I would blow Dane Cook posted:

I think I have found my new favourite website

quote:

Katharine Murphy and Paul Karp talk to two key marriage equality campaigners about how they campaigned for a successful outcome to the postal survey: Sydney MP and co-chair of Australian Marriage Equality Alex Greenwich and Anna Brown, Director of Legal Advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre.

Amoeba102 posted:

Some of the posters in this thread's obsession with unremarkable right wing commentators is obsessive and creepy. They've said and done nothing important, why are you posting this?

woofbro posted:

We’ve had coverage of Bennelong by-election everywhere. I get that Kristina has a lot more going on than John Alexander but man, just feels like nothing was done to strongly contest Barnaby in the New England seat. Apart from roots level stuff like his daughter high jacking a Ute and public members calling him out at conferences which weren’t covered by any of the biggest news sources.

buzzfeed posted:

Geoffrey Rush Steps Down From Screen Academy Role After "Inappropriate Behaviour" Complaint

The Sydney Theatre Company is still yet to disclose details of the allegation.

The 66-year-old actor was the subject of a complaint lodged to the Sydney Theatre Company about his alleged "inappropriate behaviour" during a production of King Lear.

"The complainant has requested that their identity be withheld," a spokeswoman told the Daily Telegraph.

In a statement sent to BuzzFeed News, Rush said there had been no provision of "any details, circumstances, allegations or events that can be meaningfully responded to".

Rush announced on Saturday (via his lawyer Nicholas Pullen) he would step down as president of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, "effective immediately".

“Certain recent media reports have made untenable allegations concerning my standing in the entertainment community," the statement said. "It is unreasonable that my professional colleagues should be somehow associated with such allegations."

Rush said the decision had "not been made lightly".

"However, in the current climate of innuendo and unjustifiable reporting, I believe the decision to make a clean break to clear the air is the best for all concerned," he said.

AACTA said in a statement it accepted and respected Rush’s decision to voluntarily step aside.

JBP posted:

Um, what is this?

drunkill posted:

So is their pay docked because they didn't do their job and vote?

Oh, of course not.

NTRabbit posted:

I don't know what Lowes is

Synthbuttrange posted:

Rush to judgement

Brown Paper Bag posted:

https://twitter.com/satpaper/status/939249500442578944

mumbrella posted:

News Corp Australia has abruptly withdrawn its newspapers from being audited by the Audited Media Association of Australia, dealing a near fatal blow to the future of print circulation audits in Australia.

mumbrella posted:

In future News Corp will argue that advertisers should look to Enhanced Media Metrics Australia (EMMA) which was created by the newspaper industry in 2013 to promote readership numbers, rather than circulation, as the key metric.

EMMA is run by research company Ipsos under the auspices of trade body NewsMediaWorks’ sister organisation Readership Works. Based on asking survey questions, EMMA offers data including audience demographics, media consumptions, lifestyles, psychographics, and product and service usage and attitudes.

News Corp is Australia’s largest newspaper publisher with mastheads including The Australian, The Daily Telegraph in Sydney, the Herald-Sun in Melbourne and Courier Mail in Brisbane as well as a string of local and regional titles.

According to News Corp, the decision follows a consultation with advertisers and media agencies. It claimed: “The decision to use EMMA as the primary measurement metric follows an extensive review with more than 100 advertisers and media agencies that highlighted that the existing print circulation metric is no longer a representative measure of today’s cross-platform audiences.”


Miller: Claims engagement across platforms, not circulation, should be primary metric

Michael Miller, News Corp Australia’s executive chairman, argued that circulation was not an indicator of how media is consumed.

Supporters of circulation audits argue that providing third party verification that publishers actually circulate the number of copies they say they do is an important safeguard for advertisers.

“Media buyers and advertisers plan media based on the audience that engages with our mastheads, not the number of papers sold,” Miller argued.

