I don’t know if you’ve ever watched the sea lions at Pier 39 in San Francisco. I’m reminded of that querulous and stinking marine rabble whenever I encounter the Turnbull government in my media. The sea lions are a nasty bunch, and they fight a lot.
I now can’t picture Malcolm Turnbull as anything other than a self-congratulatory pinniped in a top hat, barking and clapping his flippers at his own cleverness as Lucy throws him a fish.
While the PM hastened to reassure the country that he had “excoriated” his rogue MPs (including ministers) who left parliament early on Thursday afternoon, the real issue is not that the LNP have taken this event as “wake-up” call for their one-seat majority government, but that such a call was needed in the first place.
Surely someone (a staffer, one of Dutton’s ninety, yes that’s ninety spin doctors) could have reminded the government that with a one-seat majority, everyone really needs to stay till the end.
That seasoned politicians holding powerful positions (and, apparently, their entire staff) need such a fundamental “wake-up” call is worrying indeed. What it confirms is what I’ve long suspected: the LNP perceive governing as a game weighted in their favour that they are entitled to win, without any particular merit, or even by actually playing it. Any challenges to these perceptions are dismissed as little more than the grumblings of opinionated upstarts.
Turnbull’s first sitting week after the election was woeful. First thirteen of his backbenchers defied him on the matter of Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Next, for the first time in some fifty years, the government lost three votes in the House of Representatives because of the Thursday bunk-off. Thankfully, they’ve now gone home for a few days.
On the matter of Section 18C, it’s interesting that the cohort advocating a “watering down” of the section are those who are the least likely to ever need the protections it offers. Read this piece by Jeff Sparrow on the co-option of speech laws for their own benefit by those who have no skin in the game.
Similarly, those most vehemently opposed to marriage equality are those who can in no way claim to be, in reality, affected by it.
(If such people are seriously concerned about a perceived debasing of the institution of marriage, they urgently need to make infidelity illegal. Imagine that).
I think it’s safe to say that politics has ceased to be much to do with good and fair governance, and is now almost entirely to do with the furtherance of the interests and ideologies of largely (and sometimes large) white men. In this they differ little from the sea lion colony in which the dominant males rule in their own interests, biting great chunks of flesh out of dissenters and shoving them, bleeding, back into the sea. It’s every pinniped for himself.
They even savage the young, and the ones with the loudest bark win.
No Place For Sheep 
On Dutton – ninety (90) spin doctors????? WTF???? Really????
Running out of ‘?’s’ must stop or my key board will explode.
Get the Sea-lion analogy, but humbly suggest, most of the LNP look like elephant-seals.
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-5W4nKGlD4rg%2FTtOyi0zQtBI%2FAAAAAAAACXc%2FC2JvEby6EE8%2Fs1600%2FNorthern%252BElephant%252BSeal2.jpg&f=1
😉
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Ha ha yes, indeed.
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This govt is way more closely related to the anal discharge bacteria of these animals, than the animal itself.
That would explain the hybrid fish/crap smell of every action they undertake..
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I would like that comment of Hypo’s twice if I could
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Read Jeff a bit earlier and walked away gobsmacked at the arrogance and bias of the Tribunal…not allowed to call a scab a scab…not allowed to tell the truth for fear of jail?
Yet politicians are allowed to get away with this
http//www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/i-could-live-on-the-dole-says-families-minister-jenny-macklin/story-fndo1gb8-1226546184170
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I know, PW, I found that interesting. Apparently it comes under bullying legislation
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My take is up at AIM. Of course my argument is specious, but then against that, that much?
I think the hate speech you direct at a coloured person, that she is not worth consideration or barred exclusively because the skin thing, is one thing.
For biased conservative judges to regard to the belling of a cat as to scabs, a didactic exercise actually concerning individuals who,unlike the black person, actually and consciously do harm, is despicable and risible.
Ok, So I am probably wrong. But it is too late in the day for this fella to change his feelings as to scabs.
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http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/i-could-live-on-the-dole-says-families-minister-jenny-macklin/story-fndo1gb8-1226546184170
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Looks like this in my last blogsite.
I have been censored out at AIM for drawing attention to the disappearance of the Jeff Sparrow comments and their link there.
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Why don’t you elaborate ?
Who is Jeff Sparrow?What did he say that needs to be hidden or not hidden?
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Hypo, he wrote the piece in the Guardian I linked to. He also famously said that the middle class fear wind farms because with every turn the windmills whisper *kill the bourgeoisie* He’s one of us.
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Whispering Windmills
I like that.Just what the rightfully paranoid entitled ones would fear.
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I’m sure it’s a mistake, PW.
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90 spin Drs?
That’d be about right.According to effluent physics, 101, that’s about the bare minimum it takes to give a turd the most basic of sheens.
Of course our bog wading PM has many more turd polishers, than that on hand.
Many are supplied by Rupes,(He is the shiniest of barkers eggs) but Malodorous Turdball is so busy soaking in spas filled Brut 33 concentrate (to remove the Liberal RWNJ stench) he has skipped every second bullshit buffing treatment.Hence the dull skid mark lustre.
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Hypo, some times you amaze me, some times you amaze me more. You DON’T Know who Jeff Sparrow is? Wilson DID link that.
I noticed the Jeff Sparrow bit had been edited at AIM ( you DO visit AIM from time to time don’t you?), commented on that and turned up later to see the comment gone.
A moderator and I had a quick chat and found it had been edited out by someone suffering from sleep deprivation and the now the whole lot is back up, as are my comments.
Someone like you should visit AIM, a good site for current affairs and the sort of site I’d expect someone like you to relish.
Its link is on the blogroll on the right of the page, depending where you are standing.
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Sorry,PW,(guilty) I skimmed.Passed on the link,I don’t always go linkies) I DO know a bit more about Sparrow now.
I’ll try to drop into AIM a bit more.I like the vibe here.There’s only so much head/wall/bang/futile left in me—-to go around..
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Enough of cavillings!
Let’s instead honour a substantial Australian, another Bob Ellis, now also setting out on his Big Journey:
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/sep/04/richard-neville-obituary
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Yes, Paul another fine left wing warrior lost to us all.
DQ sighs.
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Thinking, watching the QA Shakespeare edition, listening to Greer and it struck me that most folk outside our generation will never know what a game changer Neville, with his twerp mates, was for popular culture here and in Britain. Think of the strife they got into with the first OZ, the Australian one, in the early mid sixties, for the very slightest infringements of hirthoe unchallenged high puritan morality. Then the OZ trial and Britain and finally look at how the world changed from say, 1963 to 1973.
As powerful a rational influence on our generation as any. Like Ellis he did NOT like bullshit, could identify it from a
LONG range and then shoot it down through drollery and satire.
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Greer has it as an article of faith that Shakespeare, the greatest writer in the English language was an almost illiterate jobbing actor from Stratford.
It seems to me beyond argument that the Man from Stratford was not the great poet.
They talk about King Lear. In 1591 the Estates of the Earl of Oxford were settled upon his three daughters, to protect the (remaining) family fortune from the said Earl. Sound familiar?
Oxford returned from Italy to find his wife had given birth to a child, which he thought might not be his. He cast her out . . . familiar?
An author mines his own life for his art. How can he do otherwise? Joseph Conrad went to sea; Herman Melville was a whaler. JK Rowling was a teacher. Tolkien was a professor of English and deeply into medieval legends.
Where did a jobbing actor who as far as we know never went to school, never travelled outside England and did none of the things he wrote about get his ideas and inspirations? Something like Joan of Arc’s voices???
It was Oxford.
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Nasty man, for throwing out his little petal and her tiny offspring… a girl gets lonesome sometimes.
The Hack gets the accolades as an out working of the karma phenomena, thus.
Germs can “wear” a bit on her most cherished hobby horses, but I think there is still bang for the buck there, although she is past her best.
I think a good soul, not badly intentioned.
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But they later patched up the dispute, and lived happily ever after. BTW she was hardly destitute, as daddy was Lord Burghley – the model for Polonius.
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“An author mines his own life for his art”
We can expect a shitload of drossful LNP books based on zombies,snake oil sellers,pimps and carnies,then.
Mostly biographies.
They will be more interesting ‘post mortem’, and twice as enjoyable.
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I don’t think that’s necessarily true, Hypo. Writers mine the lives of others as well, and use their imaginations about events they haven’t experienced.
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” Like Ellis he did NOT like bullshit, could identify it from a
LONG range and then shoot it down through drollery and satire.”
2 men after me own ‘eart, I says.
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Ive actually paused for thought- the moderators job, like the referees, is a thankless task.
Consider the following:
https://www.facebook.com/paul.walter.7982
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Bugger it. It has gone to my FB page but not the feature I wanted to include which is a bit of scroll down, but worth it, watching a baby galah dealing with cats.
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I’ve agreed even if it gives the sea lions a bad name.
Mal as a barking, flipper-waving sea lion or elephant seal fits so well.
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Meanwhile Credlin and Bolt continue to undermine Turdball, and do the bidding of the pugilistic FStick.
Election within 6 moths? Less??
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Brandis and his govt will fight all the way to the High Court to deny access to his diary.
Meanwhile Slippers diary was available to every man and his dog, via the same rancid LNP scum stains .
I wonder what a nation with a media would make of this govt?
Those were the days.
“Mummy,what’s a journalist?”
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Polonius and Burghley..that is a fascinating factoid, dq.
Hypo, you read the Brandis story? Disgraceful and WHAT IS HE HIDING that he is prepared to waste $55,000 of taxpayer’s money to prevent it being turned over, at a time when we are earnestly assured that the priority is “budget repair”?
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‘Grandis’ entire future as a politician rests on him keeping his diary secret.
Imagine it’s smelly innards.
Brrrrrrrrrrrr.
On another front the Dastyari scalp is precious to the Libs because,(a) he is the ALP version of Pyne and (b) he is a Muslim ALP man and one that would be worth a lot to them crucified,when kissing the redheads arse in the senate.Next he will be painted as funnelling money to the bad guys, such is the ‘derangedness’ across the way in the HoR.
Turnbull is a goner, the Libs will take any distraction they can.
They define shamozzle.Abbott and the RWNJ began the hate and treachery era, and my god he will go be there when it all plays out in the final act.
Shakespeare is relevant.
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Most folk are aware that Dastyari is just the tip of an iceberg. The whole thing revolves around how politicians and political parties fund themselves and how it leaves them open to capture and manipulation by vested interests.
The system itself is the problem and we both know it won’t be fixed and why.
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The current problem is Dastyari looks embarrassing now.Laying low was stupid.A straightforward,’you oughta talk’ initially would have steered the debate to neutral ground.Now he just has to go, and Labor need to find a big Lib scalp doing the same thing, within a few hours of him going or lose the momentum.It’s a pathetic kids game to politicians, but where the high (reality) cost is every citizens existence.
Non-one is governing the country.
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That’s Dastyari.
The culture has had him believe that, like many of his colleagues, he is not accountable in the way we are.
But he has been naive to believe that one of the political dirt units would not have had an inkling and kept any info for that little lull when the release of the information might get attention off the Coalition.
Time was, he would have gone, but over the last decade the standards expected of parliamentarians have become much more permissive, to use an old term.
I think if he was a minister he would have gone, but he doesn’t matter that much, except in as a pawn in the bigger game.
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think Sam’s in shock, PW. I think he was labouring under the illusion that he was the special one who would never suffer a fate such as this one.
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I still want to know why he got the Chinese to pay such a paltry amount. He couldn’t pay it himself on his salary?
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There’s only one outcome.The time-frame is the only question.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-06/nasa-images-reveal-extent-of-human-impact-on-earth/7817726
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It is almost guaranteed that Brandis,highest law officer of the land, will not co-operate with the latest ruling of the court.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-06/brandis-loses-court-bid-to-keep-diary-private/7818030
What does that say about respecting the law to the ‘average’ Australian?
I say we fine him $180 dollars a day until he provides the data.
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Perish the thought that Brandis would lie or be bent.
It would be a simple thing to produce the diary and prove his innocence, whatever, but it is the principle, isnt it?
Or is it?
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You can’t use principle & Brandis in the same sentence PW.
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Racist bigots rewarded in Australia.Here are the Kings.
Entitled to run policies from back bench and outside govt.2 spineless men showing how to keep the genocide going.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-08/conservatives-lock-in-against-treaty-with-indigenous-australians/7825298
The next PM (still strongly knitted to the catholic cult, rife with pedos) currently grovelling in an outback community while he poisons their well, while they’re not looking.
He is the Trojan Horse car bomb of indigenous reconciliation and recognition.
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