Matthew Guy Twitter block
Victorian Liberal leader Matthew Guy (Image: AAP/James Ross/Crikey)

Just a Guy standing in front of a girl, blocking her on Twitter So the clown car that is the Victorian Liberal Party has returned seafood aficionado Matthew Guy to the leadership, presumably working on the premise that someone people have heard of (even if it’s almost exclusively for bad reasons) is an improvement on someone whose own reflection has to quickly google him to be sure who he is.

Apart from chowing on lobster with someone allegedly belonging to the one profession that you can rhyme with lobster in a headline — while running a “tough on crime” campaign aimed squarely at young men of “African appearance” — and overseeing the tawdry practice of reneging on a pair on Good Friday, and costing Victoria millions with a botched rezoning as planning minister, Guy is also well known for blocking on Twitter people who bring any of those things up.

He’s been at it for years. And it’s not high-profile, out-of-touch media elites — just ordinary citizens. Indeed his approach is incredibly scattergun. Some of Australia’s most creative swearers have ruefully noted they’ve escaped, while ordinary people who claim to have never interacted with him (or in some cases heard of him) are wondering why they are blocked.

ASX shuffles the deck There are big changes coming to the ASX top 50. Energy group and fossil-fuel fossil AGL will be dropped from September 20, along with a2Milk and Ampol (nee Caltex Australia). Replacing them will be Resmed, the sleep and ventilator group, Tabcorp and Endeavour (the grog and pubs demerged from Woolworths).

AGL shares are down more than 70% in the past three years; a2Milk shares are down 65% in the past 12 months. Ampol shares are up13% but it seems to have been forced out because Endeavour’s value is almost twice that of Ampol’s $6.5 billion.

AGL’s departure is because of the collapse in its market value as renewables have got cheaper, driving down the price of power, all of that happening without any sort of energy/climate policy from the Coalition government. AGL is going to split into two — one company to hold the coal-fired power companies (called Accel), which will presumably get little or no interest from investors, although if the half-arsed idea to pay it to continue to produce uneconomic power goes ahead, there will be some value.  

What’s the, uh, go here? So there was a weird subplot to emerge from yesterday’s flip-flop from singer Guy Sebastian on vaccines. He backed away from the music industry’s Vax The Nation campaign, presumably taking a leaf out of the Murray Hewitt approach to pop stardom — that is, you don’t release an anti-AIDS song in case you alienate the pro-AIDS portion of your fanbase.

It transpired that Guy’s brother Jeremy apparently has an extremely odd tendency regarding people who criticise the singer. Rapper Urthboy and several others report that Jeremy had gone on to their Instagram accounts and “liked” every photo featuring their children… apparently as a deeply sinister intimidation tactic? He has since deleted his account.

Trump’s continuing influence He is gone but he is not gone. The influence of former US president Donald Trump on the global right lingers, and can be seen most vividly in Brazil. President (and Trump fan) Jair Bolsonaro is being trounced in the polls for next year’s election. He has already warned that the election — not due until October — is “rigged”. He claims Brazil’s electronic voting system is susceptible to fraud. He’s attacked Brazil’s Supreme Court and is clamping down his clampdown on the media and other entities.

The fear is, as The Daily Beast reports, that this ends up at its logical conclusion: a riot along the lines of the January 6 attack on the Capitol building.