Lazy wasted informal votes could have determined election - The Feed

Yes we all know how much of a douche Turnbull was for completely misjudging this silly election. However there are also the douche's who wasted their votes, not bothering to actually select anyone and using the ballot paper for graffiti. Which is ironic as some of them are likely on the dole with all this unemployment, and would be very much affected if the Lieberal 6 month wait for it came to fruition.


 

The Chilcot Report - In Emoji, The Last Leg :)

If you're like me and haven't bothered much looking into the Chilcot report because it's like "Duh. No shit Sherlock", and you decided years ago that Bush 
Blair and Howard were war criminals and should face trial, then this little wrap up is for you.

The entire report is summed up in emoji's. Sort of like getting it in cartoon form :) 

 

 

The Mad Katter supports Lieberals - blames refugees for unemployment :s

World, meet Bob Katter from up there somewhere in Australia, far far away from major cities I think. I have now dubbed him for the blog The Mad Katter. I think he's even more mad than the Hatter himself!

He's given his support to the Lieberals to help them in their desperate scraping together of enough MP's to form gov.

This was his election add, released shortly after the Orlando shootings, depicting The Mad Katter shooting MP's from the Lieberals and the Labor party. 



He claimed he didn't watch news so hadn't heard of Orlando. Seriously, he said that. Someone who is a member of the Australian federal parliament says he doesn't know what's going on because he doesn't watch the news. I guess that means he doesn't use the internet either.

Now that he has some attention nationally he's on about refugees. He wants much fewer you see, as although apparently the Lieberals should be shot for their piss poor economic management of 24 million people giving us the highest unemployment in over ten years, he's not blaming them for it. It's the refugees you see.... 

The man on whom the Turnbull government may have to depend to form a minority government in Canberra wants to restrict migration to just three groups, with Muslims left off the list. 

Bob Katter, fresh from a marathon 2½-hour meeting with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in Brisbane on Thursday, said he wanted to see immigration reduced to "virtually nil", except for people in some persecuted minority groups. 

Having been asked about Senator-elect Pauline Hanson's inflammatory remarks about Muslim migration, Mr Katter said migration should, ideally, be confined to Sikhs, Jews and Middle Eastern Christians. Brisbane Times   

Yes, this is who the Turnbull gov is going to have as part of Team Turnbull. Far out.

 

Voters rejected "trickle down" ideology - Australia's stand against corporate slavery

The George Brandis Live Art Experience

There has been much hoopla over the last three years as to crazy captains calls and ideologically driven foolishness. Much of that was what caught the attention of the public, with regular updates in the TV news as to the latest insanity from Team Abbott, or the sideshow that was the Turnbull takeover. 

However for those of us political tragics there was a much more real story going on. The AbbottTurnbull gov was from day one ultra-conservative, the likes of foreign to Australia. Indeed many of their economic talking points and opposition to things like marriage equality and social justice are directly from the lunar right US Republicans. The Abbott gov was one that had lurched the Lieberals into far right territory which had as yet been unexplored here. The party were corporate puppets as never before. Corporate fascism was trying it on in Australia. Abbott wanted us to become an uncaring country shackled to capitalist extremism. All very christian you know :s

On the other hand, Labor in opposition moved somewhat to the left. In developing new policies Shorten was able to pick up on the public's aghast opposition to WTF PM Abbott was doing to the country. Some of this described in The Guardian in a look back on three years of disaster:

Who or what is responsible for the government’s many other strange cultural and religious obsessions? Eric Abetz’s insistence on a link between breast cancer and abortion, notwithstanding the science that discredited this theory five decades ago. The attempt to ban the burqa in the confines of Parliament House. The campaign to water down racial vilification laws in support of the right to be a bigot. The havoc wreaked on investment in renewable energy as the government campaigned against “ugly” wind turbines. The many attacks on the ABC, culminating in a government black-ban on appearing on its current affairs flagship, Q&A. The attack on Safe Schools.

Endless fuel to stoke the fires of satire – perhaps – but there is another more disturbing dimension to these obsessions. The federal government almost always “punches down”. The coalition caucus is a toxic brew of fierce antagonism directed at minority groups, the disadvantaged and victims of discrimination.

Those targeted to be disadvantaged by its policies are invariably minorities, the less well-off and those with little or no political voice: those with the smallest superannuation balances, Muslims, cleaners of Canberra offices, food processing workers employed at SPC, the unemployed (the attempt to impose a six-month qualification period to qualify for unemployment benefits), children in disadvantaged schools (the sabotage of Gonski education reforms), the strenuous attempts to chisel lowly paid workers with intellectual disability out of backpay owed to them, the calculated and deliberately cruel infliction of injury on refugees fleeing war zones including Syria. The Guardian

Mad Monk Abbott and his so called Team were happy to ignore Australians who were vulnerable, instead making us an easy target. A hard nosed and uncaring approach to 
gov, that saw us labelled by compliant media as a "burden" on society in headline news, screamed from the street from newsagent front windows. Minorities and the powerless were used as canon fodder in his ideological war. Whole sections of society became disenfranchised and demonised by his gov.

Unfortunately for Abbott poor people have the internet. Shorten appears to have plugged in to this disaffection we were feeling knowing that his party had a way to address it. His "people first" slogan was an example. Shorten simply plugged into old school Labor values and ran with them. Long before the election was called the stage was being set. Abbott's ideologically motivated Royal Commission into "union thugs", vs eventually a Labor policy to have a royal commission in to banks. It was unions vs the finance industry. Or in this case, workers vs our corporate masters. This is what resonated with voters. 

It was an ideological struggle on a national scale between 30 years of Reaganomic "trickle down", and living in a human society where corporations and capitalism weren't our masters but our tools. It was Australia's stand against corporate slavery.

How the main stream media couldn't see this when blind Freddy could is beyond me :s 

The most interesting element of the election result, however, is that I don’t think the electorate made the same mistake the media did. Voters know personally how important education, access to healthcare, a fast NBN, public transport, environmental protection and renewable energy, penalty rates and childcare funding are to their everyday cost of living, and their ability to compete in an economy stacked in favour of the rich. That is why, even with a low primary vote, Labor has still managed, through voter preferences, to put themselves close to a winning position. 

Therefore, the real story this election is the backlash against the Liberal National’s neoliberal trickle-down agenda, which, even when propped up and maintained by the mainstream media, isn’t attractive to voters anymore because they can see the damage these policies cause to the economy and social fabric of their communities. 

Even if the Liberal Nationals manage to form a minority government, with a wafer thin majority and possibly 20 crossbench senators to work with, every neoliberal policy brought to parliament will have to be sold, negotiated, and justified to MPs and senators elected by voters who are concerned about growing wealth inequality. So voters have, in a way, got what they voted for; a government who will be forced to take their needs into account. What could be more exciting than that? New Matilda  

Lieberal links to extremist christians Exclusive Bretheren - anti gay marriage

Exclusive Brethren thank Howard for changing the marriage act against gays, 2004

Bruce D Hales, leader of the Exclusive Brethren, with his wife, Jennifer

I haven't been following this until now as it's all caught up in school funding unfairness. However the Sydney Morning Herald has now published internal documents from the Exclusive Brethren showing just how extremist wacko anti-gay they are, and even appear to have been an influence in John Howard's amendment to the marriage act in 2004 defining marriage for the first time in Australia as being between a man and woman exclusively.

I've already pointed out on numerous occasions the ties between Lieberals and christian extremism, such as the Australian Christian Lobby and the US based Alliance Defending Freedom, both of which have had gov ministers attend and speak at their events. Both of which are extremely anti-gay. This however seems to me to be in a league of it's own.

Serious questions are now being asked of the gov as to why Exclusive Brethren private schools are getting much more gov funding than other gov funded schools, especially when their views are so extreme as to be described as a cult by Kevin Rudd? How much money are the Exclusive Brethren donating to the Lieberal party? 

But probably the most important of all, in light of donations to the Lieberals from the Exclusive Brethren, why did John Howard feel so obliged to change the marriage act to exclusively heterosexual in 2004? Why has Tony Abbott been against marriage equality every step of the way? Why has it been delayed with a $500million plebiscite instead of simply being voted on by parliament freely?

And is it appropriate for extremism like this to have such a big sway over Australian public policy? 

Former Greens Leader Bob Brown called on Mr Turnbull to send back donations to the Liberals from members of the Exclusive Brethren. 

During a meeting in his office in Parliament House in 2006, "the cult's elders warned me ... that I should read Romans I in which St Paul advises that homosexual men 'are deserving of death'," Mr Brown said. 

"They came with advice that I and my partner Paul Thomas were destined for 'a lake of fire'." 

Melbourne-based elder Richard Garrett had told then Senator Brown that same-sex marriage would "destroy society". 

"'We repel it because it's against God's word. People get themselves so perverted and they just can't think morally'," Mr Garrett said, according to Mr Brown. Sydney Morning Herald 

Exclusive Brethren warnings of doom over Canadian gay marriage

Why did the Canberra press gallery get the election so wrong?

It's a question the media are now asking themselves. It appears they simply were too busy talking to each other than the voters. 

They ended up convincing themselves that despite the tight polls that hadn't moved in eight weeks, and a lackadaisical campaign by Team Turnbull, that the Lieberals were heading for an easy victory. 


Journalists started talking about sensing things, and getting vibes. The polls didn't move but apparently there were turning points in the campaign. In the end their commentary was just a fiction of their own imaginations.

Perhaps they should have asked themselves how willing voters were to swallow a turd?

During the campaign, several events became seen as "turning points" for the Coalition despite the polls never really budging. Labor's admission it would increase the budget deficit over the next four years was one. So was the UK's departure from the European Union. ​

The Australian Financial Review's Laura Tingle spoke for many in the gallery in mid-June when she wrote that "the sense that Labor is a serious challenger has faded". 

And The Australian's Dennis Shanahan on the day before election day: "Malcolm Turnbull is coming home with the wind in his sails, Bill Shorten is running out of puff. 

The Daily Telegraph, already foreshadowing a challenge to Shorten's leadership, reported on Friday that Malcolm Turnbull was on the "brink of victory". Fairfax Media highlighted a 50-50 poll result but with an unusually strong emphasis on voter expectations that Turnbull would win. 

Leading commentators on Sky News predicted between 80 to 85 seats for the Coalition, with Peter van Onselen saying he would quit in the event of a hung parliament. 

Many had picked up a "vibe" in the community that voters were disappointed in Turnbull, but not sufficiently angry to remove him. There was also the confidence exuded by Turnbull and his advisers. 

Many of us even convinced ourselves that the low-energy, small-target campaign was a clever way of "boring" voters into backing the Coalition. 

"You got the impression they were confident and confident for a reason," former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes says of the coverage. "There was very little scepticism of what was behind that". 

But if the media were wrong they were hardly alone. Two days before election day the bookmakers - often hailed as more accurate than pollsters - had Labor at $8 and the Coalition narrowing to a near guarantee of $1.08. Canberra Times

 

GetUp targeting of the hard right - huge swings

Out of the 12 seats lost by the Lieberals, 8 of them were hard right ideologues, labelled as "The Blockers" by GetUp. There's no doubt that the targeting of The Blockers by GetUp had a big effect on the election outcome.

Strangely the Lieberals seem to have been taken by surprise by the campaign. The only thing I can think about that is that they mustn't of been listening at all to community concerns of their outdated and extremist views. We've been trying to tell them this since 2013 but you might as well go and bark at the moon.

