Blagoya

If it’s Right, it’s wrong. @blagoya.bsky.social blagoya on threads,

[politic@l spinner @Justabogan]

🤣👇🤗😁☺️😂😂😂 #auspol

[Aaron Smith @aaronsmith]

Thank you, Dave. I appreciate you reaching out to ask what you got wrong.

The clip we’re discussing is less than 90 seconds long. What I’m about to do demonstrates Brandolini's Law: where the amount of energy required to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude greater than that required to produce it. Or, in this case, it takes around 600 words to correct 90 seconds of your economic fan fiction.

1⃣ Between 0 and 30 seconds

You begin by confusing government debt with the Future Fund and appear to suggest that the Future Fund can't exist along side Govt debt.

They’re different things. One can exist without the other, and in Australia they do.

Australia's Future Fund was established in 2006 with an initial govt investment of about $60B. Its first annual report, in 2008, showed assets of around $64 billion - not the $100B you suggested.

Then, at around 27 seconds, you talk about the Future Fund as though it ceased to exist (you used the word 'had' as in past tense).

It still very much exists Dave. In fact, it's grown every single year since it was created. Today it's worth around $270 billion, or over $330 billion once the other funds under management are included (eg Medical Research / Housing Australia / Drought).

So before we're even 30 seconds into the clip you've managed to confuse government debt, the Future Fund, its size, and whether it still exists.

That’s a lot of economic history to get wrong in under 30 seconds.

2⃣ Around 32 seconds

You then claim Kevin Rudd used the Future Fund to "flush money through the economy".

Again, that’s simply false. The Future Fund wasn't used to fund the stimulus. It wasn't used to build school halls. It wasn’t used for any of the things you’re describing. In your defence, you do briefly flirt with the possibility that you don’t actually know what you’re talking about. Sadly, it was a very short-lived relationship.

The GFC stimulus was funded through government borrowing.

For context, construction approvals were collapsing, more than a million Australians worked in construction, and the objective was to stop unemployment exploding during the worst global financial crisis in generations.

You're welcome to argue that was the wrong policy (but you didn't). You’re not entitled to rewrite where the money came from.

3⃣ At about 44 seconds

You say, "I might be wrong".

I concede you were correct during this part of the video.

4⃣ From 44 seconds onwards

You make a series of broad claims about the GFC response.

Yes, government debt increased. That's true.

What you omit is that Australia's stimulus largely went directly to households rather than primarily rescuing financial institutions, as happened in many other countries.

The aim was simple: keep people spending, businesses operating and Australians employed while global demand collapsed. It's known as counter-cyclical fiscal policy.

Whether you agree with it politically is your business.

The specific outcome for Australia isn't contested though - Australia was one of only two economies in the OECD to avoid recession during the Global Financial Crisis. There's no reality where that wasn’t a comparatively impressive outcome.

The money didn’t need to "trickle down". The entire point was that it started at the bottom.

5⃣ Government debt

Throughout the clip (and in life generally) you repeatedly return to the theme Labor is responsible for Australia’s debt (which btw is comparatively low).

Here are the actual numbers of net debt added by each Govt since 2007.

> Rudd/Gillard: about $190 billion over six years.
> Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison: about $366 billion over nine years, around two-thirds of which pre-dated COVID.
> Albanese: about $75 billion over four years.

Those figures don’t support the story you've been telling people. And that’s really the issue.

This isn't about getting one date wrong or misremembering one statistic. Nearly every claim in your 90-second clip turns out to be either wrong or misleading.

If you're going to publicly lecture Australians about economic history, the bare minimum expectation is that you’ve first acquainted yourself with it.

Because once the errors have been pointed out, as they have been to you multiple times, every repetition stops looking like an accident and starts looking like a strategy.

Given your very public coffee with Angus Taylor last week, perhaps people are entitled to ask what that strategy might be.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@JayJay91341991 Cunt.

[Blue Georgia @BlueGeorgia]

Shoutout to the ABSOLUTE LEGEND who relentlessly mocked Trump at his rally in Georgia yesterday. Here are some highlights.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@SupportPauline Running the country is a full time job.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@JayJay91341991 SIT DOWN!

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@DHughesy @Peter_Fitz Fix the hole by digger an even deeper one? Get a brain cell mate.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

Dropping the kids off at the pool.

Sending a letter to the PM.

Letting Dave Hughes speak his mind.

[stranger @strangerous10]

David Pocock pauses, overcome with emotion, while detailing UN’s horrific findings against Israel
“IDF has now killed 20,000 Palestinian children”
“…deliberately shot at children’s limbs…as a twisted game of target practice”😔
Barbaric & sickening. This is our ally?

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@DHughesy Still doing the “Hughesy loses it” bit?

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@karlstefanovic @elonmusk You are free to speak, but what you say isn’t free from consequences.

[Ronni🧂Salt-WhoWroteGunnawahYeahThatOne @RonniSalt]

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.

.

[MAGA Cult Slayer @MAGACult2]

Every American should be forced to watch this, knowing we did it. Our leaders aren’t even man enough to.admit it.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@AngusTaylorMP You had 11 years. What did you do?

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@AngusTaylorMP We’re on a road to nowhere…

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

@strangerous10 Definitely giving I’ve got nothing to hide vibes.

[Blagoya @bkalincev]

Why can’t Rachel move to Steve? #MAFSAU