Well, you wouldn’t read about it if you relied on the offerings of a certain media mogul and his publications because they wouldn’t print it or broadcast it.

The goings on with a certain ninety-two-year-old codger would make for a continuing soap opera not so much in the style of Blue Hills, more the Days of Our Lives. At the present time the artful old media mogul – whose name I won’t mention as he may sue me in defamation and seize my miserable pension – had been planning his fifth marriage (first one this year, however) but after a two-week, whirlwind engagement it all went pear-shaped, as they say.

This may be due to the fact that he is facing an existential defamation action of his own but in this case it is he and his pay TV outlet in the US who are before the courts in Wilmington, Delaware for allegedly telling porkies about Trump’s lost election. Why Delaware you ask? Well you get no points for guessing that he domiciles his empire in this small US state because it is a tax haven for corporations with offshore interests and an aversion to paying tax.

As an aside, the judge overseeing these matters was approached by the legal team representing the defendant mogul to have him excused from giving evidence in person due to his age and general doddering condition.

The very astute judge questioned, ‘was this the same defendant of whom he had been reading was anticipating betrothal and marriage and looking forward to doing much travelling and lounging on beaches with his new squeeze who, he had just presented with a $3.5 million 11-carat diamond solitaire engagement ring?’ The judge sensibly dismissed the application.

But, it doesn’t end there does it? The future Mrs Murdoch V has since done a runner although it’s not clear if this was due to some unacceptable clause in the prenuptial agreement concerning certain ‘wifely duties’ or some other matter. Unconfirmed scuttlebutt suggests that she saw her paramour exiting the shower and that accelerated her decision, so she grabbed the ring and was gone.

What is it about this old coffin-dodger, at an age when most of his contemporaries are pushing up daisies or having trouble locating their slippers, he’s still on the prowl? A disturbing observation by one of his previous wives to the effect that ‘he doesn’t need Viagra’ could be the rather alarming clue to this rogue’s progress. So, ladies, he’s back on the market – watch out!

In politics, the once in century tag is virtually unheard of. Miracles can take place in a matter of weeks if not months, but there is always an allotment of certainty that some things will never change, affixed in reliably sturdy stone. In the context of the Australian federal seat of Aston, located in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, that tag rose with menace from the history books and chronicles, revealing that most unusual of phenomena: a swing of votes to the government of the day.

Usually, little can be made about by-elections. The electors can be a cranky lot. Given that Australia’s federal elections are a compulsory affair, being forced to vote outside standard national or state polls can make them even crankier. It’s an inconvenience, an interruption to the weekend routine, and made all the more biting by the fine that needs to be paid in the event of not turning up. In Australia, the vote is more rite and obligation than right and liberty.

Sturdy, dramatic swings against incumbents have assumed the properties of natural law and holy writ. Rarely does it go the other way. On April 1, it not only went the other way, but dramatically so: some 6.5 percent in favour of the Albanese government and its Labor candidate, Mary Doyle, and away from the opposition Liberal Party and their candidate, Roshena Campbell. (Neither, it should be said, were of Aston, but Doyle, as commentators remarked, had lived in the nearby environs.)

It is with little surprise that the event stirred psephologists, tickled the pundit classes and moved a goodly number of social mediacrats to suffer kaleidoscopic fits of analysis. It certainly left much room for raking through the credentials, and capabilities, of that most unappealing, unattractive of leaders, Peter Dutton.

First, the leader’s slant impressions, strained as they might be. It was, he explained, “a tough night for the Liberal Party and our family here in Victoria where … we have been out of government 20 of the past 24 years.” He conceded that much work lay “ahead of us to listen to the messages sent to us today from the people of Aston but listen to them, we will.”

The next day, on the ABC’s Insiders program, Dutton focused his attention on the peculiarities of Victoria: that state’s voters, not his leadership, was the problem. “Obviously, the difficulties for us in Victoria haven’t been germinated in Aston over the course of the last five weeks.”

He should know; for years now, Dutton’s own electoral appeal has been considered, even within his own party, poisonous in the southern state. As Home Affairs Minister in 2018, Dutton famously remarked on Sydney’s 2GB Radio that Melbournians were “scared to go out to restaurants at night time because they were followed home by these [African] gangs, home invasions, and cars are stolen.”

His knuckle-dusting anti-China rhetoric, which dovetailed into the Beijing bashing relish of the previous Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has also done wonders for his Labor opponents. Aston has more than 22,500 Chinese residents, which make up 14% of the seat’s population.

Then came Dutton’s cumbersome, post-mortem assessment of Victoria as a “very difficult market for us”, prompting Federal MP Julian Hill to retort: “No, we are 6.7 million Australians who overwhelmingly reject your extremist, divisive anti-science policies.”

Liberals don’t get it.

Dutton says “Victoria is a very difficult market for us”.

No, we are 6.7 million Australians who overwhelmingly reject your extremist, divisive anti-science policies.

The problem is not Victorians, it’s you Peter and your dying party. #auspol

— Julian Hill MP (@JulianHillMP) April 1, 2023

Victoria, as a whole, has certainly returned lean pickings for the conservatives: 16 out of 38 seats in 1998; 14 out of 37 in the 2007 election that went to Labor; 12 out of 2010 when Julia Gillard held the reins as Prime Minister. Even with the Coalition victory in 2019, the Liberals won a mere eight seats.

Then came the fool’s optimist, the mandatory allowance for anyone riding into the valley of death. Enter the stumbly Liberal MP Jason Wood, in blithe ignorance, who insisted that Dutton’s face be plastered everywhere. “He’s a great guy,” he explained to Sky News host Chris Kenny, “we just need to get the public to know him a bit better and get him out and about meeting people.” The one problem with such views is that Dutton’s face is everywhere, ridiculed on Labor posters and pamphlets.

Some old hands of the party, disgruntled and seething, also offered their fill. Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, sticking to his increasingly tatty script, condemned his party for veering too far to the right, goose stepping to the tune of the Murdoch press and its conspiracy vendors. (Dutton had been the chief knife wielder in his overthrow.) “Victoria is a small l liberal state and the Liberal Party egged on by the Murdoch media has moved further and further to the right. The last time the Liberal Party went ahead in Victoria was in 2016 when Julia Banks won Chisholm.”

jeez Peter – just tell the truth. Victoria is a small l liberal state and the Liberal Party egged on by the Murdoch media has moved further and further to the right. The last time the Liberal Party went ahead in Victoria was 2016 when Julia Banks won Chisholm #InsidersABC

— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) April 1, 2023

Dutton’s party increasingly cradles the prehistoric. He speaks to a dying demographic and beats the drum of mummies in sarcophagi lost in political lore. Such views speak to cemeteries filled with deceased ideologies and false gods. Short of a purge within the Liberals, or electoral suicide on the part of Labor – something known to occur from time to time – this will remain so.

The LNP went down without so much as a whimper on May 21 2022. It was a defeat one could blame on many factors; race, misogyny and right-wing MPs of the Liberal and National parties. And those same people are still around today. You know who I mean – yesterday’s men who still believe it’s their right to rule.

The Liberal’s defeat could also be blamed on factors such as a lack of policies, flawed leadership, consistent failures while in power, and poor economic management. However, the main reason was that the public had finally caught up with the Americanisation of our politics. Its leader Scott Morrison played a lone hand in a presidential-style campaign.

A Liberal Party review of their defeat:

“… concluded that the Coalition campaign failed to make policy central to the pitch for re-election, allowing a presidential campaign focusing on Scott Morrison.”

By the time the campaign commenced, Morrison had been holding a mythical hose for so long that he was drowning in his own slime.

Now my interest shifts to where the party will end up philosophically after such a terrible defeat and who is currently under Peter Dutton’s leadership. Thus far, Dutton has not fully revealed his hand in total. There have been vague murmurings about what political identity they might adopt, but it may be one they don’t want.

“We aren’t the Moderate party. We aren’t the Conservative party. We are Liberals. We are the Liberal party. We believe in families – whatever their composition,” Dutton said.

After comments from Liberal moderates including Simon Birmingham, Dave Sharma and Matt Kean that the party had lurched too far to the right, Dutton said he wasn’t going to be radically shifting the Coalition – but also said he wasn’t “some extreme rightwing person.

We can’t be Labor-lite and we won’t be if I’m elected leader,” he said. “We’re a centre-right party.”

If he wasn’t some “some extreme right-wing person,” what is he, and who does he represent?

If last week’s superannuation kerfuffle was anything to go by, one could only conclude that the Liberal party is a party for the rich, the top end of town, and the privileged. Duttons “in-your-face anger” at Labor’s policy change that would wedge Dutton by moving the Liberals to the far right was poorly sold but still had the desired effect.

What else could one conclude when a party supports individuals placing $400 million in superannuation for no other reason than receiving a 30% tax discount? Doing so is more like saving for the kid’s inheritance.

The punters out there in average land are not economists; they don’t argue all the ramifications of such decisions. All they do is, with open eyes, see some mega-rich dudes taking advantage of a tax-saving scheme. And remember, a tiny number of people have hundreds of millions of dollars in the system. That 0.05% of Australia’s population is taking advantage of yet another tax break.

Since he has said he would repeal the legislation in support of a few filthy rich people, Peter Dutton fell for the Albanese wedge hook, line and sinker. When asked who he supports on this matter at the next election, he must answer the 0.05%.

They have lost solid blue-ribbon seats to the Labor, which were once on the moderate left faction of the Liberal Party.

Factional infighting is now controlled by the far-right of the party. Candidate selection will also be under their control in both State and Federal elections. In several states, the organisation is conflicted by the faction fighting over the management of candidate selection. Particularly women.

The party is ageing, and it was reflected in the election result and will further do so. The last census also confirmed it. Those who have stubbornly supported the conservative side of politics are rapidly dying off, and the young progressives are replacing them.

The success of the “Teal” independents raises the question of what the party might have looked like had it been 50% of women MPs. They might have changed their culture and become truly right of centre.

It will be a mighty big ask of the remaining moderates to rebuild their base and regain their safe seats.

As it is now, Labor and Teals control that space, and it will be challenging for a far-right conservative party to win it back. If, indeed, that’s what Dutton has in mind.

In an excellent piece for The Canberra Times Mark Kenny wrote:

“Still, Anthony Albanese and his treasure Jim Chalmers were careful to sidestep the broken promise charge, first by making the change small in scale and, more importantly, by delaying its commencement to July 1, 2025. This means it is not so much a broken promise from the last election as a whole new promise for the next one, Labors unspoken dare is, if you don’t like it, don’t vote for it.

But handing voters this yea-or-nay hasn’t stopped Peter Dutton’s Opposition from proclaiming a gotcha moment and pledging to repeal the change if elected.

‘They said they wouldn’t do it, they just did it, enthused frontbencher Paul Fletcher in a statement which must have had Labor thinking ‘Come in spinner!’ “

Dutton showed how desperate he is to pin a broken promise on Albanese, but Albo’s experience won the day.

With a probable “No” on the Voice, the Opposition looks very much like it is trying to wedge itself. Either that or it has no place to go. Thinking Australians might also add the findings so far at the Robodebt Royal Commission and conclude that all these acts are of a far-right philosophy and ask; “Do we really need that?”

But the attacks led by Peter Dutton could have a fatal effect on the Voice proposal. He knows that history tells us that without the support of the Opposition, the referendum may not succeed.

I’ll leave the last word to the much-respected George Megalognis, who writing for the SMH said:

“The conservative argument for the Voice understands the consequences of a No vote for social cohesion. The defeat of the referendum, by whatever margin, would split the country and damage the interests of Old Australians just as surely as it would crush the collective spirit of First Australians.”

Everyone is doing it hard at present. Or so it seems. There may be exceptions, like Woolworths, which announced a 14 per cent (to $907 million) profit rise in yearly results, and the profit of Qantas reached one billion in its half-yearly results. No, l kid, you not.

The outlook for most of us, however, suggests tough times ahead. Usually, governments cop the blame when things go wrong economically. The Opposition under Dutton is doing everything possible to discredit the Albanese Government.

They will use the economic slowdown caused by rises in the cash rate, price rises, and other factors to smash the Government’s financial credentials.

It has already adopted the mantra, “why is everything dearer under Labor?”

All this is done with total indifference to the horrendous economic management they showed in almost a decade and only finished a few months ago in a disastrous election loss. Never can it ever claim again that they are the best money managers.

The election defeat was so embarrassing that it took away any notion that what they might say in the future would contain any truth at all. Or be taken seriously.

The LNP are fast becoming an Opposition in the Abbott mould, “Oppositions are meant to oppose.” However, I suggest they first say sorry or show some remorse for the wrongs they committed during their tenure instead of saying no to everything.

As for the Greens, well, they demand perfection even when it might destroy any progress at all.

Having experienced a few recessions going back as far as Menzies in 1960, I can assure the reader that economic downturns aren’t much fun, and it is mainly the not-so-well-off who cop the brunt of the grim misery they bring on.

Pensioners are struggling with their pension rises that were changed to save the Morrison Government billions. Some people need the money for rent, even if they could find an available house. Overseas students are lining up in food queues.

Gloom seems to embrace our very being. Economic fear is everywhere. With every rise, interest rates make it impossible for many to hang onto their houses. Insurance of all kinds is rising to unbelievable levels. On top of this, wages are still going backwards.

By recouping superannuation taxes from the rich, Labour is doing what Robodebt did to the poor. The difference is that one makes our society more equitable. That the wealthy and privileged in our community were, with the consent of the Morrison Government, able to place millions into super funds to attract a much lower tax rate is a scandal that needs an anti-corruption investigation.

The defeat of Scott Morrison cleared the air from the putrid smell of bullshit that our democracy inhaled for a decade. It extinguished the lying that occurred, and the electorate said, never again – will we be subjected to such unfair government. Surely the media aren’t suggesting they will reverse their vote quickly.

If they do, then they are underestimating the anger of the period.

WORDS THAT MAKE YOU THINK
After the damage he did to our standing in the world and domestically, one would hope that Scott Morrison would refrain from making comments. He must have an enormous opinion of himself to do so. A worse politician doesn't exist in my lengthy memory.

— john lord. WORDS THAT MAKE YOU THINK (@saint13333) February 17, 2023

The Labor victory of May 21, 2022 was accompanied by an expectation that Albanese might restore those elements of our democracy that the LNP had eradicated. Truth being just one.

Where I differ from the Murdoch mainstream murder is that I believe a majority of Australians want Albo and his government to succeed. Not only in getting the economics right but also in adopting new measures that will confront the challenges we face now and in the future. These challenges also include those arising from deliberate policy decisions by past governments and the chaos that resulted.

In many ways, Labor has always been the brickie of Australian politics. The ones who, brick upon brick, have built into Australian society all the necessities of a community. Only Labor has made the changes necessary to create a modern pluralistic society. The Conservatives never could and never would. Our political history confirms this. Other than the GST, can you name another?

Take a look at Gough Whitlam’s achievements (as published by Aparna Balakumar in MamaMia):

1. Abolished the White Australia Policy and passed the Racial Discrimination Act, ushering in a new era of multiculturalism for Australia.
2. Made the Pill affordable and accessible, by removing the tax on contraceptives.
3. Implemented free higher education, making hundreds and thousands of Australians the first in their family able to go to university.
4. Legislated for no-fault divorce, so women could chose to leave an unhappy marriage without being financially burdened.
5. Helped Australia become more civilised and humanitarian in its law-making by abolishing conscription and the death penalty.
6. Introduced Medicare to allow universal healthcare for all Australians. Without this historic reform 1 in 5 Australians would be unable to afford basic access to GPs or hospitals.
7. Championed Aboriginal land rights, returning land to the Gurindiji people of the Northern Territory. He was also known for involving Australia’s Aboriginal people directly in policy making and establishing free Aboriginal legal services.
8. He reopened the equal pay case, championing the rights of women to work and be fairly compensated.
9. He was the first Western leader to visit China and make his nation’s relationship with Asia a priority. This decision and those which flowed from it have been responsible for much of Australia’s economic and trade prosperity in the years since.
10. Whitlam established the National Gallery in Canberra, doubled funding to the arts, introduced legislation to form the SBS, and created the Australia Council for the Arts.

Hawke and Keating

Between them, they reformed and opened Australia’s economy to the world. They did it with an Accord agreement between the ALP and the union movement.

Julia Gillard

She introduced a price on carbon that Tony Abbott later destroyed. An act that could arguably be described as the worst assassination of good policy in Australia’s history.

Kevin Rudd

He introduced a disability insurance scheme (NDIS).

Anthony Albanese’s undoing of conservative corruption and destruction has only just begun. They have made a brave and competent start, but there is much more. Only Labor tackles the significant issues because it believes in government action to achieve equal opportunity and equality for all.

That the government must alleviate social ills and protect civil liberties and individual and human rights, thus believing that:

“… the role of the government should be to guarantee that no one is in need. Liberal [progressive] policies generally emphasize the need for the government to solve problems.”

So Opposition Leader Peter Dutton believes that “the Voice to Parliament’ referendum will fail. If it does, there is one person to blame – Peter Dutton. Dutton’s potential self-fulfilling prophecy is the latest of a long line of pronouncements by Coalition Leaders that are leading us to a similar situation the USA found itself in on January 6, 2021.

Dutton is opposing for opposing’s sake. He’s not even original while he is doing it.

Despite his agreement to run the republic referendum in 1999, then Prime Minister Howard effectively torpedoed the possibility of success by asking for exactly how the republic would look in practice. Then and now, the point is that the Parliament has the mandate to legislate the operation of a change in the Constitution. The ‘guarantee to me how this will work’ argument is as sensible as you deciding to drive everywhere because you don’t know if the 7.56am Route 847 bus will be on time on 15 November 2025.

Dutton’s other catch cry at the moment that it is more expensive under an ALP government is a rehash of various Coalition Leaders (false) claims they were the better economic managers. The reality is somewhat different. Prices go up over time, the claim that the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison government oversaw higher prices than the Howard or Menzies Government is just as true – and as equally irrelevant as Dutton’ claim. All Governments also ‘have form’ in running good and bad economic policy. The Rudd ALP Government avoided the 2008 financial disaster known as ‘the Great Recession‘ across most of the developed world. The Whitlam Government introduced the original version of our universal health care system which assisted Australians in staying healthy because they could seek medical assistance when necessary, however they never did understand the politics and economics of borrowing. Pity Medicare was continually belittled by the Howard Government and has been gutted to extent it needs life support in the past 10 years of Coalition Government. The Albanese Government is looking at options to get Medicare out of the intensive care unit.

Probably the biggest failure that demonstrates the Coalition’s economic credentials is the mining boom of the 1990s and early 2000s. Norway experienced a boom in the volume of oil exported about the same time as the Australian ‘mining’ boom under Coalition Prime Minister Howard and Treasurer Peter Costello. Norway put a proportion of the windfall profit into a sovereign fund, Howard and Costello handed out tax cuts to those on higher salaries and reduced services to those that were less well-off through effective reductions in social security benefits and cuts to Medicare. According to this ABC RN discussion:

Australia’s lack of planning and foresight during this episode appears to reflect our British heritage. Britain disastrously mismanaged its North Sea oil bounty from the 1970s onwards, in sharp contrast to the measured, controlled and long-term strategy adopted at the same time on the other side of the North Sea in Norway. Australia’s policy settings similarly fail to register three fundamental truths about the resources industry – that companies profit from extracting the minerals belonging to the Australian people; that these resources are finite; and that price booms never last.

How did Norway’s sovereign fund work out for them?

The really big lesson from Norway is not the size of its trillion-dollar fund; it is the way every single krone of surplus revenue has been converted into foreign currency. Norway has a commodity-based economy like Australia’s, but it has built a giant hedge to help manage the boom times and protect against the inevitable periods of subdued commodity prices. This explains why Norway is a creditor nation that has almost doubled its net foreign assets to around 185 per cent of GDP since 2010. That is the equivalent of Australia having amassed net foreign assets worth $3 trillion; instead, we owe the world $1 trillion.

Australia’s ‘Future Fund’ in contrast:

has received contributions from a combination of budget surpluses, proceeds from the sale of the government’s holding of Telstra and the transfer of remaining Telstra shares.

So nothing about the retention of some of the royalties earned by selling the nations finite assets to multinational companies then?

Dutton has a logic problem. While in his view there may have been some halcyon time in the past where everything was tickety-boo, there is no going back to those times.

When Dutton was Home Affairs Minister, he was defending the indefensible – what gives the descendants of a colonial power that used a legal fiction claiming the country was uninhabited prior to 1788 the right to tell people who use similar methods of coming to the country in the past 20 years that they can’t stay? Both the First Fleet and boat people effectively entered the country without prior approval or authorisation and arrived by ship. To be fair, the ALP has been equally culpable in this regard. We should all be humiliated by the actions that have been carried out in our name.

When Dutton claims that the Albanese Government’s altering the Coalition’s ‘safeguard mechanism’ to actually reduce the carbon emissions of large polluters somehow makes it a ‘carbon tax’, it is similar to then Opposition Leader Abbott’s claims that the Gillard Governments emissions reduction scheme was a ‘carbon tax’. As Abbott’s Chief of Staff admitted years later – the opposition to Gillard’s scheme was just ‘brutal politics’.

When Dutton claims that ‘the Voice’ referendum will fail, he is firstly throwing ‘red meat’ to his base giving them permission to openly discredit the process and to vote against it – regardless of what Dutton says closer to the referendum date. The First Nations people, who have been in Australia for something like 60,000 years, have made a consensus decision that they would like to represent their own values and beliefs to the Australian Parliament and a treaty. The statistics show that governments to date have not had the skills or ability to deliver the needs of our first nations people, why wouldn’t you welcome a representative body to help in the decision-making process?

When Dutton opposes, he is using the same process as Trump – promising to make Australia great again by returning to undefined ‘conservative’ values. As we’ve seen in the USA, the armed followers of Trump’s returning America to greatness agenda mounted a deadly coup on the US Congress while Trump and his assortment of hangers on and media supporters did nothing. Unfortunately, those that should have done so, the leaders of Trump’s political party, his Vice President and Congressional Leaders as well as the media should have stood up to him far earlier – but didn’t. The ‘Convoys to Canberra’ and similar activities demonstrate that the same forces have infected the Australian political system and the Coalition has and continues to provide tacit approval.

‘Back to the Future’ was a critically and financially successful movie franchise in the 1980s, but it proved that time, fashions, technology and values systems move on. Maybe Dutton should watch a couple of old movies rather pining and advocating for the past using rose coloured glasses and a considerable amount of gloss to cover over the less appealing aspects of the past such as racism, sexism and bullying. And if Dutton doesn’t have the necessary streaming subscription – someone should tell him why the past isn’t what it’s cracked up to be before his DeLorean gets stuck there.

Beyond incompetence and corruption

Untroubled by the burdens of either wit or intelligence the embaldened tubermensch who, for now, leads the meritocracy trading as the Liberal Party seems to be struggling with his personal brand, as is manifest in his Howardesque, too tricky by half cavilling over the Voice to Parliament. A vuvuzela in a chamber orchestra hoping no-one notices the discordance.

Not being Scott Morrison is a prudent image; albeit one that was obligatory given the level of loathing due that perfidious galoot. Yet Spud Dutton’s headkicking, homophobic, warmongering, race-baiting reputation is hardly a winning alternative, particularly when such a persona is widely seen as authentic, ironically unlike FauxMo’s shamelessly contrived, yet G-rated daggy dad flimflam which in no small way helped to bring the shyster undone.

“Cuddly Pete” had only a brief run – the Murdoch manure machinery’s efforts to sustain such an obvious deceit being counter-productive given their rustadon audience of rightwing nutters celebrates bastardry, culture war attacks on the “wokes” and persecution of the others*.

*As of publication the “others” is the trans youth but subject to change without notice and as may be determined by the political advantage to be gained from tormenting the victims du jour ala Robodebt.

Tory noir is a smoking ruin of creeping nastiness, sleaze and graft yet there is no contrition, there’s hubris but no humility and there’s shameless hypocrisy to camouflage their embarrassment and their terror at the prospect of the national integrity commission. Over nearly a decade they shat in our collective handbag yet now rely on a humourless automaton pulling the wings off butterflies (“they love me, they love me not”) to recoup some credibility. Spud will never trump Smirko as our worst ever Prime Minister because he will never be PM, but for now, as tuber supreme in the L/NP vegie patch this visionless, reactionary hack is the representation of who they really are.

I have no fkng idea what I’m doing

Lined up behind the tinpotato is his idiot sidekick, the gormless Sussan Ley. Suss got the deputy dork role to help offset the Tory’s infamous fella ratio – the swollen but karmically shrinking ranks of sex pests and big, swinging dicks. (Author’s note: Dutton and Morrison are two of the remaining BSDs).

Desperately shrieking Sussan’s shtick, apart from consonant abuse, is her feigned outrage and droning whine topping the sour expression of someone who pickles her own vag.

Dutts & Suss/Bubba & Squeak – the A Team from the et al shonks, God shoppers, spongers and dullards who’d spent their years grifting like no-one was watching; who took the game of mates to a level that would shame a Saudi royal.

He’s still there, isn’t he? That plastic garbage bag of grass clippings; the beer view mirrors, the claret-complexioned coagulation of cirrhosis and stupidity, that menace to sobriety known as Barking Barmy Joyce.

Barmy’s role is to champion the monetisation of planetary destruction on behalf of his miners & frackers constituency. And therein lies the evil at the core of the Coalition – the purposeful destruction of ecosystems to feed the insatiable greed of the filthy rich who have convinced themselves that with their wealth they can isolate from the consequences of environmental collapse.

Gawd, I shoulda passed on that last slab

Barmy has an excuse. He’s a moron. What excuses do the climate science denying cookers such as Matt King Coal Canavan, Alex Antic and Gerard Rennick have?

Corruption and incompetence are bugs in politics. Morrison made them a feature of his nudge, nudge, wink, wink sleaze fest. What they have now demonstrated is their appetite for evil.

Evil is a standard now embraced by the Tory ecosystem.

Evil is the illegal pursuit and willful persecution of powerless Robodebt victims for non-existent debts.

Evil is abusing people’s lives and wellbeing to score political points.

Evil is directing disaster support funds away from Labor-voting electorates.

Evil is the fossil fuel mates who know the truth yet persist with planetary destruction.

Pure evil is that Tory accomplice, the scrotum-headed media magnate and his willing flunkies who not only know the truth but promote the lies regardless. There is no hell hot enough for Rupert Murdoch and his flying monkeys. There is no stretch in chokey long enough for the Tudges, Porters and Roberts of the Lying Nasty Party.

 

Hellbound (Image from huffpost.com)

 

This article was originally published on Grumpy Geezer.

 

Like what we do at The AIMN?

You’ll like it even more knowing that your donation will help us to keep up the good fight.

Chuck in a few bucks and see just how far it goes!

Your contribution to help with the running costs of this site will be gratefully accepted.

You can donate through PayPal or credit card via the button below, or donate via bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969