 

It was Labor's proposed carbon tax! - Lieberal scare regrets (video)

OMFG!

Abtez has actually gone on the telly saying that although Labor was entirely evil to scare people about the true lies of Medicare, that the Lieberals would have been entirely right to scare people about Labor introducing again a carbon tax! I'm utterly flabbergasted!

Including all those north shore Sydney properties that appear to be losing swimming pools  at a rate of knots right now.

Honestly, lost for words. 

I present the Lieberal, psychosis; that we are all under the Abbott spell of climate change denialism......

 

Australian Marriage Equality - new add (video)

If this is the sort of thing Australian Marriage Equality is going to produce then I guess it will mean less lives of the LGBT lost in a plebiscite. 

Watch as simple common sense is displayed to the christians and doubters. 

Personally, it's simply about how I love David. I was married to my late wife and found indescribable love. The only difference with David is that he's the same sex as me. 

I became a citizen of this country in the early '90's as I was impressed with it's take on fairness and it's strength on minority inclusion. My mind hasn't changed on that. despite the Canberra horrors over the past 15 or so years we have all witnessed.

I still hold much faith in the Australian people.  

I know one day, I hope soon, that David and I can be married.

 

The world's deadliest country for the LGBT - Brazil

Gay couple found dead in boot of burned out car

Far out. You wouldn't expect that would you. I'd have thought that a gay friendly place like Brazil wouldn't have any chance of being so, but it is. 

But then again Sydney is very gay friendly but there's been a lot of violence against us in the past here. Deaths never reported years back as hate crimes, police not bothering about investigating attacks, and the like. And we still don't even have same sex marriage in Australia yet, which Brazil does.

However Brazil has suffered an influx of US style Pentecostal christianity, making up a large proportion of the community and affecting those voted into gov. A whole bunch of Cori Bernadi's in power I guess; sounds like a total nightmare to me.

Some experts suggest that liberal government policies may have gotten too far ahead of traditional social mores. The anti-gay violence, they contend, can be traced to Brazil’s culture of machismo and a brand of evangelical Christianity, exported from the United States, that is outspoken in its opposition to homosexuality. 

Evangelicals make up nearly a quarter of Brazil’s population, up from 5 percent in 1970, and religious leaders reach millions of people through the hundreds of television and radio stations they have purchased in recent years. 

American-style Pentecostal congregations are also playing an increasingly muscular role in Brazilian politics. Evangelical voters have helped send more than 60 lawmakers to the 513-member lower house of Congress, doubling their numbers since 2010 and making them one of the most disciplined blocs in an unruly and divided legislature. 

Jean Wyllys, Brazil’s only openly gay member of Congress, said evangelical lawmakers, the core of a coalition known as the “B.B.B. caucus” — short for Bullets, Beef and Bible — have stymied legislation that would punish anti-gay discrimination and increase penalties for hate crimes. 

“Evangelicals are getting increasingly powerful and have taken over Congress,” Mr. Wyllys said. New York Times

 Plebiscite anyone?

Christian "gay zombies" infiltrate pride parade - Toronto

Gay zombie fakers. Man's dick area blocked out as pic from christian site :s

Christian zombie spy!

WTF? More love from the christians.....

In something that sounds like a possible gay apocalypse, christians have infiltrated the Toronto pride parade as a group calling themselves "gay zombies". Instead of being proud or supportive of the LGBT however, they handed out fake condoms which  turned out to be bullshit rantings against same sex relationships.

Seriously, were they just trying to really piss people off? Would there have been a single person at the event who wouldn't have been at least slightly annoyed by this ridiculous behaviour?

Toronto Gay-Pride revelers who thought they were receiving free condoms and sex tips from gay zombies in green skintight suits during the parade on Sunday afternoon were actually receiving info packets about the physical and spiritual dangers of homosexual practices from a group of concerned Christians. 

