Open Thread – Weekend 10 June 2023


The Master Painter, Jan Verhas, 1876

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Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:32 am

Muddy!

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:35 am

Muddy.

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:35 am

Nation of Muddy.

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:36 am

Yeah, I’m over it now.

Barking Toad
Barking Toad
June 10, 2023 12:38 am

muddy who?

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:43 am

Muhhhhddy.

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 12:45 am

It’s so worth sacrificing sleep for this.

Viva
Viva
June 10, 2023 1:00 am

Just read Fiona Brown’s account of the destruction of her career in the Oz.

She joins a lengthening queue including Bruce Lehrman, Shane Drumgold, Katy Gallagher, Scott Morrison, Linda Reynolds with more to come.

BritKnee Trembler is a doomsday machine.

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Brittany, Bruce and the โ€˜betrayalโ€™ of the invisible woman
Fiona Brown feels betrayed. First by Brittany Higgins. Then by her own party. The forgotten victim in the sorry mess of the Higgins/Lehrmann rape saga is finally ready to have her say.
By JANET ALBRECHTSEN and STEPHEN RICE

Fiona Brown feels betrayed. First by Brittany Higgins. Then by her own party. Then, most painfully, by a man she respected greatly: the former prime minister of Australia, Scott Morrison.

Brown is the forgotten victim in the sorry mess of the Higgins/Lehrmann rape saga, ruthlessly pursued by Labor to bolster its claim of a political cover-up, cast aside by her Liberal Party colleagues when she became, to them, a liability.

It left her, as she puts it, โ€œthe dead carcass on the road โ€“ you drive by and wonder what happened to itโ€.

The end of Brownโ€™s long and distinguished career of public service arrived unexpectedly, on the evening of February 15, 2021, when she sat down with colleagues in the press office at Parliament House to watch Lisa Wilkinsonโ€™s much-hyped interview with Higgins.

One fellow staffer had warned her earlier: โ€œItโ€™s going to be brutal.โ€
โ€œI thought โ€“ what did they know that I didnโ€™t know?โ€

She had no idea she was about to take a starring role as a chief ยฌvillain โ€“ second only to the alleged rapist โ€“ in the story Higgins told. But Bruce Lehrmann wasnโ€™t named in the program. Brown was.

โ€˜Why is she doing this?โ€™

Higgins claimed Brown knew she had been raped in the office of then-minister Linda Reynolds; that Brown had viewed the CCTV footage from that night; that Brown had refused half a dozen ยฌrequests from Higgins to see the footage; that Brown had not supported Higgins after that night, and in fact offered Higgins a โ€œpayoutโ€ to get her out of the way in the lead up to the election.
Brown was dumbstruck.

โ€œThe first time my name comes up, I go, โ€˜Oh, thatโ€™s a bit uncomfortableโ€™; the second time; the third time, and Iโ€™m starting to feel really sick; and then the fourth time and all these things that are being said, Iโ€™m just going โ€˜what the f..k is going on here? This is not what happened. Why is she doing this?โ€™

โ€œIt was like standing in front of a firing squad. And it was the day that my life ended, as I knew it. I just broke down and my colleagues around me had to witness me fall apart.

โ€œThe worst thing you can say about a woman is she walked past another womanโ€™s rape.โ€
None of it was true, Brown says, not even the claim she had seen โ€“ or could somehow obtain โ€“ CCTV footage of Higgins and Lehrmann in Parliament House on the night.

โ€œI never saw it. She never asked me for it. And even if you asked me today, how would I get it? I would have no idea.โ€

A colleague insisted on driving Brown home that night, โ€œfor which I was very grateful, because I thought I could drive but, ยฌfrankly, I would have killed myself or killed somebodyโ€.
Brown has kept her silence ever since.

When the politics of the rape claim and the cover-up allegation rocked the Morrison government, she remained quiet. Though she was targeted in parliament and in the media for months on end, she didnโ€™t speak up.

She assured police that she would not speak to the media as she didnโ€™t want to undermine a prosecution. They thanked her for that co-operation with the prosecutorial process. That judicial process is now over after the DPP abandoned a proposed re-trial, citing Higginsโ€™ mental health.
During more than six hours of interviews with The Weekend Australian, Brown asks only one thing: that we view her story not through the lens of today, or of the day two years ago when Higgins went public with her claim of rape, but, rather, as she watched it ยฌunfold four years ago.

โ€œI went to work one day. This is what happened to me. Iโ€™m not here to tell you what to think. Iโ€™m not here to defend. Iโ€™m not here to protect. Iโ€™m here just to tell you what happened to me when I went to work one day.โ€

โ€˜Security breachโ€™

Monday, March 25, 2019, was like any other busy day in the Parliament House office of defence ยฌindustry minister Linda Reynolds, as far as Brown can recall now.
She was in Reynoldsโ€™ office on a three-week stint, on loan from the Prime Ministerโ€™s office to help the newly appointed minister ยฌsettle in.

She knows she must have spoken to Higgins that day because she signed and certified a copy of her driverโ€™s licence for some ยฌadministrative paperwork.
โ€œSo she sees me and she says nothing, nothing,โ€ says Brown, shaking her head, still bewildered more than four years on from the moment that changed her life.

It wasnโ€™t until the next day, at 11.45am, that Brown got a call from Lauren Barons, an official with the Department of Finance โ€“ the agency responsible for Parliament House staffing arrangements โ€“ ยฌinforming her that there had been a serious security breach in the ministerโ€™s office at the weekend.

There was little detail. Lehrmann and Higgins had made an unauthorised access of the office in the early hours of Saturday. Lehrmann had then left; Higgins had later been found naked on a couch by a security guard.
โ€œI said, โ€˜Oh my God, what ยฌhappened?โ€™ Lauren said, โ€˜I donโ€™t know.โ€™ She said, โ€˜this is what youโ€™ve got to do. These are serious security breaches.โ€™โ€

The situation was outside anything either Brown or Barons had dealt with, but Brown followed the instructions she had been given.
She called Lehrmann in first.

The young staffer had previously committed a security breach over the mishandling of a sensitive document and was due to leave the job in coming days.
Tell me what happened, she asked. Why were you here? She recalls the conversation:

Lehrmann: I came to have a whisky.
Brown: Why would you come back for whisky at that time of night?
Lehrmann: Ah, people do it all the time.
Brown: Ah, no, I donโ€™t think so.

โ€œWhat was going on?โ€ she says now. โ€œI wasnโ€™t sure, I didnโ€™t have anything at that point.โ€
Lehrmann said the pair were not intoxicated.
Brown thought it was possible theyโ€™d had sex, but she had no idea of their relationship.

โ€œIt was none of my business,โ€ she says. โ€œFor all I knew they were dating. I donโ€™t get into peopleโ€™s personal relationships โ€ฆ Iโ€™d only been there 10 days.โ€
She says she was trying to use neutral, non-leading questions, concerned that probing into their private life could be used against her. Brown says Barons had been very clear, over the phone, in her instructions: โ€œYou canโ€™t put things in an accusatory tone to someone โ€“ youโ€™ve got to let them tell you what happened.โ€

โ€œI invite you to go back to that time frame,โ€ Brown says now, โ€œnot two years later, after The Project interview. What I was dealing with was, I had a HR issue and a disciplinary issue.

โ€œI told Bruce I was disappointed he didnโ€™t disclose after-hours access to me because, of course, Iโ€™d seen him earlier. Heโ€™d said that that was wrong and he apologised.โ€

Lehrmann left the office ยฌimmediately. โ€œAnd then I took a few deep breaths and called Brittany in. I think she knew something was afoot, because when she walks in, sheโ€™s all very ha ha, and then she sees the paperwork on my desk. The employee assistance program (EAP) and the ministerial statement standards.โ€

Brown asked Higgins if she would like someone with her. ยฌHiggins said no.
Brown began: โ€œI understand you came in after hours. Who did you come with? What did you do? Where did you go?โ€

Higgins told her she had been out drinking and recalled coming in through the Parliament House security checkpoint.

โ€œI remember her saying she woke with her dress up around her. Now that was different to Lauren Barons telling me she was naked. And I said: โ€˜Is everything ยฌall right? Has something ยฌhappened?โ€™โ€

โ€œNo, Iโ€™m responsible for what I drink and my actions,โ€ she recalls Higgins saying. โ€œSo I took a lot of comfort from what she was saying. Sheโ€™d been on a night out. There was no ยฌallegation.

โ€œAfter I talked to her, I said, โ€˜Look, you need to remind yourself of your responsibilities here.โ€™ I said, โ€˜Remember, if youโ€™re unhappy with something you have our support.โ€™โ€

Again, Brown thought it was possible theyโ€™d had sex but didnโ€™t feel she could make the ยฌaccusation directly.

โ€œI would have thought that was inappropriate. Like, they could complain about me, saying: how dare you say that to me.

โ€œI have a responsibility to both. I canโ€™t put ideas in anyoneโ€™s head. All I can do is provide a supportive environment. Thatโ€™s why I kept using the phrase: has anything happened that you didnโ€™t want to ยฌhappen?โ€

โ€˜Call the policeโ€™

Brown agrees she wanted Higgins to understand the seriousness of the security breach.
โ€œThis wasnโ€™t a playground. This wasnโ€™t a sandpit, this was the defence industry ministerโ€™s office and had we won the election and she chose to stay on, she had the opportunity to work in a defence ministerโ€™s office. Thatโ€™s pretty ยฌserious shit. And the thing about young people in these jobs is that there are two types: those that take it very seriously and those who get drunk on power, and it corrupts them.โ€ Lehrmann and Higgins were both in the latter category, she says.

โ€œBruce was a very hard worker, very smart. But, you know, a little drunk on the power, and immature; you know, the responsibility was disproportionate.
โ€œBut what we were finding is this bracket creep of young smart people who had enormous ability being given classifications beyond their ability to maturely deal with that and cope with that.โ€

Brown reported the meetings to Reynolds, who was travelling.
Wednesday passed without ยฌincident. Brown checked in with Higgins that she was OK and Higgins told her she was accessing the EAP program to which Brown had referred her.
But Higgins was away from the office much of the day.

โ€œI was always chasing after her like I was her mother,โ€ she says. โ€œI texted her, I rang her, I checked in with her.โ€

Brown was again following ยฌadvice from the department not to harass, giving Higgins โ€œspace and respectโ€.

On the Thursday Higgins came into Brownโ€™s office to return the signed statement of ministerial standards.

โ€œSo then I said to her, โ€˜Thanks very much. By the way, weโ€™re ยฌalways here. If anything comes to mind, you want to talk about anything.โ€™ She says thanks. And then sheโ€™s walking out the door and she just pivots around and says, โ€˜Oh, I remember him on top of me.โ€™

โ€œAnd I thought โ€˜f..kโ€™. And I said, โ€˜What?โ€™

โ€œI said, โ€˜Are you all right?โ€™ And sheโ€™s just staring at me. And I said, โ€˜Did something happen that you didnโ€™t want to have happen?โ€™ I get up and walk over and I say: โ€˜Do you want to sit down? Can I get you a cup of tea?โ€™ No. โ€˜A glass of water?โ€™ No. โ€˜Would you like to make a complaint?โ€™ And she shakes her head to say no and I go, โ€˜OK, what do I do with this?โ€™

โ€œThatโ€™s when she says โ€˜thanksโ€™. She said she was taking the counselling and her father was coming down for the weekend. So I expected I would get a call if something had happened.โ€

Brown told Reynolds what Higgins had said. Reynolds rang Brown and told her go to the police to make a report. Brown thought that was untenable: โ€œAm I supposed to go and accuse a young man of a criminal offence without the female telling me she was raped?โ€

The loyal public servant was willing to put her career on the line, and refuse a ministerโ€™s direction, rather than report a rape to the police without permission from Higgins.
โ€œI rang Lauren. She said, โ€˜No, you canโ€™t do that. Youโ€™ve got to give the woman agency. Itโ€™s her right as to making a report to police.โ€™

โ€œI said to Barons: โ€˜I might have to come to talk to you about my termination this afternoon. In my mind, she [Reynolds] was within her rights to sack me.โ€

But Barons confirmed in an email that Brown was taking ยฌโ€œappropriateโ€ steps to protect Higgins and that โ€œultimately any decision as to whether to lodge a police report or pursue any other form of complaint relating to this matter would be a personal choice of the person involvedโ€.

Instead, on Friday afternoon, Brown rang Higgins to ask her if she wanted Brown to make a ยฌreport to police on her behalf. Higgins said no.

The following week, on April 1, Reynolds and Brown met with Higgins.
Brown had assured Higgins that Reynolds was โ€œlovely, really niceโ€, and wanted to check on the young staffer. Even though Higgins had still not made any allegation of rape or assault, Reynolds suggested that the young woman speak to the police.

Brown found the phone number of the Australian Federal Police based in Parliament House and located the offices โ€“ in the basement, a rabbit warren of a place. It was Brown who phoned them and set up the meeting.

โ€œI go down there, I find out where they are, I go back and I say [to Higgins] โ€˜Iโ€™ll come with you โ€˜cause itโ€™s really hard to find. Would you like me to go in with you to have a support person?โ€™ No. โ€˜Would you like me to wait outside?โ€™ No. โ€˜Would you like to call me and Iโ€™ll come back and get you?โ€™ No. โ€˜Could you let me know when youโ€™re back?โ€™ Yes.

โ€œThen, about an hour and a half had passed, she hadnโ€™t let me know. So I was panicked. Where is she? Is she all right? She was back in the office.โ€

When Brown asked how Higgins was, she said she was fine.

Two years later, in court, Higgins would say that days after this meeting, on Thursday, April 4, she went into an office bathroom for hours, crying from anxiety. That wasnโ€™t true. She was at a long lunch, a farewell to her old boss Steven Ciobo.

The looming federal election soon consumed Brownโ€™s attention. Higgins was asked if she wanted to work from the Gold Coast or go to Perth for the election campaign where Reynolds, a WA senator, would spend her time. Higgins decided to head to Perth, taking the white cocktail dress from the night of the alleged rape with her.

On June 7, 2019, after the ยฌre-election of the Morrison government, Higgins sent Brown a message: โ€œI wanted to say this in person but โ€“ I cannot overstate how much Iโ€™ve valued your support and advice throughout this period. Youโ€™ve been absolutely incredible and Iโ€™m so appreciative.โ€

The Project bombshell

Brown asks us to imagine her ยฌdisbelief and devastation when, less than two years after that warm thank you, Higgins appeared on national television to claim that, not only was she raped, but that Brown was complicit in the crime.

On The Project interview, Higgins said that Brown had walked past the rape of a young woman, that Brown had tried to cover it up, that Brown had tried to offer commonwealth funds to get Higgins out of the picture in the lead up to an election.

Shocking claims against any person, let alone a woman like Brown, who herself has experienced the deep trauma of domestic violence in a previous relationship.

โ€œHow could you think it was OK to do that to another human being?โ€ she asks. โ€œIโ€™m a human being. Iโ€™m actually someone who cared for her. I worried about her.โ€

Brown can only guess at why Higgins chose to make these claims.

โ€œShe had to have a villain โ€“ apart from the rape in the office story โ€“ on the political conspiracy side that story needed a villain. She needed to present stuff as facts in order to justify or convey her feelings โ€“ and thatโ€™s why she did this to me โ€“ so I was the villain.โ€

Despite a long and distinguished career, many people outside of politics had never set eyes on Brown. She had worked for Ian Temby QC at the NSW ICAC, then moved into senior roles in the Greiner government, then federal politics advising then immigration minister Philip Ruddock.

After a stint working at Ernst & Young in London, Brown returned to politics, working with Arthur Sinodinos in John Howardโ€™s office, then becoming chief of staff to Sinodinos when he became a senator. Brownโ€™s most ยฌrecent role was director of operations for prime minister Scott Morrison.
When the rape scandal broke, the media couldnโ€™t locate a single photo or social media post of the understated, highly respected Brown.

Brown dealt with the fallout from the accusations the only way she knew how: she kept turning up for work. โ€œI had no other way to communicate that I had done nothing wrong. I was just trying to survive.โ€

She describes the relentless trauma of what was unfolding around her in the aftermath of the rape accusations โ€“ TVs on 24/7 in the office, meetings behind closed doors where she knew she was being talked about, newspapers, radio covering it daily. Brown didnโ€™t keep her mental health struggles private.

She asked for help from Morrisonโ€™s chief of staff, John Kunkel, and others. She started seeing a therapist.

Brown found herself a pariah in her own office. โ€œNo one came out and disputed Higginsโ€™ claims โ€“ I couldnโ€™t, I wasnโ€™t an MP.โ€

She wanted to take legal action against Ten for defamation but was told by senior people in PMO that a legal claim would just make the story bigger. And the #MeToo movement was in full swing.

