Bulldozers, boys and bonkers conspiracies — what a glorious, exhausting few weeks on the trail

OK, first off, here’s what I reckon. The “bulldozer” thing a double-fake? Scott Morrison looked like he chose his words badly as he “confessed” to being… a forceful and single-minded machine, capable of sweeping all before him, with no reverse gear. Labor leapt on it.

“Bulldozers knock things down, I’m a builder!” Albanese said in that slightly boyish voice of his. In other words, “I futilely pile up stuff the bulldozer annihilates, without pausing”. Was the target men in outer-suburban marginals who like gyms, supplements, Jason Statham movies and the UAP? Are the Libs now maxing the gender gap, having given up on women? Did Labor do exactly what the Morrison wonks wanted them to do? Again?

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Planet Janet Albrechtsen came back into view for the final week and what a celestial sight it was. The teal movement produced in Planet Janet what was either a strategic zen blatt or a genuine conniption: the teal movement was succeeding because dumb middle-class women would follow anything with pretty colours, and needed to have some sense rattled into them before these airheads destroy the Liberal Party that Robert Menzies founded — founded through the radical move of, er, giving 50% organisational power in key areas to women, over the objections of many of his colleagues. No word from Planet Janet on how you’d characterise an airhead lawyer who married well and got a newspaper column from one of her uni mates. The column is the most extraordinarily misogynistic thing I’ve ever read.

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Greg Sheridan is to be credited for his willingness to appear on ABC shows like The Drum, because it gives viewers a chance to see in full flight a man capable of talking himself into anything. It was of course the teals and Greens who got him going on how undemocratic the whole preferential system is. “Adam Bandt first got elected on 18% of the vote!” No Greg, he didn’t. He got 22% of the primary vote in 2007 when he failed to unseat Lindsay Tanner, and 36% in 2010, when he replaced him — the latter being the sort of result the preferential system is exactly designed for, to allow for complex voting intentions — in this case, Liberal scalliwaggery. (Bandt’s predecessor, Gemma Pinnell, took 18% in 2004. Was that it, Greg?).

A moment’s thought would have told Greg that victory from an 18% primary requires a field of at least four equally viable candidates — (50%-1) + (18%+1) + 16% + 16%, with 100% preference swap between the last three, and more likely six or seven non-trivial candidates. But logic is not Greg’s strong point when his hatred of the secular world the Greens represent comes in.

In the same show, Greg claimed to have “praised the Greens”, when they took positions critical of China in the Howard era. Well, he did, but grudgingly, and only, as we recall, after we goaded him on it. The right didn’t say boo when Howard addressed the Chinese Communist Party cadre training school in Beijing in 2006, or handed over (or was this a nightmare?) parliamentary security to China during an official visit. Hopefully, it’s this capacity for selective memory that will be what does the right in. Hopefully.

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Looking over my notebooks, I see I have spoken to 241 people about their voting intentions in this campaign. That’s equal to 24.1 phillipcooreys, the by now standard measure of sample significance.

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Come on, the kid in the soccer match? Another plant! Boris Johnson did it in 2015. It’s obviously a thing. The child is a crisis actor, a little person from the Showcast directory, a hologram? In the public eye Albo becomes the small boy, ScoMo the bulldozer. See! See!? OK, the kid was real, it was an accident. Have it your way. But…

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The campaign has raised again the question Melburnians love to ask: what’s going on inside The Age? The paper is obviously right-shifted, but it’s subtle-ish, since so many of its contributors now seem to be mere sycophants to power, who take a line that slants neatly in the direction of the Maguire/Chessell/Costello axis, and onto the Morrison axis itself.

Editor Gay Alcorn’s occasional “letters to readers” are nicely turned examples of that lost genre, the hostage letter dictated by captors: “I am being treated well — Ms Maguire’s and Mr Chessell’s demands are reasonable and I urge that they be met”, etc. Resign, Gay, while you still have something of your past reputation and dignity. You’re only there for them to buy credibility with a remnant left-liberal audience, your first-rate editorial talents notwithstanding. Resign and denounce. It’s the greatest and last service you can do for honest media in Australia. In Sydney, Nine papers have Bevan Shields; sadly, in Melbourne, they have a human shield. 

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A highlight of that of course was Chris Uhlmann’s full-page whine/defence of Nine’s second leaders debate, an event so universally dubbed a “shitshow” that they should just rename it that for the catch-up streaming, so people can find it more easily. Was it the fault of poor planning, tabloid instincts, incompetent chairing? No, it was the fact that we live in a post-Christian society apparently. Those Frankfurt School types again! First windfarms, now this. Still, thank God you’ve got a 170-year-old newspaper, once hailed as one of the 10 best in the world, to act as a PR bulletin for your TV channel.

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On that note, we would like to apologise for the use of the term “axis” in the above section, since the word “axis” can clearly only and ever refer to Nazism and the Holocaust, and we, like so many, have woefully misused the greatest crime in history for cheap political gain. We await the judgment of ever-Coalition friendly ADL director Dvir Abramovich, a man who has so cheapened the accusation of anti-Semitism that he can now effectively get it for you wholesale. 

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On that note, sue them, Simon, sue them! Sue everyone for the “angel of death” = Holocaust slander libel. With all these terrible libel suits around, this would be a righteous one. It might just be the most important thing that happens. Sue News Corp, sue Dave Sharma, sue every News Corp journo individually, sue everyone political who retweeted it. Drown them in legal discovery. Put the fear of death into journos content to pump out propaganda, until they roll over and give a public account of how that propaganda is constructed inside News Corp. Don’t hesitate, don’t let em off.

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Hanson with COVID? Planned. Unemployment at 3.9%? All 4000 people were hired by a Coalition front group I’m betting. At this point, if Scott Morrison, doing a last-minute sweep in North Tasmania, shoots himself in the eye with a speargun, I will believe it is designed to capture the all-important pirate demographic. I will not be assuaged until Saturday night, when it is all over, and Jenny backs it in.