6 - # of Straya threads or # of times we've changed Prime Minister in a decade?

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Yeah, one of my colleagues is married to an Estonian and speaks very highly of the place.
 
it's meant to be quite beautiful, she went to their wedding there. I've just never been in ACTUAL cold before and i haaaate Melbourne cold. i might die
 
More random weather talk; according to the Bureau of Meteorology's website, it is going to drop to a maximum of 16 here in Toowoomba this coming Sunday and Monday. That's mid-winter in the last quarter of October. Jesus h.w. Christ.

It already dropped about six degrees in ten minutes after a surprise storm this afternoon.
 
Not good Cobbler, hoping things work out. Journalism is tough at the moment. I'm actually quite relieved that I didn't get into the course I was determined to get into after I completed high school.

PR could be a good interim avenue - as long as you've got good communication skills, are media savvy and can exercise common sense, it'd be pretty easy to get a handle of.

Although, perhaps positioning yourself as the doyen of the the new women's AFL league could certainly be a worthwhile ambition.


Sent from a barge floating through the docks of Dublin
 
Vlad n U 2 said:
I know this is US-centric, but I thought this was a great piece that can be applied to an Australian context.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2...bias-working-class-americans?CMP=share_btn_fb
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Yeah, I think there's a lot of sense in that piece. Well, at the very least, whatever passes for liberal progressive politics in both countries will go for the easy road at their peril.

As the article notes, Trump's supporters are for the most part not the poor. The poor, as Bernie Sanders rightly observed, don't vote in America (by and large). They are, what's that old term, the petit bourgeois.

In America you pretty much have to assume that everything between the two coasts is terra incognita to the people who write and publish national news and commentary. And in Australia, everywhere outside of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne. In both places, you'll undoubtedly find 'deplorables' if you go looking for them, but it's hardly the whole picture.

It's the economics, stupid. I am fairly confident that the Clinton campaign will win this election, but they've staked everything to the culture and identity mast at this point. They're skating on extremely thin ice, as far as the future is concerned.
 
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A thoughtful piece, but because I'm wasting time this evening rather than doing the backlog of things I ought to be doing, let me pick up on a few points.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.
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There are dangerous idiots in every class of society (as Trump proves for the wealthy). But as there are more poor, there are more poor dangerous idiots - and in politics there is strength in numbers.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are “voting against their own best interests,” undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isn’t mentally fit to cast a ballot.
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Eh, this isn't quite right. From some it may be undemocratic. From others it is a call to arms for better education - that a better educated electorate is self-evidently a good thing. Here I mean "education" in the sense of awareness and knowledge rather than credentialism or possession of certain degrees. A person with a high school certificate but a familiarity with what each party stands for and some idea of how the voting system works is inherently a better educated voter, able to cast a more informed ballot, than somebody with postgraduate qualifications who unthinkingly votes for the same party their family's voted for since 1901 while parroting the generic slogans they were raised to repeat. I work with one colossal idiot, a holder of a PhD, whose vote is as utterly uninformed and ignorant as they come. I would not trust her to select an appropriate person to slice a cake.

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

“Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is ‘an idiot.’”

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesn’t support Trump. It also made me laugh – one can’t “farm cattle”. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. It’s sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.
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I may be a pedant, but what a silly and petty point. The journalist could easily be from a working class background - but one in an inner city ghetto, or a sprawling suburban slum, or a mining town ravaged by pollution. I grew up literally around the corner from a paddock of cows, born to a father from a rural service town and a mother from a family of orchardists and industrial labourers. To "farm cattle" did not leap out at me as incorrect (though admittedly I would have written "raises/rears cattle" had I been the author of the quote in question). Ignorance of agricultural or pastoral terminology does not mean one is not of the working classes; just that one is not from a specific form of community.

Also, the author's generalisation of journalists as detached from the working classes is surprising from one railing against such laziness. I cannot speak about the US, but journalism in Australia and New Zealand has been filled by people of all classes, and I would expect that to be true of any Western democracy.
 
Kieran McConville said:
In America you pretty much have to assume that everything between the two coasts is terra incognita to the people who write and publish national news and commentary. And in Australia, everywhere outside of Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne.
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I remember hearing this a lot when I lived in southeast Queensland, and found it hard to agree because so much of the LNP and the Murdoch tabloids are southeast Queensland.
 
Axver said:
I remember hearing this a lot when I lived in southeast Queensland, and found it hard to agree because so much of the LNP and the Murdoch tabloids are southeast Queensland.
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Eh, I dunno about that. Aren't the nationally-known Murdoch tabloids more (mythical) western Sydney?