โ€œNo one wanted to go against the movement,โ€ she says. โ€œIt was such a febrile environment that for me to come out against Higgins โ€“ I was already being pilloried. Theyโ€™d drawn the PMO into this and if I went to the media I would have exacerbated it.

โ€œThey didnโ€™t think it was a good idea. Itโ€™ll run out of steam in two weeks,โ€ they told her.
It didnโ€™t. Brownโ€™s career was disappearing before her eyes.

Work responsibilities were taken from her with no explanation. Some ministers wouldnโ€™t even say hello.

She recalls former health minister Greg Hunt as a notable exception. โ€œHe was good โ€“ he genuinely cared how I was.โ€

To her surprise, no one came to her after The Project aired to ask if Higgins had told her she had been raped.

Certainly not the prime minister, she says.

โ€˜Weโ€™ve spoken, right?โ€™

Three days after The Project ยฌinterview, Brown says the bullets kept coming. Only this time from the prime minister.

โ€œI remember him coming back after question time on that Thursday โ€ฆ and for the first time he said: โ€˜How are you?โ€โ€™ Brown recalls.

โ€œHe has never sat down or even walked by and had a proper discussion with me after the issue ยฌexploded. The most discussion I ever had with him was in that -moment. That was the extent of it, a two-minute conversation: โ€˜Hi Fiona, how are you?โ€™

โ€œI said, โ€˜Oh, itโ€™s pretty tough.โ€™ And I apologised to him. I said, โ€˜Iโ€™m sorry theyโ€™re using me to get to you. Iโ€™m really sorry about that. But she never, never told me.

โ€œAnd then the only thing he says in relation to this matter ever is: โ€˜Weโ€™ve spoken.โ€™ Thatโ€™s it.
โ€œโ€˜Weโ€™ve spoken, havenโ€™t weโ€™.โ€ And then he walked off.

Earlier that afternoon, in question time, in response to questions from Anthony Albanese as to whether Morrison had spoken to Brown about threatening Higginsโ€™ job, and not supporting her, Morrison told parliament that โ€œI have had these conversations with the member of staff. Iโ€™m happy to indicate I have had conversations about the support provided by the member of my staff now. I have discussed with her those matters.โ€

A day or so later, Brown read Hansard. โ€œThat was it. I realised at that moment that I was collateral damage.โ€

Brown made a note to herself, once she read Hansard and ยฌrealised precisely what the prime minister had said, given that he had never met with her about these events, โ€œI was devastated. I felt grubby.โ€
โ€œCould you imagine how it felt? I thought he genuinely came by to check how I was. I hadnโ€™t really heard question time. And then when he came by, I was like, oh my God, heโ€™s asking how I am. And then that comment triggered me and I went, huh?โ€

Brown says she told many ยฌpeople, including Kunkel, โ€œheโ€™s never spoken to meโ€.

Morrison told The Weekend Australian: โ€œI understood my statement to be accurate to the House. I regularly saw Ms Brown in the office and would ask how she was going. Specifics of ยฌmatters relating to the incident were the subject of many other processes that I did not seek to interfere with.โ€
Morrison said he accepted that Brown may have had a different expectation about what such a conversation should have entailed, hence her recollection.

โ€œI had not sat down with Ms Brown over these issues in the same way as I had with Ms Higgins,โ€ he says. โ€œI note the latter meeting was arranged at Ms Higginsโ€™ request. I meant no disrespect or insensitivity to Ms Brown, as there were many competing ยฌissues I had to address as prime minister.
โ€œMs Brown continued to do an outstanding job in my office during a very stressful period and I am very appreciative of her contribution and professionalism.โ€

Brown says she had a mental breakdown.
โ€œIt was like a pillow over your face,โ€ she says.

She says she didnโ€™t keep those mental health struggles private. She asked people in her office for help. In her darkest moment she tried to take her own life.

She can remember the day she walked down a path to the beach.
โ€œI sat on the bench there. It was like a black hole, a space, thereโ€™s nothing,โ€ she says.

โ€œI had decided I would swim out. I figured that if I drowned or got taken by a shark, it would be less traumatic for my family โ€“ they wouldnโ€™t have to live with all the guilt that I killed myself.

โ€œBut a surfer came by and said are you OK? He grabbed my hand and then took me in.

โ€œI sat on the beach and just bawled my eyes out.โ€

But Brown returned to the ยฌoffice. โ€œIf I left I thought they wouldnโ€™t see me as a person. Thatโ€™s why Iโ€™m so hurt by John [Kunkel]. I asked John, can you help me? I humiliated myself and said, can you help me? I watched other people get help from [from PMO] into new jobs. I didnโ€™t ยฌexpect to be an ambassador, I would have been an EA somewhere else.โ€

But Brown was not helped into a new job.

Why did her own work colleagues, right up to the prime minister, let her down so badly?
โ€œTheyโ€™re all fearful, theyโ€™re all scared. Everyone was out for themselves. Because no one ยฌwanted to be Fiona Brown.โ€

A year later, still turning up to work each day, the senior staffer would face another earthquake.

The PMโ€™s apology

Brown wanted to go to the chamber on February 8, 2022.
It was the first sitting day and the prime minister was going to make a statement, as recommended in the Jenkins Review, to ยฌacknowledge the harassment, bullying and other poor behaviour to women in parliament.

Brown told colleagues: โ€œIโ€™d like to be there for that apology. I think that applies to me.โ€ She was told it was a bad idea, and she knew that. The media would have lapped up the image of her and Higgins watching the PM.

She walked around to the press office instead and watched as the prime minister apologised to ยฌHiggins. โ€œIโ€™m sorry. We are sorry,โ€ he said. โ€œI am sorry to Ms Higgins for the terrible things that took place here.โ€

Brown was gobsmacked. The PM had not just thrown out the presumption of innocence for a man accused of rape. He had thrown her under the bus โ€œand run over several timesโ€ when he effectively sided with Higginsโ€™ claims about her mistreatment by Brown and Reynolds.

โ€œI walked around to Kunkelโ€™s office and I said to him: โ€˜This is a very sad day in Australiaโ€™s history.โ€™ And he just looks at me. I didnโ€™t mean him personally, but I said: โ€˜Youโ€™ve turned the parliament into a kangaroo court. Youโ€™ve just sentenced a young man for a crime that has not been prosecuted or proven.โ€™

โ€œI just stood there, then I ยฌwalked out. He said nothing.

โ€œIt was one of the many times I went into the visitorsโ€™ bathroom, locked myself in and cried.
โ€œHe [the PM] had sentenced me without even talking to me. I was crushed. I was sentenced for being the perpetrator, ignoring a rape.โ€

Brown was equally distressed when Morrison met with Higgins. Brown had arrived at the prime ministerial offices in Sydney that day โ€“ and was told not to stay. The PM was meeting ยฌHiggins there.
Brown left the office.

โ€œI watched it on the news,โ€ she says. โ€œCould you just imagine what the feeling was like that your boss gives someone else the time of day, but he doesnโ€™t give you the time of day?โ€
If there was any small comfort for Brown in the days ahead, it was that Lehrmannโ€™s trial was coming up and she had been called as a witness.

She would at last get a chance to tell her story.

The trial

True to form, Brown entered the ACT Supreme Court far from the heaving media pack, around the back, from Vernon Circle, Canberraโ€™s famous ring road.
She took the stand in courtroom Number 3 at 10.41am on ยฌOctober 11.

Over the course of the day, until she was excused as a witness just after 2pm, the senior staffer would not be given the chance to counter the most serious allegations against her.

Brown could at least set the ยฌrecord straight about the CCTV footage when asked during cross-examination by Steven Whybrow whether she had ever seen the footage of Higgins walking into Parliament House in the early hours of March 23, 2019.

Brown was emphatic. โ€œIโ€™ve never seen the footage.โ€

Did the CCTV footage ever come up in conversation? โ€œNo. Never.โ€

In yet another twist, Higgins would see the footage before Brown, when AFP Detective Superintendent Scott Moller agreed to show her it after her persistent requests in the lead up to the trial.

Brown saw the controversial footage for the first time when it was shown on the Seven Networkโ€™s Spotlight interview with Lehrmann last Sunday night.

The CCTV footage shows Higgins smiling and skipping through the corridor after she has gone through security, with little sign of the high level of drunkenness she had claimed.

The trial also allowed Brown to explain her support for Higgins. She recounted how she asked Higgins during the first meeting: โ€œAre you OK? Has something happened that you didnโ€™t want to happen?โ€

Just before the trial paused for lunch, Brown broke down in tears when Whybrow read out the text message that Higgins had sent her former boss thanking her for her support.

After Brown was excused, and the jury left the room, Whybrow told the Chief Justice that ยฌHiggins had deleted the text from her phone.

Brown says hearing Higginsโ€™ text, recognising her support for the young woman, was a ยฌโ€œreminderโ€ of that time compared to where Brown found herself 2ยฝ years later, portrayed and persecuted as a villain.

โ€œIt was jarring, it was so ยฌobvious that the chasm between the two [periods in her life] was so deep,โ€ she says.

When Higgins returned to the stand, on October 14, having a break for mental health reasons, she told the jury that Brown and Reynolds said โ€œthey would pay me out the entirety of the election to go to the Gold Coast, but that โ€ฆ I would never have a job againโ€.

Brown was distressed by what she says was a false assertion by Higgins that she had been induced by an offer of public funds by Brown. โ€œI felt that was an -accusation of corruption.โ€

But once again, Brown was ยฌdenied the ability to correct the ยฌrecord. She emailed the DPPโ€™s ยฌoffice that same day, pointing out that she had been misrepresented by Higgins. Brown wanted her to be recalled. She didnโ€™t ยฌreceive a reply.

Six months later, the Sofronoff Inquiry would hear that Brownโ€™s email pointing out the discrepancy was never disclosed to ยฌWhybrow, meaning the defence was not given the chance to recall Brown.

During the board of inquiry into the ACT justice systemโ€™s handling of the Lehrmann/Higgins matter, Whybrow described Brown as โ€œthe most important witness in this case because sheโ€™s the only person that had taken contemporaneous notes of what happenedโ€.

Worse was to come for Brown. During his closing remarks, the DPP used Brownโ€™s breakdown in the witness box against her, implying some kind of guilt.

Higgins had every reason to fear political forces conspiring against her, the DPP told the jury. The implication was that Brown had something to hide.

Brown watched reports of the DPPs closing on live feeds in the media.

โ€œHe just sought to discredit me in every way,โ€ she says. โ€œWhen I heard that statement, I felt like another person had thrown me under the bus and I didnโ€™t think there was much left of me by that stage.โ€

She wasnโ€™t invested in Higgins or Lehrmann โ€“ โ€œIโ€™d always seen myself as Switzerland. I just wanted the truth โ€“ I just wanted to be a good witness. I wanted to do the right thing.โ€

Brown felt so let down by how the DPP behaved towards her that she complained to the ACT Bar Association, and she has lodged a statement with the Sofronoff -Inquiry.

Asked about Brownโ€™s claim Higgins lied, a spokesman for ยฌHiggins referred The Weekend Australian to the court transcript for her statements about Brownโ€™s involvement, noting that Higginsโ€™ evidence was given under oath.

The terrible things

Brown has received half-baked apologies from some media outlets, including ARN over a Jonesy and Amanda segment after The Logies, and from Nine over The Logies where Brown was once again defamed.

For Brown, itโ€™s not enough.

Acres of newsprint have been given over to the destructive impact the case has had on the two young people at the centre of it, Brittany Higgins and Bruce -Lehrmann.

Brown reminds us that the lives of two older women โ€“ hers and Senator Reynoldsโ€™ โ€“ have also been irrevocably damaged.

โ€œThis has destroyed my life, my career, my livelihood,โ€ she says simply.

Brown is no longer a political staffer. โ€œIโ€™m just trying to get my life back together,โ€ she says.
She regrets not speaking up sooner, but she had been determined to do the right thing at every stage: following departmental advice, taking Higgins to the police, offering support, absorbing the blows in the media and in parliament in silence, going along with the prime ministerโ€™s ruse that he had spoken to her, watching as the PM jumped on board the #metoo juggernaut and chose to save his own skin at the expense of hers.

If there was anyone who owed her an apology, who would it be?

Thereโ€™s a long pause.
โ€œWowโ€, she says finally. ยฌโ€œImagine if youโ€™ve got an apology from Brittany Higgins. Donโ€™t think thatโ€™s ever going to happen.โ€

Would she like that?
โ€œItโ€™s a raw question because Iโ€™m still processing that. I donโ€™t think Iโ€™d ever be able to get a sincere apology from her.โ€

Thereโ€™s another long pause as sheโ€™s reminded of the words with which her old boss condemned her, in the building that was once her life.

โ€œAnd an apology from the Prime Minister and the former prime minister for the terrible things that happened to me in that place.โ€

JANET ALBRECHTSEN
COLUMNIST
STEPHEN RICE
NSW EDITOR

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity

Bourne1879 says: June 9, 2023 at 10:21 pm
Finally !
Fiona Brown the chief of staff has given interview for The Weekend Australian. It is a long read as very detailed.

Does not support Higgins version of events at all. Devastated when she saw what Higgins said about her on The Project. Career ruined. Could not defend herself as witness in the case. Said thrown under the bus by PM Morrison.

A must read. Perhaps somebody can post after midnight in new thread.

Done. Thanks for the heads up.

Gabor
Gabor
June 10, 2023 1:36 am

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
June 10, 2023 at 1:06 am

Brittany, Bruce and the โ€˜betrayalโ€™ of the invisible woman
Fiona Brown feels betrayed. First by Brittany Higgins. Then by her own party. The forgotten victim in the sorry mess of the Higgins/Lehrmann rape saga is finally ready to have her say.
By JANET ALBRECHTSEN and STEPHEN RICE

Thanks.
J Ch. what a disturbed/rotten human being that B Higgins is, how many more will she ruin before this sorry saga is over?

OldOzzie
OldOzzie
June 10, 2023 1:49 am

Salvatore

Thanks for that – the whole “No Knickers” affair is a blot on Australian Federal Parliament & Australia

As Brown said “You have turned Australian Parliament into a Kangaroo Court

You have just sentenced a young man for a crime that had no been prosecuted or proven “

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 2:45 am

Tekweni says:
June 9, 2023 at 10:16 pm

Sorry to hear about your situation.
University of Mass. has the most advanced studies on this but a lot of other places are catching up.
The more data, the higher the likelihood of a treatment.
At some stage there will be a standard treatment for prolonged side effects of mRNA.

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 2:54 am

My heart issues only started after jab #3 in March 2022.
My sister had jab #6 last month (yes, #6) and has had zero issues.
Incredibly small sample size, but it shows that people who share genetics have vastly different outcomes.
Also, I haven’t had COVID, whereas my sister has had it twice.
The bottom line is that no-one really knows why.
But the studies will find out why at some stage.

Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:01 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:03 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:04 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:05 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:06 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:08 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:09 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:10 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:11 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:12 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:14 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:15 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:16 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:17 am
Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 4:18 am
feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 5:35 am

Lee Fang (formally of the Intercept) now has proof on just how involved Pierre Omidyar was in the 2020 censorship regime.
Previously, he was known for being one of the big three contributors to the Zuck bucks slush fund with Zuckerberg (obviously) & Hoffman (LinkedIn founder for those unfamiliar).
All this was detailed in Mollie Hemingway’s book “Rigged”.
Taibbi recently went into detail showing how Omidyar started building this digital infrastructure back in 2014 to bridge between what censorship the state wanted & the social media platforms.
Fang now has proof the Omidyar funded & built the infrastructure for the Department of Homeland Security.

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 5:37 am

Billionaire Biden Donor Bankrolled 2020 Election Social Media Censorship Effort

Newly disclosed document confirms billionaire Pierre Omidyar financed the public-private partnership to censor election-related Twitter and Facebook posts.

https://www.leefang.com/p/billionaire-biden-donor-bankrolled

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 5:40 am

Imagine the squealing if Gina funded & had someone build digital infrastructure for the Morrison government that was then used to support her political views.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 6:27 am

Bok makes the same point as happens every time Australia goes up in smoke.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 6:39 am

The Brittany Blob envelopes kd wrong and SloMo. Can anyone stop it?

Bourne1879
Bourne1879
June 10, 2023 7:12 am

Thanks Sal for putting up the article about Fiona Brown.

I remember at the time being disgusted at PM Morrison for his apology to Higgins. Unfortunately we were then in the believe all women stage and PM chose that over the fact the trial was pending.

Note Brown part where days could not defend herself as was witness in pending trial. Same applied to Senator Reynolds as the mean girls got stuck into her. If they had spoken up they would have predjudiced the trial.

Still to come today will be Cassie’s thoughts which are always well worth the read. Although hard to beat what Fiona Brown has laid out.

Meanwhile Labor and the left are defending chief grub Katy Gallagher to the death.

Bruce very nearly got convicted on no evidence at all.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
June 10, 2023 7:20 am

Boris Johnson booted from Parliament.

Boris Johnson QUITS as MP blaming a ‘kangaroo court’ motivated by ‘revenge for Brexit’ (9 Jun)

Boris Johnson is resigning as an MP and has accused a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive him out. The shock announcement comes after the Privileges Committee found he misled Parliament and recommended a sanction of over 10 days in a draft report. The sanction would have been enough to trigger a by-election in Mr Johnson’s Uxbridge & South Ruislip seat.

If he’d actually delivered Brexit it’d be sad, but he never really did since the UK is still subject to the ECJ and other legal wheezes. As for his greenery, well the less said the better. He certainly wasn’t a Thatcher.

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 7:38 am

For those who like reading indictments, here’s 49 pages of the Trump one.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653/gov.uscourts.flsd.648653.3.0.pdf

John Yoo, the guy that Pence relied on to not delay certifying the 2020 election, has been more vocal on this being total horseshit than he was regarding the NY indictment.

lotocoti
lotocoti
June 10, 2023 7:42 am
feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 7:42 am

John Yoo’s failings during the GWB years means he can never be considered for a judicial appointment.
Which is a pity as he’s closer to Gorsuch than Thomas (who he clerked for).

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 7:43 am

lotocoti says:
June 10, 2023 at 7:42 am

LOL, turkeys voting for Thanksgiving.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 7:44 am

He certainly wasnโ€™t a Thatcher.

Don’t write his political obituary just yet, Bruce.

He’s hinted he’ll be back. Alas.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 7:52 am

For a woman who usually speaks her mind, Lisa Wilkinson’s apology to Jacinta Price is rather mealy-mouthed. I suppose she has no reason to fear being hounded out of public life by the media on account of her casual racism.

Farmer Gez
Farmer Gez
June 10, 2023 7:53 am

Scummo the Pharisee.

Zipster
Zipster
June 10, 2023 7:54 am
johanna
johanna
June 10, 2023 7:59 am

Taibbi recently went into detail showing how Omidyar started building this digital infrastructure back in 2014 to bridge between what censorship the state wanted & the social media platforms.
Fang now has proof the Omidyar funded & built the infrastructure for the Department of Homeland Security.

Shades of when Soros linked organisations funded lawyers to go and work in DA offices ‘to help with the workload.’ In fact they were there to push leftist agendas like BLM and to persecute conservatives.

The attempts to integrate government with private actors is very disturbing indeed. Sure, there were always informal arrangements like kickbacks for contracts and jobs for the boys. But this kind of thing takes it to a whole new level. It is about hijacking policy and weaponising government organisations against political opponents.

You have to wonder to what extent it is happening here.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 8:01 am

Haven’t seen Muddy for a while.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 8:04 am

Meanwhile Labor and the left are defending chief grub Katy Gallagher to the death.

A case of hang together or hang separately.

I suspect none of them – Gallagher, Wong, Albanese, Dreyfus – are sleeping very well at night.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:05 am

I remember at the time being disgusted at PM Morrison for his apology to Higgins.

That captured many of his failures. Unfortunately, we (as a society) are probably past the point weโ€™re he could just say that is sub judice and walk away. Maybe not. The path to under the SloMo bus was well worn. Holgate and Australia Post was equally egregious.

Davey Boy
Davey Boy
June 10, 2023 8:08 am

funny how the likes of Mariam Veiszadeh, who perceive and complain vociferously about racism and oppression of women of colour in just about every utterance and gesture by wapipo, have maintained a stony silence about Wilkinson.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:09 am

Meanwhile Labor and the left are defending chief grub Katy Gallagher to the death.

I expect they will all have complete confidence in her – until they donโ€™t. No real alternative here.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 8:10 am

With regards to those people wailing and lamenting the injustice of Brittnah’s emails being leaked to the public – would now be a good time to remind them that “If you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry about”?

Pogria
Pogria
June 10, 2023 8:11 am

Mother Lode,
Muddy was the opening act for this new thread. Scroll up. ๐Ÿ˜€

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 8:17 am

I saw Dreyfus being interviewed a day or so ago.

His trademark smirk seemed to be slipping with every weasely word.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 8:19 am

Hi Muddy! Good to see you after such a long time. Donโ€™t be shy in commenting, now.

That Albrechtsen piece on Fiona Brown is just extraordinary. She kept her silence all this timeโ€ฆrespect. Yet this was a person the Canberra lightweights were happy to sacrifice, the sort the country needs in the APS.

Alsoโ€ฆthank God for that surfer.

johanna
johanna
June 10, 2023 8:19 am

Boris Johnson is resigning as an MP and has accused a Commons investigation into whether he misled Parliament over partygate of attempting to drive him out. The shock announcement comes after the Privileges Committee found he misled Parliament and recommended a sanction of over 10 days in a draft report. The sanction would have been enough to trigger a by-election in Mr Johnsonโ€™s Uxbridge & South Ruislip seat.

What a petulant little sook he is. Gifted with charm, brains and good connections, his lack of even the slightest hint of principles has always been his Achilles heel.

As for Lisa’s comments about Jacinta, not a peep from the crowd obsessed with microagressions.

Perhaps macroagressions are exempt?

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 8:19 am

Who’s Muddy?

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 8:20 am

Samantha Maiden. Is that her real name? Or is it meant to be comically incongruent – like calling a red-headed person ‘Bluey’, or a stocky person ‘Slim’?

Maiden’s are, in a literary and poetic sense, the very essence of purity, delicacy, wholesomeness, and honesty.

Maiden is just another media tart.

On the other hand she has not entered into demonic communion with the ABC or Fauxfacts, so maybe that she is not so much a maiden, but a spinster.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 8:25 am

On a completely other subject, if youโ€™re thinking about giving a child a board game as a gift (teenage boys are particularly difficult) – try โ€œTicket to Rideโ€. Itโ€™s like Monopoly but with trains, railways and stations and sufficiently Byzantine in rule structure to satisfy the most discerning in such matters.

We played last night – I thought I was winning until one of the little horrors brought out the โ€œextraโ€ rules that I had overlooked. Good stuff.

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 8:28 am

Taking us all for fools.
The project story aired on 15 February 2021.
Kimberley Kitching warned Linda Reynolds in the first week of February she was about to be attacked.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:29 am

I saw Dreyfus being interviewed a day or so ago.
His trademark smirk seemed to be slipping with every weasely word.

I expect he knows Gallagher is finished.

Mak Siccar
Mak Siccar
June 10, 2023 8:30 am

From a commenter at Michael Smith News.

Cliff said…
I received this (see below) as an email today. It is worth the read. I just wish I could convince the younger members of my family to read it, but they simply won’t. Voting ‘yes’ for ‘The Voice’ is “the right thing to do” and to them, that’s the end of the argument. they are not remotely interested in hearing any contrary argument.

——–

In 1983, as a naรฏve youth worker and concerned by what I had been reading since the early 1970s about what was happening with Aborigines in Alice Springs, I moved there to see what I could do to help. All told, I spent six years in Central Australia, leaving both depressed and convinced that the situation could never be fixed. โ€ฆ

Unfortunately, much of what passes for Aboriginal โ€˜cultureโ€™ today is an invention of the last 50 years. Fortunately, much authentic Aboriginal culture of the past has vanished. The gruesome initiations, genital mutilation, inflicted cicatrices, burns, ritual spearings, sorcery and payback murders have by and large disappeared. Nevertheless, inter-tribe clan grievances often remain, as can be seen at some football indigenous matches, both on the field and amongst the spectators. Even though these encounters can still become violent, at least those conflicts are mostly played out with a football, not spears and clubs.

Meanwhile, the Aboriginal Industry is chock full of ill-informed, urban myth-makers and illusionists, this caste of urgers and deluded pretenders giving rise to the patronising insistence on the uniqueness of โ€˜Aboriginal knowledgeโ€™ about everything from agriculture and fish farms (a lรก Bruce Pascoe), water and fire management (a lรก โ€˜cultural burningโ€™) to Aboriginal โ€˜artโ€™, โ€˜fashionโ€™ and even โ€˜astronomyโ€™, and not to mention Ernie Dingo and Richard Walleyโ€™s thoroughly overdone โ€˜Welcome to Countryโ€. This is mostly snake oil fakery, an effort to convince contemporary Australians that the Aborigines of old were something they clearly were not.

Worse, histories and observational accounts of early Aboriginal life and culture are vanishing from library shelves, replaced by the anti-white post-modern dogma of โ€˜invasion, colonisation and inter-generational traumaโ€™. It is unusual today to find any history book about Aborigines in a secondary or tertiary institution that is more than fifteen years old. This is cultural censure and erasure happening right under our noses. We are all the poorer for it, black and white alike.

Meanwhile, the recent invention, exaggeration, distortion and misrepresentation of the alleged โ€˜frontier warsโ€™ serves as a made-to-order replacement โ€˜historyโ€™ intended to raise the status of Aboriginal people and degrade that of settlers. It is yet another bill of goods, a distorting sham, being hawked by a power-grabbing activist elite in whose interest it is to falsify and distort our history. The goal, need it be said, is an attempt to paint a genocidal racism as Australiaโ€™s original sin. โ€ฆ

Equality of opportunity is not enough for the power hungry, to whom any perceived inequality in outcome is an opportunity:

Unfortunately, self-determination for many people who today identify as Aboriginal is taken to mean the normal rules โ€” keeping children in school, eschewing clan and domestic violence โ€” arenโ€™t thought to fully apply. This is nowhere more apparent than on the troubled streets of Alice Springs.

โ€˜Self-determinationโ€™ means โ€˜weโ€™ll do what we like and you can pay for itโ€™.
Self-determinationโ€™ is about colonising and taking control, accepting all that whitefellas have to offer while offering nothing in return.
Self-determination is about undermining whitefella institutions, judiciaries, organisations and bureaucracies.
Self-determination is about enculturated white people who, on the strength of what may be a mere speck of indigenous DNA, now identify exclusively as Aboriginal, thereby giving themselves an economic and social leg-up.
For the activist cadre it always was and always will be about money, power and control, all underscored by the notion that members of one race enjoy a preeminent ascendency over all other Australians.

More examples of โ€˜self-determinationโ€™ can be found in the ban on climbing Ayers Rock (Uluru), Mt Warning (Wollumbin), Mt Gillen, and many Grampians climbs, all for ill-defined or unexplained โ€˜culturalโ€™ reasonsโ€™. After much outcry, consideration is now being given to re-opening the Mt Warning climb, but only for those who pay a fee and are escorted by indigenous guides. More rent-seeking, what a surprise!

Australian place names are also rapidly being overwritten with (most likely made-up) Aboriginal names (eg: Kโ€™gari, once known as Fraser Island). All of this is about claims to ownership, to โ€˜sovereigntyโ€™. These changes should not be mistaken for deference to Aboriginal culture; itโ€™s no more nor less than an insidious takeover. What we are experiencing here is cultural guerrilla warfare, the picking off one target after the other. Donโ€™t believe it? Look no further that what has happened in New Zealand.

The Voice:

Self-determination is not about โ€˜closing the gapโ€™, nor Aborigines โ€˜having a voiceโ€™ โ€” all of that can be achieved without a change to the Constitution. Indeed, the $35+ billion currently spent on Aboriginal affairs and the 11-plus current Aboriginal members of parliament are more than enough to fulfil both aims.

The Voice referendum is purely and simply about the drive towards Aboriginal sovereignty, which can only be achieved by changing the nationโ€™s foundational document and charter.

Under the Albanese government, self-determination means the coming referendum, whose barely concealed intention is to divide Australia along lines of race. โ€ฆ

What is hiding in plain sight is the Albanese governmentโ€™s intention to de-facto fund and promote the โ€˜Yesโ€™ campaign whilst hamstringing โ€˜Noโ€™ advocates. Anything the No campaign says can and will be construed as โ€œmisinformationโ€. We have seen this already with the appalling attacks by Noel Pearson and Marcia Langtonโ€™s on Jacinta Price. Brace for much more of that โ€” and wonder, too, if the bile and attempts at character assassination are a foretaste of an empowered Voice? โ€ฆ

Meanwhile, Australians are subjected to a daily and massive pro-Yes propaganda barrage by the taxpayer-funded ABC and SBS.

Remote Aboriginal Australians are unfortunate mascots in a power struggle among the white majority. The Voice is just the latest attempt by the left-bureaucratic class to get more control and further exploit the rest of us

Dr David Barton is a proud Celtic and Anglo-Saxon man with a long generational family history in Australia. He lives in Central Victoria.

Zipster
Zipster
June 10, 2023 8:32 am

David Putrino: Long Covid and Functional Neurological Disorder
“We are in our fourth year of work to understand #LongCovid and we now know things about it thanks to science. After being told again by a quasi-well meaning, if uninformed, clinician that LC is just functional neurological disorder (FND). Hereโ€™s a thread on why LC IS NOT FND.โ€œ

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:33 am

Lehrmann doesnโ€™t come out well from the Brown story in Teh Weekend Paywallian.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
June 10, 2023 8:36 am

Calli, if they like train games then the Empire Builder series and the 1830 series of games are excellent. Probably need to be age 10 and up with a decent feel for arithmetic. Great for learning geography!

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 8:37 am

m0nty=fa

Basically he had the opportunity on J6 to implement a fascist takeover. So many of his most fervent supporters wanted it, they worked so hard to make it possible,

It appears that most of those pushing โ€œto implement a fascist takeoverโ€ on J6 were Feds. Unfortunately, they succeeded with their fascist takeover, and here we are.

Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 8:38 am

Maiden is just another media tart.

More than than, everything she writes is designed to boost Labor and the Greens and to denigrate the LNP.

She is an activist using journalism to cheer for the parties she votes for.

Australian journalism is now full of such people — arrogant university educated loudmouth smartarse knowalls. And they wonder why the public’s trust of journalists is in the toilet.

shatterzzz
June 10, 2023 8:39 am

A meme well suited to the Britnee fiasco ..!

https://ibb.co/hV4tHkf

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 8:40 am

Trump indictments unsealed. 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Trump โ€œstored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club โ€” including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,โ€ the indictment charges.

But but butโ€ฆ Hillaryโ€™s risotto recipes!!!!!

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 8:40 am

Someone mentioned Wilkinson’s ‘apology’. Hun:

Lisa Wilkinson has personally apologised to Indigenous senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price after she was caught mispronouncing her name in a leaked tape.

Senator Price lashed Wilkinson on Friday after audio emerged of her making comments about the senator and struggling to pronounce her name during a pre-interview with Brittany Higgins and her partner David Sharaz.

In a statement released on Friday night the former Project host said: โ€œI sincerely apologise to Senator Price for any offence I may have caused.

โ€œThe conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena.

โ€œThe tenor of our conversation was about the need for real, genuine change within the Liberal party, and that too many of their female pre-selections were in unwinnable positions.โ€

In a leaked part of a pre-recorded interview with Higgins, Wilkinson pointed out the coalition had โ€œpreselected over 20 new and wonderfully diverse and strong female candidates like, and whatโ€™s her name, Nam โ€ฆ Nampinjumba? (sic). Sheโ€™s an Indigenous woman.โ€

In response, Mr Sharaz laughed and said: โ€œShe clearly got in. Clearly it was a safe seat.โ€

โ€œThatโ€™s the thing, it was โ€“ as soon as I looked at it I thought, โ€˜Oh, youโ€™re jokingโ€™,โ€ Wilkinson said.

Mr Sharaz added: โ€œTheyโ€™ve been preselected in unwinnable seats.โ€

Mr Llewellyn joined in with a joke about the Coalition preselecting Ms Price, saying: โ€œSee, we know brown people.โ€

Mr Sharaz followed, โ€œItโ€™s like, โ€˜Iโ€™m not racist, I have a black friendโ€™. Itโ€™s that argument.โ€

Wilkinson closed the chat, saying: โ€œAnd our cleanerโ€™s black.โ€

Ms Higgins is not heard engaging in this part of the conversation.

On Friday, Senator Price hit back, demanding Wilkinson apologise to her.

Senator Price said Wilkinson was living in an ivory tower and was far removed from real issues pertaining to Indigenous Australians.

โ€œThere are derogatory and racist comments โ€ฆ what would you expect from individuals who belong to the woke,โ€ she told 2GB.

โ€œThe Project has never been interested in the view of a conservative Indigenous woman from outback Australia. Not once has it demonstrated interest in the concerns Iโ€™ve raised.โ€

Senator Price said what had offended her the most was Wilkinsonโ€™s suggestion she was some sort of diversity pick.

โ€œI would absolutely expect an apology from the 10 network, from Lisa Wilkinson herself.

That would be the decent thing,โ€ she said. โ€œUnfortunately, this woke culture allows racism to exist in plain sight.โ€

The chief of Channel 10โ€™s owner, Paramount Australia, Beverly McGarvey called Senator Price to apologise to her personally on Friday.

Itโ€™s understood McGarvey said the discussion of race did not reflect the values the network stood for and that it shouldnโ€™t have happened.

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 8:41 am

But but butโ€ฆ Hillaryโ€™s risotto recipes!!!!!

And her Blackberry you swooning moron.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 8:41 am

Trump is also on tape as specifically saying he did not declassify these documents and that he knew they were national defence secrets. Confessing to the crimes, essentially.

What a colossal idiot.

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 8:43 am

Don’t worry Lisa, we all, and most especially Ms Price, understood what you meant, very well.

lotocoti
lotocoti
June 10, 2023 8:43 am

Being French is handicap enough.
Apparently.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 8:43 am

No, he doesnโ€™t Bear. Reading between the lines, Brownโ€™s account is one of entitlement and shiftyness. Looks like she assumed โ€œsexโ€ when he said โ€œwhiskeyโ€. In her position, so would I.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:45 am

“That captured many of his failures. Unfortunately, we (as a society) are probably past the point weโ€™re he could just say that is sub judice and walk away. Maybe not. The path to under the SloMo bus was well worn. Holgate and Australia Post was equally egregious.”

Don’t forget Bettina Arndt. What was done to her in February and March 2020 by Morrison and the Liberals paved the way for everything that followed after. I remember feeling utterly betrayed at how every single Liberal in the senate lined up to side with Labor and the Greens to censure Bettina Arndt. It still makes me angry.

I am yet to read the Oz piece about Fiona Brown but will do so later today. However the brief synopsis I get is that it confirms everything I have ever thought, said and written about Scott Morrison. The bottom line is that Morrison refused to defend his own, he refused to have the backs of his own, and he was always willing to throw his own (and others) to the hungry and baying progressive wolves, just ask Bettina Arndt, ask Christine Holgate, ask Craig Kelly, ask George Christensen, ask Andrew Laming, ask Alan Tudge, ask Christian Porter, a conga line of men and women whose political and professional lives were annihilated by the always inept and sly Morrison. Morrison, a deadbeat political Jack Spratt, was always eager to jump in and lead a melee against his own, always eager to slyly cheer his ideological enemies against his own, and then he’d stand back and lick his lips once the platter was clean of bodies, except the bones are now scattered everywhere, just ask Laming, Porter, Lehmann and others.

But of course his biggest betrayal was to ordinary Australians like you and me. Morrison, for almost three years, refused to utter one word of support to the Australian people when we had our rights not just violated, but completely trampled. He ain’t licking his lips now, he’s been exposed for what he is, a fool, and a buffoon.

But you know what angers me most? Higgins simply empowered other lunatic females to spuriously claim “rape”, and police today are now forced to give credence to ridiculous accusations and investigate them. And I have personal experience of this, because last year I had to spend over three hours at a police station giving testimony about how a woman’s accusation about rape over a decade ago simply did not happen. When the detective rang me to ask me to go to the police station, I asked if I could refuse and he said no. As for the “rape accusation”, in the last decade and more, not once did I ever hear from her the word “rape” until 2021, when clearly influenced, clearly motivated and clearly empowered by the likes of Higgins, this woman decided that she’d also, once upon a time, been raped.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 8:45 am

Also colossal idiots: Cats who ran with the defence of Trump magically mind-zapping the documents to become declassified. Which never happened, as per Trumpโ€™s own words, and never made any sort of sense at all.

Trumpโ€™s only redeeming feature is his habit of showing up his slobbering lackeys as being brain-dead morons by undermining their flimsy arguments on tape.

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 8:46 am

Daily Telegraph:

Embattled Finance Minister Katy Gallagher exchanged messages with Brittany Higginsโ€™s partner during Senate Question Time on the day news first broke of the former Liberal stafferโ€™s alleged rape, and was later warned by a colleague she was too close to the couple.

Senator Gallagher is under pressure to explain when she first knew about Ms Higginsโ€™ allegations that she was raped in the ministerial office of then-Defence Industry Minister Senator Reynolds in March 2019.

In June 2021 Ms Gallagher told a Senate Estimates hearing โ€œno one had any knowledgeโ€ of Ms Higginsโ€™ claims until they were made public in February 2021.

At the same hearing, Senator Penny Wong also denied knowledge of the allegations before they were published.

But text messages published this week by The Australian appear to show that on February 11, 2021, four days before Ms Higginsโ€™ allegations broke, Mr Sharaz texted his partner.

In the texts he said, โ€œKaty is going to come to me with some questions you need to prepare for โ€ฆ Sheโ€™s really invested now ha haโ€.

In another text he also described her as โ€œan old friendโ€. โ€œWe opened a chair together! So you can trust her,โ€ he said.

Ms Gallagher has gone to ground since the text messages were published and did not respond to questions.

On Friday Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told Sunrise TV show that he was โ€œabsolutelyโ€ confident Senator Gallagher did not mislead parliament.

Instead he pointed fingers at the Liberal Party.

โ€œWhat is being suggested here by Peter Dutton, you had allegations by a Liberal staffer that another Liberal staffer had a sexual assault in a Liberal ministerโ€™s office and, somehow, Katy Gallagher has some responsibility for what was going on here? This is bizarre,โ€ he said.

News Corp can reveal that Victorian Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching, who died in March 2022, was distressed at the decision of her partyโ€™s leadership to use the Higgins allegations as a stick to beat the Morrison government.

She later confronted Senator Gallagher about the amount of contact she was having with Mr Higgins and Mr Sharaz because she feared it could blow up in Laborโ€™s face if it ever became public.

Senator Kitching later told friends that Senator Gallagher had defended her interactions with the couple as โ€œa welfare checkโ€.

A senate colleague said that Senator Kitching had been โ€œdeeply uncomfortableโ€ with the Labor leadershipโ€™s decision to โ€œweaponiseโ€ Ms Higginsโ€™s allegations.

Senator Gallagher and Senator Wongโ€™s denial that they were aware of Ms Higgins allegations came at a Senate Estimates hearing during which Senator Linda Reynolds alleged she had been warned that Labor had foreknowledge of the allegations and intended to use them against her.

โ€œI was told by one of your senators two weeks before about what you were intending to do with the story in my office. Two weeks before,โ€ she told the hearing.

In a break in the hearing Senator Reynolds later told Senators Gallagher and Wong that she had received the warning from Senator Kitching.

Senator Kitching maintained that she did not warn Senator Reynolds and could not have done so because at the time she was not aware of the allegations.

Senator Reynoldsโ€™ allegations against Senator Kitching resulted in her being banished from Laborโ€™s Senate tactics committee.

She later dubbed Senator Gallagher and Wong, as well as then Senator Kristina Keneally, as โ€œthe mean girlsโ€.

Sources familiar with the events of that time recalled this week that Senator Gallagher had exchanged messages with Mr Sharaz during Senate Question Time on February 15, 2021.

During that Question Time Senator Gallagher peppered Senator Reynolds with questions about her interactions with Ms Higgins in the immediate aftermath of the alleged assault.

In the same Estimates hearing, in June 2021, Senator Wong responded angrily to Senator Reynolds’ allegations she had been warned by a Labor senator two weeks before the allegations became public.

โ€œI had no knowledge of this until that night,โ€ she said.

Meanwhile, on Friday deputy Liberal leader Sussan Ley said โ€œif anyone, a politician, or a journalist, sought to politically profit from a rape allegation then that is just morally bankruptโ€.

Ms Ley called on Senator Gallagher to reveal if she actually had โ€œno knowledge of the allegations prior to them becoming publicโ€.

Yesterday, Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Price also slammed the remarks made about her in a five-hour audio recording revealed this week as โ€œderogatory and racist commentsโ€.

Senator Price says she was most offended when they suggested she was a โ€œdiversity pickโ€, and demanded Channel 10 and Wilkinson apologise.

