The Unique 'Reality' Of Newspoll - Australian Federal Election - Day 18

The Australian gets the headline it wanted.

 
Is Newspoll now conducting its survey within the offices of The Australian?

There is Margin of Error, there is poll disparity, and then there is the unique reality of Newspoll. The Ghost Who Votes with the latest numbers:

 

Extraordinary image of a 17 metre long humpback, with unborn calf, washed up off a Western Australia beach. Photo submitted to ABCNews by Ken Read: 

Malcolm Turnbull Denies Inhaling - Rudd Fails Sniff Test - Federal Election 2013 - Day 13

Macolm Turnbull campaigns in Sydney (source) :

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd meets a local in the Territory (source) : 

 More on Kevin Rudd's visit to the Territory from The NT News.

Mark Latham: That's Not Being A Sexist Pig, This Is Being A Sexist Pig - Federal Election 2013

Former Labor Party leader Mark Latham can't help but get involved in Tony Abbott's 'Sexy Time' controversy:

"It showed very bad judgement and it shows (Tony Abbott) has low standards.

"I had a good look at Fiona Scott on page eight ... and she doesn't have sex appeal at all.

"She's not that good of a sort."

"She's a rather plain ordinary-looking woman and Abbott has exaggerated massively to try and win her vote among the blokes ... "

"Tony had the beer goggles on and in politics they say it's showbiz for ugly people and I don't think she'll (Fiona) be out of place."

This is appalling.

Abbott Denies Saying Gay Marriage "Fashion Of The Moment" After Saying Gay Marriage "Fashion Of The Moment" - Federal Election 2013 - Day 11

Opposition leader Tony Abbott in conversation with John Laws on Sydney radio, discussing the rising popularity of same sex marriage as an election-turning political issue : 

"My idea is to build on the strength of our society and I support, by and large, evolutionary change," he said.

"I'm not someone who wants to see radical change based on the fashion of the moment."

Later...

"There were many a few years ago who kept telling us a republic is inevitable," he said.

"If this country lasts for a thousand years quite possibly at some point we might be a republic but I don't think a republic is inevitable any time soon and similarly I don't see same sex marriage as inevitable."

 Yes, a Republic is exactly like two consenting adults in love being denied the right to have their relationship and commitment legally recognised.

UPDATE: Boxing gloves signed by Tony Abbott up for auction at Liberals fund-rasing do in Tamworth. Image via @LisaHerbert

Liberals 'Sexy Time' Billboard Fake - Don't Encourage The Daily Show - Federal Election Day 11

Sign of the times I suppose that this fake Liberals Sexy Time billboard pic has gained 'I Like It! Great idea!' status on social media. Thinking themselves clever japesters, some are insisting this billboard is going up in Western Sydney today. It is not :

Look, after the gaffetacular showing so far in this election, The Daily Show, and willingly gullible interational media, are likely to believe anything they see coming out of Australia. We don't need to give any foreigner an excuse to run Benny Hill theme music during their coverage of our election.

Don't encourage them. 

UPDATE: A Fairfax journalist working as a campaign volunteer for Liberal frontbencher Christopher Pyne has been caught inteferring with Labor Party posters:

Mr Pyne says she was actually helping out and is proud of her.

"I am absolutely confident that no wrongdoing has occurred and I understand that she will be entirely cleared," he said.

"She was fixing them for the Labor Party because they'd been so poorly put up."

 So the same day we hear the Liberals and Labor are going to preference the hell out of each other to save their Two Party System, we hear that Liberal volunteers are making sure Labor election poters are positioned correctly on walls around Adelaide.

Don't be too obvious about it.

Daily Telegraph "Staff Writers" Demand Destruction Of Greens - Federal Election Day 11

UPDATE: Print edition of Daily Telegraph says editor Chris Mitchell wrote today's anti-Greens rant. But the online story says it's by "staff writers". So which is it?

After months of telling us Labor lack credibility, that key frontbenchers are complete jokes, American-owned Daily Telegraph now says we must takem seriously, but only when they're bagging out the Greens.

Is Daily Telegraph editor Paul Whittaker too busy these days to go the Greens himself? Is he outsourcing his hatred to "staff writers?"

The whole editorial is a complete giveaway.

 Vote Labor, get Liberals. Vote Liberals, get Labor. Whatevs. Whoever you vote for doesn't appear to really matter to Daly Telegraph "staff writers" as long as the Two Party System is maintained, and third party and independent candidates are marginalised, smeared, destroyed.

The Coalition and the Labor Party share similar aims for Australia. Both of our major parties know that economic growth is the key to our nation's ongoing prosperity and security. Where they differ is in how economic growth should be accomplished and in the ability to achieve this goal.

Yet the goal itself remains a bipartisan vision. Both parties believe in jobs, investment and financial aspiration.

The Greens, however, are another story. Their vision for Australia is more aligned with former communist bloc nations than anything with which mainstream Australia is familiar. The Greens are, to put it simply, a party of far-left clowns.

But don't just take our word for it. Listen to senior Labor identities....

Now that opposition leader Tony Abbott has put Australia first by putting the Greens last in Coalition preferences, Labor is invited to do the same.

The Greens represent a view that is hostile to the nation's interests and to both major parties. A bipartisan solution is needed to fix a bipartisan problem.

 The Greens aren't so hostile to the 21st century or the environment, but hey, money is money money money money.

So Vote Kony Rubbott, the foreign-owned Daily Telegraph demands it.

The Australian's Obsession With Twitter Gets Plain Stupid - Federal Election 2013 Day 11

Twitter, or even tweets, are not mentioned in this story, anywhere. The Australian's War On Twitter is an embarrasing, hysterical spectacle.
 

The Australian couldn't look any more desperate in its daily attempts to convince older readers Twitter has nothing to offer them. Lest they cancel their subscription to the Australian and go read most of the facts and figures the Autralian hordes behind paywalls on Twitter, for free.

The Australian's earlier attacks on Twitter as being an unreliable medium for distribution of information would be a bit more convincing if The Australian didn't have dozens of Twitter accounts spam-tweeting links to its paywalled content.

Tony Abbott's Sexy Time - Federal Election Day 10

The whole world is watching our federal election. News editors across the globe are following Australian journos and new sites on Twitter, and running with whatever goose like behaviour our candidates can come up with. So far, the Liberals are ahead. And Labor appeared to unveil a new strategy tonight, when opposition leader Tony Abbott or one of his candidates makes a meal of it, they keep quiet, don't get involved, and don't feed the machine with snarky quotes.

Let's see how long they can hold out without fresh carping.

"Young, fiesty...sex appeal," Tony Abbott's reasons for voters to consider the new candidate for the NSW seat of Lindsay:




Apparenlty, Sky News didn't think much of that from Tony Abbott:

Yet more fuel for The Daily Show's solid roundup of the Liberal Party Gaffe-olanche so far.



The Daily Show will be continuing their coverage, all the way through to Kevin Rudd being elected prime minister on September 7.

UPDATE: Tony Abbott is merely a Luke to John Howard the Yoda:

Mural Wars Begin - Federal Election 2013

One of the first murals targetting politicans in the Federal Election 2013 appears in Newtown, NSW.  Expect many more. Image via @Flashback

The century old figs of Alexandria Park gave up a few branches today, in the massive wind storm

Top Tip: Don't sit on a park bench in wind trying to read a book, hoping the wind will go away soon. I think I already knew that.

Spam Tweets Target Labor, Greens - Federal Election 2013 - Day 9

By Darryl Mason

Who's responsible for the below Twitter spam attacks on Labor and The Greens? Almost impossible to find out. Do they impact? Do they change peoples' minds on how they're going to vote? Highly doubtful, but there they are.

The only way anyone is going to come across spam tweets from accounts with no followers is in Twitter search, it's pissing into the void, basically.

Tony Abbott's Smelly Wisdom - Federal Election 2013 - Day 9

For someone who once vowed that he would do anything to become prime minister, 'except take it up the arse', a very interesting gaffe from opposition leader Tony Abbott.



If you talk long enough, you're going to get things messed up, eventually.

But you have to wonder sometimes if politicians ever gaffe on purpose, knowing it will dominate news coverage, be a hit on YouTube and probably not do all that much harm at all, except for making you look more human.

UPDATE: Has Tony Abbott been watching a few Dirty Harry movies recently? Easy for this kind of thing to bleed over, right Harry Callahan? See 2:30:



UPDATE: Or maybe Tony Abbott's been watching Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket? See 0:36:



More soon

What Goes On At Pine Gap? One Extraordinary Theory

The American military controlled base at Pine Gap is about to leap back into the news, as Autralia's role in helping co-ordinate drone attacks that have killed more than 3500 people in Pakistan comes under legal scrutiny.

Not surprisingly, there's very little public information about Pine Gap, or what goes on there. This gap in factual knowledge has led to some extraordinary, bizarre theories. Here's one of the wildest, from the late 1970s.

The Wrong Kind Of Master Debate - Federal Election 2013

By Darryl Mason

Prime minister Kevin Rudd faced off against Opposition Leader Tony Abbott in the first debate of the Federal Election 2013 campaign.

