the upcoming trial, which he will be observing.
“What to expect to see in court? What kind of evidence you expect to be featured?” the host asked.
“We do not know whether Trump will take the stand in his own defense. It is less likely, given the steamy details of this case that he does. You cannot rule it out,” he added. “In the meantime, something quite extraordinary happened at the end of last week.”
“Judge Reggie Walton, a federal judge not connected to the case, took extraordinary action. He went on television and denounced Trump for his comments, which led to the gag order that Judge Merchan has applied in this case,” he said. “And Judge Chutkan applied a gag order in the past.”
He continued:
“Gag orders normally are for hardcore criminals who cannot restrain themselves. The idea that a former president of the United States needs a gag order not to attack our judges and system of government and court employees and relatives of the judge. It is shocking and we should not lose our sense of outrage about how horrible former president Trump’s conduct is in this legal realm.”
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-gag-orders-hardcore-criminals/
World news & politics roundup:
A man suspected of holding 4 hostages for hours in a Dutch nightclub has been arrested: https://apnews.com/article/netherlands-police-hostages-ede-29a9d187ba6a5edc538be6a251ec21db
Biden and Obama Absolutely Torch Trump With Record-Breaking Fundraiser: https://newrepublic.com/post/180256/biden-obama-torch-trump-record-breaking-fundraiser
Trump must ‘immediately desist’ from targeting judge’s daughter, prosecutors say: https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-immediately-desist-targeting-judges-daughter-prosecutors/story?id=108668982
Florida Republicans helped Trump lock up the nomination. Now he’s returning the favor: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/30/donald-trump-florida-endorsements-00149811
Conservative Judges Sound Alarm: Trump Will Shred Our Justice System: https://newrepublic.com/post/180282/conservative-judges-sound-alarm-trump-will-shred-justice-system
Family of Brian Sicknick, D.C. officer who died after Jan. 6 riot, slam Trump attending wake for NYPD cop Jonathan Diller: https://www.nydailynews.com/2024/03/29/family-of-brian-sicknick-d-c-officer-who-died-after-jan-6-riot-slam-trump-attending-wake-for-nypd-cop-jonathan-diller/
Former RNC chair calls Trump ‘visceral animal’ after he shared a video of Biden tied up: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4565400-former-rnc-chair-calls-trump-visceral-animal/
MoD admits rocket launchers and machine guns are among arsenal of missing weapons: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/30/mod-lost-dozens-weapons-thousands-rounds-ammunition/
The parent company of former President Trump’s Truth Social platform defied expectations in its first week on the stock market. Trump Media & Technology Group stock closed at roughly $62 per share Thursday after a whipsaw week of trading. Shares of Digital World Acquistion Corp. (DWAC), the “blank check” company that Trump Media merged with last week, closed at $49.99 per share the day before the newly combined firm’s stock market debut: https://thehill.com/business/4562321-trump-social-media-company-defies-expectations-in-stock-market-debut/
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk warns war in Europe ‘a real threat’: https://www.euronews.com/2024/03/30/polish-prime-minister-donald-tusk-warns-war-in-europe-a-real-threat
Radio Free Asia closes Hong Kong bureau, citing security law concerns: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/radio-free-asia-withdraws-hong-kong-press-freedom-rcna144194
Reading Phil Coorey’s piece from earlier in the weekend, noticed this snippet…
Labor insiders say the published opinion polls are more or less on the mark but the party’s own internal research, which is more seat-specific, shows it on track for a small majority should an election be held now.
And on the dim prospect of an early election later in 2024 promoted by some dimwits..
There remains an outside chance that, should rates start falling in the spring, Albanese could call an early election. There are three windows for the next election – May, which would be full term, March, or early December.
Even with rate cuts, other events will constrain his timing. The Queensland election is on October 26 and there is no chance Albanese will go before then.
Queensland is the state in which he needs to pick up seats to offset possible losses elsewhere and the state Labor government there is in deep trouble. The federal government wants voters to vent on Premier Steven Miles and his party first.
