#phonkedinthehead

https://www.crikey.com.au/2026/09/28/andy-burnham-anthony-albanese-zohran-mamdani-uk-politics/ " Anthony Albanese and Andy Burnham met in person for the first time last week, on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York. The key topic of discussion, according to the Australian media? Rugby league. Burnham, who happens to be the former president of the league’s UK governing body, was apparently recruited to support the PM’s Rabbitohs. It was the second time they had connected over the sport, having spoken by phone in July after Burnham became prime minister. But if they ever get beyond such ice-breakers — and bilateral issues such as AUKUS — the pair should trade notes on domestic politics. Indeed, Albo might ask his British counterpart for some advice. Their political fortunes are starkly diverging: Albanese’s popularity is waning while Burnham is riding high. Albanese might have been reluctant to ask for tips and relieved to bro out about the footy, for the two leaders have history. Almost exactly a year ago at British Labour’s 2025 conference (this year’s one is now underway), Albo jetted in to make a guest speech. Amid speculation Burnham might soon re-enter parliament and challenge for the party leadership, Albo told the crowd “it takes time for plans to work” and encouraged “unity of party”. It was a thinly veiled swipe at Burnham and his supporters, in favour of his “mate” Keir Starmer. Clearly Burnham doesn’t hold a grudge. Albanese intervened on Starmer’s behalf because he saw in him a kindred spirit: a fellow left-winger-turned-plodding-centrist with a small agenda and few hard-and-fast principles (no coincidence, as Starmer’s team had purposefully copied the ALP’s strategy). But Starmer has since unceremoniously crashed out of British politics — there is currently a tight by-election underway for his former seat, in which Greens leader Zack Polanski is running — and now Albanese is also in trouble. As neutral journalistic observer Latika Bourke so delicately put it at his New York press conference — in a “question” that Tony Jones would once have “taken as a comment” on Q&A — Albanese is “taking Labor to one point shy of Julia Gillard when you rolled her, and your net negatives are worse than Scott Morrison”. Burnham, on the other hand, couldn’t be jollier. Back at home, he is surging in the polls, with Labour now comfortably in first place. Even better, the party previously topping the polls, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, slipped to equal third place with the Tories in the latest YouGov poll for the first time since early 2025. Polling outfit Survation found that tactical voting could even see Reform slip to fourth place in seats. As Reform’s polling position has declined, so too has the populist right’s control of the media agenda. Don’t get me wrong, the right-leaning press is still hyperventilating about migrant crime and wokeness. But the weight of such claims is starting to feel more marginal and, dare I say, hysterical at times. Take, for instance, the recent kerfuffle in the usually sleepy village of Piddington near Oxford, population 350. It voted to symbolically secede from the UK on September 15 over a Home Office proposal to house up to 1,256 male asylum seekers at a nearby former military base. Various Reform and Conservative MPs have since paid the village a visit, including Tory leader Kemi Badenoch. Now a second village, Barnham, is considering following suit with a symbolic independence vote. The previous system of housing asylum seekers in hotels while their claims were processed was criticised for being expensive and attracting far-right protesters. The government is rightly moving to a different model. But if they can’t use former military sites in the middle of nowhere, where can they put them? There is something farcical about Badenoch trekking to rural Oxfordshire to make common cause with these eccentric villagers. Are these really your people, Kemi? And how can you call yourself a patriot while indulging people literally renouncing the flag? This tension, between traditional conservative patriotism and saying the country has gone to hell in a handbasket, plagues the British right — and its contradictions are increasingly apparent. The reason such culture war issues feel less resonant is that Burnham has focused on practical, close-to-home issues for working and middle-class families. He has made a flurry of announcements (including one every day for his first fortnight in Downing Street), almost all related to cost of living. He has also been telling voters about them relentlessly, particularly on social media. This has allowed him to regain the political centre of gravity by owning one of voters’ top concerns. Most polls find migration and the National Health Service are voters’ next biggest concerns. One can see clear parallels here to New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani — indeed, it’s a shame he didn’t get an invite to the Albo-Burnham chinwag, given they were on his turf. (I guess he’s more of a round ball guy.) Mamdani’s relentless focus on cost of living, his ubiquity on socials, his general affability and good vibes… do they teach these things in Mayor School? This is perhaps the only reliable blueprint for successful centre-left government in the world right now. In a socials-first media landscape with finite voter and media attention spans — and with higher interest rates and rising essentials squeezing