@naftalibennett Nice try.
Ben Gvir perfectly represents the genocidal intent of Israel, as do you. There's no difference between you.
Israelis are the terrorists, Hezbollah are a resistance organisation that came into being because of past Israeli aggression
The Sanewashing of Hanson Is at Its Peak.
This is how Trump came to power: platform the lies, skip the follow-up, let the headlines call it “proving her critics wrong.”
We are all watching it happen in real time.
At the National Press Club, Pauline Hanson said the following. Not one claim was challenged by the so called journalists in attendance and she continues to be unchallenged on the facts in every interview she sits.
-1. Unlike the Prime Minister, I welcome scrutiny.” Hypocritical. In the same speech she announced she refuses ABC interviews, will scrap the SBS, & will make the ABC subscription-only. The event allowed 2 hours; standard format gives 25–30 mins for the address. She spoke for 50-halving the time left for questions. When Guardian journalist Sarah Martin used that remaining time to ask about her daughter's $150,000 taxpayer-funded advisor role, Hanson called her “a trashy journalist” and banned her from all future press conferences.
• “Babies are aborted the day before birth.” Fabricated. Late-term abortion is highly restricted, requires medical approval, and occurs only in genuine medical emergencies.
• “Interest rates are heading towards 10%.” False. RBA cash rate: 4.35%. Forecast to fall, not rise.
• “There’s no gender pay gap — just women taking time off.” False. WGEA confirms the gap exists at equal hours, equal roles, regardless of career breaks.
• “$30B a year on Indigenous programs.” False. Only 18% (~$5.6B) is Indigenous-specific. The rest is the Indigenous share of mainstream services every Australian uses.
• Transgender people were compared to “militant Islam.” False and dangerous. ABS data: transgender and gender-diverse Australians make up 1% of the pop’n. There’s no body of research showing transgender ppl commit crime at elevated rates-in fact it shows transgender people are dramatically more likely to be victims of violence— assault, sexual violence, and homicide rates against trans people are well above general population rates in most studies (US, UK, and Aust data all show this pattern)
• “23% of Australians can’t speak English.” False. That 23% speak another language at home — most are bilingual. Limited English proficiency: just 3.2%.
• “The CEFC has had $200 billion.” False by a factor of six. Actual legislated capacity: $33 billion.
• “I care about the homeless and hungry.” Hypocritical. In the same speech, she backed cuts to Indigenous-specific funding — despite Aboriginal homelessness running up to 10 times higher than the non-Indigenous rate.
• $90 billion in cuts, no plan. ~$35 billion of it remains unaccounted for. No modelling.
• “I support worker rights.” False. Voted against minimum wage increases, penalty rates, criminalising wage theft, casual conversion rights, same job same pay, and the right to disconnect. Took a $100,000 pay rise while voting against a tax break for low-paid workers
• Called Australian workers “lazy.” She has attended just 12% of Senate estimates since 2016 & 53% of parliamentary votes. Paid over $200k a year
• Labor have let immigration get out of control.” False. Net overseas migration has fallen every year since the post-COVID peak in 2022-23 — 538,000 → 446,000 → 306,000 in 2024-25. She also recycled a 26-year-old ABS pop’n projection as a fresh “next 50 years” forecast
Said: This beautiful country belongs to all Australians born here and those who have joined us”- in her opening line; then spent the next 50 minutes demanding a monocultural society, comparing transgender Australians to militant Islam, inflating migration and language figures, denying the gender pay gap, and repeating the debunked $30 billion Indigenous funding myth. Welcomed everyone in the first sentence. Spent the rest of the speech defining most of them out — and offered no plan to fix anything she raised, only $90 billion in cuts.
Not one follow-up question. No source data on a single figure in the entire speech. This is what unchallenged looks like.
/2 sources
I’ve had a massive win in SA’s Court of Appeal that’ll open up Govts to greater scrutiny all around the country💪.
Transparency battles are rarely fought on an even playing field; they’re uphill all the way, but the view from the top is worth it. #auspol https://t.co/z3KglIKslS
🇺🇳 A UN hearing erupted into a public shouting match after Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, Danny Danon, demanded the resignation of senior UN official Pramila Patten over a report that blacklisted Israel for conflict-related sexual violence.
When another UN official, Vanessa Frazier, objected and said the findings were based on “verified evidence,” Danon interrupted her, saying: “You will be quiet now.”
The clash comes after almost 1,000 days of Israel blocking independent Red Cross visits to ~10,000 Palestinian detainees and amid mounting scrutiny from UN investigators and human rights groups over systematic sexual violence and torture, among other abuses, carried out by Israeli security forces against Palestinian detainees and children.
Watch the clip ⬇️
Israeli terrorist forces deliberately targeted and murdered Mona Khalil, a renowned conservationist who saved sea turtles near Tyre
Israel is poisoning farmland, destroying villages and killing everyone connected to the land of southern Lebanon
It is called ethnic cleansing
How could Israel be both a 'democracy' and a 'Jewish state'?
Article: "Recognising a 'Jewish state' in Israel – a state which calls Jerusalem its 'eternal, undivided capital' – means completely ignoring the fact that Jerusalem is as holy to 2.2 billion Christians and 1.6 billion Muslims, as it is to 15-20 million Jews worldwide.
"In other words, this would be to privilege Judaism above the religions of Christianity and Islam, whose adherents together comprise 55 per cent of the world’s population."
https://t.co/3NluumPOPL
Kratom is a plant from Asia that hits the same brain receptors as opioids. People take it for energy or pain. It can be addictive and it can kill.
People buy it at gas stations, with no age check and no honest label.
Markwayne Mullin owns up to a million dollars in a kratom company. Then he stood at an FDA podium and pushed rules to crush that company’s rivals. He never sold the stock.
The company was founded by a felon who stole $10 million and did prison time. His kratom shots are tied to liver damage, seizures, and death. The stuff showed up in 5,200 overdose deaths in five years. A 27 year old grad student took it for six weeks and died. His mother says a real ban would have saved him.
You cannot make this up. The same company paid a Trump connected lobbyist $600,000.
Then the payoff. The Justice Department dropped its lawsuit. The FDA scrubbed the warnings off its website. RFK Jr. called Ohio’s governor to kill a state ban. And the company wired a million dollars to a PAC tied to Kennedy.
This is the swamp they swore to drain. It is worse than ever before.
https://t.co/TxPRrLc7Ta
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.
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Put up (the evidence) or shut up Ambassador.
"When [Israeli Ambassador] Newman says the survivors are lying, he is saying the Foreign Minister of Australia is lying."
@Lochinvar001 on "Grotesque" victim blaming by AJA, Hillel Newman
#auspol
https://t.co/tFpBdZLeGC
@thebigjohnnyd Here's the Murdoch Budget Statement: Newscorp's corporate income tax contribution to Australia's Budget over the past ten years .. drumroll .. zero