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

[Kieran McConville]

In a sense, we're all victims. Victims in a world sized prison.

 

[Axver]

Well Hinchy is already proving to be a dickwad and showing where much of the crossbench can unite: Abbott-era Racial Discrimination Act changes 'back on the table' in new Senate

But without Xenophon it won't happen.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I had to chuckle at that One Nation knob talking about how stifling free speech stops us talking about the real issues... which are Islam, terrorism, well the economy too, but some ways down the list.

It would be almost worth it to have a CEC senator, so they could do a press conference about getting back to the real issues, such as the British Royal Family global drug cartel.

 

[Axver]

SECTION 18C HAS STOPPED US FROM TALKlNG ABOUT EVERYTHING THAT WE TALKED ABOUT INCESSANTLY THROUGHOUT THE LAST THREE YEARS!!!!!!

Frankly, this guy is alarmingly close to having a CEC senator. I cannot wait for his input on Senate committees.

 

[cobl04]

The more you read, the better it gets. The bloke is fucking insane One Nation senator-elect Malcolm Roberts wrote bizarre 'sovereign citizen' letter to Julia Gillard

Anti-government, self-identified "sovereign citizens" claim to exist outside the country's legal and taxation systems and frequently believe the government uses grammar to enslave its citizens.

NSW Police say such people "should be considered a potential terrorist threat".

In an affidavit he sent to Ms Gillard in 2011, Mr Roberts identified himself as "Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul", representing a corporate entity he termed MALCOLM IEUAN ROBERTS.

In the document, Mr Roberts demanded to be exempted from the carbon tax and compensated to the tune of $280,000 if Ms Gillard did not provide "full and accurate disclosure" in relation to 28 points explaining why he should not be liable for the tax.

The climate denier organisation he's part of https://twitter.com/GalileoMovement

Andrew Bolt Cuts Ties With Climate Science Denying Galileo Movement Over Alleged Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory | DeSmogBlog

It would be funny if he wasn't get constant, unchallenged publicity for his verbal diarrhoea bullshit.

 

[Axver]

But he's a FREE MAN!

 

[Kieran McConville]

Ah yes, the sovereign citizens movement, the folks who think you can live free or die using the right form of words.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I, Kieran-Sulieman: McConville, the Living Soul, has not been presented with any evidence that Interference exists or that I owe the non-existent premium membership fee I have never been invoiced for by Elvis, hereafter referred to as SATAN The Vendor.

 

[Kieran McConville]

The reemergence of One Nation seems as good a time as any to unearth my little lyric for an abortive song, 'Flat Tax Rant', from some years ago.

As I tuck my shirt back in
What happened
for a minute there I was
in the zone
my masters must be
pleased with me
and the flat tax rant
delivered to an institute
of admiring colleagues
salad bowls, necklaces, fine china
flat tax rant on the back of a
semen stained napkin
flat tax rant
dead dog rebound
acidic spew in your mouth

can't taste a thing
flat tax rant!!!

grossly enlarged prostate
admiring colleagues
piss in my jocks
can't taste a thing
and the sky is bluer than toilet cakes
yeah the convention
really dug the flat tax rant
it was quite a major event

 

[Axver]

The latest hit from Kieran-Sulieman: McConville.! What a flesh and blood man, a living soul, indeed! It shall be a hit among the FREE MEN!

 

[Kieran McConville]

Living Soul was going to be the name of the album, kind of a play on 'Living Doll'.

 

[Axver]

This is a relief: Nick Xenophon kills off push for changes to 18c Racial Discrimination laws

As long as Nick can keep his two little Xenophones in line, any attempt to change 18C is doomed.

Also, ol' mate Hinchy needs to try harder to make sense:

Brandis – I know he said it clumsily and he probably said it wrongly – but he was right when he said bigots are entitled to an opinion.

 

[Kieran McConville]

I find it interesting that this was the first thing a bunch of senators chose to reach for as an issue. Really says a lot about our contemporary scene.

In any case, as others have pointed out ad nauseum, it's been a long five or ten years of outright demagogues like Bolt and Jones complaining about how they're silenced. They're not silenced. In fact it's astonishing to me that Bolt isn't in jail at this point.

 

[Axver]

Yep. They could have gone after taxation or climate change, things that would affect our standard of living for decades to come, or after big moral issues like marriage equality or treating refugees better than Stalin-era political prisoners, and instead they arc up about how oppressive it is to have modest checks on their ability to say repulsive things publicly. I can't say it shocked me from One Nation but I thought Hinch would have at least used his first few moments in the spotlight to bang on about his actual core issue of "JUSTICE!"

