From the Crikey grapevine, it’s the latest tips and rumours…
And it was all yellow (vests). The harder-right fringes in Australia often import their talking points wholesale from the US — from freedom of speech on campus to white genocide in South Africa — so you have to give the Australian Liberty Alliance some credit for at least looking elsewhere for inspiration. The Australian Electoral Commission has received a request from the party — a hard-right micro-party organised around anti-Islam rhetoric and closely associated with Dutch hard-right politician Geert Wilders — to rename themselves “Yellow Vests Australia”.
The French protest movement (now entering its 16th week) began as a reaction to a fuel tax and — as it has no formal structure, recognised leader or political party affiliation — has grown into a magnet for broader disaffection and resentments. The name has spread overseas, and attached itself to elements of anti-Semitism and Islamaphobia in the process.
We’re sure the allusion to a French protest movement will really cut through with the battlers and defenders of Western civilisation the ALA are trying to appeal to.
Sniff test. While the Berejiklian government is copping flak for its stubborn refusal to budge on pill-testing, the NSW Greens have gone to the other extreme, pushing for MDMA to be legalised and sold over the counter. Unsurprisingly, it’s this policy which the party is using to target young voters disgruntled at the government’s war on festivals, live music and fun.
This Saturday, the NSW Young Greens will host a start of semester party along with Sniff Off, an anti-sniffer dog group run by MLC David Shoebridge. The Facebook event proudly displays a banner which reads “legalise MDMA now”, and the first 20 people through the door at the Annandale Hotel in Sydney’s Inner West will be lucky enough to receive free pill-testing kit. Who said Sydney’s nightlife was dead?
Stringer up! At times, a tip requires no commentary at all. And so it is with Australian Conservatives Senate candidate for Tasmania, Justin Leigh Stringer. His Twitter feed is mostly what you’d expect — sharing his colleagues preoccupation with five-year-olds being indoctrinated into gender fluidity or whatever, but it’s the pictures he chooses to accompany this hard-right agitprop that really catch the eye.
Rocking a look we can only describe as “James Bond if James Bond were a real estate agent”, he walks us through various poses — thoughtfully pondering the unfair taxes on cars from his awesome convertible, or pointing to bathroom signs with a look of victory.
The whole thing reaches a surreal peak when he comments on stats showing that young people have come to the misapprehension that socialism works. This is, for reasons we can only guess at, accompanied by a picture of Stringer, fully suited and aviator-ed, on a scooter, riding past a playground.
It’s going to be a good election year.
Heard anything that might interest Crikey? Send your tips to boss@crikey.com.au, use our guaranteed anonymous form or other ways to leak to us securely.
The Yellow Vests’ anti-fuel-tax sentiment is slumbering in countries worldwide. Yet the eventual transition to synfuel (recycled CO2) is certain to require a tax on fossil fuel to make the (expensively synthesized) synfuel appear relatively cheap to the person-in-the-vehicle. We need research to cheapen the synthesis of fuel to be underway now, before we are forced to buy it.
This is the second time you’ve mentioned co2 as a fuel.
What chemistry classes do you go to Roger? Links please.
Synfuel from CO2? The burning of gasoline, aviation fuel, heating oil, etc, amounts to adding oxygen to a liquid hydrocarbon, to get energy out and releasing CO2 and water to the atmosphere. Recycling CO2 amounts to the reverse process of adding water and energy to captured CO2, to get the liquid fuels back and release oxygen to the atmosphere. If the input energy is free of fossil carbon, the synthesised fuel can be called “carbon neutral”.
A hundred years ago the Fischer–Tropsch process (look it up) established the first catalysts for making synthetic fuel. Then, as in modern South Africa, the input gases of carbon oxide and hydrogen were made by the partial burning of coal. This step can be replaced with carbon capture. Indeed, it is about the only practical destination for captured carbon as there is far too much of the stuff to bury it anywhere.
Have these right wing critics of ‘socialism’ ever considered that millennials may have been indoctrinated with the facts about how their public schools, public hospitals, Medicare, the PBS, roads, public transport, water reticulation, libraries, public art galleries, sewerage, drainage, national parks, city parks, public boat ramps, civil aviation systems etc came about.
“Yellow Vests” is even more confusing as they’re usually known as “Hi Vis ” vests here.
The models of socialism they use are Lenin, Mao and Stalin. It’s like using Hitler as an example of right wing politics.
Socialist market policies of western governments, post war mainly, coincide with the greatest period of economic growth and stability.
I suppose the right wing nutters will use that as an excuse to go to war.
“If Bond were a R/E agent” is a good description but aren’t aviator shades mirror wraparounds?
Stronger’s look more like those flaunted by Lagerfeld.