Hanson did well enough to get through her Press Club appearance, in conventional terms. Those who like her for being Paaaaauline, who happened to see it - won’t be many - will have loved the fact that she was stumbling and stop start in a speech written for her. She’s not like the rest of em, slick and smooth etc etc. Those Coalition voters thinking of switching over to her, might find some of it disconcerting. But she didn’t break down, or go to pieces, etc etc. GetUp’s dumb stunt gave her a chance to show composure, and gave the whole thing a 90s teen movie air. If a valueless grifter like David Sharaz is part of it, the organisation should just be wound up, having long since served its purpose.
The trouble Hanson and One Nation may face from the NPC appearance was that it was the occasion for revealing a politics that was pretty….old new right. One Nation hasn’t, as I’ve noted, converted itself into a conservative party, from a reactionary one, as European parties like the Danish People’s Party National Rally (ex National Front) have - combining nativist and border policies with notions of cultural curation (rather than suprematism), and social support statism. National Front under Le Pen pere, was ressentiment insitutionalised - against immigrants, blacks, Arabs, Jews, bureaucrats, welfare scroungers etc etc. National Rally has expanded its reach by looking kindly on the French patrimonial state, and the idea that La France should protect its own from the vagaries of what De Gaulle once called ‘Judeo-Saxon capitalism’.
Not One Nation. It is a firmly pro-small business party, with a pretty bilious view of workers in general, young ones in particular. It has powerful anti-abortion forces within it, where other right parties (ex-US) have backed away from such, a guaranteed vote killer. And so on. But that makes the party’s rise all the more alarming. If this ramshackle outfit can stagger upwards to 32%, then it suggests that the politics it is offering - both the specific ideas and the pure force of oppositionality - have strong support. The reaction by progressives after the speech, suggests there is still a strong degree of disengagement, panic and fantasy as to how to respond to this event.
Politics, Gangsterism, Tautology in Victoria
Homer ‘Chip’ Le Grand V (the fifth, he’s not an 80s miniseries alien) didn’t have a story on Victorian state minister Ben Carroll this week, but he wrote one anyway. Carroll, a Right figure who could most plausibly replace Jacinta Allen and save the furniture in November, bowed out, saying he was a ‘marathon man’ (presumably not a Nazi dentist), and he would support his leader etc etc. For Chip, over several hundred words, the story was…there’s no story. Ben’s actually just a standup guy, and a loyalist. Well he may be, but this is bollocks of course. Carroll is a professional politician of vaulting ambition, and it’s because of that that he’s not going to step in now. He’s young , he’s a lifer presumably, and what’s the upside of putting yourself at the head of the retreating winter army that is Vic Labor now? Go to the election, lose it but save a few seats, finish your political career and have the stench of death about you in the corporate world? Or worse, somehow eke out a win in a hung parliament, to do four years loathed, no real choice but austerity budgets, to hand the state to the right in such a victory that they are set up for sixteen years, and you’re in the history books as the guy who lost it all? No, the ‘marathon man’ comment was a cute little clue. Do four or eight years in opposition. It’s state opposition! It’s a bludge. See your kids. Hit the gym. Come back tanned, relaxed and ready. Besides, even if he was thinking it - and maybe he might have been tempted - Carroll’s a grad of the SDA school, and he’d need whole party support to get the role, which he don’t got.
So is Chip stupid? No, in my subjective opinion, he knows all that. But he may want Carroll as a hot source after November whatever happens, so he ain’t gonna burn the bridge. His readers, who might want the actual story, not the fairytale, get a little less.If you believe Homer Fifth, I’ve got a giant horse I’d like to give you.
Woe piles upon woe for the Liberal Party, dulled jewel in the hollow crown. Brian Loughnane’s transfer to the Presidency isn’t working. The staff loyal to Phil Davis have gone, and no-one of any pzazz will take a job that was announced as an eight-month administration. Juniors only can be got, and there’s a lack of ‘institutional memory’ - save for Peta Credlin’s, Mrs Loughnane’s hairdresser, who hasn’t learnt a new style since 1976. Alyson Hannam, new state director, is formerly territory director of NT Country Libs, which is like running a linen store in Echuca. She’s a Gina Rinehart drop-in, and out of her depth, so Loughnane is directing a lot of the mundane stuff, with interns. Like any older chap with a younger wife, he’s conserving his energy, and so he’s eschewed the President’s important job of touring the state branches to give them a little lerv. Winter nights driving to Broadford, for the tin foil hat brigade to ask about 5G? No thanks. But that means doofus vice-presidents are doing it. No roughing it for the Lough
This is particularly bad now, because the Liberal Party branches are now falling apart. Half the Indian-Australians are gone because of the ambush of Dinesh Gourisetty, WesternMetro dumped preselection winner, and star of Ratatouille, the Bollywood remake, after his Hoppers Crossing caterers was rat infested - and he also did a Grigorivitch, and letter-referenced a sex criminal. The Indian faction felt that the win was theirs: they’d stacked the branch fair-and-square. They could have taken the L on the field, but the double cross of being dumped by head office was too much.
Half remained in Melbourne’s West. But now Deeming and her entourage are insisting that Gourisetty be expelled from the party altogether, beyond any usual sanction, and a seeming attempt to drive out Indian-Australians in general, who are more genuinely liberal on many social issues. The plan seems to be to winnow the branch, and rebuild it with more reliable Caroline Springs happy-clappies from Deeming’s church. To add to the Lough’s rough time, the Deeming crew haven’t discontinued their lawsuit against the party for bailing out John Pesutto after his defamation loss to Deeming. Which was the core of the Loughnane compromise deal. This crew may well snatch defeat from the upper intestine of victory.
Tales from Tasmania
A chip off the old Chip was Insiders last Sunday, which aired the day after Jono ‘Johnno’ Duniam, Number one Senator for Tasmania, announced he was bowing out at the age of forty-three, saying he was leaving to spend more time with your family…’and that’s the real story!’. ‘I love you and I really mean that!’. The Insiders panel just smiled and shrugged their shoulders at the sight of another guy, for whom politics has been everything since the age of fifteen, bowing out.
The truth that both basic knowledge and a few phone calls would have got is this. Duniam is boxed in. He got number one slot by gutting Eric Abetz a decade ago, having been Eric’s chief of staff. This was a brutal struggle because it was all conducted inside the Christian Reformed Church, the Dutch neo-Calvinist outfit both Eric and John Johno are members of, and is pretty much the Tasmanian Liberal Right. Turfing Eric was a brutal struggle which created deep divisions, and took Abetz to the edge of a nervous breakdown (the Dutchies don’t do things by half measures). But he clawed his way back, and got into state assembly, as Treasurer, and with eye on Premier. And John Johnno in his sites.
Duniam had had thoughts of a lower house move, to Braddon, when it was believed that the Tasmanian curse - no safe seats (except Clark, held by Andrew Wilkie as long as he wants) might be over. Alas Labor took that with a massive swing in 2025.
But simultaneously to that, the CRC base in the Liberals is collapsing, as the One Nation wave finally allows it to make some impact in the Apple Isle. With Jacquie Lambie renouncing any party building stuff, her one-time mini-Me Tammy Tyrell in Labor, and some money and competence in One Nation national office, it’s on like Craig Garland’s thongs. Duniam would retain the Senate slot as long as he wants. But really to what end? So the number one Tasmanian is off to spend more time with his wife and sister. The two of them might do a cruise…..
Double whammy on the everything is anti-semitism front. Cathy Wilcox’s cartoon showing western leaders holding up astroturf pro-Israel movement and marching along to a drum beaten by Bibi Netanyahu, was pinged by the Press Complaints Council for employing ‘anti-semitic tropes’. A few days later, on the morning of Pauline’s NPC meeting, the Age/SMH used a gotcha they’d be sitting on for months: that her weirdo office Malcolm Roberts had said two years ago that the US had started every war since 1913 - or its central bank, the Federal Reserve had. A standard right wing argument, but for Alex Ryvchin, hyperactive ECAJ head, this was reminiscent of ‘anti-semitic’ tropes. Tropes, tropes, tropes. AA Richards has a lot to answer for.
This bizarre double was illustrative of what was spotted in a brilliant essay by Mira Adler-Gillies in a recent Arena (and available at www.arena.org.au) - that zionist activists eventually directly produce the anti-semitism they claim to be fighting.
In the case of the Wilcox cartoon, well, Spec didn’t think the politics were particularly accurate. But this was not only a specific historical figure, rendered in a physically accurate and non-caricatured form, but one who is loathed by many Israelis, including many adamantine Likudniks, for being a shameless manipulator. Arguable with, certainly. But anti-semitic how? This was doubly so because the PCC has given a free pass to Bill Leak - portraying a generic aboriginal man, ie all blak men, as deadbeat dads who don’t know their childrens’ names, and the Herald Sun’s Mark Knight, for numerous pictures of African-Australian youf as sinister spooks, and of Venus Williams in the sort of ghastly big-lipped, big-faced style, straight out of Alabama 1923. Trope em if you got em I guess.
Rychin’s intervention was even more explicitly a reverse ferret. In this case the very absence of explicit anti-semitism, is a sign of its mysterious and pervasive presence. Which just goes to show that it is everywhere, and any amount of direct budget payment to zionist lobby organisations, presenting as community peak bodies, is worth it. A very bad week for free thought. I’m sure the IPA will be rig- I can’t even finish that sentence.
So hello David Munk! As forecast last week, The Guardian Australia’s new editor is its current acting, and very British editor. Having considered multiple internal candidates, and then headhunted some Australian grandees, they’ve gone with the safest pair of hands. Munk is well-liked in the Grauniad’s offices - a lot better liked than Lenore Taylor - and staff are looking forward to a period of minimised internal warfare.
But it means that three of the paper’s four editors since its inception have been Brits. The Grauniad was invited into Australia by Graeme Wood, the greenish founder of hotels booking site Wotif, after Crikey was mean to him a couple of times. Initial project was the Global Mail, that lunatic news site which scrolled sideways (‘no other site does it!’ Yeah…..). When that fell over, Wood went with the big blue.
Say twenty years ago or more, three Brit editors in four, would have been cause for uproar. Why not now? My guess is that the ‘so-called Australia colonisation’ stuff has so leached into the Guardianarati, that they see no real difference between a Brit editor and an Oz anglo. Another Brit and The Guardian Australia. Oh well, at least one Blind Date worked.
‘The bloke had impact, on and off the footy field’
- SA premier Peter Malinauskas, caught on hop, sending best wishes to car crash victim Tony Modra
Turnbull pet project latest: Seniors oz gay porn classic Snowy: Mountin’ 2 has now earnt more revenue than revived river energy scheme
Australian literary production to be reorganised after novelist Patrick Marlborough writes new scorching satire of publishing industry and what it’s doing wrong. Like, this will happen within weeks.
Bonnie Tyler update: Not lost, in Portugal, in intensive care.
Lincraft closing: devastated Etsy girls put together rescue package, using orange gingham, discarded blue fur, wood glue and sequins
Till next week…..
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