It's back on ...
Forget King Donald and his obsession with Iceland (Greenland too), at last there's a local ruckus worth following, what with the lettuce recently wilting in the summer sun, but now staging a comeback worthy of a 300 Spartans style movie ...
The bouffant one started proceedings yesterday with ...
Commentary by Dennis Shanahan
Bullied, outfoxed and spooked, Littleproud commits all-time act of political bastardry
David Littleproud’s calculated, idiotic Nationals decision will seal his own political demise
The consequences of the Coalition split are profound: the Nats lose staff and resources; Ley’s leadership is mortally damaged; the Libs can now contest National-held seats; One Nation is boosted and the PM has been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Bullied, outfoxed and spooked, Littleproud commits all-time act of political bastardry
David Littleproud’s calculated, idiotic Nationals decision will seal his own political demise
The consequences of the Coalition split are profound: the Nats lose staff and resources; Ley’s leadership is mortally damaged; the Libs can now contest National-held seats; One Nation is boosted and the PM has been handed a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Spoilsport the keen Keane in Crikey was inclined to blame the reptiles ...
When the Coalition and the media used Bondi to attack Anthony Albanese, it meant opening up issues that were always going to risk tearing the Coalition up. And they have. (sorry, paywall)
Inter alia:
When Sussan Ley chose to politicise the Bondi atrocity to damage Anthony Albanese’s political dominance, and News Corp and the Nine newspapers egged her on in the hope of either doing the same or achieving some form of regime change, some outcomes could have been predicted.
The first was that tighter gun laws would outrage the Nationals and require either urban Liberal MPs to oppose such laws — which have strong support in the community — or risk splitting the Coalition.
The second was that any tightening of hate speech laws, despite the Coalition’s reflexive support for Israel and incessant attempts to brand Labor as the party of antisemitism over the past two years, risked revisiting a deeply divisive issue that the Liberals themselves have struggled with for over a decade: the protection of free speech and religious groups.
The third was that so weak is Ley’s hold on her own partyroom, let alone the Coalition, that any internal divisions would immediately feed into leadership tensions.
By demanding the immediate recall of parliament to rush through tighter laws and implement “in full” antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s bizarre set of unlawful and unconstitutional recommendations, including muzzling the press and stronger laws against hate speech, the Coalition was carefully putting in place a series of land mines — not for Anthony Albanese but for itself. And journalists, under the same delusion that this would destabilise Albanese, cheered them on as they did so.
And the cheering continued in full force early this Friday morning in the lizard Oz ...
Say what, Barners as a marriage counsellor?
That was just the start of assorted absurdities.
Sublimely refusing to acknowledge their own role in proceedings, the consensus seemed to be that it was all the fault of little to be proud of's mob of mad misogynistic bushies ...with Tamworth's eternal shame seizing on the moment to verbally assault his one time colleagues ...
There were exceptions to the rule. It was inevitable that dedicated Zionist and bigot Our Henry would stay true to the old jihad ...
The reptiles did him proud with just one snap, which said just about everything ...
The pond sent the old bigot's pompous, self-pitying pedantry off to the intermittent archive ...
The Muslim Voice’s opposition to Australia’s anti-antisemitism bill exposes the limits of free speech absolutism and the Coalition’s dangerous confusion over protecting citizens.
By Henry Ergas
Columnist
The pond, as it has done in recent hole in bucket repair outings, will simply note that the pompous pedant was in fine form, with a flurry of arcane references...
The opening flourish set the scene ...
“There are moments,” Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “when education in the obvious is more important than investigation of the obscure.” The Muslim Voice’s submission opposing the combating antisemitism bill – framed as a staunch defence of free expression yet bearing the signatures of Hizb ut-Tahrir and other proponents of sharia law, under which apostasy and heresy are punishable by death – shows that we have reached such a moment.
From there, the aged obscurantist cranked it up to eleven ...
...From its earliest articulation, freedom of expression has been defended through a rhetoric of moral absolutism that has always sat uneasily with its stringent conditions, complex justifications and tight limits.
Nothing better illustrates the misunderstandings surrounding the concept than the iconic status accorded to John Milton’s Aeropagitica (1644). Its famous declaration – “Let Truth and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter?” – is routinely treated as a foundational defence of free speech.
Yet Milton himself was so doubtful of truth’s capacity to prevail that he thought only books written in Latin should be exempt from prior censorship. Even those works, once published, remained subject, in Milton’s scheme, to the law of seditious libel, under which most dissenting expression was a grave criminal offence.
No less flawed is the belief that John Stuart Mill was an unqualified defender of freedom of expression. In reality, Mill was intensely concerned about inflammatory speech to the point that, on Vincent Blasi’s influential reading, he excluded “improperly motivated speakers” and their “violence-prone and unthinking followers” from the freedom’s protection.
The underlying insight – that speech can cease to be part of deliberation and become a tool of coercive mobilisation – reappears, with even greater strength, throughout contemporary liberal theory, from Jürgen Habermas and Frederick Schauer to John Rawls and Charles Larmore.
Far from being accidental, the ambivalence of Milton, Mill and their successors reflects an awareness of how misleading absolutist claims about free speech can be. For example, the belief that truth will reliably defeat error in a “free and open encounter” is neither logically compelled nor inevitable, as experience readily shows.
Indeed, the serene confidence with which that plainly fallacious proposition is so often asserted may itself be the best evidence of how doubtful it is.
Could the pompous pedant work Burke into it? Why did you doubt?
It is reasonable, in those circumstances, to recall Edmund Burke’s observation that “though no man can draw a stroke between the confines of night and day, still light and darkness are on the whole tolerably distinguishable”. That does not deny the possibility of error or abuse; it means only that the impossibility of perfect line-drawing is no argument for abandoning judgment altogether.
Could he pass up a chance to mention Orwell? Relax, it's under control ...
The difficulty lies in framing a test that captures dangerous cases without generating even more costly unintended consequences. It would be foolish to deny that this is a real concern. But it would be more foolish still to claim that any such test must set us on the slippery slope to George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Nordic democracies may have their flaws; it is nonetheless utterly implausible to suggest that their strict hate speech laws have transformed them into authoritarian dystopias.
There was the usual smiting and smoting, but Our Henry's ending was classic ...
None of this is to imagine that laws can cure hatred. Samuel Johnson had it right:
“How small, of all that human hearts endure,
The part which laws or kings can cause or cure.”
But Johnson’s point cuts only one way: that law cannot remedy every ill is no licence to deny that limits must still be set. When the denial of limits is dressed up as devotion to liberty, and exploited for political advantage, as it is in the Coalition, the moment Holmes speaks of has come: a moment for confronting the obvious and acting on it without posturing, evasion or apology.
The pond regrets that Our Henry's Zionism prevented the pond from relishing the full text, but it's there in the intermittent archive who want the full experience.
As Gramsci is reputed to have said, though possibly he didn't have the current ethnic cleansing being conducted by the government of Israel in mind: “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters.”
Meanwhile, the reptiles wheeled in the big guns.
Lord Downer hovered into view to berate that mob with little to be proud of ...
The header: David Littleproud’s petty power game has betrayed the nation; The repeated break-up of the Coalition leaves Labor largely unchallenged, undermining parliamentary scrutiny and risking complacency in economic policy and public governance.
The caption for that mean man: National Party leader David Littleproud has twice withdrawn from the Coalition, sparking debate about opposition effectiveness. Picture: AAP
His Lordship spent a bigly four minute ranting and raging ...
There are many things that make a country successful, and one of them is to ensure those in power are constantly challenged. Those challenges come from a variety of sources, but one of the most important is the political opposition in parliament.
The break-up of the federal Coalition between the Liberal and the National parties will make it harder for the parliament as a whole to challenge the Labor government and hold it accountable. That will be detrimental to the quality of public policy.
Anthony Albanese and his ministers should always feel nervous about the opposition. It’s not just the challenges to their decisions that matter, but also the thought in the back of their minds that they could lose the next election to the opposition if they don’t perform.
Given the decision by David Littleproud and the National Party to, yet again, break up the Coalition, it’s hard to believe that, at this moment, the Labor Party has any fear of losing the next election. Whatever Littleproud may think of Sussan Ley or, for that matter, some of the moderates in the Liberal Party, to behave like he has is to abrogate his responsibility to the Australian public to provide strong opposition.
Littleproud knew when the National Party met to discuss the Labor Party’s hate crimes bill that, if the National Party shadow cabinet members crossed the floor, they’d have to resign or be sacked by Ley. He knew that given the tradition of collective (shadow) cabinet responsibility, Ley would have no choice. He should have found a way to avoid that catastrophe but instead he marched his whole team out of the Coalition.
If that was his way of getting rid of Ley as the Opposition Leader – and that could be his motive for breaking the Coalition yet again – it was a crude and dangerous strategy.
From time to time Liberal leaders have run into stormy waters but never has the response of the National Party been to storm out of the Coalition.
The Prime Minister and his ministers will be leaning back in their comfortable chairs in their ministerial suites in Parliament House thinking they have at least another five years in office.
This is a dangerous thing. It is inevitably going to lead to complacent policymaking. As the OECD has recently demonstrated, the Australian political class is confronting a significant economic challenge to lift productivity, GDP growth and, ultimately, the living standards of the Australian people over the next few years. That will require creative policymaking, including fiscal restraint, reform of the tax system and significant improvements in the way our industrial relations work.
An opposition should be promoting ideas of that kind, although not the reintroduction of inheritance tax and the abolition of negative gearing on properties, which the OECD recommends!
Such was His Lordship's fury that the reptiles only dared to interrupt with just one snap, showing the face of Satan himself, Labor ministers face reduced scrutiny as opposition cohesion weakens in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
After old Nick, née Chairman Albo, made his token appearance, it was back to the ranting and raging, and the frothing and the foaming, and all the pond had to do was put another load of popcorn in the saucepan, and stand back to enjoy the spectacle...
In putting forward alternative policies and approaches to economic management, the government will be challenged to improve its own performance, but you can see what’s happening.
A government unchallenged is running up budget deficits year by year, accumulating debt, doing nothing to improve productivity, and allowing living standards to stagnate. But so what? It is not being challenged. It doesn’t feel under pressure to change direction.
In the wake of last year’s catastrophic election loss, the Liberal and National parties need to work together. After all, it is not as though there is a wide philosophical gulf between the Liberal and the National parties. They’re basically united in their belief in individual freedom and their opposition to the corporatist and collectivist model the Labor Party favours.
They’re strongly committed to allowing the millions of decisions made by consumers every day, demonstrating their preferences, to be the driving force of economic activity, not diktats from Canberra, which is the Labor way.
Consistent with that, both the Liberal and National parties want to try to keep taxes down and make sure government programs are funded responsibly. On foreign policy, defence policy and other key elements of government, there is nothing that separates the two parties. What divides them is much more a function of geography and tradition than philosophy.
Of course members of parliament don’t always agree with each other, both within the Liberal Party and also within the National Party. Indeed there are members of the National Party who are social liberals and others who are social conservatives.
There are members of the Liberal Party who are economic rationalists and others who are more interventionist. It’s not the parties that split them between the left and the right. Those divisions exist within both parties. The great drivers of economic rationalism in the lead-up to the election of the Howard government, and throughout the life of that government, included leading figures in the National Party such as Tim Fischer and John Anderson.
Yet Tim Fischer was, on the whole, quite socially liberal, even though some of his colleagues in the National Party would have been more traditional and conservative.
In my years in parliament, all of the federal National Party leaders recognised that either the Liberal and National parties united in a coalition in Canberra, or they would founder. Doug Anthony, Ian Sinclair, Tim Fischer, John Anderson and Mark Vaile were all great leaders of the National Party who understood that truism. Yet, in less than a year, the current leader of the National Party has twice taken the National Party out of the Coalition.
So what now? It is a matter of urgency that the federal Coalition be re-formed. Together the Liberals and Nationals have to develop the courage to confront the Labor government philosophically, to develop new policy directions for the country that will help extricate it from the economic torpor it has slumped into, and to become the flag carriers of our nation’s hard-won traditions, history and symbols.
Without the Coalition being reformed, Littleproud will never have any chance of returning to government. And nor will the rest of his party.
To say that the lettuce had a whale of a with His Lordship's fury is to understate the pleasure of seeing an Adelaide toff in red-faced fury ...
Naturally the cartoonists were cartwheeling with pleasure ...
But wait, there was more, with the Caterist afoot, and offering a three minute shifting of the blame to Susssan's mob...
The header: Coalition implosion shows Libs no longer get mainstream voters; The Coalition’s split exposes its failures on immigration and national security, while One Nation’s rise shows voters no longer trust mainstream parties to keep them safe.
The caption for the hapless Susssan, fingers clenched, face glowering: Leader of the Opposition Sussan Ley in the House of Representatives as it adjourns at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Put it another way:
The desperate Caterist tried to change the matters under review to a rant about immigrants - never mind that the process introduced his poison into the country - but the main lesson to be extracted from the Caterist's raging?
If hard right ratbags have their way, Susssan will be turfed out, and the quicker the better:
Only one conclusion can be drawn from the Coalition’s latest implosion: the political realignment on the right has rendered the Liberal-National partnership unworkable.
One Nation’s surge over Christmas proves voters no longer trust the mainstream parties to protect borders or keep them safe. As the Liberal moderates focus on the teal challenge and the Nationals set their sights on countering One Nation’s rise, the Coalition split has further exposed its failures on immigration.
On Tuesday, Tony Burke opened the debate on gun laws and hate crime. It was an hour and 38 minutes before anyone in the chamber was brave enough to raise the “I” word: immigration.
Why had 15 people been murdered at Bondi? Bob Katter asked rhetorically. “Because the Immigration Department allowed some extremely dangerous people into this country. So, the first people who should be held to account are the immigration authorities.”
The messy debate that drove a wedge through the Coalition this week will have done nothing to redeem the two major parties in the eyes of a dissatisfied electorate.
That is bad news for Labor, which Newspoll found has lost 4 per cent of its primary vote since Bondi. The Coalition slipped 3 per cent, which is devastating, since immigration and national security have traditionally been its strength.
When John Howard came from behind to win the November 2001 election in the wake of the Tampa crisis and 9/11, One Nation’s vote was cut in half. In 2013, when Tony Abbott won a landslide by promising to stop the boats, One Nation looked finished.
This time, however, voters have turned to One Nation and almost no one in the Liberal Party seems to understand why. If they did, they would not have allowed themselves to be drawn into a fatal compromise on hate speech that will impress almost no one north of Moonee Ponds or west or Auburn.
Never mind that cruel and heartless immigration authorities had at some point allowed the Caterist himself into the country to become a relentless sh*t-stirrer and breeder of social ills and discontents.
The net effect was to send the lettuce into a fit of joyous optimism, and again the reptiles managed only one visual interruption: Ahmed al-Ahmed speaks with One Nation leader Pauline Hanson at the national day of mourning event in Sydney. Picture: Jessica Wang
That sighting of the appalling redhead consorting with Islamics sent the Caterist off the deep end ...
Indeed, it will only strengthen the sentiment that the political class isn’t listening. Few Australians looked at Bondi solely through the framework of antisemitism and Middle Eastern politics. Their reaction is elemental.
Bondi confirms their fears that immigration is out of control. It validates a deep-seated anxiety that there are strangers in our midst who despise our values.
The Liberal Party once understood the political consequences of uncontrolled immigration. Yet our own immigration challenge has substantively changed in the past 12 years. Like generals fighting the last war, the Liberal leadership has failed to recognise that the battle lines have been redrawn.
The challenge now is not holes in border security, but loopholes in our over-complicated, bureaucratised immigration system. The most valuable skill for would-be migrants today is the ability to game the system.
Where immigrants were once selected on their qualifications, skewed heavily to professional occupations, now they gravitate to the service sector. We have entered a phase of hyper-diversity placing strains on the old live-and-live ethos. The countries from which people come have also changed, even within the Islamic world, in a pattern that mirrors the conflicts of the early 21st century.
The combined population of people born in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Pakistan in Australia more than doubled to 340,000 between 2011 and 2021. Concerns about the character and intentions of migrants is hardly irrational when we consider, for example, that more than 10,000 people who came from Afghanistan between 2008 and 2013 effectively screened themselves by turning up uninvited by boat.
So here we are in a world that has grown meaner and more dangerous this century locked into a wishy-washy multicultural paradigm that declares diversity to be our strength.
It is little wonder that One Nation’s uncomplicated message on immigration is resonating, nor that it resonates more loudly after the Bondi attack, carried out by a proudly unassimilated permanent resident and his radicalised son.
In the midst of Tuesday’s dismal debate, in which dangerously loose legislation was rushed through to address an irrelevance, there was a brief indication that at least one person in the Liberal Party gets it. Melissa McIntosh is the member for Lindsay, a seat centred on Penrith in western Sydney, where roughly seven out of 10 voters were born in Australia, roughly the same proportion as in the nation as a whole.
In a survey late last year, 90 per cent of voters in her Penrith-based electorate said the level of immigration should be reduced.
It wasn’t just the pressure it put on housing and roads, McIntosh told the House. “Migration concerns are also about the safety of our citizens,” she said. “Australians should not be asked to accept a system that allows dangerous individuals to enter and remain in our country … This means enabling the immigration minister to deal with Islamic extremists, who we want to stop coming into this country.”
As Sussan Ley reflects on her testing week, she could do worse than revisit McIntosh's contribution, and reflect on the wisdom of following Labor down the rabbit hole. Policing our vocabulary, for whatever reason, is something Liberals should never do lightly. Certainly, it should never be done in a rush.
One thing is clear: had Ley adopted McIntosh's tone and rejected Labor’s legislation, the Coalition would have ended the week intact. The Coalition must return to the drawing board, recognising multiculturalism is finished as an organising principle.
Yes, we should deport the Caterist immediately.
Brownie was also on hand to have a few words, declaring poor old Susssan toast, without even an avocado topping ...
The header: Sussan Ley is done, but can Andrew Hastie or Angus Taylor do any better against Labor?Anthony Albanese must feel like he is on a football field playing against a bunch of reserve graders who are unable to make him pay for his mistakes whenever he looks at the Liberals.
The caption for the collage which really should have been credited to AI, so dismal was it: Sussan Ley and David Littleproud. Artwork by Emilia Tortorella.
It was only a three minute outing for Brownie but it left the lettuce panting with pleasure and anticipation ...
Sussan Ley’s days are numbered but there is no guarantee Andrew Hastie or Angus Taylor will be able to reunite a political union that has been the cornerstone of centre-right politics for the past 80 years.
There is also little evidence to date that either Hastie or Taylor has the political abilities to rebuild a Liberal Party facing its biggest ever crisis, with Anthony Albanese somehow finding himself in an even more secure position despite his botched handling of the aftermath of the Bondi Beach terror attack.
The Prime Minister must feel like he is on a football field playing against a bunch of reserve graders who are unable to make him pay for his mistakes.
Most Liberals say Ley has lost the support of the partyroom but there is white hot anger towards David Littleproud for announcing the Nationals would divorce the Liberals on a day of national mourning for the victims of the December 14 massacre.
The main leadership issue for the Liberals is timing, as MPs do not want to appear like they are bowing to Littleproud by immediately rolling Ley.
There came an AV distraction, featuring one of those skewed AI thumbs, showing the pastie Hastie in a weird way, Liberal Party MP Andrew Hastie on why he voted for the bill.
Brownie carried on, downgrading the Nats to a country party ...
Liberals are so incensed with Littleproud that many are saying they do not want the Coalition to reunite unless the Nationals replace their leader, with MPs accusing him of misleading shadow cabinet, having little authority within his partyroom and of being untrustworthy.
But a leadership change within the country party is not on the cards any time soon, ensuring there would be fierce resistance to a new Liberal leader moving to reunite the historically successful political partnership ahead of the next election.
Just consider the optics from the latest Coalition pantomime: at about the same time Littleproud announced the Nationals were leaving the Liberals, the Prime Minister delivered a statement paying tribute to the 15 Australians who were killed in the nation’s biggest ever terror attack.
Always ready to serve up monotonous visuals to the hive mind, the reptiles served up that snap of Susssan ... Sussan Ley in the House of Representatives as it adjourns at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Brownie sniped at little to be proud of ...
While Albanese solemnly declared the day was a chance for the nation to “wrap our arms around the Jewish community”, Littleproud called time on the Coalition agreement and revealed the Nationals would “sit by ourselves” and not consider reuniting with the Liberals while Ley was leader.
Littleproud – a man clearly spooked by the rise of One Nation and the leadership ambitions of Nationals senator Matt Canavan – managed to do something that seemed to confound Labor strategists since December 14: he made Albanese look like a statesman.
The Liberals and Nationals have brought the focus of the political debate back on to their own dysfunction, just a fortnight after Albanese’s leadership was under pressure after being forced into an embarrassing about-face on holding a royal commission into antisemitism.
Inevitably the reptiles featured a snap of the beefy boofhead from down Goulburn way, though it was a pity they hadn't produced one of their classic uncredited collages showing him in a forest of whale-killing windmills, Angus Taylor. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
Brownie gave Susssan little more than a month ...
Ley’s leadership and the optics of the Liberals and Nationals sitting apart are set to dominate parliament when it returns next month, giving the Albanese government a free ride despite its vulnerabilities on fiscal management, the energy transition and national security.
A fearsome debate over policy after the 2022 election was understandable, and in many ways desirable, but the outcome of this week was just pointless self-destruction.
Ley’s culpability in the soap opera is fiercely contested internally, with her supporters arguing that she did little wrong and needed to sack three Nationals frontbenchers for crossing the floor in the Senate on Tuesday night to oppose Labor’s watered-down reforms to the hate group crackdown.
Others say she made strategic mistakes by boxing in the Coalition to quickly negotiate an outcome on antisemitism legislation by calling for parliament to return immediately after the terror attack.
They also criticise Ley for opting against holding a joint Coalition partyroom on Tuesday so concerns could be aired about the legislation, a process that would have given Liberals a better idea on the breadth of opposition within the Nationals.
Cue a snap of a barking mad extremist, of creationist young earth origins: Andrew Hastie. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman
No wonder the lettuce was wildly excited:
Of the two potential future Liberal leaders, Taylor has more support within the dominant right faction but Hastie could have the numbers if he strikes a cross-factional deal with moderates and the centre right.
Lindsay MP Melissa McIntosh, from the centre right, has made no secret of her leadership ambitions and has been floated as a potential deputy for Hastie.
Any cross-factional deal will be resisted from conservative number-crunchers, who are pushing for Taylor and Hastie to come to an agreement so there is relative consensus on Ley’s replacement.
It would take a metamorphosis for Hastie or Taylor become a leader able to drag the Liberal Party into a competitive position at the next election, even if they did manage to reunite the Coalition.
Both men had key portfolios in the last term of parliament, Taylor as opposition Treasury spokesman and Hastie as defence spokesman, and neither of them landed any major blows against an Albanese government that was vulnerable on both issues.
As a final reminder, the reptiles wrapped up Brownie's rant with a snap of the man with little to be proud of: Nationals leader David Littleproud. Picture: NewsWire / Sarah Marshall
The cruellest news came in a reptile EXCLUSIVE ...
The caption: Gina Rinehart brokers Trump lunch for $300,000 One Nation donation deal; Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, has agreed to take three former Liberal Party-donating fund managers to dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago, in exchange for them donating $100,000 each to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
The authors of the EXCLUSIVE: Matthew Cranston and Elizabeth Pike
The caption for the happy snap: From left, Doug Tynan, Ben Cleary, Pauline Hanson, Gina Rinehart, Jane Cleary and Charlie Tynan with the auctioned ‘Trump’ handbag.
It was only a three minute read, but it set the lettuce to dancing in delight, while reptiles trembled in fear at the betrayal:
A trio of former Liberal-donating fund managers have given $100,000 each to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, after Australia’s richest person, Gina Rinehart, agreed to take them to dinner with Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
In a move that reflects a broader push from former Liberal Party donors to steer the Coalition to a more conservative footing, the three money managers – GCQ Funds Management’s Douglas Tynan, Tribeca Investment Partners’ Ben Cleary and Aitken Mount Capital Partners’ Angus Aitken – confirmed to The Australian that they had agreed to the fresh funding for Senator Hanson.
The switch-up in donations was in part an outcome of building frustrations with the flailing federal Liberal Party reflected by a multitude of former donors including Earl Evans, chief executive of stockbroking firm Shaw and Partners, who said he was expecting further donors to abandon the party and consider One Nation.
The splitting of the Coalition for the second time in less than a year has left both the Liberals and Nationals in tatters, with Sussan Ley’s leadership hanging by a thread and polling showing One Nation now ahead of the Coalition in voting support for the first time.
There came yet another reminder of the unhappy situation, and the odd couple, deep into a marital feud and divorce proceedings, The Coalition has split for the second time in less than a year, creating uncertainty for donors and supporters.
Oh the behaviour was shocking to behold ...
Meanwhile, Gina was keen to get into bed with the man who coveted Iceland ...
The dinner with Mrs Rinehart and the US President at Mar-a-Lago is yet to have a date set. It was agreed to between the fund managers, Mrs Rinehart and Senator Hanson at a lunch in Brisbane on December 17 aboard the 644-foot private residential ship The World, on which 165 ultra-wealthy families own apartments and navigate the globe.
The Australian understands Mr Cleary organised the meeting in the days after the Bondi attack, buoyed by a growing admiration for Senator Hanson’s stand against antisemitism.
A Trump handbag, which can be purchased only at Mar-a-Lago, was also auctioned off during the lunch and bought for $20,000 by Charlie Tynan, with the money going to Senator Hanson’s One Nation fund. Mrs Rinehart declined to comment. Her support for One Nation has been no secret and has only served as a catalyst for further funding switches from the Liberal Party.
For no particular reason, the reptiles settled on a no nothing snap ... Gina Rinehart agreed to take the fund managers for a lunch with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in exchange for donations to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. Picture: AP
Then came a a final gobbet of treachery, betrayal and demands for the lettuce to win:
Of the three fund managers who agreed to pay the $100,000, Mr Cleary and Mr Tynan declined to comment on the shift away from the Liberal Party, but said they largely supported the sentiment expressed by Mr Aitken, who observed that One Nation was rapidly snatching support away because of its more conservative stance on policies.
“The Liberals are too worried about trying to win back inner-city teal votes with middle-of-the-road policies rather than appealing to hardworking Australians in suburbia who are being totally stuffed over by the current government on everything from housing to energy costs,” Mr Aitken said.
“Hence this is why One Nation is taking a lot of former lifelong Liberal voters as the party of common sense. I have no interest in donating more money to the federal Liberal Party.
“The fact most of them could not even agree to move away from net zero shows me they are absolutely cooked as a party.”
One wealthy Liberal Party donor from the construction industry told The Australian on Thursday he would no longer donate unless there was a change.
“I, and others I know, feel the Liberal Party is continually playing the same hand and expecting a different result,” the donor said. “In order to keep our support, something has to change.”
Mr Evans said he expected donors and supporters will move, but not in the numbers expected.
He compared the saga with the Coalition to the Gillard-Rudd era, noting it will be cyclical.
“There’s definitely going to be an increase in the independent vote and you would put One Nation in that vote,” Mr Evans said.
“Given the poor performance and the shambolicness of the Coalition in the last six months, I think it definitely pushes people toward the independents, teals and One Nation, but I don’t think it will be to the level the polls are showing.”
Advance Australia executive director Matthew Sheahan said the conservative lobby group’s supporters sent more than 250,000 emails to federal politicians “demanding they vote against Labor’s hate speech laws”.
Advance spends the millions of dollars it receives in donations on campaigns against parties and causes it opposes, rather than supporting parties directly.
Mr Sheahan said the group was satisfied the former Coalition was able to get the “worst part” of the hate speech legislation dropped and, at this stage, it would not campaign against the Liberals or Nationals over the issue.
On the upside, at least the pond could slip in a 'toon celebrating the demented narcissistic King whose madness reached a new peak in his Davos speech ...
So desperate were the reptiles that they hied off to old codgers to express disgust at the way that the lettuce had been given a light handicap, while Susssan had been saddled with little to be proud of's mob ...
The header: Nationals looking at an uncertain future as country party veterans feel disgusted by Coalition split; Barry O’Sullivan is old school National Party. The chain of events that blew up the Nationals’ frontbench under David Littleproud and then the coalition itself has left him disgusted and dismayed.
The caption for the old schooler: Former Nationals senator Barry O’Sullivan says the party’s decision to walk away from the Coalition has left him “disgusted and dismayed”. Picture: AAP
The reptiles allotted a full five minutes to the old schooler having a vent ...
Barry O’Sullivan is old school National Party, a former senator from the conservative heartland of rural Queensland who thought he had seen it all in politics. Until now.
The chain of events that blew up the Nationals’ frontbench under David Littleproud and then the Coalition itself has left him disgusted and dismayed.
Disgusted because in one fell swoop the Nationals relieved the pressure that was building on the Labor government over Anthony Albanese’s ham-fisted legislative response to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack.
Dismayed because he can’t see a path back for the Coalition after Littleproud and his team called it quits with the Liberal Party, dissolving a partnership that had been a fixture of national politics for eight decades.
“This didn’t need to happen,” said Mr O’Sullivan, a one-time mover and shaker in Queensland’s merged Liberal National Party who served for five years in federal parliament.
“It’s a terrible state of affairs. Just when Labor was about to drive the pointy end of a stick into their own neck, we’ve come and taken it from them and used it on ourselves. It’s as bad as it gets. Albanese probably can’t believe his luck.”
To do it on the Day of National Mourning for the 15 victims of the December 14 beachfront atrocity at Bondi spoke volumes about the lack of decorum attending this act of epic folly. Neither Mr Littleproud nor Sussan Ley, her leadership perhaps terminally undermined, can take pride in how they conducted themselves.
The question is: where next? With the departure of the Nationals’ frontbenchers, the opposition will become a one-party show under Ms Ley. Liberals will fill the vacated positions, making any rapprochement all the more vexed.
Given Mr Littleproud’s declaration that his team “cannot be part of a shadow ministry” led by Ms Ley, the only conceivable way forward is for her to go, allowing a new leader to reshuffle the deckchairs yet again and bring the Nats back into the fold.
Don’t hold your breath. One senior Liberal MP, speaking on condition of anonymity, made the point that the colleagues were in no mood to do their ex-Coalition partners any favours.
“What’s gone on over the past 48 hours is going to create a legacy of bitterness, I can assure you of that,” the MP said. “I accept that Sussan didn’t manage things as well as she could have. But the Nats are the ones who brought this to a head. They’re the ones who pulled the pin. They’re going to have to live with it.”
For yet another reminder of the sour lemon that had ruined everything, there came little to be proud of himself, Nationals leader David Littleproud announces the end of the Coalition with the Liberal Party, a move that has triggered turmoil within the opposition. Picture: AAP
How the reptiles hated that daddy had been so cruel to mum:
Nationals MP Anne Webster, who has held the seat of Mallee in regional Victoria since 2019, insisted her partyroom was right to stand on principle and back rebel frontbenchers Bridget McKenzie, Susan McDonald and Ross Cadell, who on Tuesday broke shadow cabinet solidarity and voted in the Senate against the government’s hate laws. Ms Ley accepted their resignations on Wednesday, despite being urged by Mr Littleproud not to.
“This was incredibly difficult,” Ms Webster told the ABC on Thursday, after Mr Littleproud announced the split. “I had tears in my eyes because we want to stand for principles that reflect the values of Australians, and we represent regional seats.
“I had hundreds of emails … from my own electorate. Not one asked me to support this legislation.”
The parties had gone their separate ways twice before, most recently in the wake of last year’s federal election drubbing by Labor, when talks over a new Coalition agreement failed and Mr Littleproud walked.
Both sides blinked and the Nationals returned after a week of fraught uncertainty.
