I suspect we’re entering something of an opinion poll drought, with media polling budgets having been exhausted in the last stages of the referendum campaign. On that subject, my live results feature continue to update on a daily-or-so basis. There is also Simon Jackman’s, which includes an impressive feature allowing the user to observe relationships between booth results and various electoral and demographic measures.
Other news:
• The federal redistribution processes for Western Australia and Victoria, which will respectively increase the state’s representation from 15 seats to 16 and reduce it from 39 to 38, moved along a notch this week. Submission deadlines for suggestions have been set at November 17 for Western Australia and November 24 for Victoria; supporting information including the enrolment data that will set the quotas for enrolment (both current and projected to 2028) have been published for Western Australia and will follow for Victoria on Wednesday. The deadline for suggestions in New South Wales, which reduces from 47 to 46 seats, is this coming Friday.
• The former Liberal Democratic Party, which has lost the right to have the word “liberal” in its name following legislative changes before the last election, is seeking to register as the Libertarian Party (with a proposed logo that looks to be rather a lot like that of Queensland’s Liberal National Party). This is now its formal name in Victoria, where it boasts one seat in the Legislative Council, though it retains its old name in New South Wales, where ditto.
• The Australian reports the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters will bring down its final report on the 2022 election next month. Most of the terms of reference were addressed in the interim report, the exception being “proportional representation of the states and territories in the Parliament, in the context of the democratic principle of ‘one vote, one value’”.
As far as I can tell, meher baba brought up the octopus.
Rainman says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 2:25 pm
C@tmomma, you are …..
___________________________________
Perhaps you might like to take a cold shower Rainman
DisplayName says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 2:30 pm
As far as I can tell, meher baba brought up the octopus.
________________________________________
It was WM who kept bringing her up. I could not work out why he was singling her out among supporters of Palestine until MB explained it.
PS. The strongest image I have of the controlling octopus meme is of a sinister looking Chinese man controlling arms which were labelled prostitution, drug dealing, etc drawn to support the White Australia Policy early in the last century.
It might also surprise some people to know that octopuses can be very attractive and interesting. BW’s best mate is an octopus. And this is one of the most amazing documentaries I’ve seen in some time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Octopus_Teacher
TPOF
TPOF
You’re the second most abusive person on this blog.
Actually, with you labelling everyone who disagrees with you as supporters of ‘baby murdering rapists’ you might be the first.
Hands down, you are the most crazy offensive person on this blog.
Meher Baba
If you are still around I just wanted to thank you for your thoughtful and knowledgeable contributions during the referendum campaign. I found them very informative. You are obviously very well read on political matters and it shows.
Rainman says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 2:39 pm
TPOF
TPOF
You’re the second most abusive person on this blog.
Actually, with you labelling everyone who disagrees with you as supporters of ‘baby murdering rapists’ you might be the first.
Hands down, you are the most crazy offensive person on this blog.
________________________________________
Rainman, you’ve told us you have low EQ. I can really, really believe that now. Pretty uncertain about the high IQ you claim.
Trump will need a truck load of diapers ..
Powell & Chezbros both taking a plea deal in Georgia one in which there is an unlimited open ended agreement to give evidence & cooperate, an agreement that may overlap with the criminal case in DC is going to start an avalanche of plea deals in both cases… Trump.. burnt toast
three afterthoughts on the referendum
1) it was a huge error by PM – he had long advance notice to refer or cancel (Meher is right) and cannot blame cabinet for not telling.
He let the racist dogs out along with a string of other problems. Some here have tried to say this months ago but there always seems to be an imperial guard around the current PM who use personal insult as main defence
2) an overlooked aspect is fact that voice proposal was taken on from the Uluru statement, not from govt policy as such. as such it is a flawed commencement and plays right in opposition fears that voice entity will have too much privileged say. PM seems sentimentally emboldened to aboriginal opinion and cannot see the potential pitfalls including by passing of national governance he might be encouraging.
3) there was a censorship initiative going on with yes. that artworks, policy, history -virtually anything – speaking about aboriginality can only be made by aboriginals.
I will not spend too much of sunny sunday afternoon explaining the problems – near and far – with such a direction.
