I only recently discovered that, like Cory Bernardi in early 20171, Gerard Rennick had been dumped from a winnable seat in the Senate, and had got the hump and attempted, also like Bernardi, unsuccessfully to set up his own party, to try to hang onto his political ‘career’. Rennick, the Queensland Liberal National Party (LNP) senator was dumped from a winnable spot on the party’s Queensland ticket in July 2023 in a preselection punch up.
Now that the far right of the Liberal Party has taken over the party from the ‘moderates’ with the election of Angus Taylor as leader, they have started amping up the racist rhetoric about immigration, in much the same way the Trumpists in the US have done. The Liberal Party will no doubt state that it is not racist, and it would seem not to be to the average halfwit, but it is.
The half-time entertainment at the Super Bowl, which is an American football final, included Bad Bunny, Ricky Martin and Lady Gaga. Bad Bunny sang in Spanish, which is his native tongue, given that he comes from Puerto Rico, as does Ricky Martin. I must admit that prior to this event I had not heard of Bad Bunny. This is unsurprising as most of the music I like is no more recent than Powderfinger and The Church.
Like many people who use computers, I use Microsoft Word for much of what I write for this blog and I also for my scientific papers. In addition, I used to be the editor for a scientific journal from 1996 to 2016 and, when I started that, it was a very steep learning curve using rather clunky software called Pagemaker1. Eventually Pagemaker was replaced by the superb InDesign which was part of Adobe Creative Suite2.
As reported here some time ago, Jillian Segal was appointed Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism by the Albanese Labor government in 2024, and the main aim of her report seems to have been to conflate criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza with antisemitism. This was stated to be untenable by Justice Angus Stewart in a recent Federal Court case against Islamic preacher Wissam Haddad, whose posts it was ruled were antisemitic because he had conflated Zionism and Judaism.
Back in 2017, I wrote a piece about the likely fragmentation of the conservatives in Australia1. Here, most of the conservatives largely belong to what is ironically named the Liberal Party, with a few other small fringe groups soaking up the racist and religious extremists. That article was precipitated by one of the religious nutters in the Liberal Party, spitting the dummy, leaving that party and attempting unsuccessfully to start his own2.