Half-a-dozen Christians led by activist Bill Whatcott paid the $100 fee to parade organizers to register "Gay Zombies Cannabis Consumers Association" so that they could move more easily along the parade route to deliver their message. 

The group said their goal in participating in the event was twofold: First, to be a prophetic and unambiguous witness against the unfettered celebration of homosexuality, and second, to offer people caught up in the same-sex lifestyle a way out through a call to repent and to turn to Jesus Christ to be saved. Stupid christian site  

Bolt chucks a total hissy fit at "Team Turnbull" - video

Far out. Andrew Bolt honestly believes that Abbott could have done better in the election. An indication of Lieberal delusional psychosis.

Watch as he hissy fits all over the place at Turnbull and his dearest everest pollie Abbott getting shafted by him. 

What's interesting is how he puts up issues like Turnbull was some kind of leftie, promoting same sex marriage and climate change (he disappointed on both issues which is the reason he became so unpopular) like they were bad things to support in the first place.

 

Peta Credlin attacks Team Turnbull - video

Credlin rips Team Turnbull several new assholes. Recriminations aplenty! I note Bolt wants Abbott back.

How can Turnbull come back from this? The mockery. The laughter....


 

Election a "nail in the coffin" of Lieberals gay marriage plebiscite

With hard right Lieberals against marriage equality losing their seats, there is now a clearer than ever majority of MP's in favour of same sex marriage. Pressure will mount for a simple parliamentary vote to change the marriage act instead of a half billion dollar plebiscite.

Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays national spokesperson Shelley Argent describes yesterday’s election as “a nail in the coffin of Malcolm Turnbull’s proposed plebiscite,” and poins out that most MPs now in Parliament are seeking a swift and free vote of MPs on marriage equality so they can finally make it happen and move on. 

“With pro-equality Labor MPs replacing Liberals who were against, there’s now a clear majority of members in favour,” she says. 

“After a week in which the Coalition’s proposed plebiscite unravelled under close public scrutiny, it’s indisputable that the plebiscite cost the Coalition votes. 

“Malcolm Turnbull must acknowledge he has no mandate for a plebiscite and drop the idea. If he doesn’t, we will do our best to kill it on the floor of Parliament and push for a free vote instead.” Same Same  

Lieberals lose senate seats - face senate nightmare (updated)

Broadcaster Derryn Hinch has gained a senate seat

The whole alleged reason for Turnbull calling a double dissolution election was to clean out the senate of independents and increase Liberal numbers, so as to be able to pass the draconian building industry industrial relations legislation. It has been an abysmal failure.

Time will be needed to finalise the count, but the expected outcome finds the Liberals losing seats and facing an almost impossible task to pass legislation if Labor and the Greens team up.

The final Senate result may not be known for weeks as votes are tallied and preferences distributed. But it appears clear that far-right One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, Melbourne broadcaster Derryn Hinch and up to three Nick Xenophon Team senators will join outspoken independent Jacqui Lambie on the crossbench. 

Ms Hanson is confident of securing at least two Senate spots out of Queensland. The Liberal Democrats, Fred Nile's conservative Christian Democratic Party and other micro-party candidates are also still in the running. 

Mr Turnbull had hoped the double dissolution election, which put all 76 Senate spots up for grabs, would clean out a recalcitrant crossbench and allow a Coalition government to start anew. 

However the results suggest that strategy has misfired, and the next government may be forced to deal with a larger, more multifarious crossbench than the eight that wielded power in last Senate. 

It raises questions over whether the Coalition, if returned to power, could pass key reforms including its proposed company tax cuts. 

On Sunday, the ABC and political strategists were predicting the Coalition would secure about 30 Senate spots, a loss of three, and Labor would likely gain two spots with 27 senators. 

The Greens are predicted to finish with nine senators, a loss of one. Sydney Morning Herald  

 I can't see this gov lasting the next three years.