4) the glee and smugness by main proponents of the no is their main crime. the debate was not conducted in an orderly manner we all know this
Australian politics, please. This Ed Husic needs to pull his head in. It’s only been a thousand kids and it hasn’t even really started. Labor doesnt need all this yabbering on their frontbench
The Age 20/10
During the 2022 election campaign Prime Minister Anthony Albanese criticised the 2015 decision to lease the port to Landbridge for $506 million, and indicated a willingness to use foreign veto laws to cancel the lease if necessary.
The review has not been publicly released but in a statement released on Friday afternoon, the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet said it had found there was insufficient national security grounds to overturn the lease.
_____________________
You could have bet your house on that.
Taking out the trash on a Friday afternoon says it all.
It’s made Albanese look like a bit of a dill. No wonder he was so eager to leave the country.
This is pure gold 😆
https://twitter.com/7Cricket/status/1715938100822626322
TPOF
After a misspent youth, sat a 3 hour mature age entry exam to get into university. Scored in the top .01%. Also won prizes and scholarships during my studies.
If you want, I can come round to help you tie your shoelaces.
The low EQ is also true.
I was not aware of the alleged link between an octopus and anti-Semitism. My initial reaction was “WTF”. I googled it, and apparently the octopus was featured in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda. I really doubt Greta would have known about this. A toy octopus is just a toy octopus.
Are other cephalopods similarly incriminating? If someone carries a toy squid, or a toy nautilus, are they also deemed to be potentially anti-Semitic?
Congrats and well done Rainman.
TPOF and Yabba are the most abusive on here. Both are also very old.
Boer has an affinity for the aussie blue ringed octopus. Especially at federal elections.
I doubt anyone would mistake him for an anti-Semite.
A hater of wombats? … that’s a whole other story though. …
Ps. Isn’t the octopus a symbol of the SPECTRE organisation?
‘MelbourneMammoth says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 12:33 pm
So, Albanese is going to visit China next month. A pragmatic move, and yet debatable electorally. Dutton and Littleprice will now argue that ALP are aligned with commies, dictators and Stalin. Just like Trump did with Biden. They will probably use the word “appeasement” and “chamberlain” somehwere….’
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I am very, very pleased that Albanese refused to travel until China’s trade punishments were lifted.
These were costing Australia around $20 billion a year. Brought to us by the Morrison Government. It is worth noting that Morrison has doubled up on his unfitness to lead by, as a backbencher, going to Taiwan to preach separatism.
Ugly Dutton does not need reality to make shit up. He lies all the time. Albanese will just have to console himself with the thought that he is a real prime minister doing real stuff while all Dutton can do is ugly.
‘Andrew_Earlwood says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 3:29 pm
Boer has an affinity for the aussie blue ringed octopus. Especially at federal elections.
I doubt anyone would mistake him for an anti-Semite.
A hater of wombats? … that’s a whole other story though. …
Ps. Isn’t the octopus a symbol of the SPECTRE organisation?’
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I actually rather like wombats. I do rather dislike their penchant for sending our river banks into the river, for snipping off our tree plantings, for wrecking our fences, for undermining a house, and for creating great big bloody holes in the paddocks which are bloody dangerous until you find them.
Experts say east coast humpback whale population has reached record numbers, as tourism booms: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-22/east-coast-humpback-whale-population-record-high-experts-say/102990590
I will say this for watermelon.
He makes a change from integrity.
On Saturday BK linked to
Rick Morton explains the feature in the welfare system that is allowing private businesses to suspend hundreds of thousands of welfare payments.
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2023/10/21/exclusive-private-companies-halting-welfare-payments
Questions
Do you think it is OK for 45% of income support payment recipients to have their payments suspended in a quarter?
What do you think is an acceptable suspension rate?
happy to discuss
DisplayName: I see what you meant re the “moral clarity” comment. It had been worded in a rather complex way. I would accept that an inability to compromise on issues they deem to be of moral significance can be connected to tge obsessiveness of some high-functioning autistic people.
There goes any objectivity Ch Nein had…
“I’m delighted to be joining Nine’s powerhouse Parliament House bureau. At a time when the need for reliable, trusted and agenda-free news has never been greater, I look forward to working alongside Charles Croucher and some of Australian journalism’s best,” Probyn said.
Nine’s national director of news and current affairs across broadcast, Darren Wick, said Probyn will add value to the network’s coverage through his brief to break exclusive stories.
Following the decision to make his role redundant, Probyn told this masthead he was “gobsmacked”, adding he struggled to understand the ABC’s direction.
https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/former-abc-political-editor-andrew-probyn-joins-nine-20231022-p5ee3y.html
Recently, archeologists found the fossil of an extinct two tonne wombat.
Does anyone know how old Boerwar actually is?
Was he in anyway responsible for the death of this animal?
The poor creature wouldn’t have stood a chance against his modern warfare.
Bystander: thanks, I don’t get many compliments on here.
I reckon my view on most issues is no better than anyone else’s, but I reckon I know a little bit about marketing. And, as was also the case with Labor in the 2019 election, I was able to see a train wreck coming. (Although, in 2019, I still predicted a Labor win, or at worst a hung parliament, because my poor assessment of their strategy and campaign was outweighed by a fervent belief that the pollsters never get it wrong.)
‘meher baba says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 1:48 pm
c@t: I clearly heard the report from Yarraba as stating that it was level of reported child abuse in that community that was lower, so it is possible that there is a significant amount of unreported child abuse.
I have known quite a few people who have worked in remote Indigenous communities and all of them have reported that the level of child abuse is a significant problem. Not just by families or other males in the community, but truck drivers and other whitefellas who pay for the privilege.
Dutton is playing a distasteful political game. But that doesn’t mean that the problem doesn’t exist. However, there is no pressing need for a Royal Commission: there’s plenty of reports already available. The main solution is, as always, better services with more funding, and administered in a transparent and ethical way (be that by Indigenous people, white people or a combination of the two).’
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Classic Meher.
Always finds a way to shield Ugly Dutton.
Child sex abuse is a national problem.
If Dutton wants an RC into a national problem he should say so.
What Ugly Dutton was doing was standard Ugly Dutton: linking sexual deviance with a minority that he kicking.
This was by way of a follow up in a campaign in which Dutton led the No with racist dog whistling, lies and attempts to build anger and resentment. All this is deliberate. Next we will be hearing that Albanese condones child sex abuse in Indigenous communities and is running a child sex ring out of the basement of a Macca’s.
It is straight out of the Trump playbook.
There are no ‘buts’ with this. There are no qualifiers.
Dutton is stoking race hate and divisiveness for personal political power.
Except when Meher posts….
Well, who would have guessed it? Psychonath has jumped in to stir the shit. Again.
Rainman
Recently, archeologists found the fossil of an extinct two tonne wombat.
Probably palaeontologists rather than archaeologists – more their domain. Two tonnes seems excessive for a wombat, even an extinct one. You might be thinking of a diprotodontid – megafauna that are related to wombats but not wombats.
Dutton wants a royal commission into child abuse in aboriginal communities. …
If he’d paid attention, he would have realised we just had one … ‘the institutionalised response to child sexual abuse’ … which had a very broad scope to examine all aspects of what he – and Jacinta – now claim to be ‘the problem’ (ie. covering aboriginal organisations that Jacinta alleges covers up and enables sex abuse, and the responses by government agencies – police, community services and justice).
Unfortunately, the likes of Dutton (more particularly folk like Abbott and journos like Paul Kelly) were more obsessed with the Cultcha war aspects of this royal commission – especially how their beloved Catholic Church – and others ‘Christian’ denominations- were being ‘unfairly targeted’ – to notice the other work of that royal commission.
Furthermore, there was an inquiry in the mid 2000s in the NT – headed by the former NT DPP – which made a series of recommendations but again ‘the likes of Dutton’ – namely Howard and Marlborough Man – used the media storm surrounding that report to ignore just about every single recommendation therein and instead send in the fucking army and AFP instead. … and that ended … very poorly.
FWIW, repeated floods have trimmed our wombat population considerably. Wombats can survive fire nicely by holing up. They can survive a flood nicely by swimming. They are powerful swimmers. But if the flood is widespread enough they seem to become dislocated. I imagine that they also suffer from exposure when forced to live outside their burrows. I assume our wombats are helping farmers downstream and that we have picked up some ‘helpers’ from upstream.
Shogun
Thanks for the clarification. It was actually a 3-tonne wombat relative: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-18/diprotodon-skeletons-excavated-in-pilbara/102985942
I checked with Bluey. He tells me that occies are anti-all humans so no discrimination there.
BW: If you read my post you’d see I said that Dutton was playing a nasty political game and that a Royal Commission wasn’t required.
But you’re always telling us that you once spent lots of time working in remote Indigenous communities. Are you suggesting that you didn’t encounter significant problems wirh child abuse? You be the first such person I’ve ever encountered who didn’t.
meher baba
I did read your post. All of it. I was responding to all of it. If you don’t like that, tough titty.
meher baba says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:00 pm
BW: If you read my post you’d see I said that Dutton was playing a nasty political game and that a Royal Commission wasn’t required.
But you’re always telling us that you once spent lots of time working in remote Indigenous communities. Are you suggesting that you didn’t encounter significant problems wirh child abuse? You be the first such person I’ve ever encountered who didn’t.
__________________________________
I think the problem is the framing. Child sexual abuse occurs everywhere. We know that. The problem is suggesting that it is rampant in one group of Australians and that this needs another inquiry.
Indeed, if it is so rampant that the whole of the Liberal and National parties know about it, why have an inquiry? There are lots of solutions from previous inquiries into child sexual abuse on how to address it.
Perhaps these solutions can be addressed quietly without a whole of indigenous community perp walk.
Boerwar: Joe Biden is a real president doing real presidential stuff while Trump can and will only do ugly. But that isn’t stopping him from being reinaugurated. The same analogy applies with Dutton.
On Greta Thunberg: she is very high functioning, and probably only has a few of the traits of the spectrum such as an obsessive interest in a particular field or a relative inability to pick up on non-verbal cues. But that will be used against her in spades by the Right, who are only interested in the rights of neuro-vanilla, cisgender, heterosexual, wealthy, white conservative men.
‘meher baba says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:00 pm
BW: If you read my post you’d see I said that Dutton was playing a nasty political game and that a Royal Commission wasn’t required.
But you’re always telling us that you once spent lots of time working in remote Indigenous communities. Are you suggesting that you didn’t encounter significant problems wirh child abuse? You be the first such person I’ve ever encountered who didn’t.’
————————————-
Child sex abuse is a national problem.
Why are you joining Dutton in singling out Indigenous targets?
You don’t seem to understand that you are enabling Dutton’s racist dogwhistling as well as his sick and weird habit of trying to link sexual abuse to minorities. Have you forgotten that asylum seekers are rapists?
Do stop being a patsy for Dutton!
”Indeed, if it is so rampant that the whole of the Liberal and National parties know about it, why have an inquiry? There are lots of solutions from previous inquiries into child sexual abuse on how to address it…”
The other question is, why didn’t they hold one during the 104 months to May last year while they were in power?
‘MelbourneMammoth says:
Sunday, October 22, 2023 at 4:10 pm
Boerwar: Joe Biden is a real president doing real presidential stuff while Trump can and will only do ugly. But that isn’t stopping him from being reinaugurated….’
———————-
Trump will probably be nominated by the democracy wreckers. Whether he will be reinaugerated is up to the voters of the United States. They should be aware that if Trump gets his way it will be the last time they get to vote.
As for Thunberg, when the messenger becomes the main subject of discussion rather than the messages then the messenger becomes part of the problem.
“The other question is, why didn’t they hold one during the 104 months to May last year while they were in power?”
______
Let me re-emphasis my last post:
“They” inherited a Royal Commission dealing with exactly the sorts of issues they now say need another Royal Commission.
In fact THAT Royal Commission didn’t even publish its final report until December 2017 – more than FOUR YEARS after they came to office.
At any stage they could have acted on the recommendations – contained in both in the final report and the interim reports along the way.
IF they ever thought that the Royal Commission was doing an inadequate job with respect to child abuse in aboriginal communities they could have at any stage expanded the terms of reference and/or increased resources for the Royal Commissioners to go after this issue in more depth.
But … tumbleweeds – for the first four years of their awfully no good government … and further tumbleweeds in their last four years of misrule having received the final report at the end of 2017.
What was Jacinta doing during that Royal Commission?
Was she making recommendations or giving evidence to it? Was she lobbying the government to expand its scope? She says she got involved in conservative politics last decade because of her believe that aboriginal organisations were terrible and corrupt – and child abuse enablers – so … was she doing any of the hard hards with the Royal Commission when she had the opportunity?
FYI – https://www.childabuseroyalcommission.gov.au/sites/default/files/a_brief_guide_to_the_final_report_-_aboriginal_and_torres_strait_islander_communities.pdf
At any stage the government of the day – and their conservative constituents like the Jacinta Price’s of the world – could have had the terms of reference expanded to ‘go after’ aboriginal community organisations, DOCs, police and justice agencies to see whether there was any merit in ‘the conspiracy’ allegations. … but no. Tumbleweeds from that mob. Funny that.
“Trump will probably be nominated by the democracy wreckers. Whether he will be reinaugurated is up to the voters of the United States. They should be aware that if Trump gets his way it will be the last time they get to vote.”
Yes, but they will not be aware. The average person on the street has minimal political nous and is easily led.
They’ll probably still get to vote, but they might only have one box to vote in on their ballot paper, like it is in North Korea and how it was in Nazi Germany.
I imagine America won’t go as far as China in getting rid of even the pretense of democracy where people can live their entire life without having the right to participate in an election.
So how will the Coalition decide their next national policy priority?
Will it be to get rid of Indigenous identity? (Abbott)
Will it be to push back at trans people? (Price)
Will it be to link child sex abuse to Indigenous people? (Dutton)
All class! But dangerous nevertheless. Very dangerous.
Trump would like to go the full Xi.
There will not be any need for elections if he is the Pres for Life.
A-E
+1
I don’t think Trump wants to be a dictator, I doubt that he has the intellect to develop a plan for that. At this stage he has one aim in life, and that is to avoid being convicted, and he thinks getting elected will enable that.
Trump despised democratically elected leaders and sucked up to dictators. He never saw an electoral process with integrity that he liked. He routinely seeks to undermine faith in electoral systems.
He sent an insurrection into the US parliament.
Pretty obvious, IMO.
Engineering with Rosie.
Informative summary of the South Australian electricity grid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daZvZ4fEOp8
Can someone explain how spending 50-100million on high priced lawyers over a few years will help tackle aboriginal child abuse in the near term?
And recommendation s can just be ignored- like the ones from the Institutional Child Abuse RC.
Bess Price was an NT CLP Minister during the Royal Commission. She was previously an avid supporter of Howard’s 2007 intervention.
Jacinta Price was first elected to council in 2015, when the royal commission still had more than two waits to run.
Why did the Price’s not take the opportunity of making submissions to the royal commission about alleged rampant child abuse in aboriginal communities – and specifically the allegations that they have continually made that ‘institutions’ (aboriginal community organisations, DOCS, police, justice) were covering this up when they had such a perfect opportunity to do so … or … if they found the Royal Commission unreceptive because they weee investigating other aspects .. go to their fellow conservative federal counterparts and lobby for an expansion of the terms of reference?
Seems ‘odd’ doesn’t it (except that it doesn’t, because they are just stunting now).
“Can someone explain how spending 50-100million on high priced lawyers over a few years will help tackle aboriginal child abuse in the near term?”
_____
Easy peasy: this stunt, if implemented, will enable conservative politicians to punch down, thus exciting folk in traditional Labor voting suburbs in our major cities with another cultcha war dejore and hence a reason to break with Labor and vote for the Tories … either directly or via preference recycling through parties like ON and Palmer.
And thus aboriginal child abuse is ‘solved’ because the bogans in our suburbs won’t ever hear about it again … right up until the time there is another Labor Government to triangulate against. …
Sees? Simples.