“Total audience is the chosen metric that our advertisers and media buyers now use to make their media buying decisions and to compare alternatives across all main media, so it’s a natural course of action for us to meet the market by using one, primary metric,” he explained.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

Won't this gently caress them immeasurably when they realise that half of their circulation is just coffee shops buying bulk and no one actually reads it?

I would blow Dane Cook posted:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-11/customers-using-social-media-to-pressure-insurers-peak-body/9246392

gay picnic defence posted:

'the castlemaine effect'

JBP posted:

I credit Jones' win to my recent liberal hipster purchase of a banjo.

Zenithe posted:

The lack of Australian content is disgusting.

We need to address the real breaking news here:

https://twitter.com/Vegemite/status/940801544341131269

Whitlam posted:

Everyone wants a progressive government until we actually have one and before people jump on that statement with a long list of Andrews' sins, please keep in mind I'm not saying he's perfect or the second coming of Bernie, Lenin and Corbyn mashed together, just more progressive than the other actual option, and objectively progressive on many fronts.

Anidav posted:

Former senator Lady Florence Bjelke-Petersen has died at 97 years of age.

Lady Bjelke-Petersen was the wife of Queensland's longest-serving Premier Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

Lid posted:

Rererereposting

cohsae posted:

A top notch article from the Saturday Paper today
https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2017/12/23/its-all-john-howards-fault/15139476005689

JBP posted:

They know better than to work for MMM and Austereo. They will likely be the final ones from d gen burned forever by the station if they're serious.

One of MMMs finest days was Tony Martin at his wits end with the station inviting Judith Lucy on to shitcan Austereo for an hour.

WhiskeyWhiskers posted:

I miss Peter Grace.

quote:

A long time ago, in a magazine far far way—well, okay, the old Bulletin mag before it folded—I was asked to write an obituary for Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, premier of Queensland and the closest thing to an actual fascist dictator this country has ever known.
The obit pre-dated the internet and the magazine is long gone, but it was a piece of writing I always treasured.
I had reason to track it down this week because Sir Joh’s wife, Lady Flo, finally lost her grip on the mortal world.
It was not an unhappy moment for the nation.
To mark it, and my disgust at the deliberate hagiography surrounding that vile pair, I have dug it out of my paper archives and rewritten it to reflect Flo’s passing into the fires of Hell.


Not everyone’s a hypocrite. Some of us will pour one out for the late Flo Bjelke-Petersen, purely to send the old witch down to whatever level of hell currently plays host to the tormented shade of her unlamented husband, Sir Joh, the last of the hillbilly dictators.

If ever you needed another reason to stoke your contempt for the top hatted muppet currently impersonating a Prime Minister (spoiler, I know you don’t) Mycroft Trumble’s dewy eyed tweet in praise of Lady Flo this week was just the ticket.

In all of the maudlin, confected nostalgia generated by Flo’s long overdue demise, something precious has been forgotten.

The hate.

Because there were thousands of us trapped north of the Tweed who hated that vicious, crackbrained yahoo she married with a visceral intensity. And we weren’t too loving fond of her ceaseless attempts to humanise him either.

There were many of us who’ll look back on the Bjelke-Petersen era as a waking nightmare, when a gang of slack-jawed yokels, crooks, bandits, half-smart chancers and degenerate greedheads ensconced themselves in power by brutally crushing all opposition, debauching the public offices, and rewarding favoured cronies with the sort of naked contempt for propriety that would have impressed Ferdinand Marcos or Manuel Noriega.

As long as there is a spark of life in Australian democracy, the mid 1980s when Bjelke-Petersen ruled alone, at the very zenith of his powers, should be studied in civics courses as an object lesson in what happens when untrammelled power is gathered into the shaky, liver-spotted hands of a stuttering, proto-fascist brute with just enough rat-bastard cunning to mask his true nature behind a carefully constructed facade of endearing bumpkinry.

And what of his legacy? What was more lasting?

The corruption of the state police force, or the use of that force as a praetorian guard, a last guarantee against the depredations of civil libertarians and unwashed protesters who might disrupt the orderly flow of business in the Sunshine State? That business being the orderly flow of tribute into the pockets of the ruling junta.