Some of the more objectionable parts of the LNP are actually central and north Queensland, but sure, I take your point.
 
Kieran McConville said:
Eh, I dunno about that. Aren't the nationally-known Murdoch tabloids more (mythical) western Sydney?

Some of the more objectionable parts of the LNP are actually central and north Queensland, but sure, I take your point.
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I know they WANT to be mythical western Sydney, but they're more Gold Coast on account of their monoculturalism. Whatever your view may be of western Sydney, nobody's denying the diversity of the community out there, while the Gold Coast is painfully white.

I seriously cannot imagine a more natural LNP constituency than people who buy houses on canals in Runaway Bay, go to the casino once a week, and worry about being able to pay fees for their kid to go to some religious private school while taking out a high-interest loan to dig a new pool.
 
Well, all that as may be, I have to say that the Gold Coast is its own little enclave again, and the world you describe is not typical of Australia outside of the big capitals, white as it may be.
 
Touche. But it is definitely the case that Gold Coasters think "people down south in Sydney and Melbourne" don't get them, when in fact the city is the logical result of one party's ideology and reflected near-perfectly by the nation's dominant print media company.

I look back on it and wonder how the fuck I managed to emerge from that city a social democrat, since my political views weren't inherited from my family or acquired from my friends.
 
The theme parks are fun, if you like the idea of rollercoasters and stuff.

But I sure wouldn't spend more than a week there. I'm going up there for Christmas this year and it will be as short a trip as possible.
 
Axver said:
Touche. But it is definitely the case that Gold Coasters think "people down south in Sydney and Melbourne" don't get them, when in fact the city is the logical result of one party's ideology and reflected near-perfectly by the nation's dominant print media company.

I look back on it and wonder how the fuck I managed to emerge from that city a social democrat, since my political views weren't inherited from my family or acquired from my friends.
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Frankly I'm surprised you didn't stay and join the white shoe brigade.

It's true that the Gold Coast is, I guess, sort of our Florida or something, a little distilled slice of property uber alles.

But think we're drifting a little here, the Murdoch tabloids notwithstanding. It's more the national media I had in mind, such as it is (which of course includes the Australian, the middle-brow version of the Murdoch worldview, complete with court historian, Paul Kelly). The people who write and comment on national affairs, your Fran Kellys and the like. I would maintain that for them - and for many others - Australia is more or less an archipelago consisting of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. With occasional surprises from other faraway places that waft in and consistently surprise these people with their strange inscrutable ways.
 
I spent a night in Surfers Paradise once. It was... about what you'd expect... although I did get to see Dave Graney play at a local tavern.
 
Kieran McConville said:
But think we're drifting a little here, the Murdoch tabloids notwithstanding. It's more the national media I had in mind, such as it is (which of course includes the Australian, the middle-brow version of the Murdoch worldview, complete with court historian, Paul Kelly). The people who write and comment on national affairs, your Fran Kellys and the like. I would maintain that for them - and for many others - Australia is more or less an archipelago consisting of Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. With occasional surprises from other faraway places that waft in and consistently surprise these people with their strange inscrutable ways.
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Oh yes. If anywhere gets seriously overlooked, it's got to be Adelaide and Hobart (I don't even bother including regional areas, because those get forgotten even in Victoria and NSW). I'm sure that if you made a cursory glance over a lot of commentary on Australia, you could be fooled into thinking literally nothing has happened in either city for well over a century.
 
Yeah, exactly. Now maybe Brisbane and thus Queensland is on the map somewhat more, a lot more actually, but there is little doubt that Adelaide, Hobart, Darwin and Perth might as well not exist. Although Darwin is good for colour about the eccentric north and its inscrutable midnight coups, I suppose. And Perth has people who work in mines, or did.
 
And Perth is home to a vigorous enough strand of parochialism that, for all their complaints of neglect, they force their way into the discussion every now and then.

I'm not entirely sure Darwin existed before 2012, if the national press is to be trusted.
 
Yeah, it's easily one of the greatest moments in Australian sporting history. I have never forgotten that day; it's the loudest I've ever cheered in support of an Australian sportsperson.
 
It's so weird having someone overseas tell us about Bradbury. It's Australian sporting folklore, basically. :lol:
 
meh, i was stoned last night and thought it was hilarious.

4832727+_f5cac39af63572599ff792f2dfe9c268.jpg
 
Will she only be allowed to live in offshore detention?
 
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