Not Good Enough

66 — Stuart Robert has left the group chat

We chat about drama in the Health Minister's group chat, stripping the NDIS and check in with the Covid vaccine situation.

 

Good stuff!

• Massive protests this week against the continued indigenous deaths in custody, and continued inaction.
• Shoutout to AFLW Emma Kearney for taking a knee during the national anthem last week.

The government hate poor people…

• The government knew Robodebt was illegal, but kept it going… because it might have been confusing if they stopped?
• Stuart Robert giving himself NDIS god powers, causing drama in the group chat. Now Linda Reynolds is leaving the chat on read.
• Stuart Robert, who made his parent’s dummy directors of a company without their knowledge, and racked up $40,000 in internet bills and charged them to the tax payer. Linda Reynolds who called a victim of abuse a lying cow.
• A man with Autism was assigned a physiotherapist to assess his case.
• The architects of Robodebt are trying to do the same to the NDIS.
• As Dr Kathleen Flanagan puts it, “We will mine your pain and distress for data, and weaponise this data against you”.
• The Immigration minister has these God-powers — can allow or deny visas on a whim.
• Linda Reynolds says the medevac bill made her “almost physically ill”.

…but love rich people

• The government paid $1.4 billion to a private company to run offshore refugee processing.
• Refugee children are suffering from resignation syndrome.
• Andrew Laming has 35 Facebook pages.
• Huge companies have raked in $90 million from a slush fund that is designed to improve employment outcomes for Aboriginal people.

Vaccines

• Ol’ Scotty’s fucked it again.
• Vaccines aren’t getting to the clinics that need them, or those that have been told they would receive them.
• The Australian people used to own CSL, then Keating sold it off, and now we’re renting it back again.

Shoutouts

• Shoutout to the workers at the McCormick food factory in Melbourne, who have been on strike, and fuckin won.

65 — Rough chuckles redux

We chat about Scott Morrison's week of waterworks, proposals to ban Posting and the big Cabinet job swap.

 

War crime update

• Afgan villagers are being allowed to testify from Afghanistan in the Ben Roberts-Smith defamation case.
• Check out Episode 46 for detail on Roberts-Smith’s alleged war crimes.
• Defamation laws didn’t protect the women who had their faces plastered over the front pages of newspapers and called “enemy of the state”.

Turning on the waterworks

• Scott Morrison turned on the waterworks.
• Begrudging shoutout to Ged Kearny for calling them crocodile tears.
• After questioning by a Sky News reporter, Scott Morrison lashed out, potentially outing a victim of sexual assault (turns out he maybe invented it, and made a groveling notes-app apology).
• Alleged upskirt-photographer Andrew Laming won’t contest the next election.
• ABC’s 7.30 Report empty-chair-interviewed Scott Morrison.
• Scott Morrison got bodied on A Current Affair.

Social media

• Dutton has taken a brave stand against video games.
• Disco Elysium was recently banned in Australia.
• Staffers doing things to desks because of Grand Theft Auto.
• Australia has a long and storied history of attempting to censor the internet.
• Conservatives are pushing for requiring 100 points of ID to create a social media account.
• On the committee proposing the ID requirements? Andrew Laming, who once spent 11 hours fighting on a Facebook Simpsons meme page, who has a long history of online harassment of women.

Job swap

• Scott Morrison has reshuffled cabinet again.
• Anne Ruston is minister for Women’s Safety, despite declaring that the government doesn’t need a definition of poverty.
• Jane Hume, now the Minister for Women’s Economic Security loves brown coal.
• Liberal Party federal vice-president Teena McQueen says she would “kill to be sexually harassed at the moment”.
• Anthony Albanese: “Shuffling the deck won’t change the bad hand that the Morrison Government is dealing Australians.”
• Australian of the Year Grace Tame had a more coherent take.
• The Murdoch media didn’t like this.

Actions

• Speak out about shit that’s bad. Read more Wikipedia?
• If you’re able to, attend the protest against deaths in custody on Saturday the 10th.
• Play Disco Elysium, unless you’ve got a PS4.

 

64 — What's the go with Joel Fitzgibbon (feat. James Clark of the Tomorrow Movement)

We're joined by James Clark of the Tomorrow Movement to discuss Joel Fitzgibbon and why he's on the side of fossil fuel billionaires, not the workers he claims to represent.

 

Labor Platform

• The Labor party are holding the Special Platform Conference on the 30-31st March 2021.
• Labor takes lots of money from the fossil fuel industry.

Fire Joel Fitzgibbon

• Joel Fitzgibbon’s brother Mark is the head of health insurer NIB, and in 2009 used Joel’s ministerial office to lobby the ADF to buy insurance.
• Mark Fitzgibbon has also lobbied for the scrapping of Medicare, and allowing private insurers access to medical records.
• Joel Fitzgibbon was a key figure in destabilising Julia Gillard’s leadership.
• He also believes someone earning $250,000 a year isn’t wealthy.
• During the 2019 bushfires in Australia, Fitzgibbon met with Matt Canavan and the CEO of the World Coal Association, then wrote an Op Ed saying people shouldn’t be upset at him because there’s a crisis on.
• Fitzgibbon has joined Craig Kelly’s “friends of coal” group.
• Joel Fitzgibbon formed the conservative Labor OTIS group, and lobbied for Labor to drop climate targets from their platform.
• He also attended a cocktail party with BHP, Chevron, Coal21, ENI and Exxon.
• Brain-worm host Gerard Henderson wrote a conservative media “Watch Dog” blog in the voice of his dog for the Sydney Institute.
• Joel Fitzgibbon thinks that Labor party should take cues from the Liberals and John Howard.

Actions

• Sign the petition to kick Joel Fitzgibbon out.
• Visit the Tomorrow Movement website and follow @tomorrowmvmt to keep up with their campaigns.

63 — The boys are back in government

We discuss plagues of mice, sexual misconduct and coverups in Parliament, and left-wing Nazis.

 

Content warning: we spend about half the episode discussing the ongoing saga of sexual assault and misconduct within Australia’s Parliament.

 

Climate changed

• The floods are bad, folks.
• Plagues of mice too.

Boys club

• Thousands of people in Canberra and other cities across Australia marched against sexual assault.
• Scott Morrison says the people marching for justice should be glad they aren’t shot.
• NSW police commissioner Mick Fuller suggested an app for solving the problem of sexual assault.
• Mick Fuller defended his police force’s strip searches of children, saying young people should feel “little bit of fear” of police.
• Dumbass apps for consent have been around for a while.
• Captain Awkward on the Missing Stair.
• Staffers brought sex workers into Parliament house, and “performed a solo sex act on a female politicians desk”. The staffer has been sacked.
• A long list of freaks in parliament. Chair sniffing. Big tiddy anime figurines. Calling your co-worker a slut.

Spy guys

• ASIO are going to stop using terms like “rightwing extremism” and “islamic extremism” in their reports.
• Concetta Fierravanti-Wells thinks that ASIO should look into the left-wing Nazis.
• Fierravanti-Wells went to a celebration of the Croatian Nazi regime in 2007.

Shoutouts

• Play Trash the Planet! It’s good and fun.
• Join RAHU’s rally against the end of the eviction moratorium on March 28th.

62 — Combustable assets

The Yallourn power station is breaking down and everyone won't shut up about NFTs, so we chat talk about mining for coal and mining for cryptocurrencies.

 

Labor landslide

• Mark McGowan has led Western Australia’s Labor party to a landslide victory.
• Liberal party leader Zak Kirkup used to have a business card calling himself “Future Prime Minister”.
• Labor are talking about keeping WA’s border restrictions going indefinitely.

Gas rorts

• The Federal government has spent millions of dollars in consulting fees to work out how to give millions of dollars to the gas industry.
• The AEMO already does this!

Stop Yallourn, I can hear you already

• The Victorian Yallourn coal power station is scheduled to close in 2028, 4 years earlier than previously planned.
• Angus Taylor is big mad.
• The Hazelwood power plant closed with six months notice, and a murky fund to support workers.

NTFs? Not Fuckin Talking-about-them

• Bitcoin is bad, but Ketan Joshi’s article is good.
• NFTs are bad too. How bad? Really bad.
• I dunno about this very expensive art either.
• The real world art market sucks too.

Shoutouts

• Follow @RAFFWU on Twitter for updates on Readings worker’s EBA.
• Listen to the 7AM Podcast.

61 — International Girlboss Day (feat. Lee Constable)

We're joined by Lee Constable to discuss the history of International Womens Day, women in STEM and Woolworth's attempt at raising awareness about bees.

 

Thylacine watch

• It’s not a thylacine :(

Girlboss day

• It’s International Women’s Day!
• The hashtag for this year’s International Women’s Day is #ChooseToChallenge
• Women ask for pay rises as much as men, but are knocked back more.
• Google has fired both of the (women) AI Ethicists they employed.
• Google has also filtered candidates from historically Black colleges out of job applications.
• Ketan Joshi’s book Windfall.

Bee washing

• Woolworths removed fresh produce from the shelves to “start a conversation about the importance of pollination”.
• Australian milk is some of the cheapest in the world.
• Woolworths buys 34% of Australian groceries.
• The grocery chain is building a massive 8.6 hectare distribution center.