Or should his legacy be the damaged lives of opponents who proved so troublesome that they had to be destroyed on general principles, broken on the wheel of the law, by defamation cases, by emergency legislation, by the punitive actions of a state with untold resources and unchecked power?

Should his legacy be the flight of hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders to safer, less contested lives in those states where politics did not threaten to become an intimately personal matter, something that could, in the worst case, reach out and touch you, shrivelling your options to fight or flight? And, really, only to the latter.

There’s a certain sort of smugly stupid conservative who can’t help but mount a reflexive defence of Bjelke-Petersen because they can’t abide the critics of his regime. But there was nothing conservative about him or

his government. They were radicals with no respect for the institutions of parliamentary democracy.

He gave his wife a loving Senate seat in the national parliament for fucks sake. And the only surprising thing about it was that he didn’t get his complete Caligula on by sending a loving horse down there in the number two spot.

All those ratfucks understood was strength and fear and the simple joy of driving their enemies before them. There was no schadenfreude in seeing Bjelke-Petersen humiliated before the Fitzgerald Inquiry when he was unable to explain what was meant by the doctrine of the separation of powers, because all it did was hammer home the truth that we’d been comprehensively arse-raped by a man with the ethics of a starving sewer rat, and the political instincts of a sabre-toothed baboon with a really scorching methamphetamine addiction.

We missed a great opportunity with Joh’s state funeral. It could have been an appropriate ceremony; a pack of dingoes starved for a week then sooled upon the corpse in the mudflats down by the Brisbane River. Or he could have been buried at sea with the worst of his cabinet ministers, all of them dipped in chum and fed to the hammerheads and reef sharks off the Great Barrier Reef which they were so keen to open up to mining.

For Flo I think the appropriate send off would involve tossing her down a disused shaft in the Ipswich coal mine where she once enticed a group of striking miners to the surface with the promise of pumpkin scones and a chat ‘to sort out their differences’.

And when they came up?

The cops beat the bleeding poo poo of them and the strike breakers charged in and her jabbering fascist husband proclaimed it a great day for all the people of the Sunshine Reich.

Stay dead, motherfuckers. You won’t be missed.

==========================================

* For the absolutely bargain-basement and value-added price of $4 per month you can subscribe to Alien Side Boob (don’t ask, I didn’t dare) and get your own twice-weekly stream of the best of John Birmingham. Alien Side Boob is a private, subscription-only column doing the things he can’t do in the newspaper. Because lawyers … and good taste.
==========================================

Some thoughts of my own (Bob Gosford). We each have our memories of Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s for-far-too-long rule over Queensland. Born and raised in New South Wales, I was largely immune from any personal effect from the evil regime but looked on in vicarious horror at what was going on over the border.

Three—of many—experiences linger. The first as a sixteen-year old hitch-hiking into Queensland for a lark and a look around in the early seventies. Even at that age the barbarity and corruption was manifest—cops roughing me up as a “long-hair” and running me out of Maryborough late one evening. I survived and retreated back to the relative sanity south of the border but not without more than a hint of the sense of menace afoot.

The second came many years later while living in Maningrida on the Arnhem Land coast in 1989 when the late Wayne Goss led Labor to a very long-overdue victory. There were a number of Queenslanders living there at the time—now I realise they were economic and political refugees—and I had no idea of the hatred they had for Bjelke-Petersen and his rotten bunch until what for them was that happiest of days.

Then later still while practising law in Darwin. A colleague was before the court on a minor assault charge—or similar—and when asked if he had any priors he told the court that during the ‘illegal’ street marches towards the end of the Bjelke-Petersen era he’d been pinged for the trifecta of abusive language, resist arrest and assault police—again the details are hazy but you get the drift—and the response from the bench was along the lines of, “Well, you’d be regarding that as a badge of honour, wouldn’t you.”

Zenithe posted: