@frogglin at least two of your words exceeded two syllables. shame on you! 😜

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

anytime i hear anyone say "strayan values" or "unstrayan" in anything but a blatantly sarcastic ironic mocking way, i know i am beholding a fuckhead.

womensagenda.com.au/latest/eds…

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

@ApaulD yes; that & all other liebs there are just clueless craptaceous comical clowns, but i'm not bothered, coz long before the time liebs-the-party ever next forms govt, all the current parlie liebs & nuts will have embarked to cark city.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

@John oh the severe moral injury i feel atm, of having to agree with porleen t'other day, when she quipped that the liebs have just changed the jockey but the horse is still dead. oh the humiliation...

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

can the Liberals shake their 'women problem'?

🤔 💡

😆 🤣 😈

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead
RE: social.chinwag.org/users/sbs_b…

canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

The piteous state in which the Liberal Party, its leadership and the Coalition generally find themselves might invite only derision. Its troubles are of its own making and an apparently suicidal impulse. It has very limited prospect of winning back power in even the medium term, and when it does, very few, if any, of the current generation of elected members will be a part of the team, let alone a leader of it. The charitable and the merciful might be disposed to give the sorry crew privacy for their major bloodletting.

But it is necessarily a public matter because it conceals a major public tragedy. There was never a time in which an Australian government required more close and suspicious scrutiny, principled criticism and sensibly advanced and debated alternatives for public policy and programs. The Albanese government has not been getting this, at least not from the Liberal and National Parties, or, even, for that matter, from One Nation.

It is not merely a matter of failing to hold the government to account over its policies, programs and expenditure. Critical questions of various forms of executive action would benefit the nation - such as, say, its invitation to the Israeli President to Australia in the name of helping create social harmony, or its provision of a platform to advance the notion that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. The opposition is, of course, far more pro-Israeli than even the government, and far more hostile to protest. Most of the questioning has been one-sided and not very critical, apart from questions coming from the crossbench. The opposition has seemed constrained even in going to the limits that it could have, because of its preoccupation with its own internal conflicts.

Likewise, the opposition has seemed limited in its capacity to ask questions across the range of government. Under Sussan Ley, for example, senior frontbencher Angus Taylor had asked only three questions about defence policy since the last election, even though both the defence procurement environment, and Australia's security and strategic environment have been very important issues over the past year. It was, of course, much the same when Taylor, as shadow treasurer under Peter Dutton, seemed unable to put pressure on Jim Chalmers even at a time when energy bills and the cost of living were seen as major election issues.
Govt gets free ride from distracted opposition

In one sense government ministers might be very comfortable indeed with shallow and inadequate questions, and a failure to bring key events and policy issues up for debate. But that's a short-term view. The performance of ministers and the standing of government generally is enhanced when an effective opposition has it on its toes. Ministers discover that they must know their portfolio, and details of decisions made. Prime ministers discover that ministers who know their stuff and are enthusiastic advocates for the underlying policies are far more effective political operators than those who have memorised a few jokes about the character and abilities of their opposite numbers and rely on Question Time briefs prepared by bureaucrats. They must put more emphasis on explaining, on defending and selling policy. They also must do far more to anticipate intelligent criticisms of the policy, and, if needs be, adapt it in advance. The all too familiar styles of blocking questions, finding distractions or blather to see out the time allowed for a question simply does not work so well.

The better ministers, indeed, volunteer information and some debating points. They invite a conversation and express a willingness to explain and justify. They do not make a point of minimal disclosure. Instead, they are celebrating what they will call the government's success.

The most gifted ministers, indeed, and there have always been some, use being called to account as an occasion to be reasonably frank, and to admit the obvious, if apparently unsayable. Such as, that alternatives were considered, but the path taken was preferred for a particular reason. A good deal of Question Time, and other opportunities for being held to account seems, wrongly, to be regarded by combative politicians as occasions for determined and stubborn efforts to insist that only one approach was possible and worth following, and that anyone suggesting an alternative was either a fool or a knave. It doesn't impress members of the public.

Some people seem to think that a minister's being called to account means being required to resign because of a mistake, or failure to act. Ministerial responsibility is certainly one part of the process. But it can mean no more than being required to explain, to give the facts, to describe the circumstances. A senior public servant once described it as involving occasions where there was sweat on the upper lip.

Australia needs effective opposition. We also need effective means by which, in this complex age, we can obtain information about the working of government policies and programs. The more all-powerful a government is, the greater the temptation to treat members of the public as outsiders to the process of devising, reviewing and explaining policy. And the more that ministers appear to think that public curiosity - their right to know - can be satisfied by public relations material, short on detail, long on tendentious claims, and often making claims about cost, or personal or public benefit that are highly contestable.
Public wants explanation, not PR tosh

If One Nation is to play a greater role in politics and in holding politicians to account, they will have to lift their game as well. Probably in ways that will simultaneously hold them to account. They can, from the sidelines concentrate only on a few issues, and then mostly only at the slogan level of detail. But if they believe themselves part of an effort to be an alternative party of government (presumably in coalition with the Liberals and the Nationals), they will have to expose and outline more of their ideas, and some details about the way they would seek to put them into action. It is time that the opposition was itself held to account for its failures in being effective. It should not be only at election time that leaders give an outline of their general philosophy or broad approach to issues. Some of those who have served in government before have exposed little about their broad philosophy, even as they are identified with one faction or another. Many have served without trace, never identified with any policy or were missing in action when they should have had some contribution to make.

But, as any number of their own critics comment, they have made much of the story of the past year about personality struggles within their team. They have been looking inside rather than out. They have been narrow, rather than broad. Others have seemed so focused on their miserable personality struggles, in some cases disguised as ideological ones, that they are making no impression at all. The fear of exposure on the floor of parliament does not terrify the Albanese government. It should.

Anthony Albanese is not to be blamed for having an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives. It is not really his fault that the opposition seems to lack the will to oppose anything much. Or to experience what Neville Wran once called applying the blowtorch to the belly.

Presumably Albo, and ministers, are happy to see their proposals going through without opposition. At most there will be some loaded questions, often drafted from newspaper reports, and unable to penetrate ministerial complacency. And quibbles and points of order scarcely up to high school standards. And the seeming incapacity of the opposition to mount and sustain a serious debate on questions of strategy or performance, based on a close understanding of the way governments work. Many in the opposition have ministerial experience from the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison days, but its seems they left most of the practical analysis and preparation up to public servants, or to minders who have moved on.

It may be a little more difficult in the Senate, but the government's program usually proceeds, if the lobbies have been busy, by horse-trading and compromise rather than actual debate, whether in public or behind closed doors. The Senate, generally, is no more a forum of ideas or review than the lower house, other than on a narrow range of social legislation. The committee system, which was at its best about 50 years ago, is no longer producing much in the way of thoughtful bipartisan reports on general problems of government, new approaches to new issues, or reviews of areas of administration where there have been problems.

The opposition has allowed the public to be shut out of the AUKUS debate and national security debates. It is far more secretive than the UK and US governments.

The starting point on being held to account seems to be that some important areas are almost entirely free from scrutiny. In bipartisan spirit the public is told the absolute minimum about AUKUS. Even less is said in parliament about national security. This does not mean that the public does not know about them. It is just that ministers and public servants, the supposed stewards of such policies avoid giving explanation, details, or even any sort of sophisticated advocacy. Much of what the media write about in this field comes from information freely available from our AUKUS partners in London and Washington.

In fact, much of the machinery of government, including decisions coming through cabinet or the Prime Minister's Office, and matters coming before the cabinet expenditure review committee is wrapped up in secrecy. The government is not very keen on any sort of independent external review of programs or proposals, other than by trusted and tame former members of the inner circle, writing confidentially. Albanese is addicted to secrecy and non-disclosure, and his version of public consultation is restricted to closed meetings with vested interests (known as "stakeholders") rather than members of the public, the academy, or public interest lobbies.

Modern government has been getting unprecedented access to public relations people, press secretaries, minders, marketing folk and spin doctors, pollsters and advertising advisers. They almost all work subject to political direction, without any commitment to public disclosure, or ethical duty to tell the truth. As this happens, the number of journalists reporting on the business of politics and government is probably a quarter of the number at its peak.

Much of the advocacy and review material coming before the government, even when available, is partisan rather than objective. Where reports are critical of the government, they tend to ignore them or defer any consideration until the heat has gone out of the issue. Public servants, particularly in the Attorney-General's department (the agency once dedicated to Freedom Of Information) are working on legislation to further criminalise disclosure of information by bureaucrats, to further restrict access to national security material and to abolish any concept of public interest defences. Australia already has the most oppressive and restrictive national security apparatus and legislation of any of the Western democracies and is looking to go further.

Two current classical examples would involve Albanese's flat refusal to change anything affecting the profits of the gambling industry or the incomes of media moguls. Another would involve the return of rorts and patronage - on a scale at least as bad as in the Morrison era - as a regular incident of ministerial administration, the capture of policy development by party cronies and political donors in the lobbying industry, particularly in relation to discretionary grants and tenders, or "landmark" new policies associated with the future made in Australia scheme. All of these, including defence procurements and consultancies under the AUKUS scheme, revivals of forms of robodebt, and revivals of marginal seats grants are Albanese government scandals in waiting. None are likely to be reined in by the almost-paralysed anti-corruption commission, or by "reforms" in public administration supposedly implemented after the fall of the Morrison government.

The government's capacity to conceal maladministration and its own misfeasance is being actively enhanced by the defanging of the FOI Act, and the muzzling of most of the watchdogs of parliament, except for the ever-stretched Australian National Audit Office.

One would have to go back to the McMahon government of 1972 (I remember it well) to find a government so resistant to explaining what it is doing, or why. It is one of the reasons that tired and exhausted government fell to Gough Whitlam, who had an entirely different approach to open government.

An effective opposition would be teasing out the information, and embarrassing ministers, especially the Prime Minister, with his stance. The more so since it is the precise opposite of what he promised the public before the 2022 elections.

Shifting the deck chairs at the Coalition may have little effect in bringing forward the day when the public is ready to trust it again. But it will certainly not regain that trust until it has mastered the art of effective opposition.

• Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

easy peasy. we know they're fucked.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead
RE: social.chinwag.org/users/abc_b…

go you good thing, Michelle Milthorpe!!!

#Climate200 #Farrer #byelection #AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance

special abc 730 tonight yay

sarah interviews madmonk boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

Amid the Capital Hill dramas on Friday, Malcolm Turnbull beamed into the ABC's coverage to note, wryly, that Anthony Albanese "must be the luckiest prime minister ever" because his opponents "keep blowing themselves up".

And he said other things, too.

Like that there was only one party currently operating in the centre-ground where elections are won, the ALP.

And, that far from being the best answer to the Liberals' leadership woes, Angus Taylor, was just "the best-qualified idiot". Whoa!

Desperately trying not to sound like an ex-PM scorned - or "miserable ghost" - Turnbull's observations were grim but resonant, especially on Albanese's luck at the Liberal Party's rightward lurch.

After all, who could hope to get more than one Peter Dutton as an opponent? Or indeed, any opposition leader who denies the malady of his once dominant Liberal Party - its poor standing among metropolitan women. And younger voters. And migrants.

Enter Taylor, hardener of policy, enforcer of a new love-it-or-leave message on immigration, opponent of universal childcare, enemy of climate change hand-wringing and woke mealy-mouthiness.

By Albanese's reading, Australians not 10 months ago, rejected alpha-male, right-leaning politics.

And since the same party has now re-affirmed its pro-nuclear, anti-female quota stances, and even shifted back to being anti-net-zero, does that not also explain its continued decline?

Taylor's vague pitch to colleagues had amounted to make Australia great again, without, mercifully, uttering those words.

His press conference - some hours after the ballot - was a chance to elaborate.

Instead, he talked again of restoring living standards, nurturing national confidence and "a love for our country", lifting wages while lowering taxes and focusing "relentlessly" on the Liberal Party's core strength - at least historically - of lower government spending and superior economic stewardship.

There were mea culpas, too. New deputy leader, Senator Jane Hume acknowledged that her breakfast TV quip about "Chinese spies" during the last election had been a damaging blunder.

Taylor acknowledged that taking higher spending and taxes to that election (when he was shadow treasurer) had been the "the politics of convenience [over] conviction".

Looming over Taylor's elevation is the dark shadow of Pauline Hanson's ascendant One Nation. A by-election in Sussan Ley's regional electorate will be an unwelcome early test. It will be difficult, as will the polls.