families — one must produce a constant stream of policies, packaged into vertical video format, reminding voters you’re there to help. It also draws an implicit contrast with the less grounded concerns of the right-wing culture warriors — I’m saving you money on your power bills, they are faffing around with nutty parishioners declaring themselves a principality! Whether these bite-sized announcements are sufficient to shift the dial on affordability remains a long-run question, and how Burnham will handle harder decisions beyond these initial easy wins remains to be seen. But as political scientist Ben Ansell put it, “The Burnham strategy is not to produce a 100-page, five-year plan to be carefully considered by wonks and gleefully eviscerated by columnists. It is emphatically not about deliberating slowly and tacking and jibing according to the concerns of MPs, think tanks and stakeholders. It is about doing things and making sure the public sees you doing them. Burnhamism, it seems, is about urgency. Sometimes just acting for acting’s sake. Showing the public that you care …” Ansell’s intended foil for Burnham here is Starmer — but it could equally be said of Albanese, that approach’s modern progenitor. The Australian prime minister’s innate caution leads to picked-apart reviews and long-awaited half-solutions, too often allowing others to set the agenda and leaving him on the back foot. Andy Burnham said after his meeting with Anthony Albanese that he’d gotten halfway to Australia (New York), and that he’d have to get the full way at some point. But Albo can’t wait that long for more pointers. For now, he should simply pull up Burnham’s Instagram page and watch how modern retail politics ought to be done. Benjamin Clark is an Australian writer and digital journalist, now based in London. He is currently Prospect Magazine’s head of digital audience, and previously worked for The Conversation." #ukpol #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/foreign-relations/2026/09/26/tuvalu-criticises-its-good-neighbour " With just days to go before the climate talks that Australia is co-hosting with Pacific Island nations, only a handful of leaders from outside the region have committed to attend. They are mostly from other small islands highly vulnerable to rising sea levels. Tuvalu’s climate and environment minister, Dr Maina Talia, doesn’t mince words in describing his disappointment. “It’s immoral, I would say, and it’s unacceptable.” Major greenhouse gas emitting countries have shunned the Pacific events, which were organised as a concession to the region when Australia conceded to Türkiye in its bid to host November’s UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties, COP31. Fiji is the main venue, and Tuvalu is staging a special leaders’ event that is intended to show how climate change is affecting the nation at ground zero of the climate crisis. “We asked them to come, to see for themselves because they cannot claim leadership over the climate narrative if they never get to experience what the people are going through,” Talia tells The Saturday Paper. “They cannot claim to be taking leadership on this if they cannot make an attempt to go to Tuvalu.” The low-lying nation could be the first country to become uninhabitable because of climate change. While Fiji has mountains and rivers, the minister points out, Tuvalu has no higher ground people can move to as sea levels rise. This threat is not the only one Tuvalu faces – it also relies on rainfall for fresh water, which makes the island extremely vulnerable to drought as well as cyclones, which, scientists forecast, will become more intense as the planet and the oceans heat. Already, higher tides are pushing salt water up through the earth and limestone, corrupting traditional crops such as pulaka, or swamp taro, once a staple food. Fish is Tuvalu’s main export and a traditional source of protein but, says Talia, “with the increased heat in the ocean, fish are moving further out and are more difficult to catch”. Rising rates of heart disease, diabetes and obesity have followed a shift from traditional local staples towards imported processed food. Talia says it is also affecting traditional culture and identity. “Manhood in Tuvalu is determined by how many pulaka do you own and how many pigs do you own, because we plant, we go fishing, we feed our pigs. It’s a difficult time for our farmers. I mean, that whole cultural measurement [is being undermined].” Talia, who describes himself as “a theologian by profession and a politician by choice”, makes no apology for bringing biblical concepts of ethics and morality to political discussion. “I want to bring that flavour to the climate discourse,” he says. “That’s where moral leadership needs to come from. If a neighbour is in trouble, our responsibility is to help.” Anthony Albanese seemed to acknowledge this in a speech in New York City this week, ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, in which the prime minister said, “There’s no avoiding the scale of our responsibility – or the cost of inaction.” Albanese spoke of “a promise to our Pacific family that they will not face the climate crisis alone”. Talia has heard Australian leaders talk about “our Pacific family” many times before. He points to a glaring omission. “How does Australia, one of the world’s largest exporters of fossil fuels, rate as a neighbour when you look at it in that context? “We cannot just put money on the table and then do the opposite,” he says. “We cannot continue to open up coalmines and LNG [liquefied natural gas] plants, which is the root cause of all of this. “Being a good neighbour is doing what ought to be done, doing the right thing,” he says. “Are they good neighbours to the Pacific or not? That is a question Australia should be pondering.” The concept of tuākoi is a foundational part of Tuvaluan culture. The word translates into English as “neighbour”, but it encompasses far more. For Tuvaluans, being a tuākoi brings obligations of sharing, reciprocity and caring for others, especially the vulnerable. Talia’s PhD in theology frames the climate crisis around the concept of tuākoi and the biblical parable of the good Samaritan. He draws on it as a politician to critique the geopolitics of climate change. “Tuvalu,” he says, “is like the man robbed and left half-dead by the side of the road.” Nations that expand fossil fuel exports and fail to take the steps needed to save low-lying nations are like the priest and the Levite who see the wounded man but cross to the other side of the road, he says. At The Australia Institute’s recent Climate Integrity Summit, Talia shifted the analogy. “Let us look upon the wounded person on the side of the road as Mother Earth and the robbers as capitalist corporations. The banks that continue to issue subsidies and [the companies] that wantonly exploit and bleed nature through extractive activities.” Aiming for unlimited growth through the exploitation of natural systems is, Talia argues, “absurd and unacceptable”. “All our economic models up until now have failed us,” he says. Talia was with Albanese in Palau for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting this month when the UN Environment Programme released a report confirming global temperature rises will exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next few years – “pushing climate risks and impacts to increasingly dangerous heights”. Just days earlier, a catastrophic glacier collapse linked to rising temperatures devastated parts of Tibet and Nepal. Both events left Talia feeling distraught. “I couldn’t sleep at night,” the minister says. The UN report warns “there are no benign scenarios” with global temperatures rising above 1.5 degrees. The higher and longer the overshoot, the greater the risk of hitting irreversible tipping points such as ice sheet collapse, causing multi-metre rises in sea levels. “Once large-scale ice loss is set in motion,” the physicist and climate scientist Bill Hare notes, “it plays out over centuries and cannot be undone on any timescale that matters to us or our children. “Sustained 1.5°C destroys 70 to 90 per cent of the world’s [coral] reefs; 2°C, close to all of them.” The impact on the world would be devastating – the already grim outlook for Tuvalu and other coral atoll nations would become hopeless. Yet, led by Trump’s America, the world seems to be doubling down on fossil fuel dependency and Australia on its huge coal and gas exports. According to the Climate Council, Labor has approved 37 new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas developments since taking office in 2022. While Albanese defended Australia’s climate change record against fierce pushback from regional leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum, back home, his resources minister, Madeleine King, posed for photographs in the Northern Territory celebrating the first flow of gas from fracking in the Beetaloo Basin. Climate Analytics research suggests this project will release the equivalent of almost 50 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. Australia has made some effort to help Tuvalu adapt to climate change. It’s contributing to the cost of a project known locally as “the reclaim”, which is building up and then sand-bagging land to protect part of Funafuti, the main atoll and capital. The government is also offering some Tuvaluan citizens an opportunity to migrate to Australia to live, work and study under the Falepili Union treaty. “But that does not save the country,” Tuvalu’s climate change minister says. Australia claims the program will allow the diaspora to maintain their culture and identity, but this is easier said than done. Tuvaluan people have what Talia calls an “earthed faith”, with profound ties to land. “It’s about who we are as a people. Our culture indicates that when you give birth, the placenta and your umbilical cord need to be buried in the ground,” he says. Tuvaluans feel an ongoing connection to their ancestors and the land where they are buried. “We are [not] only talking about those who are living in Tuvalu. We are also talking about people that are resting in the land … Do we just have to neglect them or ignore them and pack up and leave?” Talia knows the UN annual climate talkfests struggle to deliver what the world needs to avoid the worst consequences of climate change. Every final text or final decision from the process requires total consensus, ensuring the lowest common denominator rules. He’s investing hope in a new international forum focused on ending the unchecked proliferation of oil, coal and gas extraction. Colombia hosted the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels this year. Tuvalu will co-host the next TAFF with Ireland in 2027. Talia wants countries to arrive prepared “not simply to restate that the transition is necessary but to demonstrate how to make it happen”. Talia says he hasn’t had the chance to sit down with Anthony Albanese and speak to him directly, but would like the opportunity. “I will be frank with the prime minister,” he says. “It is about the survival of my people. We can be very diplomatic and be problematic at the same time.” " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance #fuckfossilfools #StopAllDiscretionaryTravel

