WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

The show he did where he dated a bunch of people to get over his fiance leaving him was just a bit sad though.

Cartoon posted:

As far as I can tell there are no McDonalds that don't serve bacon. They sell Halal products but bacon is still on the menu. Three KFCs stopped doing it (in Sydney as of 2014, he claims 2010)

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/halal-food-dishing-out-change-in-our-fast-food-society/news-story/75bb715c6ff85a8aa31293061cd20601

So, as ever, the actual facts/truth matter not to these poo poo smears.

Chadzok posted:

Worked a bit in a cafe that didn't serve bacon (owner was muslim). I cannot tell you how many people just could not understand why we didn't have it without being hand-held through the mental process. Had a couple fuckwits go into insane rants about how lovely the place was because of the lovely beef rashers on the breakfast roll and how we just gotta get bacon and just forget all that muslim stuff mate.

I didn't like the beef rashers either, but I just don't go there for breakfast.

Bogan King posted:

Just lol if you're not getting smashed av on organic sourdough, maybe some feta to fancy it up.

Kafka Syrup posted:

Apparently Young LNP in Queensland just passed a motion to lobby the state party to reintroduce the crime of sedition after the "ANZAC Day controversy". StuPol: Never Not a Trashfire.

Kafka Syrup posted:

Apparently Young LNP in Queensland just passed a motion to lobby the state party to reintroduce the crime of sedition after the "ANZAC Day controversy". StuPol: Never Not a Trashfire.

Bogan King posted:

https://twitter.com/boltcomments/status/857538805741625344

Recoome posted:

Can I have a more authoritative source or something because this is loving amazing

Starshark posted:

I don't know, you get slandered on the front page of every Murdoch paper and you still can't get Bolt to acknowledge all hell's broken loose. Whaddya gotta do these days...

quote:

Political commentator Mark Latham has slammed multiculturalism in Australia as a 'disgrace' claiming it isn't working because so many people can't speak English.
The former Labor leader travelled to the diverse suburb on Fairfield in Sydney's south-west this week, to determine whether Australia's multicultural communities were integrating.
'What I want to find out is, have we got general multiculturalism in Australia, or just ethnic enclaves?' he said in a video posted to Youtube on Tuesday.

The controversial political commentator, who was dumped from Sky News in March, was outspoken about his anger when people on the street told him they could not speak English.
'It's quite disgraceful, how can we have a proper cohesive multicultural community if people don't even speak the basic language of the nation?' he said.

'It's a disgrace that Chris Bowen and others have allowed this to happen.'
Shadow treasurer of Australia Chris Bowen was elected to the Fairfield City Council in 1995 and served as mayor in 1998 and 1999.

In the video Mr Latham shows various people telling him they can't speak to him because they didn't speak English.
'No no no,' one woman said.
'I don't speak English,' another said.
'No English' was also a common response in the video.

'The government has got to step in here and do everything it can to encourage and teach English,' he said.
Mr Latham slammed the region for its inability to speak the 'basic language of the nation'.
'We can't have multiculturalism without people being able to talk to each other and build trust and cooperation,' he said.
Mr Latham asked residents what they thought of neighbouring town Cabramatta, a region with a largely Asian population.
When his interviewees told him they did not visit the area, Mr Latham said it proved Australia was not a proper cohesive multicultural community.

'Essentially they're going to become an ethnic enclave,' he said about the south-western Sydney electorate.
'People don't get down to Cabramatta which is just a five minute drive away, talk to the Asian community, get to know people, make friends across racial and ethnic and cultural boundaries,' he said.
'It's not happening, this is the problem with Australian multiculturalism.'
Mr Latham suffered a public fall from grace when he was axed from Sky News program Outsiders in March.

The political commentator was sacked following a number of controversies around his comments including labelling a Sydney schoolboy 'gay' for appearing in a pro-feminism video.
Mr Latham also courted controversy when he launched a website called Mark Latham's Outsiders.
He was fiercely criticised for the name because it was in direct competition with his former employer Sky News which relaunched its program Outsiders without him.

Brown Paper Bag posted:

Mark Latham update:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4450418/Mark-Latham-outsiders-Fairfield-Sydney-criticises-English.html

Andrew Welder posted:

Shootout at Manus
About once a month in her column at The Conversation, Michelle Grattan comes to the conclusion that Peter Dutton is not a team player and not fully honest when it comes to the complicated facts and issues of asylum-seekers. This doesn't deter her from quoting his (what by now must surely be) worthless assertions: thanks to the wonders of goldfish journalism, every Dutton stuff-up is a fresh surprise to someone who sets the standard for the press gallery.

When it came to ministerial responsibility, public accountability, and other key principles underpinning democracy, Peter Dutton never had a chance. He entered parliament in 2001, at the election following hysteria about September 11 and the refugees aboard the MV Tampa. He defeated Labor's Cheryl Kernot, learning the lesson that even high-profile opponents can be brought down with enough dirt. Being a politician in a marginal seat requires a warm personality and a genuine concern for the local community; Dutton learned that fundraising can get around such shortcomings, particularly where Labor largely seemed to direct its energies elsewhere.

By the time Dutton became Assistant Treasurer under Peter Costello, the Howard government had lost its policy reform momentum; Costello had become bitter and twisted at not becoming Prime Minister. Soon afterward the Howard government lost office: any opportunity to teach young Dutton the finer points of vision, negotiation, or any other aspect of policy development and implementation simply went by the board.

He could have learned these lessons from the two Health Ministers he shadowed, Nicola Roxon and Tanya Plibersek. Both ran rings around him, policy-wise and in terms of having things to announce, but Dutton just sat quietly for six years; eventually their job simply fell into his lap. Healthcare professionals rated Dutton the worst Health Minister in a generation, but onward he went.

Like a child raised in poverty and dysfunction who ends up addicted and/or imprisoned, there was never any possibility Peter Dutton would or could have become an effective minister. Grattan and others in the gallery who chide him for falling short of standards impossible for him look like they don't understand the people and environment they've been covering for years.

From Trump and Abbott, Dutton learned that doubling down when wrong appeals to those who confuse obstinacy with fixity of purpose. The events of this week, where Dutton implied that asylum-seekers were pedophiles and shirked responsibility for yet another riot on Manus Island, should not have been as shocking as they apparently were.

Four things arising from this were surprising, however, and none received much coverage from the supposedly alert and diverse press gallery.

The first is that the Papua New Guinea police flatly contradicted an Australian government minister. Papua New Guinea had been an Australian colony from the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 to independence in 1975, and since then the country depended heavily on Australia for aid. Previous PNG governments danced around open confrontation with Australia; any exceptions tended to be reported in the Australian media as personality defects of the PNG politician concerned, rather than the issue itself. Recently, however, PNG Prime Minister Peter O'Neill has boosted relations with China, which has reciprocated in spades. PNG's trade and economic position relies less on Australia than it has for a century. Note the contrast with always-compliant Nauru, or too-quiet Christmas Island. We can expect more of this.

While Dutton has brushed off the accounts of local police about the Manus incident, it is clear the PNG government will not spare Australia from embarrassment, and that more information is yet to come out from Manus about conditions in the detention centre. Anzac Day pictures of smiling "fuzzy wuzzy angels" were designed to convey the idea that PNG will continue being compliant to Australian interests, but to rely too heavily on that would be a mistake.

Second, Turnbull didn't have to lend his name to Dutton's frolic. It has done him no good politically to embrace Dutton and feed his tough-guy fantasia. John Howard happily set off his pet ministers like Peter Reith or Tony Abbott on frolics of their own, not denouncing them but not standing in shot by them, prepared to step in to either claim credit or smooth over the damage, as appropriate. Turnbull should discipline Dutton for lying, and he needs to start casting around for an Immigration Minister with some credibility; he can't do either of those things. The Prime Minister has limited the scope he needs to manoeuver, which can't end well for him or the government more broadly.

Thirdly, the idea of cracking down on asylum-seekers as a vote-winner no longer applies. Nobody in the press gallery has twigged to this.

Fourth, Dutton as secret-intelligence bullshit artist hasn't learned the lessons from his fellow Queenslander, George Brandis. As soon as he became Attorney-General, Brandis began enthusiastically reducing our civil liberties on the basis of threats to which only he was privy. Over time Brandis' credibility has been diminished with all this wolf-crying, to the point where his every announcement is assumed to be a gaffe or a stuff-up. Demonstrations of competence, such as High Court appointments, are treated with relief. Brandis has spent decades trying to cultivate gravitas on the barren fields of his own abilities, and it hasn't worked; that's why it is time for him to go. Dutton is approaching the same point.

Peter Dutton's first job was as a police officer, a job requiring instant cultivation of gravitas and respect for kept secrets. Like Brandis, Dutton overestimates the extent to which "because I said so" is actually going to convince anyone. Never mind sincerity - conservatives have to be able to fake gravitas, or they're finished. This government is full of senior ministers who simply couldn't do gravitas if their lives depended on it - Dutton and Brandis, Pyne, Hunt, Cash, Joyce - they have to know on some level that their game is up.

As I've said before, Dutton has no powerbase. Queensland's LNP is disintegrating before our eyes, and he is neither a big enough player to ride out the storm nor small enough to survive and start again. No marginal-seat Liberal wants Dutton gladhanding in their electorate. The idea that he might become Prime Minister is a joke. He is a stalking horse for Abbott, just as the equally hapless former Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews was; just as the Abbott forces hoped Morrison might have been.

Dutton's attack on Mike Cannon-Brookes was reported by Mashable as just wacky political randomness, and the press gallery missed it entirely. Dutton was making a proxy attack on Turnbull. The Liberal Party isn't big on tech, and Turnbull's limited, long-ago experience of the sector (which informs his out-of-date preferences for the NBN) are virtually their only connection to a non-farm industry sector growing in size and importance. To attack somebody - anyone - in the tech sector is to attack Turnbull. Cannon-Brookes appeared not to realise this; government departments, the banks and other big companies import more IT workers (and employ more Australian IT workers) than Atlassian, yet you'll notice that Dutton didn't go after them. After all this is over, watch Abbott or Dutton sidle up to Cannon-Brookes and semi-apologise for using him as a political football.

For Turnbull, this is the thanks he gets for sticking his neck out for Dutton. It was genuinely amazing that the press gallery weren't all over this.

Queensland Labor needs to target Dickson with a seriousness that has largely been absent throughout Dutton's career. No more nice-but-dim local heroes. You don't want to give the LNP a run for their money, you want them to write Dickson off and scramble to foist Dutton elsewhere.

To be fair to the press gallery, while they remain deeply flawed we have seen this year some actual outbreaks of something approaching real journalism. Press gallery claim to be hunting for truth 24/7, but this is bullshit. In the first year of both the Turnbull and Rudd governments, the press gallery behaved as if the government could do no wrong. Throughout the entirety of the Gillard government, the government apparently could not do anything right. We are not in a position where the government is dead, where the opposition are wildly popular or where they have the gallery bluffed like Abbott did. Yet, the embarrassing gushing about Real Malcolm is behind us, and lately gallery reporting sometimes starts from a position of scepticism about what is being announced. It was genuinely shocking to see a carpet-stroller like Barrie Cassidy brave the choppy waters of ministerial authority - like Justin Bieber playing Macbeth, it's so incredible that it is even being contemplated that actual critique can't and doesn't take place. It can't last, and it's a product of an uncertain environment where gallery narratives simply aren't strong enough to sustain regular stories. Normal (dis)service will resume soon enough.

If Dutton has learned from Trump that you double down when the facts go against you, the US media is starting to learn the limits to which you can/should hang upon every word of a bullshit artist. The Australian media has never learned this: Abbott is not the media pariah his predecessor Billy McMahon was after 1972, and the media have embarrassed themselves by showering his handler Peta Credlin with the trinkets and baubles of their profession.

While it lasts, start thinking about government from first principles, and compare the tentative reporting of today with the gushing rubbish and ridiculous pile-ons from not very long ago. Then start thinking about how government can and should engage with the public. Playing the double game of hoping for more and better public information, while also lamenting the loss of redundant journo jobs, will only drive you crazy. Those wider questions of coverage and who does the covering has taken focus away from the daily whack-a-mole on which this blog has been built (and haven't I told you that lapsing into the passive voice means the writer/speaker is up to no good?). The work continues, with apologies to those hoping for more content more often.

Bogan King posted:

starkebn posted:

good article

quote:

Liberal MP Stuart Robert's CCC testimony 'unbelievable', Gold Coast councillor Peter Young says 7.30 By Peter McCutcheon Updated Wed at 9:32am

Turnbull Government backbencher Stuart Robert's testimony to Queensland's crime watchdog has been described by a Gold Coast councillor as "unbelievable". Mr Robert told the Crime and Corruption Commission (CCC) last week the reason he helped divert $60,000 of Liberal National Party funds into the campaigns of two independent candidates before last year's Gold Coast council elections was to stop the Labor Party getting a foothold. But independent councillor Peter Young said he believed he was the real target in the Gold Coast Council Division 5 election, not the Labor Party. "I'm confident Mr Robert does not consider me an ally," Mr Young said. "I've often been pigeonholed as an anti-development environmentalist."

Mr Young believes Mr Robert secretly diverted money into the campaign of his ex-staffer Felicity Stevenson in order to protect the interests of his pro-development donors. "Felicity Stevenson even put me last on her how-to-vote card, behind the allegedly pro-ALP candidate," he said. A spokesman for Mr Robert described Cr Young's claims as "false and disappointing". "The management of Ms Stevenson's campaign was entirely up to the candidate, including preference arrangements," he said. "The funding was provided to Felicity Stevenson by the LNP before Cr Young announced on February 10 that he would be contesting the election." 'My personal belief is that Peter Young was the target'

In his testimony to the CCC, Mr Robert singled out AWU industrial advocate Stacey Schinnerl as the Division 5 candidate he was trying to stop. But Ms Schinnerl has told the ABC she was rung by Ms Stevenson on February 13 last year and offered a preference deal. "The offer was that we both put Peter Young after each other on our how-to-vote cards," she said. Ms Schinnerl said the offer was not accepted. "My personal belief is that Peter Young was the target, and it goes back to protecting donors to the Liberal Party," she said. "Peter Young tends to vote against development applications that threaten the environment."

Mr Young won the contested division with just under 40 per cent of the primary vote. Ms Stevenson polled 20 per cent and Ms Schinnerl finished third on 16.6 per cent. The LNP's financial support of Ms Stevenson was not made public until after the election. Ms Stevenson was one of six candidates in the 2016 Gold Coast elections who hired former Tony Abbott staffer and developer lobbyist Simone Holzapfel on their campaigns. Last May, 7.30 asked Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate whether he was aware Ms Holzapfel was working on so many campaigns at once. His response was that he did not ask Ms Holzapfel for her client list.

quote:

Israeli national charged over hoax bomb, shooting threats to Australian schools Updated 38 minutes ago An 18-year-old Israeli national has been charged with making thousands of hoax bomb and shooting threats, many of which targeted Australian schools. It is alleged over 2,000 robotic voice bomb and shooting hoax calls began in January 2016. Victoria Police, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and other state police forces investigated 591 threats in Australia. Victoria Police confirmed 128 of the threats were directed to Victorian schools. It is not known which other states were targeted. Internationally, the threats were investigated by a joint team including the FBI and law enforcement agencies in Israel, New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

"The Victoria Police E-Crime Squad provided vital cyber evidence which resulted in the arrest of the Israeli suspect," Victoria Police said in a statement. "Israeli police acknowledged they could not have done it without us [the E-Crime Squad]." The suspect's identity can not be reported for legal reasons. He was 17 at the time of the offences. The case will be dealt with by the Israeli courts. In a separate case, a 17-year-old boy was in a children's court in Victoria on Thursday, charged with making dozens of bomb hoaxes to schools across Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia between May 2016 and April 2017.
The boy is due to appear in court again on June 26. Victoria Police confirmed the two cases were not connected.

Cartoon posted:

OOOOOOOooooooooo Terror Terror Boogie Boogie Boogie Those loving Jews again!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-28/18yo-israeli-national-charged-bomb-shooting-threat-calls/8479104

JBP posted:

I thought the point was to make it look like there was massive crime and get more funding for armoured 4x4s and machine guns.

hooman posted:

I posted that yesterday 'davey.

Typical QLD, a day late, a dollar shorten.

Anidav posted:

It's not like anyone pays attention.

Cartoon posted:

OOOOOOOooooooooo Terror Terror Boogie Boogie Boogie Those loving Jews again!

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-28/18yo-israeli-national-charged-bomb-shooting-threat-calls/8479104


Australia just chocked full of bullshit and crazy.