Both Taylor and Hume insist they are committed to taking the party "forward" rather than shifting it left or right. This is a word-game to avoid the central dilemma which is that for the Liberal Party to recover as a party of government, it must re-establish its relevance in the cities.

That means speaking "for" women, "for" social change, and "for" migrant communities.

As Hume's apology demonstrates, in politics, it is what these voters hear you say that matters most.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

To seek reprieve from blistering heat during the 2019-20 bushfire summer, scientist Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick took her young children to a neighbourhood pool near their north-west Sydney home.

Within minutes, smoky ash began to fall on the girls' heads.

It was so "horrendous", the climate scientist and her volunteer firefighter husband decided to make a very big change.

"We realised that we weren't very climate resilient there. We lived in a house with a dark roof and no insulation, and because Sydney is just so frightfully expensive, we just didn't have the means to help safeguard ourselves," she said.

The family moved to Canberra because it had cooler weather, more affordable housing and career opportunities.

"It's colder at night, which is great during extreme heat events and the overall climate is drier. Heatwaves when they occur here aren't as hot as other places in Australia," Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

"It doesn't mean that Canberra is resilient against climate change, far from it, [but] it was a safer and better place for us to live."

Canberra's highest recorded temperature in 2019-2020 was 44 degrees, which remains the maximum temperature recorded since at least 2009.

The ACT appears to have cooler hot days than most states and territories. Tasmania is the only jurisdiction with a lower maximum temperature.

Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick and her husband built a house in Canberra for their three daughters, who are now aged three, seven and eight.

It is designed to stay cool in summer without much energy use, has solar panels and a battery. They also drive electric vehicles to help reduce their emissions.

"I can't stop those fires from happening, but I can give my children a better chance to be more safeguarded from [the] impacts," she said.

Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a Professor in Climate Science at the Australian National University (ANU), specialising in extreme weather events, particularly heatwaves.

During a lecture for the ANU's 2026 Climate Update series on Thursday, she warned Australia was likely to continue experiencing heatwaves even after reaching net zero emissions. That is when the amount of greenhouse gases emitted is not higher than how much is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere.

Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said the later the world reached net zero, the harder it would be to recover and the more ongoing problems it would create.

"It really does matter when we reach net zero," she said.

"The later we reach net zero ... the more likely we are to have ice-free summers in Antarctica and the worst heatwaves will be virtually everywhere in the world."

"For Australia, the trends in heatwaves just keep going up no matter when we reach net zero, and this is because of what we think of what's going on in the Southern Ocean and how it's heating up.

"We must reach net zero as soon as we possibly can."

The issue flared up again in November last year, when the Australian Liberal Party ditched their target for Australia to reach net zero emissions by 2050.

According to Net Zero Australia, the country is projected to reach net zero emissions a decade later, in 2060.

Australian sea surface temperatures reached highest on record in 2025. Ocean temperatures are considered a good measure of overall trends because there is less variability caused by externa; factors like weather patterns, Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick said.

Canberra has had two heatwaves this summer so far, with Tuggeranong recording an all-time high of 43.5 degrees in January.

While still cooler than late January, the Bureau of Meteorology expects the city to get hotter again next week, with a maximum forecast temperature of 32 degrees next Wednesday.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #ClimateCrisis #NonLinear #TippingPoints #PositiveFeedbackLoops #FossilFools #RenewableEnergy #ChangeTheSystem #StateCapture #RightToProtest #Biodiversity #WeAreTotallyFscked #Misanthropy #Karma #NativeForests #StopLoggingNativeForests #FsckCapitalism #CognitiveDissonance

@allrite as a #vegan i look at this with overwhelming revulsion & inescapable visceral disgust.

oh yeah, & the pics are pretty bad, too.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

@HalbHalb i'm certainly no fan of susssan, but believe she was treated most poorly all the same. i do hope she now decides to retire, thus forcing a byelection, which ofc the liebs will lose, thus inflicting even more deserved pain onto this nasty party of sociopaths.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

Each leadership meltdown is unique, but they all heave with the same hypocrisies, deceits and roiling ambition.

Insurgents feign reluctance, motivated, they insist, by principle, honour, and selflessness.

In a cruel game where decency and logic are inverted, the wrecker preens as the builder.

The besieged leader to whom loyalty was owed right up until it evaporated en masse, transitions, lickety-split, from flawless to fatally flawed - from being the answer to being the problem.

Angus Taylor's challenge exhibits these attributes but seems even emptier than most.

His risibly drawn-out siege of the first woman in the role, has had to be slow because it always lacked evidence. Manufacturing dysfunction around Sussan Ley's authority was both its method and its justification. Speculation set the necessary pre-conditions for legitimising her removal. The slow-burn eroded the party's standing and suited Taylor's supine disposition.

Crucially, there is no egregious error of fact or judgement that Ley has committed.

Yes, she went in hard after Bondi, shamelessly politicising a national emergency, but the hardliners barracked along, delighting in the errors and overreaches it drew from the Prime Minister.

Beyond that, impatient conservatives consistently secured what they wanted.

She conceded to right-wing demands to abandon Scott Morrison's net-zero by 2050 pledge, and to retaining the right's fringe obsession on nuclear energy.

She accepted the madness of not seeking Labor-style quotas for installing female candidates in winnable seats despite the Liberal Party's dismal holding of just six female MPs in the current Parliament.

In short, conservatives forced Ley into compromises and then claimed her leadership was to blame for the unpopularity of a party dogmatically addicted to "values" that metropolitan voters had bluntly rejected in 2025.

And for what in the end? In an ethereal resignation press conference on Wednesday evening, Taylor rolled out boilerplate bromides about falling living standards, Liberal values, and the loss of the Australian way of life under Labor.

Reporters were left to conclude that Ley had betrayed these or pursued other tangents. Except that she hadn't.

Nobody pressed Taylor for instances of her wrong turns as measured against his assertions.

A key lament - that the Liberal Party is at its lowest ebb since its creation in 1944 - is concerning. But it may be more attributable to the party's feckless surrender to the Nationals, its anti-immigration signalling in the last election, and its under-representation of women. If so, dumping Ley for the Liberal bloke from central casting is serious error.

As NSW Liberal Party Administrative Committee member and barrister, Jane Buncle, wrote in the Nine papers last year, "a new leader won't fix a party that has forgotten what it stands for. The problem is the horse, not the jockey."

• Mark Kenny is The Canberra Times' political analyst and a professor at the ANU's Australian Studies Institute. He hosts the Democracy Sausage podcast. He writes a column every Sunday.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

smh.com.au/politics/federal/if…

An unfortunate truth underlying the speculation about Sussan Ley’s future as Liberal leader was that most Australians didn’t care much for her or her putative replacement Angus Taylor. Stay or go, call on a ballot, make the change or not – none of it is likely to make much difference to public attitudes to the Liberal Party. Incredibly, a series of recent opinion polls suggest support for the Liberals is disturbingly close to the level of backing for the Greens, which consistently hovers around 12 per cent. I’m in my fifth decade of writing about Australian politics, and I never expected to write those words.

The condition of the Liberals is now so poor that the personalities at or near the top don’t matter much. Taylor in place of Ley as leader might produce a bit of a poll bump for a while. A different face with a new personal story to tell, a declared conservative rather than Ley’s vague, supposedly moderate, ideological persona, he could please the bulk of rusted-on Liberal backers in the community, who skew rightward. But that would merely underline the Liberals’ problem: there are too few of them. Tony Abbott this week declared that the party would be lucky to have 30,000 members around the country. In the 1950s, with a much smaller population, it had nearly 200,000.

Things can be turned around but not by relying on outdated verities and investing in quick fixes such as leadership manoeuvrings. What’s needed is honesty and courage across the board, not new labels on old bottles of wine. Leadership contests – even the contests that won’t in themselves transform the political environment – briefly produce all the fun of the fair for the participants and the media, but the tough work should start now regardless of the party’s weak electoral prospects in the near-term. Just about every step the Liberals should take will be painful.

For a start, they need to be honest with themselves. Ten months on from its catastrophic election loss, the party’s yet to produce its official review. When it is eventually released, either in its original form or with redactions imposed in the interests of stopping Peter Dutton from bringing in the lawyers, it will have useful things to say. But events have moved on. The party has so comprehensively cocked itself up since the defeat, it might be better off ordering up a new review into how all of that has happened.

Surely the benefit of the election review will be to force many Liberal MPs and people throughout the party to face up to their reality: they lost big-time and they lost fair and square. When voters were given a chance to pass judgment on the Albanese government’s first term, a solid majority decided the government had earned three more years. The result was emphatic. The government is legitimate. This may seem obvious but there continues to be an air of unreality in the way today’s Liberals and their supporters speak of the government, variously describing it as bad, awful or terrible and Albanese as our worst prime minister. It’s hard to see the value in that approach. Most voters don’t see it that way and are turned off by the rhetoric.

The overheated approach is partly down to a historical bug inside the Coalition parties that often causes it to struggle with defeat and avoid internal reappraisals. We’ve seen versions of the movie before. The Whitlam government was viewed as an error and had to be destroyed post-haste no matter what. The sustained success of the Hawke government led the Coalition to split and basically throw an election away with the Joh-for-Canberra push in 1987.

And Labor’s win under Anthony Albanese in 2022 was also not taken seriously. It was merely a hiccup and normal operations would resume as long as the Liberals remained united under Dutton without really offering much. This turned out to be a misreading of how much Australia has changed – and is continuing to change – socially, ethically, racially and politically. And that is in a global environment that is being remade in frightening ways by both our biggest ally and our largest trading partner.

The old order that has continued to drive Liberal thinking was built on a binary choice between Labor and the Coalition, with the News Corp titles swaying public opinion by reliably backing the Coalition cause. Senior Liberals and their aspiring colleagues could make regular appearances on News’ broadcast arm Sky News, building up their profiles, disseminating and bolstering the talking points and being legends in their own lunchtime. That binary model worked all the way up to and including Scott Morrison’s 2019 election victory.

But it’s over. Too much trust has been lost by too many Australians in conventional political behaviour and conventional politicians, as evidenced by One Nation’s apparent meteoric rise during Ley’s stewardship of the Liberals. This is not to say that Albanese is popular; he isn’t. But he has still enjoyed more residual trust than his direct opponent.

So in this new environment, what should the Liberal Party do?

Stop opposing for the sake of it. Liberal senator Jane Hume, who admittedly has had an axe to grind with Ley after being sent to the backbench, still made the accurate observation on Tuesday that since the election voters have learnt that the Liberals oppose the government’s energy, housing, tax and immigration policies without being presented with any counter policies.

The Liberals also need to take a hard look at the party’s own role during its past stints in office, in helping to create the economic inequalities that blight Australia. Instantly, they’ve attacked Labor for contemplating changes to the capital gains tax discount – a bad sign. To come up with new policies that attract the hordes of younger voters and women who refuse to countenance backing them, they are going to have to look at some radical reworking of old Liberal economic and tax positions. If they don’t, Pauline Hanson is going to scoop up ever greater numbers of disaffected Australians.

It’s been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it but the Liberals’ position is more acute than that. They need to learn from the present.

• Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

afaict the common folklore is that once upon a time, the young elbow was a firebrand leftie with a passionate eye & heart for fighting injustice.

was that ever actually true, or just effective PR?

if once upon a time it was true... well, wtf happened?

how to explain this current odious spineless gaslighting genocide-enabler & rwnj-apologist?

#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #GreensYEAH #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #PHONkedinthehead

canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

The Liberal Party needs to call time on its stale, unhealthy relationship with the National Party.

Let's face it: it's always been a marriage of convenience, a vehicle for grabbing the benefits which come from holding government rather than a true meeting of minds. In recent years the federal Coalition has more resembled a marriage where the partners stay together for the sake of the children or the tax advantages, but where the love has long since dried up.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that the National Party is a party of vested interests, whereas the Liberal Party cannot afford to be. The metamorphosis in the 1970s/1980s from the Country Party to the National Party was intended to free the party from its image as an agrarian power bloc, but the transformation never followed the name change.

Except to some extent in the Queensland Parliament, it never made the transition to representing urban Australians. It is still the Country Party in all but name.

While the Liberal Party has a historic association with the business sector, it is far less wedded to that sector than is, say, the Labor Party to the trade union movement. Of the three major parties in the House of Representatives, the Liberal Party is the one least the hostage to an obvious vested interest, the one best able to claim to advocate for the nation as a whole - at least in theory.

Being handcuffed to the party of agrarianism does nothing for the Liberal Party's capacity to speak to a broader Australia. On issues such as net zero by 2050, the need to compromise with the narrower preoccupations of the Nationals has damaged the Liberals, both in perception and in reality.

Ironically, the long-standing, almost mechanistic alliance with the Nationals seems to have hindered the Liberal Party's capacity to form alliances with others. It is the Labor Party, not the Liberal Party, which has been better at forging cross-party deals in recent years, despite the latter's long experience of coalitions.

Good examples were the failures of the Kennett government in Victoria in 1999 and the Abbott federal opposition in 2010 to clinch support from rural independents who held the balance of power. In both cases the ALP stepped up to deals that secured them government, deals that mysteriously eluded the conservative side of politics.

Walking in lockstep with the Nationals also fails to accommodate the changes in political culture washing over Australia and almost all the democratic world.

Support for long-serving "major" parties has been falling the world over. Here, the Australian Election Study (AES) has mapped falling loyalty for the major parties. In 1967 some 80 per cent of Australians voted for the big three; by 2025 that figure had fallen to 55 per cent, and shows every sign of continuing to decline.

What this means is that, notwithstanding Labor's present thumping majority in the House of Representatives, majority governments in the future will be more and more elusive. Parties will be more likely to need to negotiate supply agreements for minority governments or even coalitions with unlikely bedfellows.

This approach has long been the practice in continental Europe, where governments are generally formed by multi-party coalitions, and partners are not necessarily those parties closest to each other on the political spectrum.

Alliances between green parties and parties of the right have not only occurred, but have sometimes demonstrated surprising durability. This aligns with the almost universal voter sentiment in the Western world rejecting "politics as usual" and seeking compromise, negotiation and power sharing.

The Liberal Party will need to be adaptable and nimble in this new environment. It may be, for example, necessary for it to accommodate the agenda of the teals if a Liberal government is to be formed. Dragging the National Party into the negotiating room is unlikely to assist that process.

This is not to say that cooperation with the Nationals has to end. What may better suit both parties are casual hook-ups rather than a steady relationship.

The Liberal Party presently suffers from policy deficit. Voters are simply unsure what it stands for. Having given away its lead over Labor as the party best able to manage the economy - again, evidence from the AES - it urgently needs a root-and-branch revision of its policy platform, one that will address in particular the alienation from the party of younger voters, women and migrants.

With the National Party currently obsessed with chasing One Nation off to the right, the Liberal Party can ill afford the drag its former coalition partner will exercise over this process of policy renewal. Liberal policy should be Liberal policy, not an anaemic compromise with the narrower vested interests of the Nationals.

No one can say that they haven't tried to make it work. The trial separation less than a year ago was a real chance to work through their differences, but very soon after the Nationals moved back into the marital home it was clear that the differences were irreconcilable. For the Liberals, attempting to maintain a facade of romance that once was leaves them at risk of ultimately walking away penniless from a messy divorce.

Change the locks, move on.

• Gary Humphries is a former Liberal senator and ACT chief minister.

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blatant reporting bias! that headline makes it sound serious, when in reality it's just a rwnj fuckhead moaning.

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canberratimes.com.au/story/917…

Last Sunday, the Liberals had the chance to break free. But they blew it. They went back into a destructive, dog-wagging relationship, beguiled by an unnecessary feeling of being so dependent on the Nationals that they could never win office without them.

But the Nationals have been in chronic decline disguised by big occasions when they have held their own against anti-conservative swings: in 1972, 1983, 2007, 2022 and 2025. In those elections the Liberals got hammered and the Nationals kept their seats. It gave an illusion of a permanent, impenetrable and reliable swag of seats for the conservatives.

But between those elections, when there was no change of government and not much to see, the Nationals lost a seat here and there in an unnoticeable small-drip decline.

Overall, the Nationals have fallen from 19 seats in a 123-seat House (15.5 percent of the seats) in 1949 to 10 seats in a 150-seat House in 2025 (6.7 per cent of the seats). It is a huge fall.

The reasons the Nationals are headed for the endangered-species list is because their habitat (old, white, rural, narrow-minded) is shrinking.

