"I've Had A Yearning Inside Of Me For Quite Some Time"

Australian conservatives! The time to break free of Rudd's Totalitatyrannical Rule is now!

Here is your inspiration :



It probably seemed like a good idea at the time to spend all that money getting the Hey, It's That Movie Trailer Guy! to do the VO, but it just makes the whole thing immediately seem like a parody. A good parody, but hard to take too seriously, when obviously a certain level of seriousness was intended.

After all, Obama is clearly the Devil/AntiChrist/New Hitler/Hitler II/American Ayatollah

Abbott Redefines The Lies That Led To The Deaths Of 5000 American Soldiers And 100,000 Iraqis

The GodBott on the 2002 lies about Iraq WMDs and the alleged threat to Australia posed by Saddam Hussein, from ABC News :

".....whether something is a lie depends not on what turns out subsequently to be so, but on your state of mind."

Presumably Abbott thinks that rule applies even if your prime minister had personally committed Australians troops to an illegal War On Iraq within days of 9/11, and literally signed onto the war in February 2002, regardless of the WMD threat, or lack of one.




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Murdoch : It's Not Thievery When We Do It

By Darryl Mason

One year on, the man who sold his Australian citizenship to start Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is still ranting like a senile old goat about digital "thieves" helping themselves to his "expensive" news content.

"Good journalism is an expensive commodity," he announced, while delivering a speech at a journalism conference in the United States.

According to Murdoch, there is "no such thing as a free news story."

"Producing journalism is expensive."

Occasionally, that is the case.

But more often than not what you get is rewrites of press releases, or simply the rehashing of stories published in non-Murdoch media.

Like this 'story', from the AAP, part owned by Murdoch, which today appeared on nearly every Murdoch news site in the country :

Ousted federal Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull and his former deputy Julie Bishop reportedly have fallen out over this week's tumultuous ructions inside the party.

Mr Turnbull was deposed by Tony Abbott in a leadership ballot on Tuesday, but Ms Bishop remains the parliamentary party's deputy to a third leader in less than two years.

Shortly after the ballot, there were suggestions Ms Bishop had voted for Mr Abbott.

That led to a blazing telephone row between Mr Turnbull and Ms Bishop on Tuesday afternoon, ABC Online has reported.

This AAP story is barely a rewrite of this exclusive by the ABC's chief political writer, Annnabel Crabb. All the key quotes and new information from Crabb's story is reproduced in the AAP story, and unlike most of the bloggers and aggregators that Murdoch and his executives have accused of thievery, neither AAP, nor any of the Murdoch media sites that ran the story, provide a link back to Crabb's exclusive.

Bloggers and aggregators play far more fair than the Old Media do, when it comes to reproducing or reusing news and information and quotes that have originally appeared in other news media. We provide direct links to sources, where possible, and more often than not acknowledge where non-original content has been reproduced from.

This is exactly why so many digital journalists and bloggers laugh so long and hard when Murdoch and his executives start ranting about online "parasites, content kleptomaniacs, vampires, tech tapeworms, thieves".

Lifting, rewriting, reproducing, the best stories from your competition is a 'news gathering' technique as old as newspapers themselves. It's usually the first kind of work assigned to cadet journalists. Scan the competition's newspapers, magazines, and reproduce the best of it. If there's time, expand on it a bit.

What many bloggers do, and what Digital Rupert rails so helplessly against, is downright traditional media practice.

And as the AAP reproduction of Annnabel Crabb's exclusive proves, it's still as popular as ever.


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"The Liberals Are Back!"

@AlexHawkeMP favourites this brilliantly accurate, only slightly exaggerated, take on last week's Liberal Party Meltdown from Hungry Beast :



When the next Newspoll shows a 10 point two party preferred leap for the Liberals, you are going to see that headline all over the media....Well, The Australian anyway.

The Libs should move fast and get that phrase, "The Liberals Are Back!", into their advertising as soon as the Newspoll results are out.

It works, and it will also provide plenty of fodder for the satirists.

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Here Comes The Rooster

Annabel Crabb, now chief political writer at the ABC, broke the news of a raging three-way feud (with e-mail revelations) between Liberals Tony "unelectable" Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop.

But on Twitter, Sky News' David Speers reveals he might have a bigger, follow-on scoop :


Don't get carried away. Twas merely the result of some teasing auto-pruning by Twitter's 140 characters per message limit. The full message :



Pah!


Julie Posetti : Your Election Will Be Twitterised

Tony Abbott "lacks humanity"


I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

The Orstrahyun, December 1, 10am :

Abbott thinks reality is a confessional booth, and all sins are immediately absolved.

Tony Abbott, December 1, The 7.30 Report :

"Well, this is not a confessional and you can't give me absolution."

update : Tony Abbott joins Twitter and states the obvious :




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The Royal Society has a stunning, involving collection of scientific papers, books and illustrations dating back to the 17th century online.

It's beautifully presented. Take a look here.

This is one of the hundreds of online exhibits : 'Captain James Cook's Methods For Preserving The Health Of His Crew' by Sunetra Gupta, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford :

‘We had on board large quantities of malt, of which was made sweet-wort ... and given from one or two pints in the day to each man’. So writes Captain James Cook in this article to explain how he lost not a single man to scurvy on this, his second, voyage (1772–1775). As late as 1740, long sea voyages were losing in the region of two-thirds of their sailors to scurvy. Cook also discusses the merits of ‘sour krout’ (i.e. pickled cabbage), ‘portable broth’ and, more familiarly, ‘a rob of lemons and oranges’ (although he had ‘no great opinion’ of the latter and considered them too costly). While we are still in doubt whether it was the malt, which Cook reckoned to be the best anti-scorbutic, or simply the practice of frequently replenishing the ship’s fresh food that caused this dramatic decline in deaths from scurvy, it remains one of the earliest triumphs in the study and endorsement of proper nutrition.

The Full Article By Captain James Cook Can Be Read Here, As It Was Originally Published In 1776.

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Hello Ladies


"ten ferrets worth of torso hair"


Miranda Devine on Tony Abbott :

As for Abbott's lack of female appeal, he's decisive, fit and virile, for starters, hardly a turn-off to women...He's a rugby playing, boxing Rhodes Scholar....a surf lifesaver and a volunteer firefighter.

It's going to be one of those elections.


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Tony Abbott's office denies hot Canberra rumours that this will be the Liberal Party's 2010 federal election campaign theme :






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Rudd Too Busy With Obama To Notice Abbott

KevinRuddPM on Twitter reacts to the elevation of Tony Abbott to the leadership of the Liberal Party, and the sudden dumping of support for any carbon tax at all by the opposition :

Good meeting today with President Obama in Washington. Long discussion on climate change. Only 18 days to go to Copenhagen.

All countries now need to push as hard as possible for the strongest global action possible.

We need it for the environment, the economy, for jobs and for our kids.

Stop Laughing, This Is Serious Now

By Darryl Mason



The Rudd government will move fast to a federal election - March 2010 - on the off chance that Tony Abbott will quickly find a comfortable zone of support to build on amongst the Australian public. That off chance is in fact a good chance.

We will now be introduced to Tony 'Reasonable Guy' Abbott. The humble man, a man who has faith in God and himself, but wants to Save This Country From The SmugRudd.

This is exactly how the Liberal Party will market Abbott through the election.

Tony The Reasonable Vs Rudd The Smug.

And that approach will work better than you might imagine.

* The Liberal Party will get a boost in the polls, thanks to Tony Abbott. And it will be big enough to shock the poll watchers and cause some nervous titters in the federal government. I say about a 10 point leap for the Libs.

* Tony Abbott, in his first press conference as leader of the Liberal Party, has clearly been practicising his "I'm A Reasonable Guy, I Am" face. Which probably means, at least for a few weeks, the end of those chilling Abbott Death Stare.

* The five key issues Abbott will fight the first quarter 2010 federal election on are those he hooked into at the start of his press conference : delaying the ETS/Carbn Tax, Rudd's Schools Refurbishment Program, The RuddNet, Interest Rates, WorkChoices/Industrial Relations.

* Abbott claims nobody will ever mention "the phrase 'WorkChoices'" again. Fat chance. Abbott will simply rename the reintroduction of Howard's WorkChoices 'Fuck The Workers' policy something else. But the Australian public won't forget.

* Abbott is reminded by journo that he has referred to the reality of climate change as "crap."

"It was a bit of hyperbole, it's not my considered position," he replied.

Does Tony Abbott believe in climate change now? Yes, yes he does.

"(saying climate change was "crap")....was in the context of a heated discussion, where I was trying to argue people around. I do think climate change is real, and that man does make a contribution. The essential point here...is the mechanism for dealing with climate change. We should not be rushing through a new tax so Kevin Rudd has something to take to Cophenhagen."

Tony Abbott's position on the carbon tax yesterday, according to Annnabel Crabbe :

In the face of Mr Hockey's insistence that the matter be a conscience vote, Mr Abbott eventually lost his temper.

"So," he summarised bitterly.

"Malcolm Turnbull's for the ETS. I'm against the ETS. And Joe - nobody knows what the fuck you stand for."

Abbott : "I accept at times I have stuffed up. I also believe that when you become leader, you make a new start. The Australian public is very fair, and they are always ready to give the leader of a political party a fair go."

And they will. Watch the polls next week.

* Abbott The Apologist : "I should take this opportunity to apologise for all my mistakes of the past."

Abbott thinks reality is a confessional booth, and all sins are immediately absolved.

Andrew Bolt's verdict on Tony Abbott :

"unelectable"

That's pretty much what everyone in the media thought, just last night.

News.com.au PreNews Fail earlier today :



Not an unreasonable headline to drop into the system in preparation. The entire press gallery appeared to believe Hockey would win the leadership. I can't think of anyone who predicted Abbott would win. Let me know in comments if you find someone who did.

This is the first thing I wrote as a theme note for this post :

Welcome to the New Ugly Age of Liberal Party Religious Extremism.

Things are about to get very, very nasty indeed.

I don't think they will, after watching the Abbott press conference. They might get shouty, but I think Abbott really does believe, with a self-righteous fervour he appears to have learned to conceal overnight, that he can actually win an election against Kevin Rudd. But he won't win it by hammering Muslims and immigration and embracing, thankfully, nasty minority views.

The truth is, the Rudd government has had a pretty easy time of it, as far as formidable attacks from the Opposition goes, these past two years.

Tony Abbott has polished up his People Skills, and has already debuted his Reasonable Guy persona for the media. We will now see the soft and cuddly Abbott, edged with just enough venom to batter and sometimes better Rudd and Gillard.

Abbott wants to win. And he thinks he can. He Believes He Can Do It.

Look, if anyone in Australia still believes in actual miracles, Tony Abbott is amongst their number.

Can he do it?

Note - The above was mostly written as events unfolded, that's why it reads like a bunch of notes. It is. I just hate the look of 'UPDATE' appearing all over a post. A little * is less intrusive. Something more coherent coming on my theory that Abbott will tone down his religious extremism, not ramp it up. Australians are clearly sick of that kind of crap, the polls show it, the Libs know it. So it will be Tony The Humble Vs Rudd The Smug.

This will be the real battle in parliament. Rudd Vs Gillard. They've been sparring and flirting for years :





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Malcolm Turnbull : Not As Much Fun As Brendan Nelson



Piers Akerman apologises for helping Malcolm Turnbull to the leadership of the Liberal Party :

As one who supported Malcolm Turnbull’s bid to oust Peter King in the electorate of Wentworth, and his subsequent deposing of former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson, I admit an error in judgment.

The Turnbull I admired then read widely, listened to argument and made up his mind on the evidence placed before him.

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Now, Turnbull has joined Rudd and Wong and global warming tarts like Tim Flannery in denying the work and purpose of those who seek nothing but the truth....

Global Warming Tarts? I've had one of those. The woman behind the counter in the cake shop warned me they were bloody hot, but when I bit into one, I discovered it was actually quite cold.

The Ak :

After showing great promise, and being given great assistance...

Particularly by The Daily Telegraph, and The Australian.

....his political career is coming to a humiliating and inglorious close.

Who are you going to put the kiss of death on next, Piers?

@AlexHawkeMP better hope Akerman doesn't start praising him to the heavens, or he will never get to lead the Christian Liberal/Christian Greens Coalition of 2016.

This isn't widely known, but in the wake of the hilarious fuckapalooza of Godwin Gretch e-mails, Malcolm Turnbull was offered shocking, damning photographic evidence of KevinRuddPM's darkest secrets, but by then Turnbull was too scared of leaks to bring them before the public :

"We Don't Need Maps, We've Got An Aboriginal Elder!"

It's been a long time since I've watched any new movie trailer three times in a row.



Just brilliant. Thanks to @marcfennell for making me aware of this.

The Bran Nue Dae website is here.

It opens January 14.


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This blog has been going for getting onto four years, it has a few thousand regular Australian visitors, I've written here fairly often about new Australian movies, and yet outside of the one publicist working on the ultra-independent movie The Jammed, I've never received an e-mail press release or been sent a trailer link by anyone from either major or minor movie distributors.

You'd think Australian movie distributors, producers and publicists would be going out of their way to find every single online avenue to publicise, promote their movies, even at a blog like this.

But no.

Hopefully that will change in 2010.

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Twitterocracy

By @DarrylMason

Deputy PM, Julia Gillard, on Insiders :

"(A leader) can't govern the nation by tweet."

And yet, one day we will probably be voting by Twitter, using laptop thumbprint or iris scanners. Gillard :

People don't expect their politicians to just text out a message.

Imagine, you know, "What do you think the defence budget should be?" And apparently a whole lot of tweets come back and you accept that. That's not leadership."

It's not leadership. But it's an interesting way to get some instant unfiltered feedback, which is exactly what (pending) Liberal Party leader Joe Hockey did last week on Twitter :

Hey team re The ETS. Give me your views please on the policy and political debate. I really want your feedback.

Julia Gillard, of course, is not on Twitter. Yet.

If you're not on it, you don't get it. And even when you are on it, you still won't get it for a while. And then, one day, whap! you realise what Twitter is all about, what it can do, and, perhaps more importantly, what it can do for you.

David Speers, political editor of Sky News, has a great piece on political reporting through 140 character messages :

Now it's all about Twitter.

And here everyone can play along. If you "follow" the right people, anyone can have a front-row seat. The role of Twitter in providing information during the Mumbai terrorist attack and the Iranian election has been well documented.

But last week we saw Twitter seriously step up to the plate in Australian political reporting for the first time.

New developments, big and small, along with pithy comments were constantly "tweeted" by plugged in journalists around the clock. While still relying on party sources for major developments, I picked up a lot of good information from journalists I trust on Twitter.

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Like anything to do with press-gallery journalism, there's a healthy dose of competition when it comes to Twitter.

Every journo wants to be the first to tweet something new and there's nothing more embarrassing than thinking you have, only to scroll down and see The Australian's Samantha Maiden posted the same thing 15 minutes ago.

But there's also an interesting spirit of information sharing among competing journalists.

I didn't have much time last week to see or the news during the day, but checking into Twitter once an hour (or a few times an hour when the action in Canberra was heating up), gave me what felt like a front row seat to the historically explosive flurry of activity in the halls and backrooms of Parliament House, as press gallery journalists not only competed with each other to be the first on radio or TV with breaking news, but the first on Twitter. Most of the time, they twooted their scoops minutes before they broke them on air, or hours before they appeared on their news sites.

There are probably more Australian journalists working the twootstream than politicians, but after this week, that will all change. The idea that any serious politician will head into a late March, 2010, federal election without being on Twitter, or at least having someone in their office twooting for them, and reading the @ feedback, will seem bizarre, so very 20th century, and pigeonhole them as being out of touch with their electorate.

If Twitter really takes off with the Australian public, and it certainly seems to be doing incredibly well so far, we will see up-and-coming politicians build their base through Twitter, and arrive in Canberra with thousands of followers, instantly communicating and sharing news with their electorate online.

I'm not seeing a lot of negatives to the above prediction. Eventually, it will be all but impossible for politicians to lie or deceive on Twitter. They'll get absolutely hammered, near instantly, not only by their own followers, but by their political enemies and the digital media always searching for that next Twitter scoop.

For that reason alone, Twitter is great for Australian democracy, and honesty in politics.

The brighter the sunlight, the quicker the dark clouds of spin fade away.

What's God Got To Do With It?

By Darryl Mason

Looks like a photo editor at the Sunday Herald Sun has a sense of humour. Could there be a more non-flattering pic of Tony Abbott (clothed, that is) kicking around to illuminate this story?



Frightening.

Another Glenn Milne 'exclusive' :

The only declared leadership challenger to Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott, says he's a "pragmatic common-sense" politician and not a narrow-minded conservative.

Who writes Abbott's material? He should be doing stand-up comedy. Wait, he already is!

Well known for his staunch Catholicism, Mr Abbott said he had never let his religion interfere with his policy decisions....

No. Never. For Abbott, it's always what's best for Christian Australia. And God, obviously.

(Abbott) conceded that colleague Joe Hockey might be considered by some a better choice as Liberal leader if Mr Hockey chose to stand on Tuesday.

Malcolm Turnbull must be sick to fucking death by now of doing so much charity work for the Libs. How much more humiliation can he take?

Abbott :

".....I don't think I am necessarily God's gift to politics...."

Necessarily? He's leaving himself some wiggle room to drop the "I don't think" and "necessarily" should Biblical Armageddon arrive.

"This is not all about me. It's about a change to policy and putting the Liberal Party in the best united state to win the next election."

If the Liberals keep fucking around like they have these past couple of weeks, The Greens and Labor are going to rip away Libseats across the country. Without even trying.

Bob Brown must be laughing himself to sleep.

Science Used To Be Fun

He was mates with Albert Einstein :




This quote pretty well sums up how I feel about the double-hysteria of "Look! Warmy World Government Conspiracy!" surrounding hacked/leaked global warming researchers' occasionally dodgy e-mails, and a fresh ramping up of pants-staining predictions of apocalyptic climate
doom :

"Both sides want to maintain this idea that science is this pure thing, this source of clarity, exactness, and truth. Of course, it isn't. It's a human endeavor, a social endeavor. The people who do it are people full of imperfections."




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"Don't Leave The Building. One Of The Trade Towers Just Fell....Please Be Careful"

My first (and hopefully not last) story for ninemsn, on the leaking of Secret Service, US military and emergency services pager TXT messages sent on 9/11, beginning minutes after the first attack on the World Trade Centre. Excerpt :

The whistleblower website Wikileaks last night began to publish some 500,000 pager messages sent on 9/11: many of the messages contain the names and phone numbers of senders and receivers along with intimate details of their relationships.

Wikileaks claimed its release of the pager messages was justified by the historical weight of the information, claiming the half a million texts make up "a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time".

Read The Full Story Here

The Chaser's new book is now available. With a very timely cover indeed.



You can order an autographed copy here.

I do still have a story on The Chaser coming, focusing on producer/writer/performer Julian Morrow's quest to come up with a new TV show format that will go beyond anything they've done so far, but will not go down the predictable route of easy outrage. As he put it in a recent speech, how easy is it to offend conservatives? Too easy. He doesn't sound interested at all in heading back into that territory.

The story I've been writing is long, getting onto 8000 words, and I think I'll break it up into three parts.

Part One will focus on the shooting of one of their last big public gags (the "One More Picture" bit that aired in the final show).

Part Two will focus on the interview I did with Morrow, the recording of the final show, and what happened at the after party.

Part Three will focus on the speeches Morrow has given since The Chaser's War On Everything ended, and his feelings about what the the War On Everything achieved, where they failed, and what they might be getting up to next.

So thanks for being patient, and I'm sorry it's taken so long.

I hope to get Part One up late next week.

Feel free to post abuse in comments if I miss this hazy deadline.

God : "I Got Nothing To Do With These Racist Fucking Arseholes"

By Darryl Mason

When I wrote this piece the other day, about a leaflet being letterboxed in Sydney by Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party, I was hoping it would turn out to be fake. It had to be fake. This is Sydney, Australia, 2009. Surely nobody could be that fucking stupid?

Well, yes, they can be, and were. The nasty little leaflet is real. And many of the people who received the leaflet in their letterboxes - asking if the electorate was supportive of giving the federal government the power to deport "any Muslim" and stop the building of more mosques and Muslim schools, while introducing an immigration policy to "give preference to persecuted Christians" - are not happy about it. At all.

From the North Shore Times :

A survey of North Shore voters has been condemned as “racist hate politics” by residents, politicians and Christians.

West Pymble friends Bronwen Hanna, a Christian, and Surur Arain, a Muslim, said they were horrified to receive the survey in the mail on Tuesday.

“I felt disbelief that something like this could be written,” Ms Hanna said. “I actually thought, ‘this is a joke’.

“The views and the stereotyping was so extreme.”

Mrs Arain said: “It was really distressing to see those words in print. Implicit in those statements is stereotyping people that they are so bad they could be deported at any time.”

Greens candidate Susie Gemmel.....described it as “an ugly style of hate politics”.

“Fred Nile ... is distributing material that shows a racist, even fascist, ideology behind the Christian Democrats,” she said.

The Full Story Is Here

Incredibly, the Christian Democratic Party claims they don't support any of the ideas expressed in the leaflet, they are simply "asking questions."

If Jesus did return, and saw the shit that some people were doing in his name, he'd purgatory them all.

Will Architect Jan Utzon Be Hounded Into Silence For Questioning The Collapse Of World Trade Centre 7 On 9/11?

By Darryl Mason

Sydney Opera House architect Jan Utzon expresses a healthy professional curiosity, and asks reasonable questions, about the collapse of World Trade Centre 7 in New York City on September 11, 2001 :



Utzon, like hundreds of other architects, engineers, scientists, former military officers and intelligence officials from around the world, stated simply and truthfully that the 'official story' of 9/11 doesn't always make sense, and that three steel framed skyscrapers collapsing from fire damage is an event that has never happened before. He concludes that new investigations are warranted.

The Sydney Morning Herald decides to do some gate-keeping and claims Utzon has "signed up for September 11 conspiracy theories", comparing respected architects who have questions about how three skyscrapers can collapse from fire damage to those who believe The Moon landings were faked.

Herald journalist Sean Nichols tries to dob Utzon in to his employer :

An Opera House spokeswoman said Mr Utzon was ''entitled to his personal views outside of his professional work as architectural adviser to Sydney Opera House''.

The Herald's Rick Feneley uses a report by the US National Institute of Science & Technology (NIST) in an attempt to dismiss all of Utzon's questions about the rapid, total collapse of World Trade Centre 7 :

The National Institute of Standards and Technology spent three years investigating Building 7. It names fire as the culprit. Fire - fuelled by office furnishings, aided and abetted by the thermal expansion of structural elements.

"Heating of floor beams and girders caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down," said the lead investigator, Shyam Sunder.

Explosives? The institute concludes that the smallest blast capable of crippling the third tower's critical column would have produced a "sound level of 130 to 140 decibels at a distance of half a mile''. No witness reported it.

TV news reports from 9/11 of explosions coming from the vicinity of World Trade Centre 7 before it collapsed. "Keep your eye on that building, it's coming down", "the whole thing's about to blow up" :



Here's a video of an investigator from the National Institute of Science & Technology claiming there was no evidence of molten steel in the ruins of the World Trade Centre buildings. His claim is utterly contradicted by firemen and rescue workers who spent months digging through the wreckage :



The NIST used computer modelling for its theory explaining the collapse of World Trade Centre 7, as all material evidence was removed from the site before the NIST investigations began.


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