Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8939915/opinion-what-peter-dutton-got-right-about-gas/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">canberratimes.com.au/story/893</span><span class="invisible">9915/opinion-what-peter-dutton-got-right-about-gas/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>It's not often I agree with Peter Dutton, but I can admit when he's right and he's right about two things.</p><p>Australia doesn't have a gas shortage, Australia has a gas export problem; and putting a levy on gas exports will help fix the problem.</p><p>Unfortunately, Dutton's wrong on almost everything else.</p><p>Gas is driving up the cost of living. After Australia started exporting gas, wholesale gas prices in Australia tripled.</p><p>You now pay global prices for Australian gas. For over a decade the gas industry has been pushing the lie that Australia has a gas shortage, but the problem is we export around 80 per cent of our gas.</p><p>No matter what crap the gas industry tries to feed you - Dutton has correctly identified Australia has a gas export problem.</p><p>For the first time in over a decade, all sides of politics in Australia agree that we're exporting too much gas, including the Labor government, the Liberals and Nationals, the Greens and most of the independents who sit on the crossbench.</p><p>It's a remarkable political consensus. Politicians now have the opportunity, in the middle of a cost-of-living election, to finally put a stop Australians getting ripped off by the gas industry. It would be a win for the economy, a win for your back pocket and a vote winner for politicians.</p><p>To fix Australia's gas export problem, the Coalition is proposing to tax gas exports to ensure our gas flows first to Australian businesses and households.</p><p>This, too, is a huge shift in Australian politics. For too long, governments have let multinational gas export companies get away with windfall profits exporting our gas, while paying no company tax and no royalties, and charging Australians a fortune for gas to boot.</p><p>There is plenty of surplus gas that isn't under long-term contract. Basically, if gas companies choose to supply the lucrative global spot market instead of Australian consumers, Dutton will put a levy on the exports.</p><p>Unlike Donald Trump's tariffs, which are paid for by American consumers domestically, Dutton's proposed tax on Australian gas exports will be paid by the multinational gas companies who have been ripping off Australians for years.</p><p>Gas companies will pass that cost onto other countries who import Australian gas on the spot market.</p><p>Putting a tax on gas exports is an easy way to ensure that more of Australia's gas flows to Australians at cheaper prices.</p><p>Gas companies will whinge that this will dry up investment.</p><p>Firstly, good.</p><p>The United Nations, the International Energy Agency and the world's scientists are all clear, there is no room for new gas fields on a warming planet.</p><p>Secondly, this is plain rubbish. The gas is here underneath Australia. Gas companies can't just move it overseas along with their headquarters. Where would they go? To Norway or Qatar, where taxes and royalties are way higher?</p><p>The gas industry impoverishes Australia when, at the very least, it should be making us richer.</p><p>Australia collects a pathetic $1 billion or so a year from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. In comparison, Qatar collects around $50 billion a year and Norway around $20 billion.</p><p>Multinational companies are making ridiculous profits exporting Australia's gas while paying diddly squat in taxes and royalties.</p><p>Young Australians pay more in HECS repayments than the gas industry pays in the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax. Zero royalties are paid on over half of the gas exported from Australia.</p><p>Australia Institute research shows that over the last four years, multinational gas export companies made $170 billion - that's billion with a B - exporting Australian gas while paying zero royalties. </p><p>Gas companies $170 billion; Australia $0. It's highway robbery. Many gas export companies pay no company tax either. When Australian teachers and nurses are paying more tax than the entire gas export industry, something is seriously wrong.</p><p>As two-time Nobel prize-winning economist Professor Joseph Stiglitz says "As an economist, that makes absolutely no sense. The result of this is that is Australia as a whole is becoming a poorer country."</p><p>Do you have any idea what Australia could do with an extra $20 billion a year?</p><p>According to the Parliamentary Budget Office, Australia could put dental into Medicare and we'd still have $6 billion a year in spare change. If we made as much additional gas revenue as Qatar, there is basically no problem Australia couldn't fix if we chose to.</p><p>The Coalition also says it will also speed up the approval of new gas projects.</p><p>To be clear, this would be disastrous for the climate, the environment, farmers, and Australia's cultural heritage. These new approvals will only increase gas exports, further exacerbating gas price problems.</p><p>Peter Dutton won't admit it, but renewable energy is far cheaper than gas, even with the cost of firming and additional transmission. It is far cheaper to heat houses, provide hot water and cook with efficient electrical appliances than with gas.</p><p>Dutton's gas export levy is probably the most popular policy the Coalition has proposed this election. Attacking working-from-home arrangements went down like a fart in a lift, especially with women. </p><p>His nuclear power plan, always a distraction, has disappeared without a trace. Sacking 41,000 public servants in Canberra has been clocked as more cruel than efficient and few believe it won't impact on front-line services.</p><p>And all the Coalition's policies to make housing more affordable will only push up the price of housing, benefiting existing homeowners and no one else.</p><p>In the lead-up to the election, it looked like Dutton would ride the wave of Trump-led populist politics to victory. Around the world incumbent governments fell election after election and the polls had the Coalition drawing ahead of Labor.</p><p>But now that Australians have seen firsthand the carnage of Trump's policies unleashed in real time, Dutton's Trump-like policies have turned from populist to perilous. But a levy on gas exports? Dutton's on a winner.</p><ul><li> Ebony Bennett is deputy director for The Australia Institute and a former Greens media advisor and a regular columnist for The Canberra Times</li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
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Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/04/07/peter-dutton-policy-backflip-2025-federal-election-liberals-coalition-party/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">crikey.com.au/2025/04/07/peter</span><span class="invisible">-dutton-policy-backflip-2025-federal-election-liberals-coalition-party/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>The opposition leader has begun his election campaign in shambolic fashion. He urgently needs to fix it — otherwise, we might be doomed to a Labor majority. </p><p>It started with the Roy Morgan weekly federal poll in February. After the Coalition had held a narrow lead over Labor on a two-party-preferred basis at the end of last year, the government suddenly regained a small lead.</p><p>It looked counterintuitive: Peter Dutton had all the momentum, Anthony Albanese looked powerless to respond, and the return of Donald Trump seemed to suggest the wind at the backs of right-wing strongman-style leaders — exactly Dutton’s image.</p><p>A week later, Morgan flipped back to a narrow Coalition lead, 50.5-49.5, and it seemed the boost for Labor might have just been a one-off because of the Reserve Bank’s rate cut.</p><p>But then Labor regained its lead. And in mid-March, Morgan produced a shocker: 54.5-45.5 with Labor leading. A rogue poll, surely? But the result was 53-47 a week after that, a result that held through to the end of March. We’ll know shortly what last week’s poll was, but meanwhile, every other poll has flipped in Labor’s favour as well.</p><p>Dutton’s repeated blunders reinforced the mood that Labor was making a comeback. In particular, his early enthusiasm for Trump’s return and his efforts to ape The Mad King became politically toxic as it became clear what a disaster the US president was for the American economy and what a threat he was to Australia. Then came the campaign proper: Albanese was fast out of the blocks, whereas Dutton looked like he was surprised to find himself in a political shooting war.</p><p>The transformation of Dutton’s political prospects has been one of the fastest ever. From looking like the next prime minister in January, he’s now fighting to prop up a collapsing campaign. The prospect of an outright victory for the Coalition now looks remote, and a Labor majority is back on the cards — only the appalling Victorian government is a major impediment to victory. Already there’s talk of Andrew Hastie replacing Dutton post-election.</p><p>John Hewson underwent a larger but longer decline before the 1993 election. At one stage, Hewson’s opposition held a double-digit lead over the Keating government. By the election campaign, the lead had narrowed, and then Keating got to work dismantling Hewson. But we still went into election night expecting a Coalition victory.</p><p>Victorian Liberal luminary Michael Kroger made an acute observation about Labor’s campaign in the wash-up from “the sweetest victory of all”: Labor had started poorly, but then it “hit the panic button — and it was the right button”.</p><p>Dutton is currently hitting the panic button — time will tell if it’s the right one. The increasingly malodorous policy to force public servants to stop working from home has been abandoned, with apologies from Dutton. The commitment to sack tens of thousands of public servants has been walked back to a hiring freeze and natural attrition, which is what some of us predicted would always be the outcome. That wrecks Dutton’s planned savings. When Tony Abbott imposed a hiring freeze on the APS, it only yielded a net fall of 15,000 over two years — and a long-term rise in reliance on more expensive consultants.</p><p>The dearth of proper costings and detail around that plan, or the gas reservation policy, or even the Policy That Dare Not Speak Its Name, nuclear power, is a characteristic of this opposition — as is a lack of any policies at all. “You haven’t seen anything yet,” Dutton said last week by way of apology to his colleagues, inadvertently putting his finger on a key problem. The opposition leader’s advice to colleagues to wait until they get into the campaign is problematic given Easter, Anzac Day and school holidays are looming. And pre-poll voting — despite the efforts of the political parties to curtail it — starts in a fortnight.</p><p>What’s gone wrong for Dutton? First, Trump has gone from talisman to toxic in a matter of weeks, and all the more so after last week’s declaration of war on the global economy — and, indirectly, on every Australian’s superannuation account given the colossal damage to stock markets.</p><p>Second, under Dutton, the Coalition has been lazy on policy. The leader’s office can’t do all the work, but the opposition leader has failed to make sure shadow ministers have consulted on, developed and properly costed detailed policies. It reflects that this is the weakest frontbench the Coalition has taken to an election since 1990, when Peter Shack admitted at the election he didn’t have a health policy. (No wonder Hastie is being mentioned in dispatches, given the NSW and Victorian Liberals have failed to produce any talented frontbenchers.) This is the least prepared opposition we’ve seen for some time.</p><p>The final reason is the persistent structural tension that has existed right through Dutton’s time as leader: the dissonance between his preferred policies and Liberal Party traditions. We’ve never seen the Liberals take a big-budget expansion in the role of government to an election, or oppose tax cuts, or publicly feud over whether to break up major Australian companies. The business press hates Dutton’s unwillingness to reform tax. Their business supporters are ropeable that he refuses to commit to reverse Labor’s industrial relations changes; the gas lobby thinks the gas reservation policy and commitment to make gas a “critical mineral” (sic) stink. Even Gina Rinehart, who had Dutton at her beck and call for most of the past three years, is stroppy.</p><p>In contrast, Labor is doing what Labor does — promise lots of spending on health and pumping money into the economy. So far, it’s working. If Dutton doesn’t push the right panic button, the result might be another Labor majority — an outcome that would be disastrous for Australia, given the urgent need for the major parties to be confined to minority status to force them to embrace better policies.</p><ul><li>Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics.</li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>Sydney Morning Herald - Latest News</p><blockquote><p>Dutton pledges early access to super for first home buyers</p></blockquote><p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/dutton-pledges-early-access-to-super-for-first-home-buyers-20250406-p5lpku.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">smh.com.au/national/dutton-ple</span><span class="invisible">dges-early-access-to-super-for-first-home-buyers-20250406-p5lpku.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed</span></a></p><p>This perverse incompetent moron simply does not get it. Such a wollybutt. </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/wakey-wakey-dutton-looks-shaky-as-his-aptitude-is-put-to-the-ultimate-test-20250401-p5lobz.html" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">smh.com.au/politics/federal/wa</span><span class="invisible">key-wakey-dutton-looks-shaky-as-his-aptitude-is-put-to-the-ultimate-test-20250401-p5lobz.html</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>Last year, some people felt comfortable predicting the winner of the 2025 election campaign was more likely to be Peter Dutton.</p><p>Not because he had shown himself to be a formidable campaigner outside his electorate (he hasn’t) or because of his reputation as a policy wonk (he isn’t), but because he had resuscitated the Coalition, mainly by capitalising on Anthony Albanese’s many bloopers and strategic errors.</p><p>This year has a very different vibe. Dutton has had a shaky start. He has sounded flat, looked flat-footed and seemed woefully unprepared for a fight he knew was coming on territory he should have already staked out. Meanwhile, Albanese has performed better and Labor has prepared better for the contest.</p><p>This is Dutton’s first federal election campaign, possibly the first time in his political life that he will face sustained national scrutiny for weeks. It will be a supreme test of his stamina and reflexes.</p><p>That could be a problem for someone who avoids getting bogged down in details of costings or numbers and has habitually disappeared from the media cycle for days, usually when there were adverse stories around. Do that in a campaign and you are done for.</p><p>Dutton has made a lot of mistakes – both of commission and omission – since the campaign unofficially began in early January, and the mistakes are beginning to catch up with him. He should have released policies sooner to address the cost of living. He needs to stop jumping into culture wars or parading on obsessions, the latest being the “indoctrination” of schoolkids, but refusing to say how or where that is happening. Feel free to make a wild stab.</p><p>His budget reply speech was dull. He sounded nervous. He had a few word slips. Nothing life-threatening (Albanese still does it) unless his confidence takes a hit, and he spirals, or he is panicked by the polls into other missteps.</p><p>Dutton boasts of his wide experience, particularly that he helped clean up Labor’s economic mess as assistant treasurer to Peter Costello.</p><p>Yes, he was. For 12 months in the final year of the Howard government – when all the heavy lifting on tax reform and budget repair had been done. It was also the year that Costello pushed John Howard to go for a massive $34 billion tax cut package – quickly matched by Kevin Rudd. Costello would rather jump off a tall building than promise to repeal income tax cuts as Dutton did after Jim Chalmers ambushed him, threaten insurance companies with divestiture, or contemplate building, owning and operating nuclear power plants.</p><p>Labor’s unpretentious tax cuts were designed weeks ago by Albanese and his economics team in preparation for an expected April 12 election. They were meant as a tool to remind voters of other measures Labor had implemented or announced to ease cost-of-living pressures – last year’s stage 3 tax cuts, billions for bulk-billing incentives, energy subsidies, cheaper medicines, HECS relief and so on.</p><p>The bonus was that they turned into a wedge. After adopting all of Labor’s health measures – much safer than devising his own – Dutton was clearly overcome by too much “me too-ism”. It was a bad call.</p><p>Then, there was the half-baked gas reservation idea. It provided a good headline – Australian gas for Australians – however, it was missing content, and it now threatens to crumble under expert examination. Just like the unaffordable, undeliverable nuclear policy was meant to mask continuing Coalition conflict on net zero emissions, gas reservation smelled as if it was devised to divert attention from nuclear.</p><p>Dutton says details on gas and almost everything else will come “later”. Responding to muttering from colleagues about his poor campaign, which some senior Liberal MPs say is partly factional and partly post-election leadership positioning, Dutton was dismissive. “Well, I don’t think you’ve seen anything yet.” (Exactly!)</p><p>“I think wait until we get into this campaign, and you see more of what we’ve got to offer.”</p><p>As if the election is months rather than days away. Wakey, wakey. Voting begins in 19 days.</p><p>Dutton has also whinged that Albanese has waged a sledge-a-thon against him. He sounds like the school bully complaining to the teacher that one of the kids he picked on has punched him in the nose. Anyway, he better toughen up because Labor will not stop. Its mission, especially in Victoria, where Labor stinks, is to make him unacceptable. Labor could maintain the status quo in every other state, then lose the election in a state once seen as a stronghold.</p><p>There is still time for Dutton to come good, and certainly Labor is not underestimating that possibility. Nor is there absolute confidence inside Labor’s ranks the prime minister will not stumble or succumb to hubris.</p><p>The winner this year was always going to be decided by the campaign. It will be the one whose policies best address the key concerns of Australians, the one who makes the least mistakes, who shows the best character and temperament to be prime minister, who reacts faster and smarter, or better anticipates the forces outside his control that can derail or undermine messages.</p><p>Say, like Donald Trump. Or Kyle and Jackie O.</p><p>Albanese and Dutton especially – who has gushed over Trump and continues to ape his policies – have nothing to lose if they go in hard against him. How will Trump punish us? By scrapping AUKUS? Please. Make our day.</p><p>Malcolm Turnbull is right. No slumping to our knees, no sucking up. Allowing Trump to think it’s OK to treat Australia as an enemy rather than as a friend is not on.</p><p>Nor is it OK for a prime ministerial aspirant from Queensland to spit on the capital of the nation he wants to lead while expressing his preference to live in a harbourside mansion in Sydney.</p><ul><li>Niki Savva is a regular columnist and author of The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers and Bulldozed, the trilogy chronicling nine years of Coalition rule.</li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-30/voung-voters-trump-gen-z-millenials-albanese-dutton/105002998" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">abc.net.au/news/2025-03-30/vou</span><span class="invisible">ng-voters-trump-gen-z-millenials-albanese-dutton/105002998</span></a></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://mastodon.social/@rosco385" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>rosco385</span></a></span> Yeah, still ditto at 18:30:</p><pre><code>This website is under heavy load (queue full)<br><br>We're sorry, too many people are accessing this website at the same time. We're working on this problem. Please try again later.<br></code></pre><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/OzElection2025" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>OzElection2025</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>Seriously contemplating, this time, not even bothering to apply to <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AEC" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AEC</span></a> for my <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/PostalVote" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PostalVote</span></a>, & just taking the eventual fine. Not happy about this, but then again, not happy about much of anything. </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/24/2025-federal-budget-politicians-journalists-obsess-deficits/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">crikey.com.au/2025/03/24/2025-</span><span class="invisible">federal-budget-politicians-journalists-obsess-deficits/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>Politicians and journalists are obsessed with deficits. What happened to ‘adventurous finance’?</p><p>In August 1962, the Liberal prime minister bragged about how his recent budget had produced a higher deficit that his Labor opponent.</p><p>He’d won the federal election eight months earlier, defeating the Labor opposition led by Arthur Calwell, who had promised to eradicate unemployment via a deficit of 100 million pounds.</p><p>Robert Menzies promptly produced a deficit of 120 million.</p><p>“Too few people realise that a cash deficit of 120 million [pounds] … will of itself have a most expansionary effect,” he said. “We shall pay out to the citizens 120 million [pounds] more than will be collected from them”.</p><p>He went on:</p><blockquote><p>So, far from being timorous — I think that was another of the words used by the deputy leader of the opposition — this is adventurous finance.</p><p>Add to the deficit the tax refunds now being made, and it is clear that purchasing power in Australia this financial year will be uncommonly high.</p></blockquote><p>The Liberals’ rode this cavalier approach to the nation’s finances to a further decade in power. So how did we get so obsessed with the idea of deficits — a projection, lest we forget, that never proves to be accurate — being an incontrovertible sign of economic health, regardless of context? And do voters care half as much as the political class do?</p><p>Gough Whitlam is the go-to example of the Liberal Party mantra — happily taken up by the majority of the Australian media — that the ALP simply cannot manage money. Based on the underlying cash balance — the standard by which, say, the Howard/Costello partnership is remembered so favourably — two out of three Whitlam’s budgets were in surplus. Without getting into the ethics or legality of the way Whitlam’s government was swept from power, the next election delivered his opponents a massive majority.</p><p>Fraser, in turn, ran a Keynesian economic policy, and six out of seven budgets were in deficit (though reduced levels) under his leadership. Indeed Fraser and his treasurer John Howard where opposed on the subject, with Fraser wanting to stimulate the economy, reeling from international downturn in the early ’80s, by blowing out the deficit.</p><p>Bob Hawke recognised that an opponent’s deficit was “political gold“, a cudgel that could be used to bludgeon a government. However, his government didn’t deliver a surplus until 1988, five years after taking office. This was famously described by Hawke’s treasurer Paul Keating as the one that “brings home the bacon”. The irony being, as Australian political historian Frank Bongiorno notes, “we recall this budget not because it ushered in a glorious economic era, but because it proved to be the curtain-raiser on a deep and damaging recession”.</p><p>This is the era when the question of a deficit was really allowed to get out of control. As Jason Murphy noted in these pages, when the Howard government took office in March 1996, treasurer Peter Costello’s rhetoric was “indistinguishable from that of his predecessors”:</p><blockquote><p>In his first budget speech that August [Costello] spoke of reducing the deficit but gave no hint he intended to reduce national debt to zero … That year he ran a budget deficit. </p></blockquote><p>Then came huge tax windfalls, which changed the calculus of the next decade. As Murphy goes on, by the end of the Howard government, surpluses were “hard to avoid” thanks to annual tax revenue having “doubled compared with when [Costello] took over the treasurer’s office”.