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2026/09/26/inside-albaneses-factional-dominance-theyve-all-been-executed-except-one " When Anthony Albanese lost his first run for the Labor leadership in 2013, he blamed nine defectors from his own Left faction who had voted for the Right’s candidate, Bill Shorten. “They’ve all been executed, except one,” a Labor source close to Albanese tells The Saturday Paper, referring to Lisa Chesters, who holds the regional Victorian seat of Bendigo on a margin of 2.8 per cent. “And she’s being kept there as a warning to others, like a head on a spike.” Some of the so-called group of eight left parliament on their own terms, but the fact the Albanese camp sees their departures in such stark terms says a good deal about how the prime minister views the factional tribes he now rules uncontested. His dominance – unmatched in the history of the Labor Party – also accounts for much of the apparent timidity of his government’s policy agenda. Without pushing from the factions, everything is done at the leader’s pace. “I think he sees the world very much in personal terms,” says one long-time observer of Albanese’s career in politics. “Cross him and he can be quite vindictive, and frankly, what he’s very, very good at is this internecine warfare.” Doug Cameron, a former national secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers’ Union, who served as a New South Wales Labor senator from 2008 to 2019 and has worked alongside Albanese as a member of his hard left sub-faction, is scathing of what he sees as Albanese’s shift to the right since winning the 2022 election. “I can see the Left having the numerical numbers but not implementing Left policy vision or ideas,” Cameron tells The Saturday Paper this week. “I said 12 months ago the Left have been defanged, and I’ve now come to the conclusion that I wasn’t strong enough, because the Left have not only been defanged but lobotomised. They’re not making any difference to the lives of grassroots Labor supporters, they’re not making a huge difference to the travails of ordinary Australians, and they need to deal with that because, if they don’t, there’ll be a lot of Labor members who are in parliament now who won’t be there after the next election.” Cameron points to falling poll numbers and other signs that traditional Labor voters are drifting away, disappointed that the Albanese government hasn’t delivered what they expected. He struggles to explain why Albanese has abandoned so many of the progressive policy positions he has championed since the early 1980s. “I am absolutely bewildered by this and I don’t have an answer,” says Cameron. “I did not expect Albo to veer to the right as he has. It’s a shock and an absolute bewilderment for many people who have supported Albo, as I have, over the years.” Albanese is a lifelong member of the NSW Left, who rose to the top as leader of its hard left sub-faction. In this parliament, he has delivered something no Labor leader has managed since the war: control by the Left of both the federal parliamentary caucus and the party’s organisational wing. In a federal caucus comprising 124 members and senators, 63 are with the Left, 59 are with the Right, and two are unaligned. Of the 397 delegates to the ALP’s national conference in July, the party’s supreme rule and policymaking body, 202 sat with the national Left, 191 with the national Right, and four were unaligned. That was little changed from the 2023 conference, where the 399 delegates split 201 Left, 192 Right, and six unaligned. The NSW Right still controls Albanese’s state branch, holding 60 per cent of the delegates to the party’s most recent state conference. Yet the Right’s grip is weaker than its numbers suggest, eroded by a decade of corruption scandals. Albanese’s knack for building key alliances across factional lines, honed in the early 1990s when he worked as an assistant general secretary inside the party’s Sussex Street headquarters, has led some Labor insiders to now jokingly refer to the once-feared faction as the “Albanese right”. As for policy development, while Albanese’s NSW Left faction still sees itself as the party’s engine room of ideas compared with the Right, that’s not a position shared widely outside NSW, even among Left faction leaders from other states, who mostly consider Labor’s current factions as serving as little more than management tools. With this collapse in the faction system and homogenisation of once-strident ideological differences, Cameron sees the future for the party as more neoliberalism and more ceding of Australian sovereignty to the United States. “It’s maybe entering into a war with our largest and most important trading partner, China. It’s about battling Australians never having the chance to get a roof over their head, or having adequate social security payments, of not being able to maintain a decent life for Australians that are disadvantaged,” Cameron says. “The basics are not being delivered, but instead we get this jargon about patriotism and rules-based orders, while ordinary workers are battling to put food on the table, or pay the rent or the