Australia has become more urban and cosmopolitan. The rural rump has contracted but is still strong in the areas it has contracted to - retaining the illusion of a vital element to any centre-right government.

Oddly enough, the big supporters of having a coalition, Liberal Leader Sussan Ley, and prospective leader Angus Taylor, should be more alert to the drag the Nationals have on centre-right politics. Both now hold seats that were once held by National Party leaders - Tim Fischer in Ley's Farrer and John Sharp in Taylor's Hume.

The National Party contracted before their eyes, yet Ley has read the history badly.

The Nationals must be mightily relieved to return to the Coalition. For a start, Senator Ross Cadell (NSW) and Senator Bridget McKenizie (Vic) will most likely be re-elected in 2028. Outside coalition, on a split ticket, they would have lost, because the Nationals on their own, get nowhere near a Senate-seat quota.

That might delay the extinction trend for the Nationals for a little bit, but the Liberals should be asking why should they be surrendering one of two Senate seats in each of those states to the Nationals who get so little support - increasing the right's voice at the expense of the centre.

In the House of Representatives in 2022 and 2025, the Nationals got 6.7 per cent of the seats with just 4 per cent of the vote. (The figures are muddied a bit by the fact that the Liberals and Nationals stand on one ticket in Queensland).

And the Liberals feel that they must have that 6.7 per cent of the seats to attain government. But they are not reading the demographic trends and not looking at the cost.

Eighty per cent of Australians live in cities with more than 100,000 people. Nearly all migrants go to these cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne. These cities are comprising an ever-higher percentage of the population. Young people from rural areas, too, are moving to the cities for jobs.

Come electoral redistribution time, any new seats will be created in cities, at the expense of rural seats.

In the cities, people are more likely to favour multiculturalism, climate action, renewable energy, and social diversity and be responsive to new ideas. That favours centre-left politics.

There could be some truth in One Nation leader Pauline Hanson's assertion that Labor likes high immigration because it brings in the votes, even if it disadvantages the very people Labor seeks to attract - the young seeking housing and care for the environment and lower-income people seeking better government services and infrastructure.

Former Coalition attorney-general George Brandis went so far as to posit that Labor would increase the size of the Parliament to take advantage of the demographic trend.

He is reading the demography correctly. If you look at the Australian electoral map you see large rural areas painted National Party green and Liberal Party blue - taking up more than 90 per cent of the land mass with less than 15 per cent of the population.

If more seats are to be created, there are not enough people in these places to create more seats. The new seats will be created in urban areas. And those seats will be ripe for Labor, Green, and teal-type independents to take, especially if the National Party uses its Coalition position to force the Liberal Party to adopt policy positions which are an anathema to city dwellers.

The immediate problem for the Liberal Party is the drag the Nationals will have on policy. With so many moderate, urban Liberals lost to the teals and Labor over the past two elections, the National voice is comparatively larger, as is the voice of the conservative surviving Liberals who hold virtually no seats in the cities and have seats with higher-than-average ages.

The big issues will not be energy-climate or cultural wars. The latter is of little electoral consequence, and the former has a self-solving economic trajectory. Sooner or later the grid and fleet will go renewable because national and household economics will drive it.

Rather, the National Party push towards poor policy will come with the upcoming debate on tax and intergenerational fairness which has been flagged by Treasurer Jim Chalmers.

The National Party holds five of the six electorates with the highest average age. That is half of their seats. And the others are not far behind.

Older people tend to own their own home; have investment property and shares. It means that in any debate about capital gains, negative gearing, and franked dividends, the Nationals and the Liberal survivors are more likely to oppose change.

Younger people are angered and frustrated about housing and tax fairness. These are the biggest issues in Australian politics, related directly to the cost of living. With the Nationals dragging the Liberals to do nothing, younger voters will go Labor, Green, and independent, or reject the whole lot.

Prime Minister John Howard might have been astute to massage older voters with tax hand-outs in the early years of this century. But older voters tend to die off, leaving you in a voterless electoral graveyard.

Sunday's decision to allow the Nationals back into coalition means the Liberals will find it near impossible to get back city seats. They blew it. For them it is back to their echo chambers to talk about irrelevant nuclear power and identity politics.

• Crispin Hull is a former editor of The Canberra Times and a regular columnist.

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fuckheads gonna fuckhead

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