The ill-judged 1987 Joh for Canberra push by then Queensland National Party premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen triggered the only other rupture since the Coalition formed under Robert Menzies in 1946, two years after he founded the Liberal Party.
It was the bedrock of Australia’s two-party system of government, today creaking at the seams, with support for both Labor and the conservative parties cratering. The Nationals, especially, have felt the heat from the surge in the published opinion polls by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. For the first time this week, One Nation’s primary vote in The Australian’s Newspoll pushed past the Coalition at 22 per cent, up seven points. The Coalition’s primary vote fell three points to a record low of 21 per cent, while Labor dropped four points to 32 per cent.
While One Nation’s vote is volatile, washing in and out from election to election, the Nationals are particularly vulnerable because their home turf in regional Queensland is also Senator Hanson’s happiest hunting ground.
In the 10 federal seats where One Nation does best nationally, six are traditional Nationals’ seats held by the LNP. (MPs and senators elected under the banner of the merged party sat in a designated partyroom in Canberra under the Coalition arrangement, a somewhat clunky departure from the state scene where the LNP governs in its own right under Premier David Crisafulli.)
Even worse there were some bush women who had stood behind their men as they did old Susssan down, Nationals MP Anne Webster says the party was right to stand on principle after backing frontbench colleagues who broke ranks over hate speech laws. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage
The old timer wasn't for turning as Jamie turned to do the numbers in even more depressing detail:
Election analyst Antony Green suggested on Thursday that it was “hard to believe” Mr Littleproud didn’t have one apprehensive eye on Senator Hanson when he dynamited the Coalition. “Perhaps this week is not all about One Nation, but what has been building for months is about One Nation,” Green blogged, noting the far right party’s rise in the polls.
The Liberals’ crushing election defeat last year at Mr Albanese’s hands, compounded by Ms Ley’s well-documented woes, have masked the Nationals’ own suite of problems. The defection of high-profile senator Nampajinpa Price to the Liberals and of former leader and deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce to One Nation reduced the size of the Nationals’ partyroom to 18 – 14 MPs and four senators, down from 16 MPs and six senators following the 2022 poll. The LNP provided eight of Mr Littleproud’s current team.
Small comfort, then, that the amalgamation of the parties in Queensland, dating back to 2008, will avert potential three-cornered contests between rival Liberal and Nationals candidates if they don’t reconcile before the next federal election. The danger lurking in the Senate vote is acute for the Nationals. Then deputy leader Perin Davey lost her NSW Senate spot to Labor in 2025, an outcome she blamed on being placed third on a joint ticket with the Liberals. At the same time, One Nation doubled its numbers in the upper house to four.
Mr Joyce is considered a lock on securing a quota in NSW next time around, when he switches from his seat of New England to the Senate with Team Hanson. If the One Nation surge lasts – a big if – the party will like its chances in Tasmania, Western Australia and of capitalising in Queensland, where Senator Hanson is up for re-election and an outside chance to pull her No. 2 on the ticket through on her coat-tails, potentially at the expense of the LNP.
One veteran Coalition number cruncher wouldn’t be surprised if she fielded a team of eight senators in the next parliament.
Mr O’Sullivan said there was no chance One Nation would break through and win a house seat – in Queensland or anywhere else. “It’s not possible when you do the maths. They can’t get there,” he insisted.
But that didn’t mean their preferences couldn’t hurt the LNP, hitting the Nationals where they were vulnerable in the regional seats eyed by Senator Hanson.
This was rammed home to him recently when he fell into conversation with a member of the work crew renovating his home. Did he have any thoughts on who he would vote for at the next election? The young man didn’t hesitate: Pauline Hanson.
“He’s just over everyone else,” Mr O’Sullivan said.
And yet, after all that fuss, and more not covered by the pond, remember those words of the keen Keane ...
When Sussan Ley chose to politicise the Bondi atrocity to damage Anthony Albanese’s political dominance, and News Corp and the Nine newspapers egged her on in the hope of either doing the same or achieving some form of regime change, some outcomes could have been predicted.
...By demanding the immediate recall of parliament to rush through tighter laws and implement “in full” antisemitism envoy Jillian Segal’s bizarre set of unlawful and unconstitutional recommendations, including muzzling the press and stronger laws against hate speech, the Coalition was carefully putting in place a series of land mines — not for Anthony Albanese but for itself. And journalists, under the same delusion that this would destabilise Albanese, cheered them on as they did so.
Credit where credit is due. It's not just the little to be proud of man who has little to be proud of ...
And so to end with a celebratory immortal Rowe designed to get the lettuce dancing in the street ...
After all that Friday excitement, some might like to down an edible and chill ... (if Krugman can end his posts this way, so can the pond).
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