Realistically, that means Albanese would have to wait until after the Queensland election to call his own poll. If Donald Trump returns to the US presidency in early November, the whole political landscape might be just too crowded.
Irrespective of whether Trump wins or more likely loses, the redux of ‘stop the steal’ will certainly crowd things out.
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/labor-s-plan-to-win-the-next-election-is-all-about-stability-20240325-p5ff4a#:~:text=Thus%2C%20Albanese%20will%20trumpet%20that,trajectory%20from%20failure%20to%20success.
In a brief trawl of the social media sewer it seems we are being primed for the annual ANZAC Day culture war with Singo going full-on ‘apologising’ to BRS and some kind of specially marked ‘patriots biscuit’ being unavailable in specialty stores…ho hum.
They seem to think our indigenous population should ‘get over’ the past, doesn’t seem to apply to them though.
“Singo going full-on ‘apologising’ to BRS”.
His nonsense fairy tale includes the words “kill or be killed”.
Suggesting that it was somehow either Ben Roberts Smith or Ali Jan the unarmed civilian that BRS kicked off a cliff then ordered other soldiers to shoot. Or when he dragged a defenceless prisoner (the man with the prosthetic leg) out in the open, throwing him to the ground them shooting him in the back & taking his leg back for his drinking games. BRS ordering a soldier under his command to execute another prisoner.
Kill or be killed indeed.
‘Granny Anny says:
Saturday, March 30, 2024 at 10:59 pm
Apologies if this has been debated to death earlier today but BK’s links tells us that Peter Dutton’s opposition is working on a “big stick” law that would threaten supermarket giants Coles and Woolworths with break-up powers for anti competitive behaviour.
If the LNP is the party of big business, what are the chances that big business with divorce themselves from the Liberals? Of course there is always the possibility that Dutton is bullshitting.’
—————————–
They’re onto a winner here.
The Bush hates Colesworth which they regard as rapacious farm gate price setters. Lamb prices have fallen by something like 80% over the past year. Lamb cutlets? Not so much!
Other than that every Australian who has walked into Colesworth over the past two years will have noticed rapacious price increases for some items that cannot possibly be justified by real world cost increases.
Other than that there is a general feeling that big business in general lives only to screw ordinary people.
The political learning here is that the Coalition is resetting itself as the parties for the Bush, small business, tradies and COL-suffering Mums and Dads. Of course not forgetting the old stand bys of xenophobia, racism and sly misogyny.
In this respect it has been instructive to watch Rex’s insistence on Albanese being called ‘A list Albanese’ and ‘Celebrity Albanese’. These are both quite obvious Menzies House efforts to brand Albanese as out of touch. In terms of sly misogyny, Rex also let his slip show with his demand that Wong be shuffled out her job because she got married.
The Coalition is quite willing to shed overt connections with Big Business and with the elites and the establishment. They are going for the outer burbs. It is why they have shed votes to the Teals.
bob , +1
Meanwhile, demonstrating the kind of journalism which sees the Masthead struggling, The Canberra Times comes up with this piece of fear and trepidation at this time of the year…apparently cocoa prices are set to threaten next year’s Easter Chocolate Festival.
https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8572659/canberra-chocolatiers-feel-the-heat-of-rising-cocoa-prices/
It’s interesting note that out of the 11 seats in the Brisbane City council area only 3 are held by the LNP, ALP should target Petrie as a potential gain especially if the LNP win the state election and prove to be as hopeless as I envisage they will be. Qld is rightly considered an LNP stronghold but Brisbane is not.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/30/congressional-staffers-survey/
If the adults in Congress leave the joint, where does that leave the toddlers in the sandpit? I guess this is how you get sub-standard advice and administration by being forced to recruit inexperienced or ill-suited personnel.
Previous thread.
Been Theresays:
Saturday, March 30, 2024 at 10:49 pm
There are some big time NDIS rorters.
Taylormade, in defence of LNP practices brought in while they were in government, just shot himself in the foot by exposing those rorts.
Well done Taylormade
_____________________
That was Aust day 2 months ago.
Shorten’s your man.
Labor have held Petrie before and could do so again. Though I imagine that The Greens will also target it as well with their student-heavy brigade of enthusiastic data researchers.
Thanks holdenhillbilly
Taylormade @ #14 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 8:33 am
No, it was the federal Labor government who have exposed the rorts and rip offs that the previous Coalition government allowed NDIS Service Providers to get up to. In exchange for their grateful votes, of course.
Joe Liebermann, former American VP candidate and recent promoter of 3rd Party campaigns, passed away last Friday.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/03/30/tiktok-mnuchin-sale-algorithm/
Noooooo! TikTok is fantastic as it is, and if another American megalomaniac with too much money gets their hands on it, the platform will go the way of Twitter and become useless.
Blaming the LNP alone for NDIS rorts and waste is absurd. Labor introduced and legislated the Scheme on the basis of creating a market-based mechanism. Which was fine in theory, except the implementation of the Scheme, across governments of both persuasions, has meant that what was supposed to be a price guide has become a set price, and there is no incentive for providers to compete on pricing. It’s quite a remarkable thing, a compounding failure of both the private and public sectors at the same time.
Stinker says:
Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 9:00 am
Blaming the LNP alone for NDIS rorts and waste is absurd. …’
—————–
…after all, they only had a decade to make sure it was running smoothly. Plus, they were absolutely wedded to excellence in administration as per robodebt and outsourcing as much as they could to their cronies in the Big Four.
Adelaide Sunday Mail. Page 4 James Campbell “EXCLUSIVE”. “Far more migrants than new housing”.
The Institute of Public Affairs says data shows “380,000 more migrants arrived in Australia than houses were built in the last financial year”.
“Assuming that each person occupied a single dwelling this would have meant a housing shortfall of 380,000 dwellings.”
They then produce a figure for 2.5 per household.
Where do they find these geniuses?
By the way I also think immigration levels are too high, but the IPA and Murdoch media might do better if they didn’t publish rubbish.
@ c@t
The Libs only seem to put up diverse candidates in strong Labor electorates where they have no chance in hell. I think it was the NSW state election but they had a hijab wearing female in a South West Sydney electorate.
Although I suspect it’s also a strategy to get a “I’m Viet so I’m going to vote for a Viet” outcome. I suspect that helped Dai Le.
You do appreciate, don’t you Boerwar, that there are literally no NDIS services that can be provided other than “outsourcing”? That the Scheme is purely a private sector-based one?
But NDIS implementation has been a failure of governments of all persuasions, which you would appreciate if you weren’t so blinkered. The LNP inherited a Scheme designed and implemented by Labor, which has never been fit for purpose, and absolutely did fail to reform it during its time in office. Of course, every time it tried to do anything, Shorten was out front with the disability lobby shouting about how heartless the Libs were and how much any suggestion that the Scheme wasn’t working as it should meant they wanted to dismantle it. Bill has created quite a rod for his own back here.
What helped Dai Le is that she had a strong track record of working locally as a councillor, plus the Labor own goal of thinking that Kristina Keneally could be parachuted into an electorate she’d had no previous connection to.
Stinker says:
Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 9:11 am
You do appreciate, don’t you Boerwar…’
——————-
… that the Coalition does not give a flying fuck for excellent administration. They spent ten years gutting the APS, for starters.
Ok, so we’re just doing non-sequiturs then. No point in engaging on the substance of the discussion when you haven’t an argument. Have a pleasant day, Boerwar.
Stinker @ #20 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 9:00 am
In contradistinction from that perspective I believe that getting a Coalition government almost straight after the NDIS was introduced became the progenitor of its disintegration. A decade of mismanagement can do that to any enterprise. I also believe that if Labor had remained in control of the NDIS for that period of time then it would have had more stringent oversight. Like it’s finally getting now.
Morning all. Thanks for the international roundup Holden Hillbilly. I hope the world, or at least Europe, takes Polish PM Donald Tusk’s warning about a larger war in Europe seriously.
