On the topic of malicious foreign powers seeking to subvert a democracy:
I know that this thread gives the impression that Australia is a racist island of bigots seeking to become the Tenth Circle of America…
…and that is true…
But sometimes some good things happen
Context for furriners:
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Sky News has a tiny audience and zero credibility.
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The people of the Australian outback are (a) substantially non-White, and (b) even the White ones tend to be more “eccentric” than “conservative”. Folks out there generally don’t have much time for politicians of any stripe.
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There ain’t a whole lot of them:
“The Outback” is the yellow bit.
Why couldn’t they arrest him for going to town on that kid? I mean hitting him with an egg is not cool, but the big strong man escalated pretty quick.
I think the kid declined pressing charges.
That’s generous of the kid.
Yep, especially after he was accosted by Anning’s racist goons (more big strong men 
) and wrestled to the ground. The kid later recommended not throwing eggs at politicians because “you’d get jumped on by about 13 bogans” lol
Well, kids have generally developed a good sense of humour and a clear sense of right and wrong by the time they’re 13. Those who lack these things grow up to become lying racist scumbag senators.
That reminds me of a song called Traighli Bay, by a folk group named Tanglefoot.
I have one of their live albums, and some few of the songs are given explanatory introductions. Traighli Bay’s intro talks about how all of the songs about pirates (Barrett’s Privateers, etc.) always end with the pirates defeated. So, for the sake of historical authenticity, they wrote a song in which the pirates came out on top. After all, there’s evidence that there were successful pirates in those days: “Their descendants live, to this day, in the Senate.”
It took a year for Centrelink to approve my DSP. If I didn’t have family to lean on, I would’ve been homeless.
In that entire time, I was not able to get through to the Disability Support phone line once. Couldn’t even reach an automated menu; it’s just a permanent engaged tone. Every time I contacted them, I had to do it via the complaints line, which inevitably involves 45+ minutes on hold.
The week after they finally approved my pension, they sent me a bunch of contradictory letters saying that they were cutting off payments that I was never on, and ordering me to go in for a review. Turns out that all of those letters were generated “in error” and they eventually told me to ignore them.
A couple of weeks after that, I got hit with the Robodebt bullshit that threatened me with having to pay back the pension because I’d supposedly made too much money in the year before the pension application. I hadn’t.
I had never heard of this before today: