Thanks to Women's Agenda for publishing my article today which highlights how all of us who follow #auspol are worried about the state of our democracy & shares some suggestions on what we can do about it
Have a read & please share on FB with friends > https://t.co/ezKFb02q1s
@RonniSalt@Moo5Sa There are still voices groups active in many electorates - we are holding this engagement event in Botany (Kingsford Smith) next Thursday. Aim is to keep having conversations, listening and then focusing on solutions…no funding though (pure grassroots)
https://t.co/Ebx9aQHzov
@pritamghosh60@PressClubAust There's a lot of independent media in Australia - it's a very healthy industry
This has a great daily newsletter that collates the daily headlines of the indies
https://t.co/Zmvc3rmhJA
So, let's recap, shall we?
This week the @PressClubAust managed to:
* cancel at the last minute, the questions and subsequent presence of renowned journalist Margo Kingston, who’d travelled over 2 days to Canberra to ask her question of Pauline Hanson – and yes, they were questions initially requested and organised by the Press Club itself 9 days ago.
* cancel the press gallery membership of long-term journalist, Greg Jericho, allegedly because he works for the @TheAusInstitute. Although Greg has been employed by the Aust Institute for 4 years, his membership cancellation only came yesterday after he publicly called out the Canberra press gallery - which is of course a highly fortuitous coincidence and not at all connected to his criticism.
* somehow allowed a person or persons unknown to enter the Press Club premises and put up a 3 metre wide electronic banner, without anybody in the Press Club noticing them doing it. How several people enter a private club carrying something that large, then proceed to wire it up on an open stage and nobody at the premises noticed in any way, is yet another display of the NPC’s staggering incompetence.
* release an unnecessarily detailed, high-school level statement about said banner incident, a statement that reeks of defensiveness and hysteria, while also prejudicially naming an alleged culprit and arguably sinking to the bottom of the barrel in terms of the journalistic standards it supposedly represents. Read it below and remind yourself that people who work with words for a living wrote that.
* allowed the speaker, Pauline Hanson, to defame one of their own - a journalist from the Guardian who dared to ask a hard-hitting question - by calling her "trash". This was only weeks after calling the same journalist a "nasty bitch". Mirroring, Trump’s “Quiet piggy” incident, the journalist's alleged colleagues all sat mute, as did the moderator, Tom Connell from Sky News during the abuse. No rebuke, no blow-back, no support for their fellow journalist, standing alone under Hanson's hissing vitriol. Just pusillanimous silence.
The National Press Club outdid their already dubious reputation this week, spraying themselves in a spectacular shower of self-inflicted shit – wall to wall, dripping effluent.
Australians currently suffer some of the most timid, captured political journalism in the western world, and if the actions of the #NPC this week are the metric, then we can all see why.
What a national and international embarrassment of an organisation meant to serve as a vital democratic institution and a cultural conscience – and one that has offered us neither.
.
Ahead of Pauline Hanson taking the microphone at the National Press Club, Australians should know this
Journalist Margo Kingston was organised a few weeks back to ask the first Q - then was phoned yesterday and told she could no longer ask any Qs because they "had no time left"
Former ADF chief: " If AUKUS is the right answer for Australia, it will withstand examination. If it cannot withstand examination, that is something Australians need to know now – not in 2035" https://t.co/DRiZZYocxJ
@karlstefanovic John Howard introduced the CGT discount in 1999.
The decade before, house prices tracked income.
After, they decoupled - Howard used the tax system to make investors richer at the expense of first home buyers.
A simple correlation that even Karl Stefanovic could understand.
This is a distressing cost-benefit analysis of @NACCgovau after three years under Paul Brereton’s commissionership. One conviction/no public hearings. It reflects adversely on PM @AlboMP and his cynical deal with Peter Dutton to constrain NACC and its investigative impacts. 👇
A cartoon by Cathy Wilcox — depicting Australian media and political figures marching to the beat of Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s drum — has breached the Australian Press Council’s standards.
Here are four others that did not.
Read: https://t.co/y5GqJ8LGUN
Huge win on lobbying reform today with reports the govt will establish a public register for sponsored pass holders replicating the voluntary register I established, limit access to the building & publish more information about who has access.
We still need more reform to ensure ALL lobbyists (not just 3rd party lobbyists) are properly regulated by a body with teeth, and to shut the revolving door between government and industries.
https://t.co/oeNJmEFgrt
OMFG. Try getting through Ronni Salt's latest NACC exposé without your whole body filling with rage.
How did a body built to expose corruption end up so thoroughly captured by the people running it?
A Liberal person on #afternoonbriefing just said ‘Angus Taylor has one of the most astute economic minds in Parliament’ - and I can’t stop laughing 🤣🤣🤣 #auspol
How the fuck do we live in a country where Antoinette Lattouf was fired merely for repeating credible peer-reviewed research but Charlie Pickering gets off scot-free for happily participating in an interview with a known neo-Nazi wife-basher?
#NewsCorpse
My good mate @aaronsmith wrote this stunning piece about his week as a temp political staffer in Canberra. 👇🏽
Australians become inured to reading about Canberra and federal politics through the mainstream lens, but Aaron walks us through it warts and all.
Apart from his illuminating insights, I think it's one of the most beautiful pieces of political writing, in fact, beautiful pieces of writing, that I have ever read - seriously.
Aaron crafts a tale of a tumultuous week in Australian politics, a tale of Parliament House and its operatives and inhabitants, like only a master storyteller can.
Congratulations Aaron, this piece will go into my very special book of writing that I will read again and again. I hope everybody does. We need to savour and cherish voices like yours, not just now, but forever.
https://t.co/7qUsGBvpG7
Now that Gaza lies in ruins—shattered, like a beloved face after a long brutality—Israel moves with a terrible confidence to the next act: The act of leaving every soul there not merely wounded, but permanently disabled. Injured, sick, hungry, homeless, without work, without hope. This is not war’s collateral damage. This is design.
As my friend Gideon Levy writes—and he knows, he knows—this is the prelude to expulsion. Think of it: a society without teachers, without doctors, without social workers, without engineers, without clerks. That is not a society. That is a holding pen. A slow erasure. And when nothing functions—no school, no hospital, no office, no heart—then it becomes ‘easy,’ they tell themselves, to scatter the people to the four corners of the earth. Like seeds from a broken pod, except no soil will take them.
We must name this. Not with rage alone, though rage is honest. But with the cold, clear tears of recognition: they are making life impossible so that departure becomes the only ‘choice.’ And the world watches, adjusts its spectacles, and calls for restraint. Restraint! There is no restraint in a slow drowning.
Jillian Segal can’t explain any services provided by co of ScoMo’s fmr sec Yaron Finkelstein who she contracted without tender. Says it’s an “advisory contract”
Pocock “$200k for ad-hoc advice?"
Segal “I didn’t say that"
Then what’s the $200k for?
Peak integrity.🙄 #auspol
This!
‘There's this recognition that on so many of these big challenges we are facing, it's not necessarily left versus right, it's actually vested interests and their stranglehold on the major parties versus the Australian people." #auspol#insiders https://t.co/PyG71BY3aA