</p><p>Pretty much every treasurer since has had to operate according to the template set by Howard and Costello and has found, for one reason or another, that it was impossible. Within a few years of a global financial crisis that his government had guided Australia through via stimulus spending, Wayne Swan announced “four years of surpluses” in 2012-13. He delivered none.</p><p>Joe Hockey, obsessed with Labor’s “debt and deficit disaster” and leading the finances of a government claiming (dubiously) to have “inherited the largest deficits in Australia’s history from Labor”, produced a comically punitive and near-universally reviled budget, and thus picked out a grave plot for his government.</p><p>Josh Frydenberg perhaps offered the clearest example of governing according to this absurd logic. The ink on the “back in black” merch, celebrating the Liberals projected return to surplus in 2019, had barely dried by the time another global shock came and wiped out any possibility that voters wanted less money spent.</p><p>Which raises the question — if Whitlam is the exemplar of wild fiscal irresponsibility, why have subsequent governments never suggested dropping the level of government spending as a portion of GDP back down to the level it was when he took office?</p><ul><li>Charlie Lewis pens Crikey’s Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN’s Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio. </li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://theblower.au/@amonkeyinsilk" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>amonkeyinsilk</span></a></span> There's so much i loathe & hold in utter contempt re RWNJ pollies, media, & acolytes, but one of the biggies is how they peddle this lie incessantly to fool the credulous Great Unwashed, who then vote for them. </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>Gasp, this is <em>most</em> unexpected... the COALition Liebs & Nuts railing yet again at workers & unions 😲 🤯. Still, prolly fair enough, <em>innit</em>, given these delightful pollies have already solved the previously intractable problems of white-collar crime, inequitable taxation, racism, transmisia, domestic violence, social support, climate crisis, ohmightyzarquonican'tgoonanymore...</p><p><a href="https://social.chinwag.org/@abc_bot/114175487784121979" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">social.chinwag.org/@abc_bot/11</span><span class="invisible">4175487784121979</span></a></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>I feel guilty & culpable every time i cook, or boil the kettle, on my gas cooktop.</p><p>And yet</p><ul><li>Melbourne, this weekend</li><li>Bathurst, each October</li></ul><p>We humans are such idiots. 🙄🤦♀️</p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>I'm not a fan of Trumble, but on this one at least i reckon he's spot on. IMO, the question from both Sarah Ferguson & Sally Sara was preposterous bothsidesing, not informed incisive journalism. </p><p><a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/11/malcolm-turnbull-is-right-silence-wont-protect-us-from-trump/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">crikey.com.au/2025/03/11/malco</span><span class="invisible">lm-turnbull-is-right-silence-wont-protect-us-from-trump/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>For many weeks now, Malcolm Turnbull has been detailing the case for our leaders to wake up and respond to the environment created by Trump 2.0 — or what the former prime minister calls “the new world of disorder”. Having led Australia during the first Trump administration, and having criticised the Gillard government for being overly close to the Obama administration, he speaks from a vantage point of experience that no-one in politics at the moment has.</p><p>In an ABC interview three weeks ago, the former PM pithily spelt out the problem with the response of the government and opposition to Trump: “They’re scared that he will impose tariffs, and so in other words they’re doing exactly what a bully wants you to do which is to knuckle under.” And he offered a solution: “We have got to be able to appeal to American self interest but at the end of the day we have to be able to defend ourselves.” That includes taking a hard look at AUKUS, accountability that he thinks will only happen if the crossbench force a minority government to do it.</p><p>“People always say ‘isn’t it a pity there isn’t more bipartisanship’,” he said back in February. “But when you’ve got a bipartisan error, or bipartisan gaslighting, that’s essentially where we are at the moment … we’ve gotta look at that clear eyed, objectively, don’t delude ourselves, don’t worry about offending anybody and just focus on how we defend this country…”</p><p>Turnbull has repeatedly referred to bipartisan gaslighting since then, including in his stoush yesterday with Trump and his appearance on 7.30, where he sharpened his rhetoric with a Lathamesque reference to “a conga line of sycophants creeping through the White House”.</p><p>What was more remarkable, however, was the reaction of the ABC’s Sarah Ferguson. “You’re … making an argument publicly,” she said. “Is it easier and better for Australia in this acute moment when the tariff decision is being made, if diplomatists are given the maximum opportunity to operate behind closed doors without your intervention?”</p><p>Turnbull suggested she was embarrassed to ask that question. If she wasn’t, she should have been. It was effectively a demand that Turnbull cease from urging Australia do what other Western countries are doing, which is focus on the new thinking required by a world with an unstable American government that might ally with our enemies.</p><p>Ferguson isn’t alone in this demand for Turnbull to shut up. The Australian’s Cameron Stewart, while endorsing what Turnbull has said, reckons it wrecked whatever slim hopes the Albanese government had of securing a tariff exemption. Unsurprisingly, at Fox News After Dark, Chris Kenny, interviewing Liberal hack Zoe McKenzie, offered the same view — though News Corp’s shitflingers have to walk a fine line, because Turnbull’s ability to secure a tariff exemption is the stick with which they want to beat Albanese, while his fundamental critique of Trump and Australia’s response to it is at odds with the Murdoch line.</p><p>So the bipartisan gaslighting extends to the media as well, which wants a conspiracy of silence about Trump and the historic risks he poses to Australia.</p><p>Turnbull’s response isn’t merely that standing up to Trump is the only way to protect our interests; it’s that the disorder the US president is inflicting on the world and on allies like Canada demands a response. “This is all unprecedented, but yet, if you look to our political leaders, there’s nothing wrong with AUKUS, everything’s fine. The relationship is fine. Nothing’s changed. Well it has changed.”</p><p>Turnbull is acting as a one-man engine to drive a reassessment of Australia’s role in a changed world, not just around his long-standing unhappiness with AUKUS — likely to become the greatest disaster in Australian military history if it’s not stopped — but about how we stand on our own two feet. He’s organised a conference at the end of March to discuss a rethink of Australia’s role in “a future without the protective blanket of a great power” — the sort of work the government itself should be doing. </p><p>Instead the government and opposition are paralysed by fear of Trump, and have let the short-term issue of tariffs on two relatively small export markets get in the way of a clear-eyed view of the bigger issue of Australia’s role in a post-US security environment.</p><p>The demand that Turnbull shut up perhaps suggests something else might be at work. “We are now seeing somebody who is utterly unconstrained,” Turnbull observed last night. “And if the advice is to go and suck up to him, well, where does that get you?”