Lid posted:

Macarthur, to Penrith's west

Starshark posted:

Mars, Bringer of War.

Starshark posted:

Reasoned nuanced debate from Bolt.

https://twitter.com/jrhennessy/status/846104383817367553

Robert Manne posted:

Bolt challenged me to name ten stolen children. This was, I must admit, a cunning move. Unless one is prepared for a challenge of this kind, lists of names of the victims of a policy do not trip off the tongue. I doubt I would have done better if I had been asked to name ten victims of the Stalin terror or the Armenian genocide, matters I have read a very great deal about. Bolt’s “name ten” myth was born.

Soon after this radio encounter – the transcript of which was published in the Herald Sun – I asked the Director of the Melbourne Writers’ Festival if she was interested in inviting Andrew Bolt for a debate with me on the stolen generations. What then followed was truly bizarre. Bolt made it a condition of his participation that I send him a list beforehand not merely of ten “stolen children” but of “a hundred” or even “hundreds”. I emailed Bolt to let him know that I found his request peculiar. The issue dividing us was whether or not there were ten or a hundred or indeed thousands of “stolen children”. What Bolt seemed to require, as a condition of agreeing to a debate, was that I first provide him with the evidence proving that he was wrong. Although we had by now entered an “Alice in Wonderland” world, I told him I was happy to meet his condition so long as he provided me with a definition of what counted for him as a “stolen child”. Bolt refused to answer this question. Nonetheless I decided to send him a reasonably detailed list of mixed descent children removed in the different states and territories between 1900 and 1970.

I divided the list sent to him into four categories. The first involved cases outlined in detail in books. Here there were twelve names. The second category was of “half caste” children seized in Queensland at the beginning of the twentieth century. As I explained to Bolt: “The origin of the policy of “half caste” child removal began in Queensland at the turn of the century. All these children were “half castes” who came to the attention of the Protector Walter Roth. He authorised for them to be formally arrested. None of them received a welfare assessment of any kind. All of them were found guilty of being neglected after a perfunctory hearing of a magistrate’s court.” According to the relevant law, the Industrial Schools and Reformatory Act of 1865, being Aboriginal was in itself evidence of neglect. In this category I provided Bolt with some 65 names. The third category was of children sent to “half caste” institutions in the Northern Territory in the interwar period. As I explained to Bolt: “In the Northern Territory from the early 1920s ‘half-caste’ children were picked up by authorities of the Commonwealth government (which administered the Territory) and sent to one of two extraordinarily overcrowded “half-caste” homes, in Darwin and Alice Springs. None of the children received any welfare assessment. None was taken before a court … The aspiration of the policy was to pick up all these children …” There were some 120 names in this group. Finally in the fourth category I sent Bolt a list of 60 names of those who had been removed and had subsequently provided testimony to a Howard government-funded stolen generations Oral History Project. Simply to convince Bolt to debate me I had provided him with some 260 names of mixed descent children who had been removed by government from their mothers, families and communities and sent to institutions. At last Bolt agreed to a debate.

...

Not only did Bolt ignore the evidence presented in the documentary collection. After the debate, almost everything Bolt wrote about the stolen generations was not merely a lie but provably so on the basis of the evidence he had in his possession.

Bolt claimed on a dozen occasions or more that I had been challenged but had failed to name even ten “stolen” children. Usually he failed to mention that I had sent him some 260 names. He never mentioned that I had asked him to supply a definition of what counted for him as a stolen child and that he had refused. On one rare occasion when he did acknowledge that I had sent him more than 200 names, Bolt claimed that the names I had sent him all came from Queensland. They did not.

TheMightyHandful posted:

Bolt moonlighting for buzzfeed:


E: beaten like Bolt in court

Bogan King posted:

starkebn posted:

what has the LNP actually got done since Tony Abbot became Prime Minister?

Dunning-Kruger victim Rowan Dean posted:

The world of political depression was rocked to its core this week by news that former prime minister Julia Gillard has been appointed chairperson of mental health organisation Beyondblueties.

"Oi am deloyted to accept moi friend Jiff Kunnut's koind offer to reploice him as the moin person in Orstraya in charge of mental health," said a clearly deloyted, er, delighted Ms Gillard to an enrapt press conference of mental health experts. "Normally Oi don't loik men in blue tois but in Jiff's case Oi am prepared to moik an exception."

Ms Gillard is believed to have been hand-picked for the job due to her lengthy experience diagnosing imaginary mental disorders such as sexism and misogyny during her three-year stint as head nurse at the notorious Lakeside Lunatic Asylum in Canberra. The asylum, which is buried deep underground and can house up to several hundred patients at a time in its notorious "Green" and "Red" twin chambers, is known scathingly as Capital Punishment Hill.

Critics of the institution claim that Nurse Gillard was responsible for inflicting a series of highly dubious and extremely costly research programmes upon not only unsuspecting inmates but the nation as a whole. "The sums involved were mind-blowing," complained a former colleague, Dr Wayne Springsteen of 4 Surplus Row, Nambour. "They did my head in."

Wandering daze

"It was like the lunatics had taken over my asylum," complained a former inmate, Kevin, a drifter of no fixed abode. "Which is exactly what she did. I've been wandering around in a daze ever since and I'm incapable of landing even the most menial of jobs. They won't even let me scrub the dunnies at the UN."

But Nurse Ratshit remains unapologetic:

"Moi good friend Kevin was a dangerous psoichopath suffering from severe narcissism with delusions of being the Proim Minister of Orstraya which was of course moi job. Oi had no choice other than to get Little Sammy, Smurky Burky and Fat Howzie to pin him down so Oi could perform an emergency lobotomy on his spoinal chord with the sharpest knoife Oi could foind."

Nurse Gillard remains convinced that her controversial approach to mind control allowed an entire generation of women and young girls to discover they were inflicted with severe bouts of non-existent male oppression. "These girls are now so oppressed they feel they have no choice other than to go and jump off the Wage Gap," explained one expert.

"Oi clearly established through moi extensive research programme that when a man in a blue toi looks at his watch when Oi am spoiking then he is clearly suffering from acute misogyny," explained Ms Gillard to a jubilant crowd of nutcases at the Sydney Opera House. "And Oi will not be lectured to about sexism and misogyny boi this man, Oi will not. And Oi sincereloi hope that Mr Rabbit has a poice of paper and is wroiting out his own job prescription," she added, to thunderous applause from a group of wailing, hysterical feminists.

Moi Story

However, other experts believe that evidence published in her autobiography Moi Story suggests that Nurse Gillard herself suffered from repeat bouts of paranoia and self-delusion, indulging in extreme flights of fancy where she imagined herself to be a happily married woman living in a quaint cottage in Canberra charmingly called "The Lodge" with her own private hairdresser/boyfriend ensconced in a man shed at the bottom of the garden. "It was all part of the fantasy," claims one psychologist. "She even imagined she would be Headmistress of the Entire World if she gave enough taxpayers' dollars to the Clinton Foundation."

CT scans are believed to indicate that the Left side of Nurse Gillard's brain is abnormally enlarged, likely to have been brought on through years of unhealthy exposure to student undergraduate politics and hardcore union affiliations. "On occasions, those close to Nurse Gillard could be spotted in the middle of the night hiding her medication in a brown paper bag and burying it in the garden," admitted her former boyfriend.

Beyondblueties was established by former Victorian premier Jiff Kunnut after he lost his marbles thanks to an intercepted phone call with fellow Victorian Andrew P. Cock in 1987.

In a clear case of Munchowards-by-Proxy, an audibly deranged Mr Kunnut can be heard accusing another man identified only as Little Johnny of "going off his brain". Mr Kunnut then accuses the man of being an unprintable four-letter word, before admitting that he himself is "going berserk".

Mr Kunnut explained that he was standing down from Beyondblueties for mental health reasons and to spend more time with his id. "This whole thing with Channel Seven and that Amber sheila is driving me bonkers," he admitted.

ewe2 posted:

Let that be a lesson unto you, Daisy.

JBP posted:

No. If what you are saying can be justified as being a belief you hold it is protected. It's really broad and basically says do whatever you like as long as you aren't just trying to gently caress with people. Like if you are a Christian and you truly hold that Muslims are evil baby rapers that is ok.

e: I work with journalists union from time to time and they don't feel like editorial content is threatened by 18c, but they acknowledge that doing blatant rabble rousing might land you in poo poo.