On pre-selections, I hope Labor at least considers the SA seat of Sturt, where Liberal incumbent James Stevens has a 1% margin. He would be unseated by a smaller swing than the +1.5% achieved in the Dunstan by-election last weekend. State Dunstan sits within Federal Sturt.
Sturt is a seat full of professionals, not tradies, including a lot of working professional women. Local issues are things like public transport, school quality climate change and housing affordability. A Teal candidate would be a bigger third party threat than a Green, although the Green candidate who did well in Dunstan did well in Sturt in 2022 as well.
The SA Liberals are, if possible, even more dysfunctional and unpopular than the Victorian Liberals. They couldn’t defend Dunstan in a cost of living crisis.
They are now dominated by Alex Antic, a male version of Pauline Hanson. Labor will never get a better shot at Sturt than 2024/25.
Confessions @ #25 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 9:15 am
Yep, and that the people of the Cabramatta area would have stars in their eyes and vote for her like sheep. Whereas, the Vietnamese-Australians are actually very smart and thoughtful people. They also showed that they haven’t held a grudge against Labor for parachuting Keneally in as they elected a Labor Vietnamese-Australian in at the NSW State election following the federal election.
I don’t think it’s that simple, C@tmomma. The issues are structural. For better or worse, the Libs did try more stringent oversight, particularly in the proposal to employ independent assessments in the planning process. Their efforts were howled down as being unfair on participants by the Labor opposition and disability advocates in concert, and were ultimately abandoned.
The long and short of it is that the mess in the Scheme has continued to compound since day one. It falls to Labor now to try to fix it, but they’ve made the task hard for themselves because of the attitude they took in opposition.
If you would like to listen to a very thoughtful discussion about Conservative V Progressive demographics, Ukraine, Israel/Netanyahu V Gaza/Hamas and the refractive nature of how all this is playing out within politics everywhere, not only in the US, then watch and listen to this video:
https://youtu.be/2dc_vGTHtmI?si=4RbNdndMrUyX9clT
MadHousesays:
Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 9:08 am
@ c@t
The Libs only seem to put up diverse candidates in strong Labor electorates where they have no chance in hell. I think it was the NSW state election but they had a hijab wearing female in a South West Sydney electorate.
____________________________
I think Jaymes Diaz being in the contest for Greenway (what was the tightest Marginal seat) and Nicole Werner (now MP for Warrandyte) are 2 examples counter to this rule, but it does seem to be true.
Stinker @ #31 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 9:32 am
You are correct to say there is more than one father of the baby that is the blowout in the NDIS. However, it’s not just been the Disability Advocates (and why can’t they advocate for their cause it’s a worthy one?) Or Labor politicians who have championed the NDIS, that have had rose-coloured glasses on and stymied any attempt by the Coalition to reign it in. Because I vividly remember what the ‘stringent oversight’ that the Coalition proposed amounted to, and that was a focus on drastically reducing the number of participants in the NDIS by making the number of hoops that applicants had to jump through to qualify, very difficult to get over, indeed.
So, if you are trying to say that that’s the way to go, and the Coalition should have been allowed to continue in that vein, because I never saw the Coalition proposing the NDIS Service Providers cut back their hourly rates for services provided, or the owners of the NDIS businesses having the cream they took off the top reduced, then I’m sorry but I cannot agree with you.
And don’t forget that I have intimate knowledge of these matters from the last 10 years of the NDIS.
What helped Dai Le is that she had a strong track record of working locally as a councillor, plus the Labor own goal of thinking that Kristina Keneally could be parachuted into an electorate she’d had no previous connection to.
@Confessions
You play with matches too many times you are eventually going to get burnt. Frankly the party deserved that. The problem with parachuting Kristina Keneally was not only she was not a local. But it’s a since of entitlement that Labor can allow to fester. It’s alright for everyone to want a safe seat. However, it does nothing to help Labor’s election chances handing out safe seats- when the party needs to win the marginals to win government. It should of been Deborah O’neill recontesting her old seat of Robertson, or the very least Keneally recontesting Bennelong (mind you she’s not a local there either). Keneally apparently wanted to go to the House of reps, probably so one day she could have a crack of being Prime Minster. But using Fowler just as a stepping stone for ambition was toxic with the electorate.