</p><p>Is it merely political calculation — and the mediocrity of Albanese and Dutton as leaders — that has kept them silent about how the world has changed? Or is it because Australia’s foreign policy and security establishments are so incapable of understanding a world without the United States that they can only advise politicians to keep pretending nothing has changed, and stick with “quiet diplomacy” (AKA cowed silence) as the response? Is our governmental system — the major party politicians, the security and foreign policy bureaucrats, the institutional media — so captured by their long-term role as subordinates of the US military and foreign policy apparatus that the idea of planning for a world devoid of the American security blanket is unthinkable?</p><p>Other countries, led by France and Canada, are seeing the need to reassess their global role. The Canadians have been forced to by being targeted by Trump. Will Australia sit on its hands doing nothing until our turn comes and we are forced, startled and blinking, into the new world of disorder? It’s possible to make even worse mistakes than AUKUS. We might be right in the middle of one.</p><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8910982/international-womens-day-2025-radical-anti-feminism-on-the-rise" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">canberratimes.com.au/story/891</span><span class="invisible">0982/international-womens-day-2025-radical-anti-feminism-on-the-rise</span></a></p><p><u><strong>Quote</strong></u></p><p>Never has a women's revolution been so desperately needed. Right here. Right now.</p><p>Australian women kickstarted one 50 years ago. We need to crank it up again.</p><p>On this day, International Women's Day, 1975, prime minister Gough Whitlam called for a "revolution in people's heads".</p><p>This was straight out of the feminist manifesto of the Australian Women's Liberation Movement, with whom Whitlam wholeheartedly agreed.</p><p>The United Nations had declared '75 International Women's Year and called on every nation to step up. Whitlam was all in. He urged women to "give the world a shove in the right direction."</p><p>Appalled by media misogyny and overt sexism, Whitlam told his audience, "... our overriding task and challenge for this year is to strike out at the attitudes".</p><p>Female oppression was "deeply embedded ... in the psychology of the society", he said. That must change.</p><p>As Whitlam knew, driving real change - transformative social and cultural change, that attempts to take the nation with you - takes moral leadership. And political capital.</p><p>International Women's Day has a way of focusing our attention. For the past decade it has become performative, overtaken by purple ribbons and cupcakes. While we sit on our hands.</p><p>This year, listening to the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese's dreary words about "marching forward", reflecting on how far "Australia has come" and "the foundations we've laid", was like floating mindlessly inside the bubble of a parallel universe, disconnected to the real world that real women live in.</p><p>Albanese's IWD speech at the annual parliamentary breakfast, hosted by UN Women, did nothing to acknowledge, much less address, the almighty anti-woman sentiment and backlash whipping women around the globe right now. Including we meek sods sitting in front of him.</p><p>According to UN Women, one in four nations report backlash on women's rights. They report "higher levels of discrimination and weaker legal protections" across the world.</p><p>Fascist plutocracies are literally ripping up reproductive rights - exciting conservative men in places such as Queensland and South Australia, who sniff the changing winds of patriarchal power.</p><p>Others, such as misogynistic theocracies in Iran and Afghanistan, are playing the God card to justify dehumanising women and banning basic human rights and freedom of movement.</p><p>In Australia women's freedom of movement, voice and expression have all taken a serious hit, now that "radical anti-feminism" is an official thing. Research from Melbourne University shocked but confirmed what women can see for themselves - female hatred is coming out of the closet. The data found "20 per cent of Australian men believe that feminism should be violently resisted."</p><p>We know that men "frustrated out of their brain" because they can't "get a girlfriend", can hunt down women in a Bondi shopping mall stabbing spree, and yet still authorities don't call it "terrorism", because it wasn't "ideologically" motivated.</p><p>"Radical anti-feminism", as detailed by the Melbourne researchers, sounds like a dangerous ideology to me.</p><p>Albanese says we need to be "clear about where we still have a long way to go."</p><p>Well, two out of every five Australians are already clear. They think "women's equal rights have gone far enough", according to research out this week from the Global Institute of Women's Leadership. Young men think this most.</p><p>Misogyny doesn't die out with the old dinosaurs. It's new, hip, cool and likes a bet on bitcoin. It's all the rage in the US these days.</p><p>The death of DEI was swift. As if suffering battered wife syndrome, American institutions learnt quickly to shut up and submit. The US National Science Foundation is not the only research organisation to remove the words "woman", "female" and gender from its website.</p><p>So, what can we take from those revolutionaries of five decades ago? Those women who set about changing their world and themselves along the way? Women whose stated goal was not "equality", but "liberation!"</p><p>When Whitlam's Women's adviser, Elizabeth Reid, walked on stage at the inaugural UN World Conference on Women, in Mexico City, 1975, to mark International Women's Year, she had steel in her spine. Over 6000 women activists, 1300 government delegates from 133 nations, and 1000 media representatives had arrived. The UN called it the "greatest consciousness raising event in history".</p><p>The world was watching and Australia's representative was there to prize open the one subject the UN did not want on the agenda - sexism. Reid let rip.</p><p>"We live in societies ... ruled by men - our societies are patriarchal," she said, eyeballing world leaders.</p><p>"None of us live in, and it is impossible to imagine living in, a non-sexist society."</p><p>The word sexism had never been used in an official UN forum before. UN member states were squirming. Reid pushed on.</p><p>"The basis of racism, racial discrimination, colonialism and neo-colonialism ... is similar to that violence against women which we call sexism. It is based on the need ... for power over other human beings. Patriarchy is yet another form of colonising people."</p><p>It is, she said, "a colonisation by mute consent".</p><p>The New York Times called Reid a "militant feminist". Historians call her an international "feminist rockstar". By the end of the UN conference, Australia was lauded for its bold, progressive approach to ending discrimination against women. Even the UN secretary-general praised Whitlam's International Women's Year program, with its focus on changing women's attitudes to themselves, and men's attitudes towards women.</p><p>But such transformative change demands nothing short of revolutionary thinking. Elizabeth Ried, her fellow femocrats and the Australian women's movement lit a feminist fire that burned bright, but now is fading from history. It worked for them. And we need it now.</p><p>In recent years, Reid asked a Canberra audience, "Why does such a movement seem so anachronistic today? What happened to this social movement? Don't women need liberating anymore?"</p><p>I asked ChatGPT. The computer said "yes".</p><ul><li> Virginia Haussegger AM is a Canberra journalist and writer.</li></ul><p><u><strong>Unquote</strong></u></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckRWNJs" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckRWNJs</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckThePatriarchy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckThePatriarchy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckMisogynists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckMisogynists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckSexists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckSexists</span></a> 🖕 <br><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Feminism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Feminism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRepresentation" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRepresentation</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/misogyny" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>misogyny</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/sexism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>sexism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/DomesticViolence" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DomesticViolence</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/DieDickswingersDie" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>DieDickswingersDie</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomanNeedsManLikeFishNeedsBicycle" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomanNeedsManLikeFishNeedsBicycle</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/MaleViolence" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>MaleViolence</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensSafety" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensSafety</span></a> </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Women" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Women</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Equality" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Equality</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Gender" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Gender</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Sociology" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Sociology</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Demographics" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Demographics</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/07/western-civilisation-donald-trump-canada-trudeau-macron/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">crikey.com.au/2025/03/07/weste</span><span class="invisible">rn-civilisation-donald-trump-canada-trudeau-macron/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>Why have Australian leaders stayed silent while Canada has been bullied and Ukraine hung out to dry? Do they understand at all that the world has fundamentally changed? </p><p>The decline of the West has long been a beloved trope of the right: that the soft, irreligious, affluent citizens of the West were no longer up to the task of protecting the values upon which Western prosperity was founded.</p><p>Protecting from whom? Name your favourite other — the Soviet Union. Islam. China. Declining birth rates. Secularism. Immigrants. Globalism. But no matter the threat, it was always existential. It was always five minutes to midnight, the great test was always imminent, and we’d always fail it without an embrace of the right’s agenda.</p><p>Well, with stopped-clock inevitability, the right was, well, right. The threat to Western civilization is here. Except, the calls are coming from inside the house: it’s the right’s own champion, Donald Trump, who is the threat. All it took was three decades of white people being told they needed to start competing with the rest of the world and stop inflicting egregious discrimination on people unlike them. That, and a reality TV grifter who, whether or not he’s an actual Russian agent, loves dictators.</p><p>Oddly, the earnest thinkpieces about the fall of the West have dried up, even as it becomes more and more apparent that we need to take Trump both seriously and literally about his goal to wreck the existing world order. And it’s hard to think of a more telling moment in the collapse of the West we all grew up with than the prime minister of Canada saying that US tariffs were intended to wreck the Canadian economy in order to make it easier for the US to seize the country.</p><p>Even at a time when the historic seems to happen every minute, it was an extraordinary statement. It’s hard to think of two closer countries than Canada and the US, and yet Trump has driven a massive wedge between them, and the Canadians have rightly responded by counterpunching with their own tariffs and bans on US products.</p><p>Canada is a member, with Australia, of the Five Eyes alliance — which the Trump administration wants to expel Canada from. Canada is a fellow Commonwealth country and we share a monarch. Canada is a Pacific power that, like Australia, has incurred the enmity of China. Australians have fought alongside Canadians in major conflicts for generations.</p><p>And yet, Trump’s bullying of Canada has elicited no comment from Australian leaders. If Canadians thought they might get some moral support from a friend and ally, they’ve been sadly mistaken. Australia keeps condemning tariffs, sure, but otherwise, our leaders prefer to leave the Canadians to look after themselves.</p><p>Perhaps they can see themselves where Canada is — the centre of a MAGA vortex of abuse and threats. Australia is a close ally of the United States, like Canada. We don’t share a border but we have a free trade agreement with the US on very favourable terms for the Americans. But we could find ourselves targeted like Canada. Not, perhaps, for annexation, but for the kind of economic vassalage that Trump wants to impose on Ukraine. </p><p>After all, if the Ukrainians have to hand over much of their country’s mineral wealth to the United States in exchange for protection from Russia, why shouldn’t Australia hand over its wealth in exchange for protection from China?</p><p>The silence of our politicians on Canada’s treatment is thus the silence of the bystander who figures they could be the next victim of the bully, so they’d better not attract attention.</p><p>A similar reticence applies to the Trump administration cutting off intelligence-sharing with Ukraine. A part of that intelligence — relating to Russian signals and missile launches — is gathered using combined US-allied satellite facilities like Pine Gap in Australia. Was the Albanese government consulted on the decision to withhold intelligence gathered via Pine Gap from Ukraine? Has the government protested, given we allegedly “stand with Ukraine”?</p><p>Crickets. The prime minister has stuck to his formula of refusing to comment on what the US is doing, while insisting that our relationship with the US is “secure”. After the last few weeks, the last thing it is is secure — and the denialism isn’t confined to right-wing hysterics by any stretch.</p><p>At least Albanese reversed on providing Australian peacekeepers in Ukraine, leaving the door open to considering the idea. But Peter Dutton, hitherto the scourge of Labor for its failure to help Ukraine enough, insists that Australia should send no peacekeepers — making him the first Coalition leader to refuse a foreign military venture in our lifetime. But hey, you wouldn’t want to upset mad king Donald would you, Pete?</p><p>For an example of how a real leader has responded to this historic transformation, look to Paris and Emmanuel Macron’s address to the French people yesterday. Macron expressed hope that the US would “remain at our side” but “we must be ready if this is not the case”.</p><p>“Whatever happens,” Macron said, “we need to equip ourselves more, we need to raise our defence posture, and we need to do this for peace itself, to act as a deterrent … we remain committed to NATO and our partnership with the United States of America, but we need to do more, to strengthen our independence in terms of defence and security.”</p><p>France has the benefits of being a major power, including its own nuclear deterrent, which, in a historical moment, Macron signalled would be willing to consider sharing with Germany, while keeping it under French control. But he laid down a challenge to the French political class:</p><blockquote><p>All in all, these are times that call for decisions unprecedented in many decades. When it comes to our agriculture, our research, our industry and all our public policies, we cannot have the same debates as in the past. That’s why I’ve asked the prime minister and his government, and I invite all the country’s political, economic and trade union forces, to join with them in putting forward proposals in the light of this new context … That’s why our country needs you, and your commitment. Political decisions, military equipment and budgets are one thing, but they will never replace the fortitude of a nation. Our generation will no longer receive the dividends of peace. It is up to us to ensure that our children reap the rewards of our commitments tomorrow.</p></blockquote><p>The idea of any of the current generation of Australian leaders giving such an honest address is unthinkable.