mortgage.” Cameron dismisses incremental policymaking of the sort that has characterised Albanese’s first four years in office as an excuse to do as little as possible. The same goes for the argument that Labor can govern only by holding together a coalition of working-class and middle-class voters wary of radical change. “I take the view that if you deliver for your base, you deliver for Australian people,” says Cameron. “You’ll get elected, and re-elected, and you don’t have to veer to the right. You don’t have to take selfies with Donald Trump. You don’t have to abandon Australia’s sovereignty to the United States. You don’t have to do any of these things. You can defend Australia without becoming the deputy sheriff for Trump and his minions.” If Labor’s factions are to a large extent something of a black box, with faction leaders often reluctant to talk openly about what happens behind closed doors, some still see Labor’s factional system as influencing policy development. First, says Flinders University associate professor Rob Manwaring, there is an overlap between union power and factional power. The Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association, Australia’s largest private sector trade union, is traditionally part of the Right, for example, and the United Workers Union is the backbone of the Left. “What that means is that certain factions and/or unions have what’s described in political science as ‘issue ownership’, so they tend to be seen as custodians within the party of that issue,” Manwaring tells The Saturday Paper. “For example, when you take issues around pay rates for certain key workers in key industries, then the unions and the associated faction become gatekeepers around that issue.” Second, when it comes to formalised structures and policy development forums such as the Australian Labor Party national conference, Manwaring sees the party’s factions as still being the key driver of deals and agreements around policy positions. “That’s where there’s a lot of kind of behind-doors negotiations between factional and union leaders about what they’re prepared to sign off on, even if they know that a formal policy adopted at national conference might not necessarily then translate into an election commitment, something we saw 10 years ago with the jostling around same-sex marriage. “There’s this growing view that the factions are not ideological, or that ideology is less important, and I tend to disagree slightly with that, because you can still see evident traditions within the party, from social liberals to labourists, to social conservatives, too. There is still a broad sort of division where progressives tend to be either unaligned or they go towards the more progressive faction, and that’s where you might see some of those real pushes for tax reform and those sorts of things.” Manwaring concedes that compared with the 1980s, when Labor’s factions guided policy positions as well as managing issues of potential conflict and deciding who gets every job or trip overseas, there has been an atrophying of ideas. “There are just far less publicly vocal debates, and nor do I see a huge amount of internal advocacy. Once in a while, you see things like Labor for Refugees pop up as an activist sort of group within the party, but then their influence tends to wax and wane, and I just don’t see the Left faction advocating the same way.” Manwaring adds: “I think the reason for that is twofold. One, there’s still a lot of people burnt by the Rudd–Gillard years and the 2019 election defeat, that you can’t be too noisy within the party, because it becomes problematic. There definitely does seems to be kind of less idealism, almost less intellectual vigour, than you might have seen in the 1980s within the party.” With so many inside the Labor caucus today believing they owe their seat in parliament to Albanese’s political astuteness, much like when John Howard was at the peak of his powers during the early 2000s, there is little appetite for a radical change of direction. Most Labor MPs in the federal caucus, it would seem, overwhelmingly trust Albanese to lead the government to the next election and beyond. “I keep running into people, inside and outside the party, who still manage, despite everything, to underestimate Anthony. Not just his ability to deliver policy wins but electoral wins too,” says one Albanese confidant. “And no place is that more evident than in Macquarie Street,” the confidant adds, referring to the NSW parliament, where the Labor Right’s Chris Minns is premier. “This is where the NSW Right, the faction that prides itself on having a reputation for ruthlessness about the decisions that need to be made to win elections, still runs the show. And some of these guys still think that Anthony has just lucked his way to it all, because they actually have to hold on to this idea that no one else can possibly know how to win.” There will always be a price to pay for anyone who crosses Albanese, says the confidant, reiterating the view that no one knows better than him how to square the ledger. “Why is Chris Minns such a thorn in Anthony’s side? Because he [Minns] is a prick,” a NSW Left faction powerbroker says. “But don’t worry, we’re watching and we’re waiting, and when the right time comes, we’re going to give him a whack.” Factional dominance of the sort that Albanese enjoys not only gives him enormous influence over policy but also in terms of succession planning. 1/2 " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/albanese-is-all-talk-no-action-on-climate-20260922-p60zet.html?ref=rss " Albanese is all talk, no action on climate Anthony Albanese opens Climate Week in New York with a clarion call about climate action. “We need to meet the problem head on” and “unfortunately, without strong action” climate disasters will get worse (“Albanese takes climate warning to New York, but fossil fuel experts test credibility”, September 22). Yet his actions at home are anything but strong. Australia, the world’s third-largest fossil fuel exporter, is still approving new fossil fuel projects, has a Clayton’s carbon offset system, has a 43 per cent target for emissions reduction that is not enforceable, and gives billions to fossil fuel companies through diesel rebates and direct project funding. Like his gambling advertising reforms and government transparency, he talks the big talk, but his actions speak otherwise. Rowan Godwin, Rozelle PM Albanese must surely have developed a thick skin after 30 years in politics. How else could a leader proclaim the need for greater measures to curb global warming in front of an international audience, despite having approved 37 fossil fuel projects since assuming office? Admittedly, Australia’s dependence on fossil fuels is trending downwards, but any reduction is offset by an increase in our coal exports. No doubt this is facilitated by more than $1 million in donations from the fossil fuel industry before to the 2025 election. Roger Epps, Armidale I welcome Prime Minister Albanese standing up on the world stage and acknowledging that our climate is warming and that we need to meet the problem head on. But since coming to office, the government has approved multiple new, expanded or extended coal, oil and gas developments. If Australia is going to call on the rest of the world to confront climate change, we need to confront it at home, too. That means stopping the approval of new or expanded fossil fuel projects. Our actions need to match our words. Suzy Bessell, Cremorne " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance #fuckfossilfools #StopAllDiscretionaryTravel

1/2 https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/2026/09/19/who-gets-be-traitor " When Pauline Hanson labelled SAS veteran and Liberal frontbencher Andrew Hastie a “traitor” eight times, then animated the insult and pinned it to the top of her social media feed, she did more than provoke outrage. She exposed the conditional nature of Australia’s reverence for military service and revealed how brittle our nationalist mythology becomes when it collides with powerful, wealthy political interests. This month, a grubby internet cartoon metastasised into a crisis of legitimacy for the Australian right. In 2022, Hastie was compelled by subpoena to testify in the defamation case brought by Ben Roberts-Smith. He told the court, “I don’t want to be here.” The court denied him protections afforded to other special forces witnesses, publicly identifying him. Justice Anthony Besanko described his evidence as “honest and straightforward”, whereas he characterised Roberts-Smith as a liar driven by “a fear of the truth”. Roberts-Smith now faces five war crime murder charges, which he denies. For fulfilling his legal obligation to tell the truth, One Nation denounced Hastie as a “gutless maggot” and a “traitor”. Hanson added “wanker”. When condemnation arrived from the Returned and Services League, Senator Jacqui Lambie and Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles, Hanson refused to apologise. Barnaby Joyce issued an insincere, backhanded personal retreat from his leader’s disastrous grab for the title of White Queen of the Patriots. He and Hanson thoroughly deserve Hastie’s rejoinder: they are “lying cowards”. The speed of the backlash made one thing clear. “Traitor” – when directed at a genuine soldier – is the one accusation the Anzac myth cannot withstand. Its deployment here showed how brittle the mythology is and how quickly it fractures under political expediency. Australia’s conventional sense of patriotism falters the moment it is asked to apply its own standards consistently. Hanson and One Nation routinely deploy nationalist symbolism – flags, borders, the all-purpose slur “un-Australian” – and, at their rallies, demand incoherent immigration and border controls. Yet the moment a veteran’s testimony threatened accused war criminal Ben Roberts-Smith, the digger became expendable. Hanson – whose key donor, Gina Rinehart, is another Roberts-Smith supporter – immediately launched a social media onslaught against Hastie. Hanson had recently condemned a satirical ABC video about Rinehart as grotesque. Then she defended her own cartoon as “satire”. The contradiction is not incidental: it is the whole story. This is patriotism as performance. It is a rhetorical device used to discipline opponents. Australia’s nationalism has always rested on an unstable foundation. Lacking a revolution, a founding document, or a unifying moment of democratic birth, the nation turned the military catastrophe of Gallipoli into its emotional bedrock. From this unlikely material, fought on a foreign beach, Australia built a civic religion, renewed each Anzac Day with dawn services, marches, medals and ritualised reverence. The legend’s peculiar power lies in its claim that the authentic nation resides not in parliament or constitution, but in the sacrificial body of the soldier. To be a “real” Australian is, at some level, to be imagined as a digger, or as someone who reveres the digger appropriately. Military service becomes the highest currency of national belonging. The Hanson–Hastie affair is instructive precisely because it puts that currency under pressure. Hastie is not a figurative stand-in for the digger; he is a literal one. Yet a party built on nationalist symbolism produced and then refused to delete a cartoon depicting him as a traitor. This contradiction reveals how thin and instrumental “patriotism” becomes when it collides with anything more complicated than a slogan. More disturbing than the disruption of military service as a national value is the billionaire apotheosis of Roberts-Smith. Rinehart and Kerry Stokes seem intent on elevating Roberts-Smith to an emblematic role in their culture war. Stokes privately bankrolled Roberts-Smith’s extraordinarily expensive defamation case against Nine Entertainment. The trial ran for years, cost millions and ended with a decisive judicial finding: the allegations of war crimes were substantially true to a civil standard. Stokes did not fund the subsequent appeal, but his earlier backing ensured Roberts-Smith could mount the most lavish legal defence available to any Australian soldier in history. Rinehart publicly defended Roberts-Smith as a “brave and patriotic man”, criticised the media for “gloating” and questioned the justification for the Australian Federal Police investigation that led to his arrest. She framed war crimes prosecutions as a threat to morale and argued that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on investigations should have been used “removing terrorists and their supporters from our country”. This year, Rinehart transformed her support into a physical monument. She purchased a Scarborough apartment block for $8.75 million, renamed it the Ben Roberts-Smith Beach Houses, erected large signage, and opened it as veteran housing. Roberts-Smith’s parents cut the ribbon. Tenants were quoted thanking Rinehart in emotional terms. She described Roberts-Smith as a hero “looked up to by Australians across our country”. This is not loyalty. It is myth-making – the deliberate elevation of an accused war criminal into a symbol of national virtue. It constructs an alternative narrative in which judicial findings, AFP investigations and the testimony of fellow soldiers are reframed as an attack on Australia itself. In this narrative, Roberts-Smith is not an accused murderer; he is a martyr of the culture wars, a vessel for billionaire anxieties about national decline and media scrutiny. The Hanson–Hastie dispute cannot be separated from the billionaire-driven myth-making around Ben Roberts-Smith. This is the big right-wing flex, and it costs millions of dollars. Last year, the booing of Aboriginal veterans and the far-right disruption of Anzac Day were further attempts to recast Australian nationalism and patriotism as a whites-only affair. The brittleness of Australia’s nationalist consensus was evident again this Anzac Day, when Aboriginal people delivering the Welcome to Country, including Pastor Ray Minniecon, himself a veteran, were booed at ceremonies across the country. Minniecon, who spent decades reminding the nation of Indigenous servicemen and women and advocating for their recognition, stood on the steps of the Sydney dawn service and was jeered by some who claimed the Welcome was “political”. This disruption of the solemnity of the dawn service revealed, with startling clarity, who some Australians believe Anzac Day is for and who they believe it is not for. The booing was not spontaneous. It was amplified by far-right networks online and encouraged by One Nation figures who had railed against the “politicisation” of Anzac Day. Neo-Nazi groups, animated by culture war rhetoric, staged unprecedented disruptions at dawn services in Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth. They marched near cenotaphs, unfurled banners and attempted to drown out Indigenous speakers. Police intervened at several sites. Veterans’ organisations condemned the behaviour as a desecration of the day. The spectacle made one thing clear: the same movement that claims to be the guardian of the Anzac legend is willing to disrupt its most sacred rituals – and boo an Aboriginal veteran – when a ceremony does not align with its preferred narrative. The contradiction is not peripheral; it is central to understanding the Hanson–Hastie dispute. The far-right’s “patriotism” is not about honouring service. It is about controlling the story of who counts as Australian and who does not. It is no great coincidence that at the same time as Hanson is using the Anzac myth to mock Hastie, comments have resurfaced of her mocking First Nations people. In a podcast last year she brought out the old line about Aboriginal people not inventing the wheel. “There was nothing there. What are we actually holding up? A few, you know, rock paintings,” she said. “Sorry – they’re the most primitive race on Earth and we’re supposed to be holding them up and saying what they’ve achieved? They’ve achieved nothing.” So, who owns the Anzac legend? While political leaders rushed to defend the sanctity of the Anzac legend, almost none addressed the fundamental question: Sacred to whom, and built upon whose memory? Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men served at Gallipoli. They rode with the Light Horse. They fought on the Western Front. Yet for a century, the nation that now invokes “the Anzac spirit” to determine who counts as a real Australian scarcely acknowledged their presence. Under the Defence Act, Aboriginal men were barred from enlisting unless they could pass as “substantially of European origin”. They enlisted anyway. Between 800 and 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men served in World War I. Men such as Private William Reginald Rawlings, an Aboriginal horse-breaker from Purnim, Victoria, were decorated for bravery. Rawlings earnt the Military Medal for his role in a bombing team that cleared an enemy trench at Morlancourt Ridge. He was killed on August 9, 1918, aged 27, and buried beside his friend, Corporal Harry Thorpe, also a Military Medal recipient. A veteran later recalled: “The AIF judged a man not by his colour, but by his worth.” Then the survivors returned home, to a country that refused to recognise them as Australian. They were denied soldier settlement land grants. Many were barred from RSL clubs. They could not vote. They were not counted in the census. They were deprived of many citizenship rights and many did not have the right to vote until 1984. This is the truth Australia still struggles to confront: the Anzac legend Hanson claims to defend was constructed around a white digger. At the same time, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men who served beside him were erased. So, too, were Australians with Chinese, Indian and other non-British heritage. This is why the current controversy is so instructive. Hanson seeks to weaponise “traitor” against a white veteran whose testimony was inconvenient, while the institutions now expressing outrage spent a century erasing Aboriginal service. " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://theshovel.com.au/2026/09/09/taking-drugs-breaking-law-ok-if-youre-white-one-nation-confirms/ " Taking illegal drugs, breaking the law and endangering lives is okay if you’re not a migrant and you can reframe it as a redemption story, One Nation has confirmed. Victorian One Nation leader Warren Pickering yesterday admitted to taking speed and ecstasy and losing his licence three times for drink-driving, leading to confusion, given the party’s previous statements on law and order. In a previous interview, Pauline Hanson suggested migrants should be deported if they break the law, saying “We’re taken as mugs. They come out here, peddle their drugs, commit their crimes and yet we still put up with it”. She has also called for migrants who commit crimes to be deported. In its election campaign this year, the party has pledged to make Victoria the “toughest state on crime”. When asked why the same standards don’t apply to their own party members, a One Nation spokesperson was happy to clear up any confusion. “Foreign people taking drugs is a failure of multiculturalism. Warren taking drugs is a complex personal journey,” the party spokesperson clarified. “When a migrant is caught drink-driving, it demonstrates that they don’t respect Australian values. When Warren does it, it demonstrates that he’s just like the rest of us”. One Nation, which is contesting November’s state election on a platform of making Victoria “the toughest state on crime,” including a hardline stance on drug offences, insisted there was no contradiction whatsoever between locking up drug users and also employing one to run its Victorian branch. “It’s quite simple,” the party spokesperson said. “When Warren did drugs and repeatedly lost his licence, that was a young man finding his way. When black or brown person does it, that’s a sign of moral collapse”. " #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

https://chaser.com.au/national/gina-realises-she-forgot-to-buy-one-nation/ Gina Rinehart’s holiday has been interrupted by stress after a flaw in her attempt to control Australian legislature through the One Nation party has become glaringly obvious, the flaw being that all their politicians are totally fucked in the head. This followed a string controversies for the far-right party including covid conspiracy theories, praise of the White Australia Policy, calls for ‘mass deportation’ and the spread of victim blaming regarding domestic violence victims; all of which have taken place within less than two weeks. Gina reportedly had her ‘oh shit’ moment when the party had to resort to sending out Barnaby Joyce of all people to try make the party seem more rational, in an interview where he randomly started barking at his dog. “There’s always that one thing you forget when you go shopping,” she said, “One Nation has a heap of deranged racist freaks, but I forgot I was meant to buy them a sacrificial lamb. Whoops.” “Do we have anyone normal to clean up this mess? Who can I gift a jet to that is able to spin this as just people expressing concerns and frustrations?” #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

@Kyna@aus.social you poor thing -- & you fabbo thing! i honestly can't fathom her logic here... exactly who is her targetted voter demographic for opinions so vile & deluded? does she see some magical path to govt via the rapist, beater, murderer cohort? 🤔🤷🙄🤦‍♀️ she's as absurd as she is repugnant -- well, duh, droppie #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead #misogyny #sexism #FsckRWNJs #FsckThePatriarchy #FsckMisogynists #FsckSexists #Feminism #WomensRights #WomensRepresentation #DomesticViolence #DieDickswingersDie #WomanNeedsManLikeFishNeedsBicycle #MaleViolence #WomensSafety #WhyAreMen