The first voting intention poll of the new year has been conducted by DemosAU for Capital Brief, and it offers the remarkable finding that One Nation has drawn level with the Coalition at 23% of the primary vote. The further surge to One Nation has also taken its toll on Labor, whose 29% is three points lower than in any published poll since the election. The Greens are on 12%, leaving 13% for “any other candidate”.
A two-party preferred result has Labor leading the Coalition 52-48 uses preferences flows from last year’s election, which means the 74.5-25.5 split of One Nation preferences in favour of the Coalition is doing exceptionally heavy lifting. The pollster further stirs the pot with a highly speculative Labor-versus-One Nation two-party result of 50-50, which applies Coalition preferences 83-17 in favour of One Nation based on the result in Hunter, splits Greens preferences 88-12 by assuming the same split as between Labor and the Coalition, and the rest 50-50.
Anthony Albanese’s performance is rated positively by 29%, neutrally by 30% and negatively by 41%, while the respective numbers for Sussan Ley are 17%, 55% and 28%. Albanese leads 42-29 on preferred prime minister. The poll was conducted Monday and Tuesday from a sample of 1027 – based on the amount of weighting involved, the pollster estimates an effective sample size of 586 and a margin-of-error of 4%. Demographic breakdowns will be provided in a full report to be published later today. UPDATE: Full report here.
Ven at 3.29pm.
“Italian PM wants Europe to dialogue with Russia.”
Obviously it is starting to sink in that Chump can’t be trusted and if Europeans want the Ukranian war to end they will have to make it happen.
If we were to cancel all the cartoons that piss someobody off there would be no more cartooning… certainly any cartooning that is worth doing.
Looks like the US Media is buttering up the population for Trump annexing Greenland.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mC-NDSvot08
Nadia – thanks for calling attention to my oversight in not adding that RedBridge poll. I won’t be updating BT until I’ve got at least one more data point to use, because it does weird things when you add a single result after a month-long gap. I normally require that a pollster have two results before including it, but I might make an exception for Fox & Hedgehog because it has state breakdowns I’d like to use.
Boerwar:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 4:34 pm
[‘If we were to cancel all the cartoons that piss someobody off there would be no more cartooning… certainly any cartooning that is worth doing.’]
We need a Bill of Rights, with 1st Amendment protections.
“Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused”
Who’s we? The owner? The editor? All the staff?
Does it include the person who drew the cartoon? Or excludes them?
Entropy: ““Wilcox cartoon was divisive – and we apologise for the hurt it has caused”
Do you support that response?”
——————————————————————————–
I do. As I posted the other day, I think that any commentary that suggests that there is subterranean Israeli/Jewish control of politics in western countries strikes too many wrong notes.
There is a deranged element in our society (and that of all other western nations) that believes that there are secret Jewish conspiracies all over the place. That thinking should never be encouraged in any way, shape or form.
The cartoon would have been fine if it had just shown Netanyahu applauding or cheering the conservative Australian politicians. But having him banging a drum implied that he was manipulating what was going on. That’s just not on IMO.
No probs, anytime.
On 14-Dec there was obviously a bit going on, plus the days thereafter.
meher babasays:
The cartoon would have been fine if it had just shown Netanyahu applauding or cheering the conservative Australian politicians. But having him banging a drum implied that he was manipulating what was going on. That’s just not on IMO.
__________________________
Other people don’t see it that way. Smarter people, like me. The idiom ‘beating a drum’ is not about control or manipulation, it is about persuasion.
They might want to hurry up: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/starmer-could-send-troops-greenland-200745344.html
A good history of Denmark’s deployment of troops in Afghanistan and Iraq (which I never knew about): “Denmark Bled Alongside American Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now Trump Won’t Rule Out Taking Greenland From Them”: https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-features/2026/01/07/denmark-bled-alongside-american-troops-iraq-and-afghanistan-now-trump-wont-rule-out-taking-greenland.html
Includes this gem:
I thought old Chumpy was in control of Venezuela. According to the Guardian, US citizens are advised to flee because paramilitaries are setting up road blocks and hunting for them. Maybe the Greenland invasion will be paused while he applies his superb management skills to Venezuela.
Critics of Wilcox would have a stronger argument if she had depicted Netanyahu playing a flute with musical notes which would imply that the politicians are ‘dancing to someone else’s tune’. An idiom which does have connotations of control and manipulation.
BBC: ‘There wasn’t even time for CPR’: Iran medics describe hospitals overwhelmed with dead and injured protesters
And it will quite happily shed the blood of hundreds and thousands of honourable people to remain in power.
Unfortunately a body in a car on a burnt road near Yark (Longwood Fire) has been found.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/fresh-warnings-for-otways-blaze-as-statewide-total-fire-ban-extended-20260111-p5nt3w.html
Wilcox’s cartoon was pretty accurate in my view.
“One person has died in the Longwood bushfire that has destroyed dozens of properties and livestock in central Victoria.
Police said they found human remains 100 metres from a vehicle on Yarck Road in Gobur, a remote area east of Seymour, on Sunday afternoon.”
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/fresh-warnings-for-otways-blaze-as-statewide-total-fire-ban-extended-20260111-p5nt3w.html
Unfortunately a body in a car on a burnt road near Yark (Longwood Fire) has been found.
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/fresh-warnings-for-otways-blaze-as-statewide-total-fire-ban-extended-20260111-p5nt3w.html
_______________
Fark 🙁
@Entropy
That’s really sad to hear. I send my best wishes to their relatives.
Rex Douglas says:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:09 pm
Wilcox’s cartoon was pretty accurate in my view.
________________________________________________
In what way?
Granny Anny says Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:02 pm
The US military are going to be busy, what with Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Syria, Iran and Denmark.
Maybe the leaders of those countries need to grow sideburns, then Trump might give them cash instead (a bit of a bummer if your country elected a female leader I guess).
TPOFsays:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:12 pm
Rex Douglas says:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:09 pm
Wilcox’s cartoon was pretty accurate in my view.
________________________________________________
In what way?
_______________
Let’s save time and cut to the chase.
You think I’m an anti-Semite and that’s that. Whatever.
Nath
[So pro-Netanyahu’s position writers would be banned?]
Is Josh Frydenberg a writer of note?
nath: “Other people don’t see it that way. Smarter people, like me. The idiom ‘beating a drum’ is not about control or manipulation, it is about persuasion.”
—————————————————————————–
Oh nath, nath, nath. Here was I thinking I was being respectful to you by not responding to David’s earlier suggestion of a RC into Collingwood supporters with the suggestion that such a process would be “toothless.”
Yes, political leaders have been known to beat their drums to get attention. But surely the connotation of the cartoon was that the conservative politicians were “marching to the beat” of Netanyahu’s drum, which implies a degree of control on his part.
bc: “The US military are going to be busy, what with Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Syria, Iran and Denmark.”
You’ve forgotten about Canada. A great deal of lebensraum is required, apparently.
Which is rather odd when you consider that ICE is embarked on a campaign of greatly reducing the population of the US.
gollsays:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:22 pm
Nath
[So pro-Netanyahu’s position writers would be banned?]
Is Josh Frydenberg a writer of note?
——————————————
Didn’t he write “Back in Black and Other Fantasies”
Working title: “2019 Australian federal budget”
meher baba:
Which is rather odd when you consider that ICE is embarked on a campaign of greatly reducing the population of the US.
Agreed – and not entirely in a bloodless fashion.
One form of words I’ve noticed lately among right wing bots and trolls is
“I bet you have” [pronouns/blue hair/been vaccinated/believe in climate change]
Without any explanation for why it matters or any sense of whether their ‘bet’ is well founded. Eg knowledgeable person posts that bushfire is getting more extreme and the response is “i bet you have a rainbow flag” and it’s for me “what?”
They sound like housebound types eg brethren or home schooled.
meher baba says:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:25 pm
bc: “The US military are going to be busy, what with Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Syria, Iran and Denmark.”
You’ve forgotten about Canada. A great deal of lebensraum is required, apparently.
Which is rather odd when you consider that ICE is embarked on a campaign of greatly reducing the population of the US.
______________________________
If Trump does take military action against Greenland – hence NATO it could get complicated as Canada is part of NATO
Shogun @ #1177 Sunday, January 11th, 2026 – 5:30 pm
I think a lot of stakeholders involved in the US Republican project just basically want to bring back slavery.
That excess population would no longer become such a problem if human rights were taken away from them and they’re forced with the choice to either work for nothing or die.
GoW
Who knows?
I was very sorry to see Bevan Shields leave his role as editor at the SMH, for a number of reasons. But he always signed his editorials. I did not agree with all of them, of course. But he wrote un-emotively, always giving his reasons. A quality sadly lacking in modern news discourse.
[‘Minneapolis: Tens of thousands of people marched through Minneapolis to decry the fatal shooting of a woman by a US immigration agent, in one of more than 1000 rallies planned nationwide this weekend against the federal government’s deportation drive.
The massive turnout in Minneapolis for the rally on Sunday AEDT despite a whipping, cold wind underscores how the fatal shooting of 37-year-old Renee Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer last week has struck a chord, fuelling protests in major cities and some towns.
The Minneapolis protest was one of more than 1000 planned for the US over the weekend.
Minnesota’s Democratic leaders and the administration of President Donald Trump, a Republican, have offered starkly different accounts of the incident.
Led by a team of indigenous Mexican dancers, demonstrators in Minneapolis, which has a metropolitan population of 3.8 million, marched towards the residential street where Good had been shot in her car.
‘Heartbroken and devastated’
The boisterous crowd, which the Minneapolis Police Department estimated in the tens of thousands, chanted Good’s name and slogans such as “Abolish ICE” and “No justice, no peace – get ICE off our streets.”
The Minneapolis anti-ICE rally on Saturday had tens of thousands of demonstrators.
“I’m insanely angry, completely heartbroken and devastated, and then just like longing and hoping that things get better,” said Ellison Montgomery, 30.
Minnesota officials have called the shooting unjustified, pointing to bystander video they say showed Good’s vehicle turning away from the agent as he fired. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, says the agent acted in self-defence because Good, a volunteer in a community network that monitors and records ICE operations in Minneapolis, had driven forward in the direction of the agent who then shot her, after another agent had approached the driver’s side and told her to get out of the car.’]
https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/tens-of-thousands-protest-in-minneapolis-over-fatal-ice-shooting-20260111-p5nt4v.html
Removing healthcare from poor and sick people is going to kill more than ICE. Not to mention vaccine changes.
The BBC Radio 4 show and podcast “More or Less” had an episode yesterday examining the claim that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves at 300 billion barrels. Worth a listen: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/does-venezuela-really-have-the-biggest-oil-reserves/id267300884?i=1000744457403
@Mavis at 5:44pm
I’ll bet most of the monsters in ICE and their Republican masters wish they could just machine-gun down all of those protesters.
Spotted on BlueSky:
For those in the hybrid/EV market.
Chery Tiggo 7 currently has a $5k discount offer down to $35k.
https://cherymotor.com.au/models/tiggo-7-super-hybrid
Lauren Ashley Davis @laurenmeidasa.bsky.social
That might account for the most recent bombing of Syria. I wonder if they’re now planning extensive briefings of the current situation in Iran?
Of course the source is the Daily Mail.
Aren’t cartoonist’s supposed to be edgy?
I thought the Wilcox cartoon was on point and rather brilliant.
How it’s been determined as been offensive and anti semitic is beyond me. How is it offensive to Jews?
Dr Doolittle says:
Saturday, January 10, 2026 at 11:33 pm
if anybody wants to read the story about how McMahon contributed to Whitlam’s success as the first Australian LOTO to visit Communist China, by ignoring his own officals’ advice, see:
https://sci-hub.se/10.1111/j.1467-8497.2005.0385a.x
——————————————————————————————————————–
Hadn’t seen that interesting analysis before. It recalled my involvement on a minor level in the timely and historic Whitlam visit and my interview with him about China recognition as he was about to meet Chinese Prime Minister Chou En Lai. . We talked on the steps of our hotel in Canton as he and his Labor Party delegation was about to fly to Peking where our Canadian delegation had met Chou the week before.
The article outlines the stubborn Coalition position on not recognizing China as most of the western world had done or was about to do, and their anger when they realized Washington had kept them out of the loop on the imminent U.S. recognition.
They realized that you can’t trust the Americans when their slavish “all the way with LBJ” Washington foreign policy was undermined by this incident. At the time, Foreign Minister Billy McMahon was insisting that Australia would not follow the lead of the Brits and Canadians, telling Young Liberals in a speech that had been cleared with Washington that Chou En Lai had “played Whitlam like a trout.” Days later, Nixon was announcing that he would be going to Peking for that historic rapprochement.
It wasn’t clear whether the Canadian and Whitlam visits of July, 1971 were planned by the Chinese, to take place around Henry Kissinger’s highly-secret mission. Or was Whitlam just lucky with the timing of the visit which gave him increased stature as a statesman which helped in the next election?
One of the issues he wanted to discuss with Chou was the decline in Australian wheat sales to China. I was able to read to him the communique issued the night before after the Canada-China talks. It said that when China needed to import wheat it would look first to Canada.
His reply was: “I wouldn’t want you to get the impression that the Australian Labor Party’s interest in China flows solely or mainly from the wheat question. “
On the question of recognition he told me: “ The Australian Labor Party believes very strongly that the Trudeau government was on the right track . We want to follow it.”
A few days later in Hong Kong we understood why we had been asked to leave Peking and visit South China. Nixon was announcing his visit to China arranged when Kissinger met Chou a couple of days after we left the Chinese capital.
And the rest, as they say, was history.
Dr Fumbles
“ If Trump does take military action against Greenland – hence NATO it could get complicated as Canada is part of NATO.”
—————————————————-
I think that is the point. Any US action against Canada or Greenland functionally brings NATO to an end. That is where we are headed IMO.
This has lots of implications. For example, EU nations choosing a mediator to negotiate a peace with Russia and Ukraine makes sense once you accept USA won’t stand with NATO. So does UK and France proposing troops on the ground in a peacekeeping operation.
There are implications for Australia to. What happens to Five Eyes (Australia, Canada, NZ, UK, USA) intelligence sharing?
If USA does not recognise defense obligations other than self interest ANZUS and AUKUS have no value either. Nobody here wants to say it, but it is obvious.
This is not hypothetical. South Korea already has so little confidence in US protection that the new government has started negotiating directly with China.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/south-koreas-lee-jae-myung-in-beijing-sees-full-restoration-of-china-ties-in-2026
Another marvellous anecdote from beguiledagain.
Whitlam was a visionary in many ways. If I recall he had visited china a few times before the pre Nixon visit. He did love his trips.
Socrates
Twenty years from now, many Australian’s will look back on Albo and Marles determination to proceed with AUKUS as a pivotal moment.
Three board members resign from Adelaide festival as Randa Abdel-Fattah sends legal notice
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/jan/11/three-board-members-resign-from-adelaide-festival-as-randa-abdel-fattah-sends-legal-notice-ntwnfb
“On Sunday the Sydney legal firm Marque, acting on behalf of Abdel-Fattah, wrote to the festival board chair, Tracey Whiting, demanding she provide each and every statement made by the academic that had played a part in the board’s decision to axe her from the 2026 program.
:::
The board has been given until 14 January to respond, along with a request to Whiting and her diminished board to retain all documents relating to the matter, for the purposes of possible litigation.
On Sunday Guardian Australia revealed that the board had resisted attempts to remove a pro-Israel columnist, Thomas Friedman, from the 2024 writers’ week program after he published a controversial column comparing the Middle East conflict to the animal kingdom.”
bc: That BlueSky cartoon might be relevant in relation to how a few million Americans might feel. However, there are over 340 million of them though, most of whom, I would suggest, are happy to go along for the ride with Trump.
Socrates says Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 6:14 pm
I think the other members of NATO really need to start deploying forces to Greenland pronto. They can make the excuse that it’s to deter Russia and China, but we all know the real purpose.
They probably only need to be there for 12 months, assuming the Democrats win the House in the midterms.
It might also be worth some Republican Senators having a quiet chat to the White House, perhaps suggesting that they might vote to convict if the House voted to impeach Trump if he invaded Greenland.
meher babasays:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:22 pm
nath: “Other people don’t see it that way. Smarter people, like me. The idiom ‘beating a drum’ is not about control or manipulation, it is about persuasion.”
—————————————————————————–
Oh nath, nath, nath. Here was I thinking I was being respectful to you by not responding to David’s earlier suggestion of a RC into Collingwood supporters with the suggestion that such a process would be “toothless.”
Yes, political leaders have been known to beat their drums to get attention. But surely the connotation of the cartoon was that the conservative politicians were “marching to the beat” of Netanyahu’s drum, which implies a degree of control on his part.
____________________________________________
Except it’s not an idiom, which is what cartoonists usually deal in. There is an idiom that you ‘march to the beat of your own drum’ which is the opposite of being controlled and manipulated.
Clearly you can see what you want to see in that cartoon. As do I.
If my interpretation has some advantage it’s that it doesn’t condemn someone for anti-semitism with no evidence.
It’s not offensive. Those who complained have to pretend it is, however, because the New Rule is that critiquing Israel is straight-up anti-Semitic.
There is a list. Let’s call it “Bibi’s List”. If you’re an academic, a writer, a journo, a broadcaster, a Lefty politician – or now just a cartoonist – you don’t want to be on Bibi’s List.
If it’s at all possible, join the Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party before it’s too late. They’re racist ratbags, explicitly so; proud of it, too. They’d thank you for pointing it out. But Bibi likes them. They’re his kind of racists. And they’re charting in the Aussie polls with a bullet.
On another note, speaking as one was, about some of the old classic shows now streaming…
Am thrilled that Northern Exposure is finally available again, after all the issues with music copyright.
Get around it, brilliant, quirky show which I loved back in the day. This one is on Amazon Prime.
Kirsdarke:
Sunday, January 11, 2026 at 5:49 pm
[‘@Mavis at 5:44pm
I’ll bet most of the monsters in ICE and their Republican masters wish they could just machine-gun down all of those protesters.’]
Given that there are around 500–540 million guns in civilian hands in the US, ICE might find that people will start firing back. I think it’s getting to that point with this fascist administration.
Bushfire Bill
It isn’t about whether you are offended; our discrimination laws are clear in saying it is about the person that feels offended. It is much the same as how some Chinese people react to criticism of the Chinese Government.