</p><ul><li>Bernard Keane is Crikey’s politics editor. Before that he was Crikey’s Canberra press gallery correspondent, covering politics, national security and economics. </li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>Sydney Morning Herald - Latest News</p><blockquote><p>‘More frequent, intense’: PM puts climate front and centre for election</p></blockquote><p><a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/more-frequent-intense-pm-puts-climate-front-and-centre-for-election-20250307-p5lhqx.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">smh.com.au/politics/federal/mo</span><span class="invisible">re-frequent-intense-pm-puts-climate-front-and-centre-for-election-20250307-p5lhqx.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed</span></a> </p><p>Gaaaah, we know all this, you dweeb. We've known it for decades. We also know that you keep funding fossilfools via undeserved obscene tax breaks, & doing their work by approving new fossilfool projects & expansions, plus demonising protesters instead of the actual climate criminals. You simply have NO credibility in this space, dear PM. </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NonLinear" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NonLinear</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TippingPoints" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TippingPoints</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/PositiveFeedbackLoops" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>PositiveFeedbackLoops</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FossilFools" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FossilFools</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/RenewableEnergy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RenewableEnergy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ChangeTheSystem" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ChangeTheSystem</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/StateCapture" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>StateCapture</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/RightToProtest" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>RightToProtest</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Biodiversity" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Biodiversity</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Karma" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Karma</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NativeForests" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NativeForests</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/StopLoggingNativeForests" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>StopLoggingNativeForests</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckCapitalism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckCapitalism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/CognitiveDissonance" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>CognitiveDissonance</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><span class="h-card" translate="no"><a href="https://aus.social/@dgar" class="u-url mention" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">@<span>dgar</span></a></span> In my druthers anyone not understanding basic civics like this should forfeit their voting rights. Democracy is wunnerful, apart from the morons. With the morons, we get warcriminal, madmonk, trumble, morriscum, & maybe even... </p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/03/03/zelenskyy-donald-trump-america-australia-aukus-defence-spending/" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">crikey.com.au/2025/03/03/zelen</span><span class="invisible">skyy-donald-trump-america-australia-aukus-defence-spending/</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>Zelenskyy has ensured world leaders have nowhere to hide from Trump’s threat to Western countries. Australia’s leaders can’t respond. </p><p>Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has done the rest of the world an enormous favour by not merely showing how Donald Trump should be dealt with, but also by fully tearing the MAGA mask off the United States and revealing its capricious, egotistical and unreliable nature. There is now nowhere for any credible leader in the West to hide from the reality that the post-war security environment that kept Western countries safe for two generations is gone.</p><p>Anthony Albanese believes he can continue to hide. He immediately emerged on Sunday morning to declare that Australia stood with Ukraine, but continued with his stolid refusal to express a view on Trump. It’s becoming an increasingly difficult line to maintain — if Australia stands with Ukraine, it cannot stand with the US, which seeks to impose economic vassalage on the country (without any concomitant security guarantees) and hand large parts of its territory over to the vile regime that attacked it. The statement “We stand with Ukraine” no longer makes sense in the absence of the rider “including against Donald Trump’s bullying”.</p><p>At least the prime minister had something to say. Peter Dutton has pulled another of his disappearing acts. His hard-man stuff is just an act — all that bravado directed at easy targets like refugees or journalists vanishes when he’s faced with a difficult choice. As usual, shadow ministers found themselves having to navigate the politics their leader wanted to avoid. “We’re fully supportive of the Ukraine at this time,” Angus Taylor said, sounding a bit like a club president saying he had “full confidence” in a losing coach. Shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie suggested wasting billions of dollars on more F-35s would placate Trump. Home affairs shadow minister James Paterson said we should be doubling down on cooperating with the Americans.</p><p>So, those are the policy options on offer: Labor pretending that everything will be fine if we don’t upset Trump; the Coalition wanting to throw taxpayer money at him to stay in his good books.</p><p>But Trump and Vance’s treatment of Zelenskyy shows that’s simply untenable. The US is a direct threat to Western nations in its determination to dictate other countries’ domestic policies and undermine their security by sacrificing their interests to thugs like Putin. The world has changed, radically and in ways unknown since the 1940s. But Albanese and Dutton aren’t reacting. They’re like deer in the headlights of history.</p><p>The first, most urgent issue for reappraisal is AUKUS. No-one can now credibly maintain that AUKUS is anything other than a doomed venture. It was always highly risky — neither the US nor the UK have the capacity to build additional submarines for Australia, and in fact will be flat-out building the ones they themselves need. If they ever arrive, we don’t have the workforce to maintain or crew them. But now, we’re in the position of paying a standover merchant for them. There’s literally nothing to stop Trump from simply jacking the price up endlessly. Another $5 billion. Then $10 billion. Where does it stop? The risk to the budget is simply too great.</p><p>If Anthony Albanese was capable of moving fast — which he isn’t — he’d immediately send Malcolm Turnbull on a trip to the Élysée Palace to beg Emmanuel Macron to find out if he can get Naval Group to agree to build nuclear submarines off the shelf for Australia. Chances are the bill would be a fraction of the $368 billion we’ve signed up for.</p><p>The next step needs to be a cool, cross-party assessment of what Australia needs to do to prosper in a world without our traditional security guarantor. Former prime ministers and foreign ministers of both sides should be tapped to offer their expertise — hawks, doves, pragmatists, warmongers, it doesn’t matter. Opinions will vary widely, except that all will agree we need to lift defence spending significantly.</p><p>That will require its own major policy response. What does it mean for the budget to spend 3-4% of GDP on defence? What does it mean for tax? What does it require from our workforce? How do we work better within our own region? How do we achieve the Keating maxim of security in our region, not security from our region?</p><p>And if we’re going to spend a lot more on defence, we need a royal commission into the Department of Defence, which has demonstrated repeatedly that, either because of incompetence or corruption, it cannot be relied on to manage major procurements. At this point, there is no guarantee that the bulk of any increase in defence spending won’t simply be wasted.</p><p>As for the more immediate challenge of Trump’s threats to impose tariffs on Australia, that can be dealt with. If Trump wants transactional — as his advocates and apologists insist — then give him transactional. If he imposes tariffs, we curb intelligence-sharing with the US. If he maintains tariffs, we pause marine rotations through Darwin. If he threatens Australia’s interests, we suggest Pine Gap might go dark until he realises Australia’s value.</p><p>The United States is no longer an ally. It’s just another large country prone to bullying smaller ones. Zelenskyy, who faces an existential threat to his own country, not to mention his life, showed how to deal with it. Have our own leaders, with far less at stake, got the fortitude and sense to heed his example?</p><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p><a href="https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8903607/opinion-mateship-tested-australia-us-alliance-amidst-tariff-threats" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">canberratimes.com.au/story/890</span><span class="invisible">3607/opinion-mateship-tested-australia-us-alliance-amidst-tariff-threats</span></a></p><p><strong>QUOTE BEGINS</strong></p><p>Australia and the US have been mates since World War II.</p><p>When our prime minister told the UK that our Diggers were needed at home, Churchill told us to get stuffed.</p><p>But the United States was at war with Japan and so was Australia.</p><p>America had our backs.</p><p>We battled the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese Army together.</p><p>We defended democracy together.</p><p>From that time on, for decades, Australia has stood by the United States through thick and thin.</p><p>We answered the call when the US asked for Australian troops in Vietnam.</p><p>When Al Qaeda flew those planes into the towers and the Pentagon - Australia backed America to the hilt.</p><p>Australian soldiers went to Afghanistan and then to Iraq.</p><p>An attack on one of us was an attack on all of us.</p><p>Since then, our ties have only got stronger.</p><p>Australia hosts Pine Gap, America's most important intelligence-gathering facility outside the US.</p><p>The North-West Cape antenna allows the US to talk to its submarines in the Indian Ocean.</p><p>Thousands of American troops rotate through Darwin, and just this month, Australia gave the US $800 million as part of our AUKUS deal.</p><p>We buy American products. We love them to the tune of $17.9 billion in 2024, which is a 1.6 per cent increase ($279.7 million) from 2023.</p><p>We made it through COVID, that was tough but our economy survived - just!</p><p>The war in Ukraine put our supply chains under pressure.</p><p>People in my backyard are skipping medicines, struggling to buy clothes for their kids and putting food on the table.</p><p>Our interest rates have started to come down, thank God, but there are still queues at the food banks and a record number of small businesses closing their doors.</p><p>The fact that the next economic shock could come from the country that is supposed to be one of our best mates is confusing and hurtful.</p><p>If the US puts tariffs on us it will hurt Australians and risks pushing our already fragile economy off a cliff.</p><p>Australia's mateship and loyalty are priceless.</p><p>We only expect that same loyalty in return.</p><p>President Trump's threats are not something that you do to a mate.</p><p>We need to stand together and remind the US of the values we share.</p><p>Values that we have fought and died for together.</p><p>The only question left is does America truly believe that mateship and loyalty mean nothing?</p><p>The question for Australia is do we cop it on the chin?</p><p>Or, do we reach out to like-minded countries that support a rules-based order and present a united front?</p><p>We need to push back and tell President Trump that peace and prosperity lie in honouring free-trade agreements.</p><p>If I was the PM, I would be on the phone with those leaders and working out the next steps.</p><p>The leaders of Europe demonstrated this strength when they went to Ukraine to stand with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the anniversary of Russia's invasion.</p><p>There is no doubt that our defence alliance with the United States is very important.</p><p>China sticking out their chest to Australia, and live firing just off our Commonwealth water border, is not just to intimidate Australia, they are testing the US resolve in the Pacific.</p><p>Without Australia's intelligence sites, Pine Gap and NW Cape, the US is more vulnerable.</p><p>I hope our Defence Minister and our Prime Minister are reminding the President of the crucial role Australia plays in the region.</p><p>President Trump believes in putting America first, but America's strength also relies on her allies, like Australia.</p><ul><li> Jacqui Lambie is a Jacqui Lambie Network senator for Tasmania.</li></ul><p><strong>QUOTE ENDS</strong></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ClimateCrisis" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ClimateCrisis</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WomensRights" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WomensRights</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>Ooooh, New Juice! </p><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="">youtube.com/watch?v=1kYIojG707w</span><span class="invisible"></span></a></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/TuckFrump" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TuckFrump</span></a></p>
Droppie [infosec] 🐨:archlinux: :kde: :firefox_nightly: :thunderbird: :vegan:<p>It continues to irritate me so much that elections are being decided by morons, idiots, fools, clueless, ignorant, disengaged, & malicious voters. So that's a great big fat <em>Yay Democracy!</em> 🙄🤦♀️</p><p><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/18/guardian-essential-poll-labors-policies-appear-unknown-to-voters-as-major-parties-neck-and-neck" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://www.</span><span class="ellipsis">theguardian.com/australia-news</span><span class="invisible">/2025/feb/18/guardian-essential-poll-labors-policies-appear-unknown-to-voters-as-major-parties-neck-and-neck</span></a></p><p><a href="https://infosec.space/tags/AusPol" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>AusPol</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Greens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Greens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/VoteGreens" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>VoteGreens</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ProgIndies" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ProgIndies</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreTotallyFscked" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreTotallyFscked</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WeAreSelfishCruelBastards" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WeAreSelfishCruelBastards</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/Misanthropy" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>Misanthropy</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FsckOffDutton" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FsckOffDutton</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty1" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty1</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ShitParty2" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ShitParty2</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/ComeOnTanya" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>ComeOnTanya</span></a>! <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/WhyIsLabor" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>WhyIsLabor</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NatsAreNuts" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NatsAreNuts</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/NoNukes" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>NoNukes</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/racism" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>racism</span></a> <a href="https://infosec.space/tags/FuckRacists" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>FuckRacists</span></a></p>
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