I can't wait for Malcolm Roberts' first Senate sitting. Ricky Muir may have been the butt of jokes before he took his seat but at least it was obvious he was just some ordinary bloke out of his depth. The absolute crazy of the Free Man, Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul, ought to leave us caught between hilarity and despair.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Yep. They could have gone after taxation or climate change, things that would affect our standard of living for decades to come, or after big moral issues like marriage equality or treating refugees better than Stalin-era political prisoners, and instead they arc up about how oppressive it is to have modest checks on their ability to say repulsive things publicly. I can't say it shocked me from One Nation but I thought Hinch would have at least used his first few moments in the spotlight to bang on about his actual core issue of "JUSTICE!"

I can't wait for Malcolm Roberts' first Senate sitting. Ricky Muir may have been the butt of jokes before he took his seat but at least it was obvious he was just some ordinary bloke out of his depth. The absolute crazy of the Free Man, Malcolm-Ieuan: Roberts., the living soul, ought to leave us caught between hilarity and despair.

It's all about Teh Islam, you see. It used to be all about Teh Jews, but then they had a holocaust so even the far right usually steers clear nowadays (well, sort of). I can't tell if Hinch has strong views on this stuff or if (more likely) he just gets carried along on the tide. Probably Bernadi or the Liberal Democrat guy had him sit down over a cup of coffee and the way they put it fit in with Common Sense As Hinch Understands It.

The only Frea-mon I'm interesting in hearing from is natural po-lice.

 

[Axver]

Census party time, everyone.

 

[Axver]

Wow, now even the census has pissed off me. It won't let me put my name as André, just "Andre". Fuck off, that's not my name; e and é are different letters. The acute isn't there just because I want to look fancy. Do you want your name spelt wrong? This is like writing "Jack" for "Jake".

I don't mind when people skip the acute in casual contexts, especially as it's not easy to type on some devices (much, much harder on PC than Mac), but it really irritates me in formal settings.

Now I'm halfway tempted to troll the census and put my name down as Ax instead.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Wow, now even the census has pissed off me. It won't let me put my name as André, just "Andre". Fuck off, that's not my name; e and é are different letters. The acute isn't there just because I want to look fancy. Do you want your name spelt wrong? This is like writing "Jack" for "Jake".

I don't mind when people skip the acute in casual contexts, especially as it's not easy to type on some devices (much, much harder on PC than Mac), but it really irritates me in formal settings.

Now I'm halfway tempted to troll the census and put my name down as Ax instead.

What I find awesome about this post, after all the sturm und drang about privacy* and how the Nazis used the census to round up their enemies (just like Turnbull will, with the incredibly sensitive information about how many people live at your house and what your occupation is), is that you just gave me your name.

You should totally enter your name as Axver and your occupation as 'internet message board commenter'.






*Not that I don't take privacy concerns moderately seriously, but the census questions are fairly warm vanilla overall. It's not impossible there'll be some cross-referencing - a lot actually - with Centrelink and the like, but as I've had no dealings whatever with that agency since 1998...

If it's a matter of the government quietly selling databases to the commercial sector, frankly, the volume of crap calls and mail I deal with suggests to me that this already happens in some form.

Also all those people like Nick Xenophon seem to have overlooked that if they're filling out the census, then the ABS has their address. It's not that hard to look up records to ascertain who resided at a given address on a given day... oh look, Nick Xenophon, the guy who withheld his name. The penalty is DEATH!

 

[Kieran McConville]

"It is time to kill the cockroaches," prime minister Turnbull whispered over Radio National. "You know them from the census."

 

[Axver]

What I find awesome about this post, after all the sturm und drang about privacy* and how the Nazis used the census to round up their enemies (just like Turnbull will, with the incredibly sensitive information about how many people live at your house and what your occupation is), is that you just gave me your name.

I'm actually surprised you didn't know it already! I've made no secret of it. But I suppose it's rarely used around here, given Ax has become a sufficiently common nickname for me that it has crossed over into offline usage.

You should totally enter your name as Axver and your occupation as 'internet message board commenter'.

If they questioned me about it I could almost justify that as a legitimate statement of my occupation.

I loved that the usual response of the census paranoiacs to the "but Medicare and the ATO already have much more detailed information on you!" objection was "yeah but it's not cross-referenced". So fucking what? The nefarious government that's apparently going to use the census to persecute people could just as easily cross-reference those databases. I am also certain that what Medicare and the ATO each have on me is more detailed than what you could gleam in the census, without any need to cross-reference. My Medicare records will tell you a shitload more about my lifestyle than the census; my ATO records will tell you more about my earnings; about the only things you can't gleam from them are a few points of self-identification, my (absence of) religion, and how I travelled to work.

And ooh yeah I really don't want the world to know I'm a Pākehā atheist of English ancestry who commutes by tram. I have never divulged these things before! (Actually, you can probably get the ethnicity from Medicare too, and you could deduce I'm not Jewish or Muslim from it too.)

 

[Axver]

I'm also not sure what the point is of Nick Xenophon or Scott Ludlam grandstanding about the census when literally every bit of information they would give the census is already a matter of public record.

 

[Kieran McConville]

It's all just a big fever dream. It's not that I think we should 'trust' the government in any blind way, depending on what you mean by 'the government' (the present administration is beneath contempt), but as you say, we are divulging far more sensitive and thorough details to other agencies already, quite outside of the census.

And if we want to touch briefly on a particularly vulnerable religious group in this society right now, I'm unclear how the census makes much difference one way or the other. They're just as exposed as they were last week or last year (and anyway, remember the Sikh who got caught up in the post-9/11 backlash? When you're dealing with that level of understanding, any sand monkey will do, right?)

I think Census 2016 will go down as a bit of an own goal for the ABS seemingly dropping the ball on what should have been a fairly straightfoward public relations campaign.

No, I did not know your name, but hey, I wasn't trying too hard I guess. I know Cobl4's name, but then forgot it again. Wait, no, I remember, Daniel.

 

[Axver]

I like how many people have already linked this back to the claims we should shift to online voting. The e-voting crowd won't be enjoying this evening much. (Plus why the hell would you vote online? There's no fucking sausage sizzle, not even over the NBN.)

In all this rush to seem modern, up to date, even futuristic, sometimes we lose sight that the established way of doing something is actually pretty sound and effective. That could be misconstrued as a terribly conservative thing of me to say, but I've come out of tonight thinking the paper census has some pretty obvious perks.

 

[Kieran McConville]

Actually I'm very against e-voting. Both the paper census and the paper vote are much more sensible overall, partly for reasons of security and partly for cultural habit. I'd dread the day this country ever scraps the paper ballot. Hacking the census data is one thing, but an election? That's unconscionable. If people don't like waiting a week to find out who the government is, fuck 'em. It's important, take all the time you need.

The only reason the ABS tried out this little scheme this year, as I understand it, is they are dealing with funding cuts like every other branch of government (we're such a poor country; I'll elaborate on that some day, but it's funny how a country much poorer than the one we have now, managed to build a great deal more). Naturally their backup help line has been completely overwhelmed. Frankly I did my census this morning because I didn't want to deal with a site crash tonight.

 

[Axver]

I made a point of doing my census before dinner, not after, because I knew the site would implode.

And I totally agree with you on e-voting. This need for instant gratification, that at 6:01pm the computer should spit out the results, is needless and introduces far more problems than it solves.

Lest I appear a luddite, it is perfectly possible that at some point in the future switching to e-voting may make more sense than using paper and be robust, secure, and sophisticated. But it isn't even close at the moment.

 

[Kieran McConville]

In any case it only clarifies what was and has always been the case. The days of Antony Green calling it at 6.30 belong to the days when elections weren't that close. It's not as though the counting ever got done any quicker than it does now.

I see no reason to shy away from the dreaded label. Most people don't even know who the Luddites were. It's little more than a pejorative. I reckon we'll all be Luddites sooner or later, barring massive upheavals in the political, economic and ideological system. For as long as current technological inroads (many of them fairly unimpressive, merely extrapolations of preexisting phenomena) spell job losses somewhere, and for as long as a job = the one ticket to inclusion within 'respectable' society, then there's a powderkeg waiting to blow.

 

[Vlad n U 2]

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention

 

[Kieran McConville]

We're fast approaching the point where if the Australian government proposes to be in the business of abuse and torture, it will have to roll up its sleeves and do it itself, no contractors, a nationalised gulag.

 

[cobl04]

I was very pro-online Census but it has been an unmitigated disaster.

 

[Axver]

https://www.theguardian.com/austral...-of-children-in-australian-offshore-detention

I hate that my first response was "oh look, a truly shocking revelation that will not change policy or the majority public opinion at all".

I think the Australian public has genuinely accepted this is the human cost of... whatever the fuck objective it is they think they're achieving.

We're fast approaching the point where if the Australian government proposes to be in the business of abuse and torture, it will have to roll up its sleeves and do it itself, no contractors, a nationalised gulag.

Well as long as there are more votes in doing that than in not doing that...!

I was very pro-online Census but it has been an unmitigated disaster.

I was very pro-census, and sceptical but optimistic about the online delivery. What a failure. Never mind the people boycotting it; even if there had been no questions in that regard it's now basically certain that the census will be less reliable than normal.