Australia could barely disguise a stifled yawn.


Very little fresh policy detail, outside of PM Rudd's promise to deliver legislation to recognise marriage equality legislation into Parliament within 100 days of being re-elected, and 'the worm' scrolling across the bottom of the screen either said Rudd Is Shit, if you were watching Channel 7, or Rudd Rocks if you were watching Channel 9. The polarisation between audiences for two TV commercial channels seettmed absurd.

Channel 7's online debate vote gave Abbott an extraordinary 18 point win.

But hold on, Channel 9 debate voters gave Rudd an 18 point win.

Ugh.

How boring was the debate? The only glint of Story! resulted from Rudd checking his notes, in apparent violation of debate rules, though the moderator failed to pull him up on this. Incredibly, Rudd Reads From Notes During Debate is now an international headline.

Here's the most important thing. Word clouds, lovely words clouds via Ben Harris-Roxas. Red is Abbott, Blue is Rudd.

THE FIRST DEBATE - FULL TRANSCRIPT

AUSTRALIA'S TWITTER RESPONSE IN DETAIL

DEBATE OPENING STATEMENTS 

The Great Twitter Myth: Working Class People Don't Tweet - Federal Election Day 7

By Darryl Mason

The Liberal Party of Australia Facebook page smells a social media conspiracy.

 If the Liberal Party has got this wrong - raising suspicion of naughty social media pranking or sabotage by Labor - they will look like idiots who don't know how social media works.

The Mystery Followers panic spreads to Twitter:

The Herald Sun is onto it: 

News Corp Australia has scrutinised a sample of last 100 recent accounts to "follow" Mr Abbott. Ninety-nine are questionable - having either tweeted no more than once, tweeted in at least three languages, tweeted non-sentences, are based in foreign countries, or have no more than a single follower.

One possible, and more likely, explanation than Labor Party activists buying fake followers for Tony Abbott (why exactly?) is Abbott's Twitter account is now a highly placed Recommended Follow for those opening new Twitter accounts in Australia, and internationally. Being a recommended follow immediately sees your following ranks swelled by fake, spam accounts that auto-follow those recommended by Twitter.

Whatever the truth behind it, social media will be well and truly thrust into the Federal Election 2013 spotlight next week, where, presumably, many old and threatened mainstream media figures will try to hose down how much of an influence social media will have on election outcomes.


Meanwhile, the Australian sounds more threatened than ever by social media, Twitter in particular, and has to resort to quoting a Boomer generation Liberal Party advisor, who doesn't even use Twitter, to fill out its 'Real Australians Don't Tweet' agenda. Embarrassing :

To deliver another term of government, Mr Rudd needs to connect with voters in marginal working-class seats such as Lindsay and Greenway in western Sydney and Forde and Longman on Brisbane's southern and northern outskirts. These are traditional Labor-voting electorates now out in the wilderness but critical to ALP success.
Mr Rudd must reach out to undecided voters in these seats and bring them back into the Labor fold. Social media seems an unlikely strategy to achieve this.

The question is, will Mr Rudd's 1.3 million followers on Twitter help him win over voters against Tony Abbott's 151,875 followers?

Grahame Morris, federal director of Barton Deakin Government Relations and a former Liberal Party adviser and campaigner, thinks not.

"The campaign team that focuses its efforts on winning the twitterverse will wake up the day after polling very disappointed," Mr Morris said.

"They will have missed the target and the target is undecided and uncommitted voters who are most certainly not rushing to their iPhones over their Coco Pops to see what Kevin Rudd is tweeting, or anyone else for that matter."

Mr Morris thinks it will be the next election or the one after that will ultimately be determined through social-media campaigns.

There you have it. The Australian extensively quotes someone who thinks social media won't impact on federal elections until 2016...or 2019!

But the unions also have no idea:

Australian Services Union NSW secretary Sally McManus is on secondment to the ACTU to run its digital campaigns.

"Facebook is where normal people are; Twitter is for the talking classes."

"When I walk into a room full of our members, predominantly working-class people, and ask who is on Facebook, most hands go up and now the exception is people who aren't," she said.

"Working-class people are on Facebook, but not Twitter."

So the ACTU is pouring all its resources and efforts into Facebook at the exact same time a massive flight out of Facebook to Twitter by Australians is taking place?

The ignorance is blistering.

UPDATE: This is an image the Liberal Party of Autralia posted after Tony Abbott somehow managed to get one of the biggest, fastest surges in Facebook followers in Australian social media history:
 

So the Liberal Party of Australia are now looking dodgy, dishonest and manipulative on both Twitter and Facebook.

Quite an accomplishment.

Julian Assange Helped Police Fight Child Porn And Catch Paedophiles

Has Julian Assange ever talked publicly about this important work? The media sure never mentions. He should be proud. He may have ultimately saved children's lives.

From The Age :

It has been revealed in a Melbourne court that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange once helped Victoria Police in two investigations into child pornography.

He provided expert technical advice and support to assist in the prosecution of people suspected of involvement in pornography offences on the internet.

The Saturday Age can now report this after a judge yesterday revoked a suppression order she imposed last month, partly out of concern for Assange's safety.

Judge Jeanette Morrish last month suppressed a portion of a transcript of Assange's court appearance in 1996 when he admitted computer hacking offences.

The paragraph included his lawyer stating that in 1993 Assange had ''provided assistance to police authorities'' but he could not elaborate.

A week ago, when The Saturday Age appeared before Judge Morrish to apply for the order to be lifted, Assange's Melbourne lawyer, Grace Morgan, said he did not consent to or oppose its revocation.

Ms Morgan, of Robert Stary Lawyers, passed a handwritten note to the judge that elaborated on Assange's ''assistance''. Judge Morrish then said the contents of the redacted paragraph, if unexplained, ''are apt to be utterly misleading and dangerous because they convey the impression that Mr Assange is an informer and he's not''.

''In 1993, when Mr Assange was in his early 20s, he provided assistance to investigators from the Victoria Police child exploitation unit.
''My client assisted in relation to two investigations. His role was limited to providing technical advice and support [and] to assist in the prosecution of persons suspected of publishing and distributing child pornography on the internet.

''Mr Assange's participation was concluded in the mid-90s. He is not aware of the ultimate outcomes of the operations, but understands that his technical expertise was of value to the investigations.

''Mr Assange received no personal benefit from this contribution and was pleased to be in a position to assist.''

MURDOCH MEDIA TO ASSANGE: FUCK YOU VERY MUCH FOR ALL THE GREAT STORIES

ASSANGE: THIS IS SERIOUS, MUM

WHEN TRUTH TELLERS ARE TREATED AS TERRORISTS 

ASSANGE SUPPORTERS RALLY IN SYDNEY (PHOTOS)

Murdoch Flogs Nazi-Themed Merch

Sydney's Daily Telegraph reached peak Godwin's Law last week when editor Paul Whittaker dressed  prime minister Kevin Rudd in Nazi regalia on the front page. Such a hoot, they're now selling prints of Rudd dressed as a Nazi for only $70.

Wonder what Hogan's Heroes copyright owners Bing Crosby Productions think about all this?

The above invitation to buy prints of Australian public servants dressed up as Nazis by an American-owned media company originally appeared with this story from Adeaide Now.


RUPERT MURDOCH HAILS THE DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS: "IT'S GOING TO BE GREAT"

NEWS CORP AUSTRALIA CEO QUITS AFTER 'NAZI PM' FRONT PAGE

HOW RUPERT MURDOCH CONNED BRITISH MPS BY PLAYING CONFUSED OLD MAN

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE MURDOCH NEWS MINES

This Is What It Sounds Like, When A Blog Dies

A few weeks ago, Andrew Bolt let slip on his blog, a preview of future Bolt Blog plans:

"I don’t want to waste your time. I apologise, but all media outlets are now under severe pressure, and we cannot keep offering what’s essentially a free service. Should you have better suggestions, feel free to let the paper know."

Andrew Bolt deleted the above a few hours after posting it.

Bolt was the first of the Murdoch stable to hit his readers up for subscriptions and paywall ladders, and it was a complete disaster. Nobody wanted to pay to read online. Nobody.

Now, quite the opposite to executive-stacked newspapers and TV news room, small independent media in Australia is actually doing OK. It's the ones that have to kick up a few million a year to The Boss and all his executive buddies that are in the deepest shit.

Small, lean, fast digital news rooms (no office, no execs, no physical product) are the future, of course, it just took the likes of Murdoch, and Bolt, a lot longer than digital natives to understand.

Am I Prime Minister Yet? Federal Election 2013 Day 5

 Not yet, Tony. Not yet.

UPDATE: Already labelled as 'The Photo Of The Election Campaign', photographer Alex Ellinghausen captures Tony Abbott as he would like to be seen by the Australian public, on his bike with his crotch pouring light. Probably.

Photo by Alex Ellinhausen for Fairfax.


Source

Campaign Gets Ruddy Bloody - After months of unemployment and general beardiness, The Chaser team pick up some top shaving tips from prime minister Kevin Rudd as they begin work on their election specials.