Who was our best Prime Minister and why?

Honestly, they should be. Even their rank and file members have been betrayed. As for supporters, the CFMEU fiasco gave many people in my union’s chat rooms cold feet, with the pro-Labor peeps in disbelief they would do what they have, and that’s on top of the Party’s active complicity in the Middle East conflict. Labor have mirrored the US Democrat Party in many clear ways. The main difference I see in the situation is that is much easier for Australia to swing left instead of right, since we don’t have the same FPTP spoiler effect in our federal voting system, so they can’t just fearmonger over the Coalition to scare the socdems and socialists into joining them.

It will be interesting to see how the Victorian council elections pan out as a litmus test, interestingly in NSW council elections the Labor Party lost 26 seats, with the Greens gaining 8. That’s just surface level looking at numbers but its enough for me to wonder if Federal Labor are worried.

Condorcet

Nice.

edit: for those who aren’t aware

Yeah, dismal job from the ABC this time. If you want a better account with quotes, there was one shared here.

They make a good point about these being useful in camping and disaster relief situations as portable lightweight power generation. Perhaps they could be effective integrated into window roller blinds, making use of the light we try to shut out.

Further details: the USyd student magazine’s article on this.

Something tells me they don’t care about the US’s opinion when it comes to invasions.

Perhaps there’s a new market for crystal cases then.

This is straight from a think tank commentary site (their words).

ASPI was established by the Australian Government in 2001 and is partially funded by the Department of Defence

The following copypasted from Wikipedia:

In 2020, Myriam Robin in the Australian Financial Review identified three sources of funding, in addition to the Department of Defence. ASPI receives funding from defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman, Thales Group and Raytheon Technologies. It also receives funding from technology companies such as Microsoft, Oracle Australia, Telstra, and Google. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Taiwan and the Netherlands.

For the 2019-2020 financial year, ASPI listed a revenue of $11,412,096.71. The ASPI received from the Australian Department of Defence 35% of its revenue, 32% from federal government agencies, 17% from overseas government agencies, 11% from the private sector, and 3% from the defense industries. Finally, it receives funding from foreign governments including Japan, Israel, Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands.

So it’s important to understand the article with that bias in mind - this is sponsored content.

Honestly, with news like that the title doesn’t do it justice (as appropriate as it is). I’d pick something more like “Labor Party members revealed as corrupt union gang”, or “ALP loots hundreds of thousands from CFMEU”.

Labor has justified suspending industrial law and union democracy, claiming that the appointed CFMEU administrators are independent and acting in the best interests of union members. However, documents leaked to Jacobin by the “Defend the Unions, Defend the CFMEU” rank and file group directly contradict these claims. According to payroll documents covering the period between August 1 and September 30 this year, the bulk of CFMEU administrators are career Labor Party operatives. Administration started in mid-August, and for roughly one month, they paid themselves over $170,000, taken directly from union coffers.

This has been happening for over a year, it’s not sudden just now that there’s an election.

Its not like trump is any different.

That’s irrelevant. Just like Liberal and Labor here are both systematically supportive of the Zionist regime, just because one might prefer a party over the other doesn’t make them less worthy of criticism. No-one’s going to say ‘omg biden is complicit in genocide, im going to vote for trump instead!’, or ‘labor leadership have blood on their hands, hopefully the coalition will fix it!’ so I’m not sure what Trump has to do with this at all.

Did you verify that, or did you just copy paste a machine-generated comment?

afaik, ‘cooker’ has risen as a slang term for the wackier conspiracy theorists:

From Wiktionary:

5. (slang, Australia) A person who makes or uses illicit drugs, especially methamphetamine or cannabis.

7. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A person who is cooked in the head; a crazy person.
8. (slang, derogatory, Australia) A conspiracy theorist, especially one who is involved in politics.

I don’t see the contradiction, they sprayed them as a deterrent without making an arrest. (And apparently chemical irritation doesn’t count as an injury)

Oh, I didnt know about Tuntable Falls. Thanks.

If we include smaller communes, then Wikipedia has a sizable list of intentional communities which is fun to explore. I found Cheran interesting, they had problems with organised crime coming into town and logging, disappearing people who tried to stop them, and the police and politicians were complicit, so the town kicked them all out. Now if you try to drive in with a political sticker on your car, it will get torn off at the checkpoint. A short Vice video on the place had some interesting interviews, including a local patroller who said crime plummeted and is now basically as simple as pub fights that locals can split up, and an interview with a political representative who was voted in, despite them not really wanting the job as they would get paid more in their previous job at the university. Reminds me of a Douglas Adams quote:

[…] To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. […]

If I indeed think that oath is, as you said, an outright stupid anachronism, then why should I consider it poor conduct to openly reject the oath?

On the other hand, I think it’s the appropriate conduct for anyone who wants to be a political representative of me, because I am an anti-monarchist. I do want my representatives to falsely affirm the oath, only because if they reject it then they can’t represent us in the electoral system. I see no positive meaning in that oath, no honour in upholding it, no hypocrisy in betraying it.

As far as offensiveness, for me it’s about the same whether it’s one person or a hundred ‘representatives’. In either case they’re all completely alienated from me and what decisions would actually help us.

But on a pragmatic level, we’ve seen what happened to Gough Whitlam so we know this isn’t merely a symbolic monarchist structure. It has a real impact.

The only place I have seen that work was the Internet in the 90’s. Nowhere in the real world.

There are real world success stories of anarcho-socialist societies (although perhaps not syndicalist) even in the present day. I’m not saying this to claim whether it’s viable or not in our industrialized conditions with imperialist empires at play, just pointing out relevant info.

The largest scale anarchist-style societies I know of are:

• FEJUVE in Bolivia, population >100,000, ongoing for 45 years
• Chiapas autonomous areas (formerly MAREZ) in Mexico, population >300,000, ongoing for 30 years, although reorganised structurally last year

And while I’m aware they don’t technically qualify as anarchist, they are certainly evidence of autonomous modes of social organisation at a scale larger than many existing states.

Tagging @kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone for relevance.

Yeah the public majority all agree. You wouldn’t know them, they live in America.

(or wherever their troll farms are outsourced to this year)

The problem isn’t that people are offending people, it’s that neo-Nazis are propagandising proudly in public.

Banning specific symbols is a non-solution. The symbols aren’t the problem. I tore down some of this group’s stickers this week and none of them had swastikas or salutes on them (they had things like the sonnenrad/“Black Sun” symbol and the NSN’s four-arrow logo blurred out in that article). And if you ban those, they’ll find other wolfwhistles. It’s really not hard to allude, adopt and evade. There are historically successful strategies for dealing with these kind of groups, and they rarely end with the law or police. For example, the BUF in Britain started dissolving after the Brighton police intentionally only sent one officer to their rally so the fascists could have bricks thrown at them by the '43 Group. That’s when Mosley stopped going out in public.

The fact that they’re doing these petty little masked-up rallies for photo-ops in relatively small rural towns really sings out to the fact that they’re scared of doing this in cities with established anti-fascist presence. They have to travel out to towns (and make no mistake, most of them aren’t even local to the region, they gather from various states just to make up numbers for a small rally) and make unannounced rallies with no-one around just to be safe in public without police protection. Those masks aren’t hiding from police (like some protestors do), they’re hiding from the community.