msdropbear

womensagenda.com.au/latest/whe…

why are men? 🙄🤦‍♀️

#sexism #misogyny #patriarchy #womensrights

despicable craven cowardly unprincipled space-waste... strayan pm, jfc.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch
RE: @abc_bot@social.chinwag.org

theshovel.com.au/2026/03/03/ka…

In the wake of a stressful day of being enlisted into a war that he was promised this President would never initiate, one MAGA diehard has found relief in the fact that America did not vote for a woman with a weird laugh.

Shortly after learning that the United States had launched strikes against Iran based on dubious and half-arsed reasoning — and that American troops had already begun to die as a result — 24-year-old Jim Campbell received news he would be enlisted into the US armed forces.

Not one to let bad news ruin his day, the Wichita man put a positive spin on the situation by reflecting on how much better off he is now after voting for Trump.

“Sure, I was told that grocery prices would decrease on Day 1 of Trump’s second term, which didn’t happen,” Jim thought.

“And yeah, I did really hope the Epstein Files would be released, and the perpetrators would be put to justice. Plus I guess being forced to die in another forever war isn’t too crash hot.

“But at least I don’t have to hear Kamala Harris laughing. That’s where I draw the line.”

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

#USPol #TuckFrump #FuckRWNJs #magamorons #FuckChristoFascists #FuckAllReligion #OrangeOaf #HeyFascistCatch

oh this excoriation is so very good!

johnmenadue.com/post/2026/03/l…

#AdelaideWritersWeek #AWW #LouiseAdler #censorship #zionism #AusPol #saPol #genocide #IsraelLobby

womensagenda.com.au/latest/whe…

are we destined always for lamentable cringeworthy craven PMs?

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #GraceTame #WomensRights #WomensSafety

theshovel.com.au/2026/02/24/fe…

One Nation leader Pauline Hanson has been hospitalised and was in a serious condition last night after discovering some people are simultaneously Asian and Muslim.

“Until now she just assumed they were two separate evils that could be tackled individually. The realisation hit her pretty hard,” a One Nation staffer said.

“When you consider that Asians are ruining Australia and Muslims are ruining Australia too, who knows what sort of damage an Asian Muslim could do to this country. We could be swamped by terrorists”.

He said staffers held back from informing Ms Hanson that the number of people containing both attributes may run into the hundreds of millions. “I’m not sure she would have survived that statistic,” he said.

#satire #auspol

this seems like a brilliantly worthy project, about which i now feel so sad, knowing it's only a matter of time before elbow, muzza, & madking decide to approve a dirty great fracking project in the middle of the bridge...

abc.net.au/news/2026-02-22/caw…

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #BiodiversityCrisis

thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/p…

When Angus Taylor won the Liberal leadership eight days ago, he stood up to address the party room.

“He spoke a little bit about immigration, he riffed about childcare – a lot, which was very unusual – and how we’re going to have nanny vouchers and all that, but there was no other issue forthcoming except the crescendo of the speech,” a Liberal MP tells The Saturday Paper. “The room goes all sombre and silent, as you do in the crescendo of a speech, and Taylor says, ‘You know, there is, on top of this building’ – and he points at the sky, his voice going all hush – ‘just one flag.’ And then he pauses for effect, heavy with gravitas, and, looking up, he says, ‘And it’s the Australian flag!’

“Then up came this almighty cheer from the hard right – Tony Pasin almost had a hernia jumping out of his chair, James Paterson went crazy – and a lot of us are just sitting there thinking, Oh, fuck, what is this all about? Yes, there is a big flag on top of the building, but so what?”

“The cheer was totally disproportionate to the crescendo of the speech, and the reason I am telling you this is because it reveals our problem. It wasn’t a speech that said, ‘We’re gonna cut taxes! Yay!’ There was nothing about reforming the economy, or free markets, or deregulation. The key takeout was that there is a big motherfucking flag on top of parliament. And only one flag.

“Sure, I love the flag, but I definitely didn’t feel like jumping out of my seat and yelling out, ‘Yes! We’re gonna win the next one!’ I was actually dying inside, because that kind of thinking is not going to get us anywhere. Honestly. When I got home, I said to my partner, ‘I can’t cope with this shit.’ It was, in my view, his first major error.”

According to the MP, Taylor’s first speech as leader reinforces longstanding concerns about his judgement, priorities and political instincts, concerns that will continue to shape internal unease about his capacity to reset the party following its worst defeat in history.

Those doubts are now converging on a far more consequential dilemma: the fate of the internal review of the Liberal Party’s disastrous 2025 election campaign, conducted by Nick Minchin and Pru Goward. The document is understood to be deeply critical not only of former leader Peter Dutton but of Taylor as well. Its release has been delayed after Dutton threatened legal action.

Had the report already been published, the MP argues, it would by now have been debated and largely absorbed. Instead, with Taylor newly installed as leader, the review’s findings carry greater political weight but are possibly further from being released.

“It is the biggest hot potato inside the party, absolutely incendiary,” the MP tells The Saturday Paper. “Everyone’s ringing around, the whole world is asking for it, and that tells you something as well, right? It’s not what it says about Peter; it’s the scathing assessment of our newly crowned leader.”

While the document is understood not to single out individuals by name, its assessment of economic incoherence, weak policy development and a lack of alignment with Liberal values cuts directly across Taylor’s role as shadow treasurer in the previous parliamentary term and as a central architect of the Liberals’ 2025 election campaign.

What makes those judgements especially difficult for Taylor to dismiss is the standing of the reviewers themselves.

Minchin, a senior minister in the Howard government, is a pillar of the party’s conservative wing. Goward, a moderate and a former senior minister in successive New South Wales Coalition governments, brings institutional authority of her own. Together, they cannot be written off as ideological adversaries or disgruntled outsiders.

One reason the Minchin–Goward review has landed so heavily is that its conclusions echo doubts raised repeatedly over the course of Taylor’s political career. These doubts are rooted in a series of controversies that Liberals fear Labor will be quick to exploit.

“Everyone makes mistakes in politics,” the MP says. “The issue with Angus is his capacity to learn from those mistakes and adapt and change.”

At the centre of those controversies is watergate, which remains the most politically corrosive.

In 2017, when Barnaby Joyce was agriculture minister, Eastern Australia Agriculture sold water entitlements to the Commonwealth for about $80 million. The sale was made without a competitive tender process, generating a reported profit of roughly $52 million.

The company’s parent entity was structured through the tax haven of the Cayman Islands. Taylor – who had described himself as a co-founder – served as a director in 2008 and 2009. Despite outrage in the press, Taylor consistently denied any involvement.

“I was a consultant and I was paid consultant’s fees,” he said. “That’s what consultants do. I never had an interest in the company or any related company, nor did any of my family members. I concluded any relationship with the company before I entered parliament. I didn’t receive any benefit from the buybacks; indeed I wasn’t aware of them until sometime after they happened.”

If watergate raised questions about probity, the so-called grassgate controversy goes to compliance with the law.

In 2016, the NSW environment department began investigating the use of herbicide on a property in south-eastern NSW owned by Taylor’s family company Jam Land. The property contained critically endangered native grasslands.

By 2017, the department had concluded that the spraying constituted unlawful clearing under federal environmental law and began enforcement action, including remediation requirements.

The matter entered national political scrutiny in 2019, when media reports revealed Jam Land was part-owned by Taylor and that, while the investigation was under way, Taylor had sought meetings with senior environment officials and the office of federal Liberal environment minister Josh Frydenberg, prompting questions about the use of ministerial access during an active regulatory process. He said he was simply representing constituents and the minister knew about his interests. “I make absolutely no apologies for standing up for farmers in my region,” Taylor said. “That includes me and other family members.”

In 2020, the environment department’s findings were made public, confirming that the grasslands had been illegally cleared and ordering remediation of the site.

Jam Land challenged the decision, prolonging the dispute through the courts. In September 2022, the Federal Court dismissed the company’s appeal, upheld the finding of unlawful clearing and confirmed the remediation order.

Following grassgate was Clovergate, an episode that crystallises Taylor’s vulnerability on truthfulness.

In 2019, Taylor’s office circulated a document purporting to show that the City of Sydney Mayor Clover Moore had spent $15.9 million on international travel.

The claim was false: the council’s actual travel spending was closer to $6000, and the document Taylor circulated was soon revealed to have been doctored.

Taylor said he did not know the document was forged, but the matter was referred first to the NSW Police Force and then to the Australian Federal Police, which in February 2020 announced it would not pursue a criminal investigation, saying there was no evidence Taylor was involved in falsifying the document and that any further investigation was unlikely to yield charges.

In December 2019, questions turned to a previously unnoticed anecdote in Taylor’s first speech to federal parliament six years earlier, when he told the House that while studying at Oxford in 1991 he had lived a couple of doors down the corridor from prominent feminist author and fellow Rhodes Scholar Naomi Wolf.

According to Taylor, Wolf was involved in a push to remove a Christmas tree from the college common room because some people might be offended, citing the incident as an example of “insidious political correctness”.

The only problem was that Wolf was not at Oxford at the same time as Taylor – she attended the university from 1985 to 1987 – and had no involvement in the incident he described.

The episode unsettled colleagues and critics alike – not least because it appeared in Taylor’s very first speech as a parliamentarian, a moment traditionally reserved for establishing credibility and seriousness of purpose.

Other controversies that continue to dog Taylor include accusations that, as energy minister, he undermined market confidence by delaying the disclosure of electricity price rises ahead of the 2022 election and that he concealed construction delays and cost blowouts surrounding Snowy 2.0, Australia’s largest committed renewable energy project.

As shadow treasurer, he became associated with disputed costings – from tax-deductible business lunches to nuclear power – and repeated changes to tax policies that weakened the Coalition’s economic credibility.

Other, smaller episodes include a failure to declare an indirect shareholding; links to controversial fundraising vehicles; internal party disputes over preselection and policy; and a run of rhetorical missteps that, only last week, left Taylor exposed in Question Time, with Treasurer Jim Chalmers saying he had been “born with a silver foot in his mouth”.

Taylor’s one-time leader, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, was even more frank. He told the ABC that people had described Taylor as the “best-qualified idiot they’ve ever met”.

According to A.J. Brown, professor of public policy and law at Griffith University and chair of Transparency International Australia, a leader carrying unresolved integrity questions has a heightened obligation to demonstrate seriousness about reform – not only in the public interest but in their own political interest as well.

“Whenever any leader or alternative prime minister has more than a few integrity questions in their political track record, it only increases the reasons why it’s in the public interest – and their own political interests – to commit to reforms that will ensure the highest level of public integrity,” Brown tells The Saturday Paper.

“If not, the public is only left wondering if, through silence or by default, the future might simply mean a slip back into the integrity standards of the last government in which Mr Taylor was a minister – famous for sports and other rorts, robodebt, and a prime minister prepared to swear himself secretly into multiple ministries.

“The weakest lobbying controls in Australia, a defective and disorganised federal whistleblower protection regime and the case for strengthening the National Anti-Corruption Commission – these all provide an alternative government with a huge opportunity to show it would move forward on ensuring trust in government, not just let things slide or go backwards.”

Not all political scientists believe the accumulation of controversies around Taylor will necessarily define his leadership.

According to Dr Rob Manwaring, a senior lecturer at Flinders University, modern political leadership is rarely assessed as a test of personal character. “Political leadership is not a character test,” he says. “What tends to matter more is whether a leader can project a credible forward path for their party or movement.”

Recent history supports this point. The rise of Donald Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in Britain both occurred despite extensive catalogues of scandals and allegations. In each case, leadership success hinged less on personal probity than on political projection.

Manwaring also points to what he sees as uneven standards across the political spectrum, with centre-right leaders often facing laxer expectations than their centre-left counterparts. He contrasts the scrutiny applied to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer over lawful gifts he has received, and the intensity of criticism directed at Anthony Albanese for purchasing a $4.3 million home during a housing crisis.

That does not mean scandals never matter. Sometimes, Manwaring says, relatively minor issues can take on a life of their own – as in the case of former NSW premier Barry O’Farrell, who resigned over failing to declare the receipt of a bottle of wine.

In Taylor’s case, Manwaring’s assessment is that the controversies are fragmented and unfolding amid a much larger political crisis for the Liberal Party, including dire polling and internal disarray.

“My reading,” Manwaring says, “is that none of the issues flagged around Angus Taylor are likely to engulf him.”

In the end, the moment that followed Taylor’s election as leader may prove more revealing than he intended. A room rising to its feet for a flag, while a damning internal review sits unopened and a long record of unresolved controversies shadows the leadership, captures the problem confronting the Liberal Party: a search for renewal conducted largely through gesture, while the harder work remains unfinished.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead