RAMADAN :THE SEASON OF FEASTING AND FIGHTING NOTES ONLY

When is Ramadan? On or around Tuesday 15 May to Thursday 14 June 2018
When is Eid al-Fitr? On or around Thursday 14 June to Sunday 17 June 2018


14TH MAY

LOSING JOB OVER DV ARTICLE

https://www.facebook.com/MarkLathamsOutsiders/videos/1967850096589653/

MUSLIMS TAKE OVER AUSTRALIA BLOG POST

https://politicalnewspaper.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/muslims-take-over-australian-security-companies/

CLEMENTINE FORD, LIFELINE AND DV

https://www.change.org/p/13156494/u/22744842?

INDONESIA
ATTACK ON THREE CHURCHES


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-indonesia-bomb-churches-claim/islamic-state-claims-responsibility-for-indonesian-church-attacks-groups-agency-idUSKCN1IE0H4



CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamic State claimed responsibility for suicide bomb attacks on three churches in the Indonesian city of Surabaya on Sunday that has killed 11 people, the Islamist militant group’s Amaq news agency said, without providing any evidence.

“Three martyrdom attacks inflicts at least 11 deaths and 41 injuries of the churches’ guards and Christians in the city of Surabaya in East Java province in Indonesia,” the agency said in a statement that gave no further details.

The suspect in a deadly knife attack in central Paris on Saturday evening is a French citizen born in 1997 in Russia's republic of Chechnya, sources say.

Named by media as Khamzat Asimov, he was on a French watch list of people who could pose a threat to national security, the sources said.

Police shot dead the attacker in the busy Opéra district after he killed a man and injured four other people.

The Islamic State (IS) group said it was behind the attack.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-44098615

French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted (in French): "France has once again paid in blood, but will not give an inch to the enemies of freedom."

Later on Sunday, a judicial source said that a friend of the suspect had been detained for questioning in the eastern city of Strasbourg.

France has been on high alert following a series of attacks. More than 230 people have been killed by IS-inspired jihadists in the past three years.

MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD INFILTRATES US NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCIES WITH HELP OF OBAMA BLOG POST

http://www.hngn.com/articles/67439/20150207/muslim-brotherhood-penetrated-u-s-national-security-agencies-under-obamas.htm

RECLAIM AUSTRALIA




FROM THE AUS

Child bombers unleashed

SIMON BENSON

Intelligence chiefs have warned of an increased threat to Australians from mass-casualty terrorist ­attacks in Southeast Asia.

https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/embrace-the-fourth-industrial-age-or-become-a-backwater/?

Many countries in Asia, including China, have chosen to lift their people out of poverty by becoming the manufacturer to the ‘Walmarts’ of the world. That model will come undone when every Australian, European, American and even Asian home has a 3D printer with which families can print whatever they want, from food to high-quality clothes and beyond. Value will cease to reside in the product, but will be found in the design. And as the economic foundations of the developing world fail, instability and social collapse in those countries may be the result.
Australia has its own perilous exposure to the coming disruptions of the fourth industrial age. After European colonisation of the continent, Australia developed into a maritime exporting country. There’s an Australian saying that the nation’s economy ‘rode on the sheep’s back’, although more recently iron, coal, education services and wheat, rather than wool, have been its more valuable exports.
Australia has always been a shipper of primary materials and is dependent on the regular dispatch of cargo ships from its shores and the existence of a rules-based world order that provides governance over global shipping lanes and the interaction between states for the regulation of trade.
Yet, as the value of things declines relative to that of information, it’s worth speculating on the effect this will have on Australia’ to continue to generate wealth via its material export paradigm relative to the potential of other countries. Australia is committed to the maintenance of the current global order, but it’s an order that regulates the movement of things and one that was designed by a friendly ally, the United States. Who will set the rules for the movement of information in the fourth industrial age? Will it still be the United States, another nation or perhaps even a consortium of corporations? At this point in time we simply don’t know.

****
Computer Society of Australia predicts loss of five million jobs within five years.
****

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2018/05/14/daily-202-trump-voters-stay-loyal-because-they-feel-disrespected/5af8aac530fb0425887994cc/?utm_term=.f86bf4359032&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1


“We voted for President Obama and still we are ridiculed. Still we are considered racists,” said Cindy Hutchins, a store owner and nurse in Baldwin, Mich. “There is no respect for anyone who is just average and trying to do the right things.”

“Our culture in Hollywood or in the media gives off the distinct air of disregard to people who live in the middle of the country, as if we have no value or do not contribute to the betterment of society,” said Amy Giles-Maurer of Kenosha, Wis.“It’s frustrating. It really wants to make you stand up and yell, ‘We count,’ except of course we don’t. At least not in their eyes.”

“Live in a small or medium-sized town, and you would think we were dragging the country down,” said Michael Martin of Erie, Pa. “We aren’t a country just made up of large metropolitan areas. Our politics and our culture up until now has dictated that we are less than in the scale of importance and value.”

Notably, people in all seven of their categories expressed frustration, even a year after the election, that they are not understood, respected or valued by the powers that be on the East and West coasts. “In the short span of a generation, the face and focus of the Democratic Party nationally has shifted from a glorification of the working-class ethos to multiculturalist militancy pushed by the Far Left of the party,” Zito and Todd argue. “The driving construct of otherness … is at its core driven by perceptions of respect. … The professional Left focuses heavily on race-related questions in analyzing the Trump vote, but race-tinged subjects were rarely cited by Trump voters interviewed for this book.”

RECLAIM AUSTRALIA

Suicide bombers aged 8!
Our Government gives $316 MILLION PER YEAR???
Indonesias population is 87% Islamic and this is a huge concern!
Should we cease our foreign aid to Indonesia and spend our tax dollars on Australians and growing our ADF?
Your thoughts?

Indonesia terror: 'Little kid' and family behind second suicide bombings | SBS News

A family of five, including a child, carried out the suicide bombing of a police headquarters in Indonesia's second city Surabaya on Monday, police said, a...

SBS.COM.AU

DIATRIBE AGAINST ASIO'S DUNCAN LEWIS
AUSTRALIA FIRST LONG UNDER ASIO SURVEILLANCE


http://australiafirstparty.net/asios-duncan-lewis-compromised-by-turnbull-politics-ordering-australians-to-hug-a-muzzie/

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/17/world/middleeast/iraq-isis-trials.html

FROM APRIL:

http://johnmenadue.com/henry-reynolds-australias-perpetual-war-footing/

https://thediplomat.com/2018/05/indonesias-hizbut-tahrir-debate-rages-on-amid-election-fever/

Indonesia had until last year largely quietly tolerated the organization, and there were a number of mass demonstrations and events over the last two decades. HTI is suspected of having been linked to varying degrees to terror group Jemaah Islamiyah in the 2000s and then again to the Indonesian arm of Islamic State via Bahrun Naim, the mastermind behind the 2006 Thamrin attack in Central Jakarta.

LATHAM

THE CASE FOR CUTTING IMMIGRATION

Mark Latham's recent speech to the CIS in Sydney:

IT’S a brave move to be hosting a debate about immigration and questions of ethnic diversity on International Harmony Day. There’s an international day for everything, but I wonder whether we’ll get through the whole session without Tim Soutphommasane and his 18C storm-troopers bursting through the door to close us down for the thought crime of speaking freely about Australia’s immigration intake. Let’s hope we can go the distance. My starting point is to argue that, for sound economic reasons, Australia needs big cuts to its immigration program: for the sake of wages growth, housing affordability, productivity and urban efficiency.

I used to have a little rule, having lived in Western Sydney for 50 years and heard the eternal promise of ‘better planning’, that I called the ‘scream rule’. I’ve now moved onto the ‘garrotte rule’—I always remember the way Gareth Evans said he wanted to garrotte Bronwyn Bishop one night in the Senate. The garrotte rule is for people who say Western Sydney’s problems can be solved by ‘better planning’. For 50 years we have heard of how better services and ‘better planning’ will end the congestion and overcome the paucity of infrastructure. But it never happens. It never happens for the basic reason the elites pushing for Big Australia are way out-of-touch with the realities of suburban life.

Speaking of elitism, I should start with the most elite of the elites, Malcolm Turnbull, our Prime Minister, and his policy-making offsider, Lucy Turnbull. On ABC radio in March 2016 Mr Turnbull said in relation to his Big Australia immigration policy: “This is the simple concept. Most people in their day-to-day work, education, shopping, recreational activities, should be located within 30 minutes of walking, cycling or public transport from their home.”

I failed the 30-minute test today—I left home at 9.45am on the outskirts of south-west Sydney and got here at 11.45. I don’t live in the 30-minute city that Malcolm Turnbull advocates. I live in the 120-minute city, and there’s large numbers of people in the same circumstances because of Sydney’s gross urban inefficiency. We need a helicopter to help us comply with Malcolm’s 30-minute rule. In fact, his helicopter would be nice.

A fortnight after Mr Turnbull said this, Lucy Turnbull echoed his views in an article in The Weekend Australian, in her position as the Chief of the Greater Sydney Commission. She too believes in the fantasy of a 30-minute city. Unfortunately, in terms of urban efficiency and Big Australia, Malcolm and Lucy Turnbull have become to this policy area what Joh and Flo were to good governance in Queensland. On the urban fringe, we are all feeling the adverse impacts.

The Greater Sydney Commission has projected Sydney will need to accommodate another 1.8 million people over the next 18 years, that is, 100,000 per annum. In April 2017, the Federal Cities Minister Angus Taylor said that already two million people call Western Sydney home and this number will increase by another million in the next 20 years.

These numbers have given rise to what I call the Upside-Down City. In the 1970s we had the centre-and-radial-spoke system in Sydney and other Australian cities, where everyone assumed that the most congested spot was in the centre of the city. These days you can put down a picnic blanket and have morning tea in the Cross City Tunnel under Sydney’s CBD. Meanwhile, the congestion has moved to the urban fringe. It’s upside down now. Congestion has become a way of life on the urban fringe, while the centre of the city flows much more efficiently.

Outer-ring inefficiency has a massive economic cost. No sooner have roads like Narellan Road and Camden Valley Way in south-west Sydney been widened and improved, and new car parking areas have been built at Leppington and Edmondson Park railway stations, that the congestion starts again, just six months later. Whenever the state government builds new facilities, the rate of immigration and population growth ensures they are over-crowded again shortly thereafter.

I invite anyone who talks about ‘better planning’ to go to the new Oran Park Public School where, with the wonders of ‘better planning’ from the state education department, they have 24 demountable classrooms—three rows of eight lined up. It looks like Manus Island. All those lefties in Glebe and Paddington who complain about Manus Island should go and have a look at Oran Park. There are huge liveability and urban efficiency costs to this crazy policy of extra population growth fuelled by Big Australia migration.

In Melbourne the situation is no better. A 2013 study found that, “A worker who lives in the centre of Melbourne can access 90 per cent of jobs in the metropolitan area by car within 45 minutes, compared to workers in outer suburban growth areas where just 10 per cent of all metropolitan jobs can be reached within a 45 minute drive.” State Governments cannot keep up with the pace of growth. They promise big things in opposition, raising expectations, but when the reality of permanent congestion sets in, the voters kicks them out in a regular cycle of electoral change.

It’s not just the urban fringe suffering from growing pains. A recent Department of Home Affairs report concluded that, “In parts of Sydney, such as Ryde, Parramatta, the Inner-West, North Sydney, Hornsby and the Eastern Suburbs, migrants accounted for more than 70 per cent of the increase in population (between 1996 and 2016). In Melbourne’s Inner-East, migrants accounted for 100 per cent of the population growth.” New homes and apartments do not simply spring out of the ground. They are a product of a deliberate Federal Government decision to force upon our cities immigration and population overload.

On top of this, our ethnic integration and settlement policies are atrocious. I always look at the promise of the NSW Baird Government when it took a special intake of 7000 Syrian refugees into the state. Mike Baird went to the trouble of appointing Peter Shergold, formerly head of the Prime Minister’s Department, to be the Coordinator-General for Refugee Settlement. Shergold said the new arrivals would live in Coffs Harbour, Albury and Wagga, yet over 6000 of the 7000 Syrians went to one local government area: Fairfield in Western Sydney, with all the problems of integration and service delivery. Fairfield has the highest unemployment rate in Sydney.

I did a couple of surveys last year in the Fairfield town centre and 90 per cent of people there don’t speak English. I support multiculturalism but on the basis that people can speak to each other in the national language of English, so we can communicate and build the bonds of support, trust and social capital. That’s the only way in which multiculturalism can work. But Australia’s immigration program is so big and our settlement programs are so flawed, we haven’t got effective ethnic integration. We’ve got the emergence of ethnic enclaves.

Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott has blown the whistle on the economic impact of Big Australia. He has said the Federal Treasury uses it as an easy, artificial way of boosting Australia’s headline GDP numbers. Over the past decade, two-thirds of Australia’s annual growth figure has come from funnelling more people into the country.

This does nothing to improve GDP per capita – the best measure of Australia’s true economic strength. The Turnbull/Morrison strategy is to boost headline GDP with more people. Yet what the Australian economy actually needs is more incentive and more productivity. Big Australia migration allows Treasury and the Federal Government to avoid this reality. It gets them off the hook – a soft, complacent, self-defeating outcome.

Numerous studies have shown how high immigration levels are causing urban congestion, sluggish wages growth and unaffordable housing in Australia. The labour market has been flooded with recently arrived migrant workers, suppressing wages growth. Governments have flooded the housing market with migrants settling in our major cities, driving up prices. Treasury recently cited a study “pointing to population growth as the main factor driving housing demand and price growth since the mid-2000s, since both natural increase and immigration increased more strongly over the current decade compared to the previous decade.”

Evidence has also emerged questioning the need for an expansive Skilled Migration program. In recent decades, Australia has produced a huge number of university graduates. Forty per cent of the 25-35-age bracket has tertiary qualifications – a high level by international standards. Logically, skilled migration is no longer needed in vast numbers. Why are we spending billions of dollars on our education system each year to then rely on migrants for workforce skills?

The Australian Population Research Centre at Monash University has found that between 2011 and 2016, 84 per cent of new arrivals to Australia aged 25-34 who held degree-or-above-level qualifications came from non-English speaking countries. Among this group, less than one-quarter found work as professionals. We are bringing in engineers to work as taxi drivers.

Migrants are filling semi-skilled jobs in large numbers. In a recent research paper, even the Federal Treasury admitted to the job-taking impact of Big Australia policies. It chronicled how: “Recent migrants accounted for two-thirds (64.5 per cent) of the approximately 850,000 net jobs created in the past five years. For full-time employment, the impact is even more pronounced, with recent migrants accounting for 72.4 per cent of new jobs created.”

These are stunning numbers. New arrivals are taking nearly three-quarters of new full-time jobs in the Australian economy. The Turnbull Government has boasted of strong employment growth since 2013, but overall (for full- and part-time work), only 300,000 new jobs have gone to existing Australian residents, an average of 60,000 per annum.

As a result, we’ve got the worst of both worlds. We’ve got a flooded labour market holding down wages and we’ve got a political system relying on immigration as an artificial way of boosting economic growth. Meanwhile, in terms of job opportunities, existing Australian residents are only getting the crumbs from the table.

The scale of immigration in Australia is massive. The difference between the current program of around 200,000 a year and the 20th century average of 70,000 involves tens of millions of extra people coming into Australia over the next 30 years. It’s reshaping our country in a way that’s bad for our cities, bad for wages growth, bad for housing affordability and bad for economic efficiency.

The purpose of our immigration policy must be to do what is right for the people who live here now, rather than the fantasy that we owe the rest of the world something. In fact, here’s what we owe: we owe it to our cities and the people who live in them to take a breather from high population growth. We owe it to housing affordability and family living standards to return the annual immigration intake to its 20th century average of 70,000 per annum. That would be the smart thing to do, and it’s something that every economist in the country should be advocating.

HIZB IN INDONESIA BAN FAILING WHILE HERE THEY ARE LEGAL, SUPPORTED BY THE COUNTRY'S MOST SENIOR MUSLIMS AND A BENEFICIARY OF GOV LARGESS IN MANY DIFFERENT WAYS: OPENLY ADVOCATE OVERTHROW OF AUSTRALIAN GOV.

https://intpolicydigest.org/2018/05/17/indonesia-s-ineffective-fight-against-hizb-ut-tahrir/

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• The Australian
• 12:00AM May 21, 2018
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• STEPHEN BROOK

  

  Media Diary

  Sydney

  @ViscountBrooky

  

ABC journalists will be sent to writing workshops in a bid to ­improve the flagship 7pm news, which is suffering from declining ratings.

