The Australian Zeitgeist Tracking Thread

hello from [coughs & splutters for nine minutes]... Sydney

I’m not looking forward to my trip to Sydney next week.

I’m also very ashamed. I had to present to the board of the company I am working for right now and was chatting with the chairman (notorious coal plant owning, climate denying fuckstick), in the preamble, while the conference call was getting, I passed up the opportunity to educate him (and possibly loose my job). I bottled it. Not next time.

Albo can go fuck himself as well.

Albanese, Terri Butler, Joel Fitzgibbon, useless fuckwits all.

What is this Australia Day tv advert and why doesn’t it have a message at the end say who is funding it?

Clive Palmer is out trying kill readers of The Australian today,

good

About time, frankly.

Can we pause and laugh at Peter Dutton’s continuing failure to “Stop the Boats”

What’s happened today?

Petter Dutton is shouting at a number of cruise ships anchored off New South Wales that won't leave. I think they only have crew on them but he wants them to go back to their home ports. I think he called the AFP about it.

Ah - I saw they'd been ordered to leave after three crew from the Ruby Plagueship were evacced to hospital from Botany Bay the other day, didn't know they were staying. Loving the idea of him standing on the outcrop where John Woo had Tom Cruise throw a motorcycle at a dude, screaming so hard at a boat that a single vein finally shows up on his smooth potato carapace.

All it took was for the world to end to provide free childcare.

Prime Minister uses a security-hacking scam app to read bible & deliver prayers for a group that asks "Coronavirus TS: God's punishment for sin, or the work of the demonic?," from his Parliamentary office

we are doomed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6v5Zx41y64

Been enjoying the responses to Alexander Downer's grotesquely false dilemma:

We either save avoidable deaths & destroy society OR accept avoidable deaths & save society. The moral dilemma of our time.

— Alexander Downer (@AlexanderDowner) April 7, 2020

might be the biggest ratio I've seen (at present, 86 / 1274)

This is the neuron bomb approach: kill the living things but spare the buildings and roads.

and the negatively geared investment properties paid off with franking credits

oh yeah, how could I have overlooked mentioning those?

we either save the liberal party and destroy society, or destroy the liberal party and save society

making cuntish remarks in his posh feeble voice is his main talent

who could forget "the things that batter"

Arts Minister votes against arts industry relief package designed by others, then uses COVID-19 as reasoning to unilaterally axe local content quotas on broadcasters, with press release on his personal website.

Between this and piling on the WHO by the usual thugs the government have done their best to remind us that they are a bunch of miserable vindictive pricks. Get ready for the evisceration of everything when we get out of lockdown.

votes against arts industry relief package designed by others

Ex-PM's book push-bootlegged by current PM in effort to further undercut the publishing industry.

such fuckwits

Have YOU ever read a book that wasn't quite right?

Important immigrant question:

Are NRL players bigger dickheads than AFL players or does the AFL have a better press officer?

the former, times a bazillion

A little from Column A, a little from Column B.

ah I see we have a New South Welshman in the room

live in NSW, grew up in Aussie Rules states

~the balanced take~

pfff I lived in NSW for 8 years and have family in Qld, but ARL players are phenomenal dickheads. AFL players are merely dickheads.

WTF is Albo up to?

Dude set out in the first weeks of his leadership that his strategy was going to be "advocate policies almost exactly as vicious as the LNP, and vote through all of theirs" in the hope of getting swinging voters in 2022. There's no room left for disappointment.

(I stopped placing him mid-ticket after he was not only pissweak on, but dismissive of voter concerns re:, closing concentration camps; doing any sort of investigation into the obvious rort of Westconnex blowing out from $10 billion to $45 billion while his constituents' homes could still be saved; or the Libs flat-out deleting every local council in his electorate in order to gerrymander & shut down protest to the former project. Still managed to summon some disappointment when he rolled out his Full Compliance mode last year, but by the time he was criticising the govt for not being cruel enough to refugees a week or three later, I'd run out.)

Australian politics is a venal shitshow without any ideology beyond economic rationalism (and look how well that served us when the pandemic hit). Aside from his obsession with Julian Assange I am glad to have Andrew Wilkie as my member.

Assange should have seen court in Sweden years ago, but unfortunately neither avoiding that, nor apparently being a colossal prick, mean all other prosecutions & imprisonments he’s been subject to are fair. It would muddle the message for Australian pollies now calling for him not to be a political prisoner as punishment for revealing war crimes, to frame it as “this probable half-rapist is being unreasonably held on unrelated, more globally serious grounds.”

Obv it would be entertaining if he were released and Ludlam or Wilkie immediately clamour for him to be extradited to Sweden to face trial.

Haven't voted Labor since they caved to shipping refugees to remote Pacific islands. Thankfully with our preferential voting system I can vote Green without worrying about splitting the non-fascist vote.

Oh I agree sic, there is violation of basic human rights there for sure, I'm just not sure why the member for Clark should take on the cause so assiduously.

Prominent Australian political prisoner overseas means the idea has traction he can lean on, possibly a strong interest in advancing freedom of speech / protection of the press within .au?

not like there’s going to be a press left to protect soon, but

Posted this before seeing that 150 entire newsrooms have been made redundant in the last 16 months.

yikes
still, the government tells us what we need to know.

[4pm on a Friday arvo, while the rest of the world is collapsing] ah yeah sorry about the robodebt

fuck this guy

all our prime minister has to say. this is a fucking joke #AboriginalLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/ljvgxqhv14

— 𝐜𝐚𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐫 ✿ (@PATTYURlS) June 1, 2020

oh no need to get angry like america nothing to be angry about down here at any time in the past 232 years

nothing to get angry about in the last week either. (please don't look at the very suspicious blowing up of 45000 year old aboriginal site)

no no no it's okay Rio Tinto have apologised, turns out they didn't realise that this was not good

(despite local indigenous groups telling them to definitely do not do this please)

Scomo saw a good meme, policy directions vindicated