Despite Labor having only been in government for less than three months, the Liberal Party have already come up with a new meme titled 5 Labor failures. It’s worth addressing each of their claims individually.
At last somebody noticed. The LNP under Scott Morrison ran as if it were a GOP/ Trump franchise with Scott Trump Morrison it’s leader icon performer and poor mimic. Even Dutton’s first move was to go to America for instructions.
Former PM Scott Morrison’s incompetence mirrored that of his political idol, Donald Trump, writes Paul Begley.
Except Keith Pitt knew about the arrangement when he was overruled on the PEP-11 gas permit and he told Q&A host Stan Grant that Michael McCormack knew of Morrison’s co-ministering as well. So clearly the Nationals did know and allowed it to happen without comment.
The expectation that Palestinians under thumb for 75 years can plan, present, and articulate as well as the Israelis or are even expected to is a form of Apartheid in itself. Colonisers for hundreds of years have been running arguments like this. Australia for one has been doing it for 200 years
Mahmoud Abbas hasn’t been an effictive leader, and certainly not for a very long time, and his outbursts are just embarrassing. Had he taken the opportunity of the stage in Berlin to bring home to a German audience the magnitude of the human rights crisis faced by Palestinians, he might have done some good. As it is, by trying, pitifully, to appropriate the language of Holocaust for his people’s dilemma, he made himself look small, and a little crazed.
While Israeli politicians may argue about Gantz’s decision to continue meeting with Abbas based upon the recent statements, it is the former army chief of staff who holds enough sway to influence the PA towards Israel’s demands. There is no contradiction between Gantz and Lapid’s intentions. The PA’s existence is subject to international financial donors; if that fact is taken as groundwork by Israel, then the Palestinians are being set up for a much bigger and possibly irreversible loss of land and liberty.
Forced to say “sorry and call it an accident” why? For revealing their truth naturally their Trumpists
A Republican group in Alabama is super sorry they ‘accidentally’ used a picture of the GOP elephant that contained Ku Klux Klan imagery. KKK hoods, to be exact. I’m not sure how this even happens. They did offer a reason why it happened, but it’s still hard to grasp.
Morrison is pleased to present himself as nothing less than a Christ like figure condemned by those he wished to save.
Despite having breached ethics and deceived Australia, former PM Scott Morrison has tried to convince us that his secret power grab was in our best interest, writes Darren Crawford.
Fresh from the mortifying news that he was sharing the second highest post in government with his leader, former treasurer Josh Frydenberg is being spoken of as a Liberal saviour. Apparently Peter Dutton has not inspired the nation in his role as opposition leader.
As outrage swirls around Scott Morrison for running a secret parallel ministry, there is are some wistful musings about the prospect of Josh getting back into parliament, even by replacing ScoMo. The former PM has become an unwelcome presence on his own side, and few would be sorry to see his back. Perhaps only Labor really wants him to hang around.
A recent investigation details a campaign by the car industry to have its (low) voluntary standards on fuel efficiency legislated into national standards. This campaign fits into a broader pattern of lobbying by the fossil fuel industry to hinder effective climate action and highlights the importance of democratic integrity in addressing the climate crisis as well as the urgent need for robust regulation of lobbying.
Like Trump the stench of Morrison is about to hit all those that stood around him. Hurley Frydenberg, Dutton, et al have all been tarnished by Scott Morrison who blames them in that he didn’t trust they coud do their jobs or sufficiently support him.
The scandal building over the secret appointments by Scott Morrison may cost the Governor-General, David Hurley, his job.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has this morning failed to give an unequivocal endorsement of Hurley’s role in the appointments. This is close to being the kiss of death for a vice-regal figure in today’s Australia.
When confronted with their malfeasance the Tories are capable of embarrassment but not shame. They circle the wagons – obfuscating, quibbling, blame-shifting and projecting albeit while blushing and looking at their shoes. Any regret is only ever at getting caught.
DiddleyScott led the Nasties to new levels of heinous behaviour, clad in his belief he had celestial licence to indulge his megalomania. Can the Nasties change? They won’t. Morrison and his messiah complex may be toxic and while now a figure of derision he moved the dial on acceptable behaviour way beyond norms and conventions. He tested what he could get away with; who knows what he was capable of had he been re-elected. The stench still clings to the shady characters who survived. I doubt that Spud has the inclination, the character or the stones to do anything about it.
Morrison’s bio reads like a history of an inept con artist taking on jobs he in effect was never competant to perform and caught out each time. NZ sacked him, The Australian Government sacked him and we sacked him. The only people that didn’t were the members a the Cook branch in the Liberal Party who opened the door by allowing him to lie his way into representing them over and above their original and preferred candidate at the time.
In an expert analysis, Anne Twomey, a professor of constitutional law and director of the Constitutional Reform Unit at the University of Sydney, told ABC radio that Morrison’s actions suggested “delusions of grandeur that suddenly you’re a president who should be in charge of everything rather than [thinking] I’m a prime minister who’s first among equals and is a participant in a system of responsible government”.
Australians didn’t deserve him. Morrison says he was smarter than us all. Sacked, Sacked and sacked it was never his fault. The PM didn’t go rogue the LNP chose a rogue for PM.
He wants us to believe his portfolio pilfering was perfectly rational – but at the same time he admits colleagues couldn’t be told because they’d be shocked
Top spies unaware of Morrison’s ministerial appointments
Even the nation’s top spies were unaware of Scott Morrison’s ministerial grab of five portfolios, it has emerged.
Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neill has confirmed Australian intelligence officials did not know about Mr Morrison’s secret appointments, which she described as “damaging” to the nation’s security.
“What I can tell you is that the secretary of my department, the intelligence chiefs, including the head of ASIO, did not know he was the minister for home affairs,” she said on Wednesday, according to a report in The Australian.
Scott Morrison defends secret ministry power grab, does not dispute also taking control of social services. (ABC and Jake Evans)
Former prime minister Scott Morrison has defended his extraordinary move to jointly appoint himself to several ministries in secret, including the health, finance and resources portfolios.
Mr Morrison said he did not dispute claims he took joint power over a fourth ministry, the social services portfolio, in June 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic…. See more
Recent episodes of purposeful and accidental truth-telling brought to my mind the latest verbal lapse by George W. Bush, the president who hustled this country into war in Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks. He clearly hadn’t planned to make a public confession about his own warmongering in Iraq when he gave a speech in Texas this spring. Still, asked to decry Russian president Vladimir Putin’s unjustified invasion of Ukraine, Bush inadvertently and all too truthfully placed his own presidential war-making in exactly the same boat. The words spilled out of his mouth as he described “the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified invasion of Iraq — I mean of Ukraine.”
Shadow Government: Morrison’s Minstries – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Conclusion: What is to be Done?
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is being briefed regularly on these issues. If ever there was a situation custom-built for a federal investigative body such as ICAC, this is it. So blatant a personal power grab violates not only meaningless norms, but also the very rule of law itself. To whom was Morrison accountable? If he could simply swear himself into positions sua sponte, he was effectively a king.
To end on a lighter note, if a empire is ruled by an Emperor, and a kingdom is ruled by a King, Australia was a country ruled by Scott Morrison…
The only credible explanation for Scott Morrison personally installing himself, as an undisclosed ministerial partner, in several portfolios is the former prime minister’s passion for control.
Name and Fame should be accompanied by the Name and Shame Awards particularly in the media and the News Corp and Sky News deniers,confusers and propagandists who built their careers and still do on continuing to deny the ever growing discovery of the detrimental man made warming of this planet warming. Andrew Bolt has been a long term antagonist against the global science and has built his career on it. Rowan Dean,and News Corp in general have worked their butts off denying the science with inumerable false and fake facts and giving deniers the platform to disribute them.
Science & Technology Australia Media Release
Australia’s climate change legislation should be passed with an added commitment to ‘name and fame’ sectors leading the charge to reduce emissions, the peak body for Australia’s 90,000 scientists and technologists has urged.
In future, those in the business of dolling out such health initiatives should think more carefully. These systems may be intended to keep public trust afloat but can have quite the opposite effect. Ultimately, the proof of COVIDSafe’s great demise can be found in the number of individuals who consented to having their data added to the National COVIDSafe Data Store for reasons of contact tracing. While there were 7.9 million registrations of the app between April 2020 and May 2022, fewer than 800 gave consent to that measure. As Australia’s current health minister, Mark Butler, opined, the entire endeavour was a monumental waste.
The history of Australia’s drinking culture from rum as a currency to non-alcoholic wine – ABC News
Australia’s first prime minister, Edmund ‘Toby’ Barton, was many things: A leader, a visionary and as one of his obituaries summed up, “a great Australian”.
And, according to author Matt Murphy, he was also “an outright drunk”.
This week, Victorian Premier Dan Andrews pledged to make N95 masks free for Victorians to reduce COVID transmission, continuing his determination to save lives in the community.
In this article from 2020, John Wren examined how Andrews did his best to combat the virus amid scathing criticism from conservatives.
People of Indian ancestry in Australia number more than 780,000 – an increase of almost 165,000 since 2016. As migrant groups go, Indians have leapfrogged the Chinese and now sit second only to the British.Credit:Josh Robenstone
Australia is now the first English-speaking country in the world to be a “migrant majority” nation – where 50 per cent of the population were born overseas or have an immigrant parent. And the biggest story within those numbers? India.
However it’s no longer good enough when BP is the biggest controler of solar energy in the country.
“Personally, as the new Labor Government backed by the Greens and Teal Independents proceeds with the 43% climate target laws and invests heavily in renewables. I hold out hope that the new Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek who has just rejected a new mega coal mine proposal for Clive Palmer in North Qld that horrendous developments like the Toondah Harbour PDA will also be rejected as well. I for see a better horizon forward on environmental policy making.”
In response to recent reporting that former President Donald Trump was illegally in possession of classified material – including nuclear secrets – at his Mar-a-Lago resort, Fox News hosts and Trump himself lied that his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, had also kept millions of government documents in his possession. After Trump and his right-wing media allies promoted these lies, the National Archives and Records Administration released a statement refuting them.
Tim Smith and Matthew Guy were once mates, buddies who believed they were smarter than everybody else, and were going to inherit the keys to the kingdom. We saw what Matthew Guy did after Smith got drunk and thought he was untouchable. Matthew Guy turned his back on him. Now Guy thinks he’s made of teflon too but having shot himself in the foot he has discovered the bullet really hurts. He isn’t the magician he believed himself to be. After more than a week his blunder hasn’t disappeared. He has tried every “agracadabra” to convince us it was just an illusion but the fact has remained in plain sight. So Guy like Trump, by hiding, is pleading the 5th Amendment but convincing us even more of his guilt. Having his staff speak for him has amplified it even they are in shambles. 3 have jumped ship an gone for “personal reasons”.
Everybody other than the Andrew’s government are now looking into fast shrinking Matt Guy who once thought he was a giant but never grew. Even the AEC are now investigating the circumstances and the crowd are shouting for blood. To do what Tim Smith did resign because what Matthew Guy has done wasn’t a drunken accident it was intentional. Maybe Tim Smith might be allowed to have a say?
In Wodonga on Friday, though, far away from the Melbourne press pack, he had no choice but to raise the issue himself. He announced that the Victorian Electoral Commission had requested copies of documents discussing a proposed payment to his chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, who was forced to resign after the plan leaked.
Antarctica’s coastal glaciers are shedding icebergs more rapidly than nature can replenish the crumbling ice, doubling previous estimates of losses from the world’s largest ice sheet over the past 25 years, a satellite analysis shows.
As former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney Ken White noted in a lengthy Twitter thread following the raid, the “feds do not seek search warrants lightly.” As White explained, such warrants generally require “probable cause to believe that the specified location has the specified evidence of a specified federal crime.” This one, in particular, would have been combed over by multiple high-ranking authorities, including Attorney General Merrick Garland himself. Crucially, while we the public do not know the details of what is almost certainly one of the most careful and detailed warrants imaginable, Trump himself does, because the subject of the search is given the warrant.
Covid and the Flu are nothing compared to the Right-Wing Media fury backing Trump and their effort to take control of America.
The baseless claim that the FBI may have planted evidence while carrying out a court-approved search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence on Monday has surged through right-wing media, as the former president’s allies continue their effort to turn their audiences against the probe and shield Trump from accountability.
Meanwhile Putin is doing to the Ukraine what Trump wished he could have done to America.
Former federal prosecutor Michael Stern suggested that TrumpWorld is trotting out the claim because the FBI may have found damaging evidence at his home.”I have written hundreds of search warrants. Lawyers and people whose homes are being searched are routinely not present during the search,” he wrote. “That Trump is now talking about ‘planted’ evidence means he knows there is something damning they found.”
If charges were laid Trump could take it all the way to “his chosen and private Supreme Court”. Al Capone it appears was easier to nail than this Don. But then he didn’t have Steve Bannon as his close advisor.
In less than 24 hours, the agency’s actions have galvanised his political opponents and supporters alike, fuelling rumours he could soon announce a run for president in 2024.
A Virus worse than Covid the leaders of the variant forms of the less than Liberal Coalition these past 22 years. When any means were justifed by their ends and Australia was left behind.
Whatever it takes – » The Australian Independent Media Network
An investigation by the Department of Home Affairs determined that former Prime Minister Morrison
pressured public servants to publicise the interception of an asylum seeker boat on the day of the May 2022 federal election, a damning report has found.
But the officials in Home Affairs had acted with integrity and refused to amplify a media statement they were forced to write about the Border Force operation unfolding on the high seas.
The report into the extraordinary circumstances surrounding one of the last acts of the previous Morrison government was prepared by the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Michael Pezzullo AO.
The Liberal Party then sent text messages to ‘undecided’ voters early in the afternoon urging a vote for the Liberals and Nationals to ‘stop the boats’. Apart from the obscene use again of human suffering to make a political argument – something all Australians should be ashamed of – the action breached the Coalition’s 8-year facade of not commenting on ‘on water matters’.
Former Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews claims that no ‘caretaker’ conventions were breached, something that the investigation questions. According to media reports, the Coalition was pressuring public servants to upload a ministerial statement by Andrews, promote the boat arrival on social media as well as briefing ‘selected’ reporters.
A departmental statement was eventually issued minutes after Mr Morrison announced the interception in his final press conference as prime minister, but the report concluded officials refused requests to post it on social media or send it directly to journalists.
The Psychedelic Renaissance Is on the Verge of an Uneasy EnlightenmentBy Benjamin Y. Fong Pharma companies and shrewd investors are poised to make massive profits off the medical legalization of psychedelics. For now, they’re united with the psychedelic movement’s true believers — an uneasy truce that must break in one party’s favor.
Dutton’s political career has not been what you’d call “stellar” by any means; rather he has plodded along with the flat-footedness of a beat police officer.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd has launched a scathing rebuke of the emerging conservative campaign against a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to parliament, attacking his longtime rival Tony Abbott for suggesting the body would change Australia’s system of government.
Australia’s leading scientific research organisation, the CSIRO, has delivered a damning blow against the renewed push by the federal Coalition for nuclear power, saying it is expensive, and too slow to make a significant contribution to any serious climate targets.
Putin’s War of Vengence. Nine years for a Joint seems to mirror America’s determination to make Julian Assange suffer.
A Russian court has sentenced US basketball player Brittney Griner to nine years in prison for illegal drug possession, the TASS news agency reports from the court in Khimki near Moscow.She was also fined one million roubles ($23,395), according to media reports.
One joint and one whistleblower two individuals up against the states of Russia and America
Putin might do a deal and let Griner go after his judiciary sentenced her to 9 years jail. Will he do it for releasing Julian Assange and surprise us all with his humanitarian spirit?. Imagine the positive publicity he’d get. However, would America then do it? Little has changed when it comes to the barbarism of states despotic or democratic in name.
It was a big day for the Albanese government on Wednesday when its 43% emissions reduction targets were guaranteed passage in the Senate. Announcing the news, Albanese and Energy Minister Chris Bowen were grinning from ear to ear.
One of the ‘arguments’ that are brandied about concerning the Voice is ‘lack of detail’. The government is not being precise in its definitions of what these changes would mean in practice. This claim can be laid to rest if one reads the report that serves as the basis for the Voice. In this piece I want to provide some of the ‘missing detail’ by quoting from and analysing the report. Since the media will seemingly not do its job, somebody has to.
Defamation law may turn out to be America’s most important weapon against rightwing media lies.
On Friday, Infowars star Alex Jones’ parent media company, Free Speech Systems, filed for bankruptcy in the midst of a defamation damages trial underway in Austin, Texas.
A want for a Christian ISIS State has always threatened America’s Democracy and it’s reared it’s head against the separation of powers and Secularism in the USA
Following the Supreme Court’s elimination of the federal right to abortion in June, conservatives have taken aim at other fundamental protections, such as same-sex marriage and access to contraception. But some on the right are resurfacing a different, long-simmering project: stigmatizing divorce, including, in some instances, attacking no-fault divorce laws.
No-fault divorce in the U.S. was first adopted in California in 1969, and New York was the last state in the country to pass a no-fault divorce law, which it did in 2010. Although state laws differ, in general no-fault divorce means that one party can successfully dissolve a marriage without needing to first prove wrongdoing by the other partner – including adultery, abuse, or desertion.
Much of corporate Australia is outdoing the government on climate ambition but some have little more than motherhood statements and no firm plan to achieve net zero, a business forum has been told.
olddogthoughts 
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