In a widely-unread seminal book written by the great Australian Architect Robin Boyd, he nailed the Australian character as "cruel but kind." This was in 1960. Still applies today. Shameful.
Dear Treasurer @JEChalmers here’s hoping you can get those neg-gear/CGT changes through the Senate quick smart. The vested forces against you are formidable: Murdochs’ https://t.co/z7oq5Aa6Yp; Nine Entertainment; Domain; Gina; IPA; Advance; Pauline for PM; Abbott-Taylor-Canavan.
Pickering is in damage control. He didn’t have to talk to Avi; he didn’t have to say what he said. But he did. And he did it very deliberately. The backlash was more than he expected and he knows he has to try and fix it.
Too late Charlie. You’ve shown your true self.
Welcome to consequences in Australia.
I’d like to acknowledge the many experts at Sky News and on Twitter who tried to convince us all that booing on ANZAC day was totally acceptable.
I pay my respects to how much it must suck to be you today.
👏🏼
Tim Wilson claimed Labor was stealing taxes - straight after the LNP just voted against tax cuts🙄
Albanese "He never lets facts get in the way"
Wilson continues to embarrass himself with this rubbish.
#LyingNastyParty#qt
Rapist filth, Bruce Lehrman is suing more people.
The filthy fucking grub doesn’t have a job.
Where the fuck is the money coming from to not only sue two thirds of the country, but his travel, accommodation, food, transportation and every day living expenses?
The same person who’s allegedly bankrolling Ben Roberts Smith?
Tony Abbott's two most notable achievements were the destruction of two of the most important tax reforms of recent times - the carbon tax and the mining tax. His contribution to the future of this country has been totally destructive. He offers just regression and division.
Jane Hume skewered as she scrambles to avoid choosing between first-home buyers & investors.
PK doesn’t let it go, then when cornered, “that’s a ridiculous question.” 🙄 Yikes.
She’ll be now praying no one sees this pathetic display, esp people locked out of housing. #auspol
Clare O'Neil shreds the LNP dog-whistling about migrants using the 5% housing scheme.
"Temporary migrants are not eligible .. Permanent residents are not the cause of the challenges on housing .. (The LNP are) racing to the bottom against One Nation"
#qt
Pauline Hanson’s entire schtick is built on bullshit fed to her by whinging idiots. She can’t respond when asked a question that deviates from her demonstrably WRONG understanding of reality. #auspol
The LNP has gone quiet after the fuel shortages they repeatedly predicted didn't happen - because the government acted whilst the LNP refused to help and only wanted to scare people.
Chris Bowen "When the news is good, the opposition is not interested"
#DopeyDanTehan#qt
Australian politics is no longer a contest between two parties, and our polls can no longer be read as though it is. The addiction to interpreting polls via a two party system lens has created or should I say, triggered, a new generation of anti intellectuals, otherwise known as poll deniers.
It has now been widely reported across numerous polls, including our own RedBridge Accent poll published in the Australian Financial Review that One Nation leads on the primary vote. That does not mean Pauline Hanson can become PM.
Our country is transitioning into a multi party system and hence, the conventional ways of reading polls can be miss-leading and at times, lacking nuance. And nuance is the key word here because it matters a lot more in 2026.
In a multi party landscape, a national primary vote and a two party preferred figure tells you almost nothing about where seats fall. This is precisely what our recent MRP was designed to illuminate…..what the electorate actually looks like once you stop forcing it into a two horse race, with only two riders.
This is how to read polls.
Firstly, polls measure electoral sentiment now, today, this week. They are not a crystal ball, revealing an electoral result in 2028.
One Nation is dominating the regions. Its support concentrates among older, trades-qualified communities, people who built their working lives around skilled manual labour and critically among those now experiencing financial stress. It also polls strongly across a band of peri-urban suburbs, such as Camden, Melton, Ipswich, where that financial pressure is equally acute: mortgage-belt households, long commutes, the sense that the cost of simply breaking even at the end of the week, does require the shopping trolley to be at times, half full.
Labor, by contrast, holds up well in most urban settings, particularly in electorates with larger numbers of younger voters and more diverse communities. The picture here is almost a demographic mirror image: where One Nation draws support from older, financially squeezed, less diverse communities, Labor’s electoral coalition runs through the younger, the more educated, and the more multicultural parts of the country. None of this rules out some of those voters backing One Nation, but the numbers there are far smaller, and the broader trend matters here.
The real big insight this week is the huge existential problem facing the Coalition. Post Budget, they continue to lose support, across all published polls. Having already surrendered significant ground in a number of high-wealth electorates to the Teals, the kind of blue-ribbon seats that were once safe, it has suffered even steeper attrition across its regional base, where One Nation is now eating directly into its vote. It is being pulled apart from every direction at once: bled at the top by voters who have drifted to the centre, and hollowed out at the bottom by voters defecting to its right. And it is compounding the damage itself, pushing diverse communities further away with an anti-immigration narrative, closing the door firmly shut from diverse Australia. The Coalition cannot survive by alienating urban Australia while simultaneously losing vast stretches of regional Australia.
I am absolutely fed up with the relentless targeting of Grace Tame.
Let's be clear. There is a difference between fair criticism and a public pile-on. What we keep seeing directed at Grace is not constructive debate. It is constant scrutiny, personal attacks, outrage cycles and a level of judgment that seems reserved for women who dare to speak too loudly, too honestly or too unapologetically.
Grace Tame survived child sexual abuse. She helped change laws. She gave a voice to countless survivors. She has spent years doing work that most people would never have the courage to do.
Yet the attacks never seem to stop.
A few weeks ago it was the Prime Minister taking aim at her. Now it's Charlie Pickering. Before that, countless commentators, columnists and social media critics. Different names, same pattern.
And frankly, it disgusts me.
No, women in public life should not be immune from criticism. Nobody is. But there is a world of difference between criticism and the kind of sustained public hounding that seeks to diminish, discredit and exhaust someone.
As someone who has experienced public judgment and media attacks, I know how destructive these campaigns can be. They reduce human beings to caricatures. They erase context. They encourage outrage while ignoring the very real emotional toll on the person at the centre of it.
What troubles me most is that women who survive violence are so often expected to be perfect. The moment they become angry, outspoken, political, imperfect or inconvenient, they are treated as fair game.
Grace Tame has contributed more to the conversation about sexual abuse and survivor advocacy in this country than most of her critics ever will.
Maybe it's time some of the men lining up to take shots at her stopped and asked themselves a simple question:
Why are they spending so much energy attacking a survivor instead of supporting the change she helped create?
Enough. #gracetame #charliepickering