Shoutouts

• Donate to Sisters Inside and Black Rainbow.
• Check out Farmers for Climate Action.
• Follow @Constababble. And watch Lee recap Captain Planet on Twitch.
• Lee’s book — How to Save the Whole Stinkin’ Planet

 

60 — Lie to me, I'm begging you

We respond to some listener feedback, discuss the LNP's miserly raise to the Jobseeker Rate, and the media's response to some basic new rights for Victorian renters.

 

Cap watch

• One “cap” of cocaine, please young sir.

Listener feedback

• Listener Tara Nipe’s blog post on the practicalities of a fly-in-fly-out COVID quarantine.
• Victoria have instituted dedicated agency, the COVID-19 Quarantine Victoria (CQV), to manage the hotel quarantine program.

Raise the rate

• The Coronavirus supplemental payment helped people escape from a cycle of poverty.
• After an extended campaign by advocates, the Government has raised the rate by… $3.57 a day.
• The Government has announced a “dob in a dole-bludger hotline”.
• We almost had some good news, with Greens Senator Rachel Siewert putting forward a motion to recognise that the Jobseeker rate should be be raised to above the poverty line, like Phoebe teaching Joey.
• Labor then agreed to back the Government’s misery bill.
• Anthony Albonese on Insiders, refuses to name a number.

Media watch

• The media love to use the words “dole bludgers”.
• Victoria is introducing new rental reforms, to give renters basic rights.
• The media have freaked out about the reforms.
• Contact the Renters and Housing Union if you need help understanding how these laws effect you.

Slave labour watch

• All of Victoria’s number plates are made using prison labour, earning (up to) $2 and hour.
• Victoria also proposes to use prison labour to pick fruit.

Shoutouts

• Play some Australia videogames! Untitled Goose Game, Hollow Knight or Armello are fantastic.
• Listen to two great podcast episodes on the Facebook news debacle: Banning Australia from this Machine Kills, and Lizzie O’Shea on Tech Won’t Save Us
• Listen the Pop Test ABC podcast.
• Read the Chaser and Matthew Davis’s rundown of LNP bullshit.

59 — Throw the Facebook at them (feat. Joanna Horton of Floodcast)

We're joined by Joanna Horton of Floodcast to discuss the political and media response to the Brittany Higgins story, the Facebook news ban and Kristina Kersher Keneally's posts.

Content warning: A chunk of this episode is spent discussing the Brittany Higgins story, which at its core is about sexual violence. We don’t discuss specifics of the incident itself, but do talk about the surrounding political context.

 

Good news

• Victoria is out of lockdown!
• Public drunkenness has been decriminalised in Victoria, after 30 year campaign.

Britney Higgins

• In 2019, Defense Minister staffer Brittany Higgins was allegedly raped in an office in Parliament house.
• Scott Morrison needed to have this explained to him by his wife.
• Political staffers have few workplace protections.
• There is absolutely no connection between drug use and a marble table being broken during a party at Tony Abbots office.
• The Full Story Guardian podcast on Brittany Higgins.
• Craig Kelly’s longtime office manager has stayed on, despite repeated allegations of grooming teenagers and having an AVO taken out against him.
• Oh, and the Family Court has been abolished as an independant body, after a long campaign by Pauline Hanson.
• Jacqui Lambie continues to be a problematic fav, blasting the family court merger.
• Lambie made a secret deal with the Liberals to secure her vote on medical evacuation of refugees.
• Former Motoring Enthusiast accidental Senator Ricky Muir was “forced into a corner” on asylum seekers.
• Scott Morrison doesn’t send his girls to government school, because he is uncomfortable with a course on “Building Respectful Relationships”.

Facebook

• Facebook has banned all links to news in Australia.
• Read Lizzie O’Shea’s article in Overland on the ban.
• The genocide in Myanmar was incited using Facebook.
• Facebook encouraged media organisations to start focusing on video content using faked metrics.

KKK news

• Kristina Kersher Keneally tweeted out a lie about the Greens opposing a motion to recognise Pregnancy & Infant Loss Remembrance Day.
• Greens Senator Janet Rice corrected her.
• Janet Rice’s article about the heart-wrenching decision to have a late-term abortion.

Actions

• Listen to Floodcast. It’s great. Follow them at @floodmediaAU on Twitter too.

 

58 — Electric root wagon

We're back in lockdown again, the government still loves fossil fuels (but hates workers) and hybrid cars are a trick to lock us into using petrol.

 

Victoria has the COVID again

• We’ve got this.
• Poor nebuliser guy.
• COVID spread from a quarantine hotel worker to their housemate who worked at an airport Brunettis.
• A man is stranded in the Spirit of Tasmania terminal.
• Behrouz Boochani — “The border is part of Australia and it reproduces at home”
• Scott Morrison says he won’t take over hotel quarantine.

Fossil fuel good, workers bad

• ExxonMobil has announced the closure of its Altona refinery.
• Labor minister for Climate Change Joel Fitzgibbon — “…we need to commission new opportunities to extract more crude oil”.
• Matt Canavan — “To rebuild our refinery capacity we have to find more oil”
• Matt Canavan says he would cross the floor to vote against a net zero target target by 2050.
• Michael McCormack — “We are not worried, or I’m certainly not worried, about what might happen in 30 years’ time”
• Barnaby Joyce — “Quite a high proportion will have passed away… that’s the only thing certain about 2050”
• Matt Canavan thinks that the government should “do whatever it takes” to keep the mining industry going.
• During the COVID pandemic, more than 17000 jobs have lost from universities.
• The United Workers Union recognises that fossil industry workers need a just transition to new work.

It’s hybridmatic

• Australia is very reliant on imports of petroleum from other countries.
• Angus Taylor, “Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction” really wants to lock Australia into using petrol, even with hybrid cars.
• The Prius is lumpy, sorry for perpetuating petro-masculinity.
• Electric cars are getting better and better as the energy grid gets cleaner.
• Labor went into the 2019 election with a plan to get to 50% electric vehicles by 2030. The Liberal party attacked them as wanting to “end the weekend” and “kill the ute”.
• We could’ve had an electric root van.

Hunting for vaccines

• Health Minister Greg Hunt has put Liberal party logo on announcements about vaccines.
• ABC’s Michael Roland asked Hunt a question on this. Hunt accused Roland of “identifying with the Left”.
• The ABC has given journalists notice they could be sacked if they Tweet wrong.
• in July 2020 Greg Hunt tweeted an infographic questioning the use of face masks.

Actions

• Listen to Auspol Snackpod’s episode on Craig Kelly.

 

 

 

 

57 — The new Kelly Gang sucks too

We chat about Australia's bushfire/covid/storm situation, then a deep dive into why exactly Eddie Maguire should quit (he did), followed by a check-in with cooked unit Craig Kelly.

 

Australia is on fire

• Perth has massive bushfires, with at least 86 homes lost.
• COVID lockdowns and evacuation orders make for confusing mixed messages.
• Fire, plague and storms.
• Kangaroo Island is on fire, threatening the little Pigmy Possum, which was feared lost after devastating the 2019-20 bushfires.

Eddie McGuire corner

• Eddie McGuire is a weird little freak with a long history in Australian media and sports. He is currently the president of the Collingwood football club.
• Former Collingwood player Héritier Lumumba’s complaints about the culture of racism at the football club sparked a report, which was finally leaked on February 1st (PDF Link).
• Read along with Tweet-thread horror of Eddie’s press conference.
• Eddie says Collingwood can’t be racist because the larger wing of the club has asian netball players.
• Around the time of the internal release of the report, Eddie Maguire announced his “retirement”.
• Eddie supported Collingwood football coach Nathan Buckley after he made insinuations about Héritier’s mental health.
• Premier Dan Andrews reckons Eddie stepping down is poor leadership.
• The Project had Héritier on to grill him on his racist treatment. They’ve since removed the episode.
• In 2017, a documentary about the racism that Héritier Lumumba has faced was released.
• Between the recording of this segment and the release of this episode, McGuire has quit.

Australia Open

• The Australia Open went into lockdown for a day.
• The Quarantine hotel workers has a party with 60 people to celebrate the end of Australian Open quarantine, sparking fears that the infected person caught or spread it there.

Craig Kelly

• Craig Kelly is big on Facebook, and is a totally cooked unit.
• Kelly went on conspiracy-addled celebrity chef Pete Evans’s internet show.
• Scott Morrison finally told Kelly to keep a lid on it.
• Labor member Ged Kearny called Kelly a “dangerous fool”.
• Labor’s Tanya Plibersek and Craig Kelly had a Parliament House corridor showdown.
• On the same day the Julia Gillard made her famous “misogyny” speech, she threw thousands of single mothers off parenting benefits and into poverty.
• Following a report into cross-burning nazi meetups in Australia, the Labor party moved a senate motion to condemn far-right extremism.
• After amendments, it was watered down to be completely meaningless. It was passed anyway.
• George Christensen posed with a gun, asked “greenie punks” if they’re feeling lucky, then called it a joke.
• Peter Dutton insists that ‘leftwing lunatics’ must be dealt with.

Shoutouts

• Shoutout to We Are Hughes, who trying to unseat Craig Kelly.
• Listen to a great interview with Héritier Lumumba on friend-of-the-podcast Vocal Minority, and read his interview in Junkee.
• Listen to Floodcast, it’s good.