Improving the storytelling on the news is a key ambition of a “7 keys for 7pm” strategy document obtained by The Australian.

Last week ABC News attracted about 660,000 viewers in the mainland capital cities. This compares with about 760,000 viewers a year ago. “We want to improve our story­telling for 7pm news,” the strategy document says. “To do so, we’ll begin writing workshops for TV news. These will be aimed at reporters at all levels to help reinforce how TV news story­telling is different and to ­remind reporters what pro­ducers are looking for.”

The ABC stages many training sessions, but a two-hour workshop in Sydney by senior journalist Adrian Raschella several months ago, attended by ­national reporters and local NSW journalists, was judged a “great success”, the report said. It has inspired a program that will be rolled out ­nationally.

The ABC has acknowledged the need to improve the 7pm news and promises in the document to deliver more exclusives, more interviews and “a program of big-hitting stories, and not a list of what happened today”.

“If we let the 7 o’clock news be a digest of what has happened that day, we will struggle to maintain audiences,” ABC head of news Gaven Morris told The Australian recently.

VICTORIA TO BAN BARBIE AND WINNIE THE POOH

PHFEN SHOCK: THE MYSTERIOUS YEARNING FOR THE CHASM

Dingos hanging from a dog tree in the Barrington Tops. Nick O'Malley 

Phfen Shock. The phrase kept repeating through his head, although he could find no definition, no logical reason. He found himself perched above a strange valley. House sitting a farm. Two useless dogs, three donkeys, four chooks. And a rooster. 

Instead of being industrious, he just went into some sort of profound shock. 

There were times he could hear them thinking, out there. And others when his mind rooted around for threat, and they gathered there in their bored ranches, more worried, like all good public servants, about their contracts than the target or the task at hand. 

Days passed without pen in hand. The record broken. 

A massacre in Afghanistan. 53 dead on first reports. Promptly disappeared from the consciousness of all but the immediate families and neighbours. In a land used to tragedy. 

Pedestrians were mowed down in Toronto. The mayor promptly claimed the city proud of its diversity. More lies. The same as Australia. Lie after lie after lie to defend a failed theory. Until those who knew the truth, how this engineered debacle had come about, had all died, been eliminated, or were in retreat. 

Now, the machines were difficult if not impossible to detect. Invisible drones. Micro-cameras. Who knew if they had given up, or simply withdrawn to a safer distance. 

Once they set the inflammation in place, it remained, even if the disease, the mismanagement of the nation, the mismanagement of the agencies, the brutal assassinations, the misuse of power, the persecution of the people, no longer presented in his immediate life. 

But there it was, a mystery. His mind swept across an unmarked valley. Primordial in nature. Fabulous in intent. Complex as only machines could be; as if they, too, had sown organic machines across the galaxies and this was just one fine reach, far, far away. 

Giant wombats, larger than most he had seen in other parts of the country, romped in the fading light. Rabbits picked across the disappearing pastures. A few lichen coated apple trees, remnants of the orchards from a century ago, still survived. Around, the deep forest. 

It was the shock of somewhere new, somewhere different. Where, when you entered a new valley, even a neighbouring valley, it took time to determine where the threats lay. Unseen. Lurking. Ready to strike. Born in dangerous times in a dangerous world.

He was rising from the ether. He was marking out territory. He was defying the worst the society had to offer. He was carried through his own mysterious yearning. And then away, away, as if he could not focus, as if he could not stay intent on one narrow grievance, as if the gods were welcoming him to a safer place. 

While all around lay a mysterious injustice. A place where no one cared. No one took any pride. Where the shops were dilapidated, as the country sank into Third World status. 

On a trip to Sydney, that morning, the only Australian accent he heard were the housos checking the value of stolen Ray Bans on their equally stolen iPad. 

And all around, no one hoped. Sydney had become the worst city in the country. Crowded, bogged, grasping, vicious, and they were led by the greediest, shallowest, most vicious leader the country had ever seen. 

He drove, like so many, straight back out of town. Back to the primordial valley. To be watched, he assumed, by the surveillance machines. The bastardry of this government knew no bounds. And most mysterious of all, as the country drove ever more rapidly backwards, was that nobody cared. 