I have intimate knowledge too, C@t. And I think we both fundamentally agree that the issue is the rules themselves. One of the biggest issues, and hardest to address, is the codependency of participants and service providers, which gives neither any incentive to do more with less. Structural reform addressing that is going to be fundamental to fixing the Scheme and making it sustainable long-term.
Tough budget coming it’s being reported this morning WA treasurer says 1.5 billion taken away from the 30.8 billion GST windfall coming in the next four years.
Budget will take place a week before the federal budget announced today.
Give us our 1.5 billion back Fed labor.Libs gave you take thieves.
WA/Our new Embassy in Canberra will be expecting a Visit to explain.
Stinkersays:
Sunday, March 31, 2024 at 9:18 am
“Ok, so we’re just doing non-sequiturs then. No point in engaging on the substance of the discussion when you haven’t an argument. Have a pleasant day, Boerwar.”
Textbook bullshit about non control of the outcome of any discussion.
Are you from the IPA ?
My bat, my ball, my game, my rules, you’re at the wrong address!
Goll, I’m happy to discuss substance. That’s what I’m doing with C@t. Boerwar refuses to do so, and so it is pointless to engage further. I rather suspect it will fall to being pointless to engage with you too.
There is a disturbing article in The Guardian this morning about what happened around Robotax: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/31/ato-robotax-scheme-government-best-practice-on-hold-debts
Stephen Jones is spouting the literal exact same excuse for having Robotax go on under his watch as every LNP minister during Robodebt: “oh, the Department totes told me it was fine so I ignored all the media reporting, complaints from the victims and criticism of the scheme from people with specialist experience”.
I like Jones as an MP, but this is an unforgivable failure of governance if the Robodebt Royal Commission was, to this government, really anything more than a great chance to target their LNP opponents. In defending the scheme for months and months, and then only when forced by the Ombudsman acknowledging it was wrong, and blaming departmental advice for him ignoring all the backlash around it, Jones has just done the same thing as those LNP ministers within nine months of the handing down of a Royal Commission report that tried to stamp out this sort of thing permanently.
This is a “the standard is you walk past is the standard you accept” moment for federal Labor, and Jones should resign or be sacked.
But he inevitably won’t, and Labor will just repeat the same song and dance as the LNP did until Robotax, too, arrives at its ultimate sorry conclusion. Hell, I wouldn’t be shocked if the LNP won the next election if they called a Royal Commission into Robotax just to be spiteful.
Perhaps the success of parachuting Reba Meagher into Cabramatta led Labor to the false belief that the people of SW Sydney would vote for anyone with an endorsement.
(Here’s an interesting thing. Reba is now the CEO of the Sisters of Charity – a position sure to trigger many a PBer)
MadHouse @ #23 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 9:08 am
I get where you’re coming from with that and I agree. I’m thinking that, in general it may be to garner conservative diaspora votes for the Liberals in the Upper Houses of state and federal parliaments. Maybe also to begin the long term project of stripping away these groups from Labor. A couple of groups that both sides of politics compete heavily for now though are Indian-Australians and Chinese-Australians (though that fell off a cliff for the Coalition at the last federal election and Labor capitalised on that).
Indian_Australians’ voting patterns really interest me. Though I think Ven could probably speak to that better than I could.
Suffice to say that when you look at the federal Coalition in parliament and who they have pre-selected up above, you don’t see too many faces of diversity.
There is a huge difference between the kind of oversight C@t talks about above (e.g. cutting down on providers rorting the scheme) – which no one could reasonably disagree with – and what is being proposed this time.
The explanatory memorandum to the NDIS bill contains some of the most profoundly patronising stuff I have ever seen Labor put out in any context: it reads like a Morrison or Ley bill from the most tone-deaf of LNP ministers.
I particularly liked the fun hypothetical about someone with a physical disability (not an intellectual disability) who might order 10 food processors with their NDIS funding, and how of course Labor would need to step in and strip the hypothetical person of agency. Because of course there is just an abundance of people with physical disabilities going out and buying 10 food processors with their NDIS funds for shits and giggles. I thought someone was taking the piss when I saw it shared, and then I read the memorandum myself and…they were not taking the piss and this was a document that Labor actually put their name to.
It, along with Jones stealing the LNP’s lines from Robodebt to defend against criticism over Robotax, have made it twice in one week that you just couldn’t even satirise Australian politics.
Oakeshott Country @ #41 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 10:01 am
And Sam Crosbie is Executive Director of St Vincent De Paul NSW and former Victorian Labor Senator Jacinta Collins is now head of the National Catholic Education Commission.
Re: south-west Sydney – Kos Samaras has been on a bit of a tear recently about the importance of preselecting candidates who resemble/are from their elections, particularly after looking at the respective results in Ipswich West and Inala in the Queensland by-elections (much worse in more diverse Inala than in whiter Ipswitch West).
It shouldn’t be any surprise when the Libs select candidates from migrant communities they’re trying to win over when they go for traditionally Labor seats, and Labor shafting local candidates from multicultural backgrounds (as in Fowler) is a perfect opportunity for anyone who wants to try to take them out.
Rebecca,
Are you sure the 10 food processors example doesn’t refer to someone with OCD or similar? Could you please point me to the part of the memorandum you are speaking to which states that someone with a physical disability does this and it should be attended to with oversight?
Joe Liebermann, former American VP candidate and recent promoter of 3rd Party campaigns, passed away last Friday.
@C@tmomma
Joe Lieberman name will certainly have mixed feeling amongst Democrats. Michael Moore was scathing of Lieberman even when he was a Democrat. Moore simply said of Lieberman that he wasn’t a Democrat plain and simple. A couple were surprised Al Gore selected Lieberman as his running mate in 2000. Some suggested choosing Lieberman from the Right, was a way of distancing himself from the Bill Clinton and his scandals as president. Lieberman and Gore had a bit of fall out later, after Gore backed Howard Dean and not Lieberman for president in the Democrat primary’s in 2004.
After Lieberman defected as an independent after he lost his Democrat primary against anti- Iraq war candidate Ned Lamont. Lieberman had always backed the Iraq war. Lieberman backed Republican John McCain for president in 2008. McCain wrote in his book he regretted choosing Sarah Palin and not Lieberman as his running mate. But his Republican strategists advised against it. As Lieberman who was once a Democrats, and was pro-choice, would be viewed a divisive selection amongst the republican base.
Re Dai Le, she had high visibility and apparently high regard in the Fairfield-Cabramatta area of SW Sydney. She is of Vietnamese heritage in an area with a high proportion of Vietnamese immigrants and their descendants.
Then there was the issue of the “parachuting” of Ms Keneally for Labor. Both sides do it all the time. It often causes grumbling but nonetheless it nearly always works as voters mostly go out and vote for their preferred party.
So what happened this time ? Well, Ms Le seems to have been a particularly good local candidate. Ms Keneally was unpopular with many in the broader community, including Fowler. She has no connection to SW Sydney.
There was something else, however. There seems to have been a concerted media campaign against Ms Keneally and for Ms Le, including in these pages and no I expect very much in the Murdochracy and social media. Odd that so much attention would be paid to what was a safe electorate. Actually not really – the strategy worked as intended. Maybe a trial run for the future. It’s not hard to guess who Ms Le, a once and future Liberal, would support in a hung Parliament situation.
Anyway, Ms Le won and good luck to her. How she goes from now will depend upon how good a local member she is. Good local independents are hard to dislodge.
We’ll see how she goes next time.
Confess “recruit inexperienced or ill-suited personnel.” Steve Bannon has publically stated that thousands of Trump loyalists are in training to take over public administration roles when Trump regains power. The plan is to fire anyone who is not fully maga and could stand in Trumps way and replace them with loyalists.
Rebecca @ #45 Sunday, March 31st, 2024 – 10:14 am
And Labor reversing course when they realise their mistake. Which you’ll see in Fowler I am reliably informed.