(Image: The Australian Greens/Facebook)
(Image: The Australian Greens/Facebook)

Greens political party ranger Last week we lamented our reliance on Greens shitposting for weird political content. And they appeared to be happy to oblige us — producing this eye-catching monstrosity:

As an example of the deliberately bad political posting, this mock-up of the new members of Parliament is mildly amusing. As a reminder that the new cohort of Australia’s most progressive party contains two fewer people of colour than a kids show from the early ’90s, it’s either a lot funnier, or a lot less funny.

I Grant you Though it deprives us of reading the kind of insight that equates teal voters in Australia to Trump voters (which is true, as long as you ignore almost literally everything that defines and motivates each group), the news that Stan Grant has been appointed the new host of ABC’s flagship bad show Q+A is a good move, given its primary way of drumming up attention is through outrage. Grant passed that test earlier this year during a fill-in stint, turfing out a questioner some 20 minutes after the fact for apparently “advocating violence” in a question that, while based on a shaky premise, didn’t involve a clear call to violence.

And speaking of things people didn’t say, the potential for media attention won’t stop there. Remember back in 2017, when Grant wrote a piece interrogating how Australia commemorates the more horrifying ends of its history, inspired by debates in the UK and US about the statues that stay up and those that might come down? He explicitly did not call for Australia to pull down any memorials.

As an Indigenous man writing for the ABC, can we assume his work was critiqued in good faith by the conservative media? The Daily Telegraph cited the Taliban, Andrew Bolt checked in with Mao, NSW Liberal MP Peter Phelps went to Stalin, and Alan Jones made loaded asides about Grant going the way of Yassmin Abdel-Magied. So we’ve got a lot of good and worthwhile stuff to look forward to discussing during his tenure.

Howard said: “There’s only one place I know” The new John Howard library in UNSW Canberra celebrates his many achievements in government — including a section of his great leadership on gun control. This is one area in which we in the bunker would agree Howard deserves a great deal of credit. But if the fact that this is housed in Australia’s military academy isn’t enough, the exhibit itself is sponsored by weapons manufacturer Raytheon.

We note the exhibit also features a reference to the deployment of Australian troops in East Timor in 1999. We look forward to a further exhibit crediting the work Howard did in helping to rebuild our devestated and impoverished neighbour — perhaps Woodside could sponsor?

Propaganda watch RT, the Kremlin-backed and certifiably insane TV network formerly called Russia Today, is setting up its first Africa bureau. The propaganda outfit has been subject to bans in the European Union, the US and Australia, but President Vladimir Putin seeks to entrench support in a continent that’s largely refrained from criticising his invasion of Ukraine. An earlier, pre-invasion plan centred on a Nairobi office, but that appears to have stalled. The office will be headed by Paula Slier, a South African broadcaster who ran RT’s Jerusalem bureau, and will put RT in competition with both the BBC and the China Global Television Network.

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