THE BIGGER STORY

RICHARD FLANAGAN 

There are no saviours of democracy on the horizon. Rather, around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is always anti-democratic in practice, populist in appeal, nationalist in sentiment, fascist in sympathy, criminal in disposition, tending to spew a poisonous rhetoric aimed against refugees, Muslims, and increasingly Jews, and hostile to truth and those who speak it, most particularly journalists to the point, sometimes, of murder.

 

Around the world we see a new authoritarianism that is ... hostile to truth and those who speak it

And yet this new authoritarianism is resonant with so many, acting as it does as a justification for rule by a few wealthy oligarchs and corporations, and as an explanation for the growing immiseration of the many.

In Australia though we feel ourselves, as ever, a long way away. We feel we are somehow immune from these dangerous currents. After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns. But it is all very far from a dictatorship.

Our society grows increasingly more unequal, more disenfranchised, angrier, more fearful. Our institutions are frayed. Our polity is discredited, and almost daily discredits itself further. The many problems that confront us, from housing to infrastructure to climate change, are routinely evaded. Our screens are filled with a preening peloton of potential leaders, but nowhere is there to be found leadership.

Holderlin, the great 19th century poet, wrote of the “mysterious yearning toward the chasm” that can overtake nations. Increasingly, one can sense that yearning in the overly heated rhetoric of some Australian politicians and commentators. That yearning can overtake Australia as easily as it has many other countries, damaging our democratic institutions, our freedoms and our values.

Politics, which ought to have as its highest calling the task of holding society together, of keeping us away from the chasm, has retreated to repeating divisive myths that have no foundation in the truth of what we are as a nation, and so, finally only serve to contribute to the forces that could yet destroy us. Or worse yet, openly stoking needless fear and, with the refugee issue, a xenophobia for short-term electoral advantage.

The consequence is a time bomb which simply needs as a detonator what every other country has had and we have not: hard times. But hard times will return. And when they do what defence will we have should a populist movement that trades on the established scapegoats arises? An authoritarian party with a charismatic leader that uses the poison with which the old myths are increasingly pregnant to deliver itself power?

 Dealing with 

Pix. At book launch of She Said She Said. Sydney Theatre Company. 26 April, 2018.

THE DEATH THROES OF CREDIBILITY: TURNBULL ON THE ROPES

Google Dream

What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Matthew 16:26. 

Truly pathetic, a failing Prime Minister, just like his predecessor, was using the military to bolster his standing. 

America, after pulverising Aleppo, Raqqa, Mosul, after flying tens of thousands of its lethal drones over villagers around the world, after committing a string of some of the worst war crimes in history, was taking the high moral ground on Syria and the use of chemical weapons. 

Without waiting, of course, for UN inspection teams, or for evidence. 

And Australia, of course, was jumping up: me too, me too, us too, us too. 

Well, at least this particularly hapless caste of politicians were. 

Before he jets off to discuss international security in London, Brussels and Berlin, Malcolm Turnbull has announced a new Australian Defence Force chief and made sure he is in lock step with Donald Trump.
Mr Turnbull says the appointment of the hero of Operation Sovereign Borders, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, to the top defence job before he departed for Europe was a “coincidence”.
But it did provide a welcome aura of authority to an embattled leader, as he stood surrounded by the nation’s top brass in his Parliament House courtyard.
Former defence secretary Paul Barrett says the air strikes lacked UN Security Council authority, Mr Trump lacked congressional support, and the United Kingdom’s Theresa May avoided a querulous parliament. In other words, the strikes were a clear breach of international law.
It makes Mr Turnbull’s indignant condemnation of Syria’s gas attacks more than a tad hypocritical.
Mr Barrett is not the only commentator who believes Ms May’s and France’s Emmanuel Macron’s weak political standing at home was a key motivator in them quickly backing Mr Trump. It made them look stronger leaders.The next 10 days overseas will be a definite respite for Mr Turnbull. He leaves behind at least four leadership aspirants who have begun jockeying for his job.
The destruction of the leader is inevitable when that genie is out of the bottle... The leaking of a story at the weekend accusing Mr Turnbull of investing $1 million in a contentious fund that profits from Australian companies who fail is a sure sign destabilisation is in full swing. Embattled Malcolm Turnbull goes on a war footing, Paul Bongiorno, The New Daily, 16 April, 2018.

They robbed the poor and gave to the rich. 

"Worst government in Australian history," the lad behind the counter at the Tallong store declared, keen to talk about the gay marriage plebiscite which had alienated the constituency Turnbull had so grandly courted, masquerading as a social justice warrior. Without any prompting from Old Alex. The young man's idea of history barely stretched back two decades, but never mind. It was a widespread sentiment. 

"I think that, too," Old Alex replied with more enthusiasm than was his wont, and off the conversation ran. 

A phone order came in for hot chips and gravy. 

"Vegans," the lad explained.

"Healthy!" Alex exclaimed.

Everything was ordinary, too ordinary. Quiet, too quiet. 

The valleys were breathing in the air. And everyone waited for the bang. 

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The Prime Minister just can’t handle criticism or being caught out telling untruths. Because he thought the politics of even having canvassed a cut in immigration as proposed by Abbott looked bad, he raced to deny a report in The Australian that the matter had been discussed among ministers. I called this outright lie “mega dumb” on Richo on Sky News on Wednesday night. Peter Dutton conceded a discussion between himself and Turnbull and other ministers had taken place. Turnbull went into his normal hopeless spin mode. Having originally branded The Australian’s story as fake news and telling the journalist concerned to check his sources, Turnbull resorted to claiming no discussion had been held in cabinet or in a cabinet subcommittee — a suggestion never made by this newspaper.

Declaring a jihad on The Australian when the newspaper is right on the issue and needs only to rely on Dutton’s public utterances to prove it shows Turnbull has learned nothing from past mistakes. He still believes he is the smartest man in every room he enters but the evidence to the contrary is continuing to mount.

Friendless and floundering, this Prime Minister knows time is running out. He would be stark raving mad to call an early election, so he will have many, many more mornings when he wishes the alarm just won’t ring. The mob have well and truly worked him out.

Graham Richardson, Turnbull's lack of political nous proving deadly, The Australian, April, 2018.

THE CONTRACT IS BROKEN, THE BASTARDS SLEEP

Flinders Power Boilers being blown up

A government that treats its citizens with the complete contempt that this one does, does not deserve to govern. 
The oligarchs were destroying the country.
The bureaucrats were destroying the country. 
Ruinous rates of immigration were destroying the country.

In September 2015 the NSW Premier, Mike Baird, urged the Federal Government to accept a “generous number” of Syrian refugees, pledging to settle the bulk of them in his state. Ultimately, Australia took 12,000, with the Baird Government accepting 7,000 for NSW. Big promises were made about their positive economic impact on country towns.
Two-and-a-half years later, where did the Syrians end up? More than 6,000 settled in just one local government area, Fairfield in Western Sydney. There was no dispersal to NSW country towns. Nor is there any evidence of significant job placement.
Fairfield has become Australia’s refugee capital. As Mayor Frank Carbone said, “They stopped the boats and put them on buses instead”. The local impact has been devastating, with housing rents rising by 35 percent and Fairfield High School facing new enrolments four times higher than previously planned.
The district already had the highest unemployment rate in Sydney, at over 9 percent. Less than one in five of the new arrivals have found paid-work, adding to problems of welfare dependency and ethnic enclaves. Twice last year I tried to interview people in the Fairfield town centre for Mark Latham’s Outsiders, but only 10 percent could speak English. The local State Labor MP, Guy Zangari, told me to learn Assyrian instead. Mark Latham, column, Daily Telegraph, 10 April, 2018.

And still they blundered into a dystopian future. 
When the bombing starts. 

Dystopia: a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding.

They cried with laughter.
Soon enough they would cry with grief.
There were offers of help. I'm going to go out on a limb here. They demanded an answer. 
"You don't understand what he's doing."
There they were, out of phase, passing through the lattice. 
At the centre of it all, the Gobble Turkey in chief, mired into the front page, as if the entire country was about only one person. One grievous preening idiot with a smack on grin, caught, pleasingly as far as he was concerned, in a mirror maze, his image front and centre on a thousand screens, in every newspaper. It was grievous assault, a terrible waste of money. And it was happening here. And happening now. 
I did fight it. 
But they kept their distance. 
The days were growing shorter. 
The locals more familiar. 
Divorced from their own country.
Imperiled, although they did not realise it, in a tiny place.
And the politics remained putrid: 

The party is turning on itself in a spectacular and public fashion. The leadership issue will keep running not just because Turnbull rejects the conservative mantra. Ultimately, this is not about what Turnbull says or does — it is about what he represents.
Understand what the 30th Newspoll represents. It shows the Liberals cannot liberate themselves from the events of September 2015. They are obsessed about themselves. Sure, the symbolism is powerful: Turnbull should be held to account because he now fails the test on which he judged Abbott. Turnbull now says he made a mistake at the time in invoking Newspoll. Of course he must say this, but it doesn’t matter. The real point is that the Liberals cannot get over it.
And they have persuaded much of the media the biggest story in politics is Liberal strife. It is a frustrating and convenient story because it is all headlines though nothing ever happens — it is a story in permanent anticipation of an event. Liberals will struggle for however long they remain the issue, Paul Kelly, The Australian, 11 April, 2018.

Local news dwindled to nothing.
It was easier and cheaper to write about Trump. 
Meanwhile the politicians, captive to armadas of bureaucrats, continued to rewrite the country, drowning it in people who had no allegiance either to the country or to its history. 
Black people, now, were the Sudanese. Not the indigenous, who shrank, at least in suburban imagination, to ever more remote and dysfunctional reservations. 
All they knew was their taxes paid for all of it.
And the democratic contract was broken. 
Broken. 
Someone turning 30 in Australia had never in their voting life known decent, honourable, honest politics. 
All the heir apparent Peter Dutton had to do to win the next election was to promise a return to pre-Howard levels of immigration, 70,000 a year, when, even then, there had been no public support and cries it was too high. And a line by line audit of government spending, which was entirely out of control. Every single bureaucrat, every single idiot project, should have to answer one simple question: why should someone have to go to work in a factory to support this?
At the centre of mounting tensions and rising dysfunction was history.
Former Prime Minister John Howard, always mates to the big end of town, particularly the Chamber of Commerce, quadrupled the rate of intake and transformed the country quicker than the left could possibly have dreamed. 
A typical blind by Howard. 
You never paid any attention to what he said.
You watched what he did.
This contempt for, and manipulation of, public sentiment continued to be a defining feature of the Liberals aka the conservatives to this day. 
Fundamental dishonesty. 
Ironically, the public blamed the left, the Labor Party, thanks to their ceaseless promotion of identity politics and, equally, contempt for ordinary working people who paid their salaries.
The contract was broken. 
It didn't matter where you looked, nothing worked. The pathological contempt for males that characterised its social policies, including family law, child support, and child protection. The massive incompetence of communication policy, where millions of people were being forced by law onto an inferior broadband network. The massive mismanagement of immigration. Of power, with the most expensive electricity in the world. Shocking mismanagement, top to bottom.
And their, mired in the middle of it, transfixed into every front page, a grinning corpse, Malcolm Turnbull.

THE BIGGER STORY: 

The prime minister emphatically denied a report in the Australian Dutton had suggested reducing Australian’s immigration intake by 20,000 last year, a proposal which was reportedly shut down by Turnbull and Scott Morrison before it made it to cabinet.“It is completely untrue, it is completely untrue, it is completely untrue,” Turnbull said on Tuesday. “The article, the claim in the article, is false. Full stop. OK? Full stop.”
But asked about the report on Wednesday, Dutton, confirmed that discussions canvassing different options had taken place, while maintaining he was not contradicting his leader.
“I’m not going to going into comments or discussions and who said what and who was in the meetings and the rest of it, others can speculate on that,” he said. “I don’t, as a policy and I never have, commented on what’s been discussed in cabinet or subcommittees or whatever it might be, or gatherings of cabinet colleagues.
“But as I say, as immigration minister, as Scott Morrison did, as Chris Bowen did, Philip Ruddock, whoever you like to nominate … of course there are discussions of what the figures should be, the benefits of different aspects of migration, there is obviously a debate about congestion and about housing affordability and the government is alive to all of those concerns, about geographic placement of people out to the regions, they are all issues that we considered.
Peter Dutton contradicts Turnbull on immigration, Amy Remeikis, The Guardian, 11 April, 2018.

Peter Dutton has confirmed reports he discussed cutting Australia’s immigration rate, contradicting Malcolm Turnbull’s repeated denials that the conversations took place.