Evidence revealed during the criminal trial suggested that Ms Higgins received support from her former employers in the Morrison government, raising questions about the Commonwealthโ€™s decision to pay compensation.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:47 am

“What a colossal idiot.”

Yes you are, good that you’re acknowledging your own incessant idiocy. Baby steps.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:47 am

Poor pervert apologist, like a crying, screaming child, he’s desperate for some attention.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 8:47 am

And another trait common to the two players – immaturity and promotion and clearance way above level of competence.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 8:48 am

feelthebernsays:
June 10, 2023 at 5:35 am
Lee Fang (formally of the Intercept) now has proof on just how involved Pierre Omidyar was in the 2020 censorship regime.
Previously, he was known for being one of the big three contributors to the Zuck bucks slush fund with Zuckerberg (obviously) & Hoffman (LinkedIn founder for those unfamiliar).
All this was detailed in Mollie Hemingwayโ€™s book โ€œRiggedโ€.
Taibbi recently went into detail showing how Omidyar started building this digital infrastructure back in 2014 to bridge between what censorship the state wanted & the social media platforms.
Fang now has proof the Omidyar funded & built the infrastructure for the Department of Homeland Security.

Yet another example of the fascist takeover which m0nty=fa mistakenly thinks was “averted” on J6. In reality, it occurred somewhat earlier, and continues now.

Bot m0nty=fa is too blinded by his ideology to comprehend that simple fact.

Bruce
Bruce
June 10, 2023 8:50 am

@ Mother Lode:

โ€œIf you have done nothing wrong then you have nothing to worry aboutโ€?

That should be added to the list of the greatest lies in history.

To wit:

“Of course I’ll still respect you in the morning” , and:

“I’m from the government and I’m here to help”

Especially in a penal colony inspired by Lavrenti Beria:

“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”

And “Doctor Ferris” from “Atlas Shrugged”:

โ€œDid you really think we want those laws observed? We want them to be broken. You’d better get it straight that it’s not a bunch of boy scouts you’re up against… We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted โ€“ and you create a nation of law-breakers โ€“ and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.โ€

The “Rum Corps” LIVES!

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 8:50 am

What a colossal idiot.

Coming from someone who defends drag queens reading to kids, conservative teens run down in SUVs, coordinated attacks on women and Supreme Court Justices with whom he has differing views, supports abortion, the above statement from the fat lesbian is extraordinary to say the least. FMD

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:51 am

Whilst Ten has apologised to Price, the Amphibian is yet to personally apologise. I suspect the Amphibian is now holed up in her palatial waterside mansion at Mosman hiding. How long before she complains about being a “victim”?

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:53 am

Witnesses like Brown are key to understanding complex situations where lots happens after the event. No real dog in the fight and just trying to do their best.

shatterzzz
June 10, 2023 8:54 am

With regards to those people wailing and lamenting the injustice of Brittnahโ€™s emails being leaked to the public

It’s a worry! .. anyone hacking into my phone or emails would end up with a bad case of the yawns …….!

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 8:54 am

In a statement released on Friday night the former Project host said: โ€œI sincerely apologise to Senator Price for any offence I may have caused.

Sincerely?
How sincerely?
Read on, dear reader.

โ€œThe conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena.

Private? So it’s OK to be racist in private?
As for context we read the entire grubby context and it doesn’t excuse you.
The context was that a conservative black woman has to be an Uncle Tom.

โ€œThe tenor of our conversation was about the need for real, genuine change within the Liberal party, and that too many of their female pre-selections were in unwinnable positions.โ€

Yeah, nah.
You didn’t talk about that.
You were suggesting that conservative black women from Central Australia shouldn’t be pre-selected ahead of ladies like Allegra Spender.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 8:55 am

johannasays:
June 10, 2023 at 7:59 am
Taibbi recently went into detail showing how Omidyar started building this digital infrastructure back in 2014 to bridge between what censorship the state wanted & the social media platforms.
Fang now has proof the Omidyar funded & built the infrastructure for the Department of Homeland Security.

Shades of when Soros linked organisations funded lawyers to go and work in DA offices โ€˜to help with the workload.โ€™ In fact they were there to push leftist agendas like BLM and to persecute conservatives.

The attempts to integrate government with private actors is very disturbing indeed.

good comment johanna. The final sentence says it all Fascism is being implemented by so-called “progressives”. Which is appropriate, since fascism is a leftist movement.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 8:55 am

On a completely other subject, if youโ€™re thinking about giving a child a board game as a gift (teenage boys are particularly difficult) โ€“ try โ€œTicket to Rideโ€.

It’s the golden age of board games, calli.

For those who are challenged for opponents there are even games designed with an analogue “bot” to pit your wits against. These saw an upswing in popularity during the lockdowns.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 8:55 am

Bruce very nearly got convicted on no evidence at all.

The thing that struck me was how often they pressed upon her this “Did anything happen? What ever you need. You have our full support.”

Firstly if you are going to say it then say it once. Once she had been asked if anything happened and reassured that she had support then she would know it. The effect of repeating it is to add something not in the original query/offer, but is tantamount to encouragement and a statement that she can rely upon them to take her side. “Do you make a report to the police? Do you want me to come with you?”

Secondly, how does this gel with the original command from Barons to not plant ideas in their heads or put words in their mouths. Compare this fussing about with the treatment Lehrmann received. Nothing about, for example, whether she did anything improper to him which his (vestigial) masculine upbringing might have insisted on reticence. Or even a faintly chivalric desire to spare Brittnah embarrassment – thinking if he said nothing then it would go no further and there would be no blow back on her.

Funny thing is I don’t even especially blame Brown or Reynolds or Barons. I expect it is simply the culture of the place and they cannot conceive that there might be anything not quite fair about how it works.

shatterzzz
June 10, 2023 8:56 am

For a woman who usually speaks her mind, Lisa Wilkinsonโ€™s apology to Jacinta Price is rather mealy-mouthed. I suppose she has no reason to fear being hounded out of public life by the media on account of her casual racism.

Channel 10 is still paying the bills .. methinx, after they went public, she was left with no choice ……!

Figures
Figures
June 10, 2023 8:57 am

I really really hope that over the course of the next few years everybody currently on the side of “we can get along with leftists, we just need to persuade them better” learns of the folly of this.

Logic works for us. It cannot work for them.

For 70 per cent of the population there is no such thing as persuasion. Just bullying and the Overton window.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:57 am

coordinated attacks on women”

The pervert apologist supports physical attacks on women. He expressed here on these pages support for the violence in that Auckland Park in March against Kellie-Jay Keen. Quite frankly, he’s a disgrace. A creepy and very grubby black shirt fascist, no different to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 8:57 am

In another text he also described her as โ€œan old friendโ€. โ€œWe opened a chair together! So you can trust her,โ€ he said.

What does “opened a chair” mean?

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 8:57 am

With regards to those people wailing and lamenting the injustice of Brittnahโ€™s emails being leaked to the public…

First rule of political skulduggery: regular emails are not safe.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 8:58 am

callisays:
June 10, 2023 at 8:25 am
On a completely other subject, if youโ€™re thinking about giving a child a board game as a gift (teenage boys are particularly difficult) โ€“ try โ€œTicket to Rideโ€.

Younger son and family have a set. Good fun, but a degree of ruthlessness is helpful.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 8:58 am

โ€œAlso colossal idiots: โ€ฆโ€ – real chutzpah from someone who failed Econs101.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 8:58 am

Sancho Panzersays:
June 10, 2023 at 8:54 am”

I think you’ve said it best.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 9:02 am

โ€œWhat a colossal idiot.โ€

Projecting again.

Wally Dalรญ
Wally Dalรญ
June 10, 2023 9:04 am

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that although Lehrmann might have been a flog, Morrisson is a dog, Higgins Pty Ltd is a sociopath, and Wilkinson, Sharaz, Gallagher et al are bog Trotskyists.
Unfortunately I con’t see the coldest psycho in Parliament, Penny Wong is exposed at all.

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 9:06 am

Wilkinson has issued a mealy-mouthed personal apology.
Also memo to herself ‘don’t tape ‘private’ conversations in relation to matters that are subject to a criminal investigation (and that you planned to profit from by using them as material for a TV program or whatever)’

In a statement released on Friday night the former Project host said: โ€œI sincerely apologise to Senator Price for any offence I may have caused.

โ€œThe conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 9:06 am

m0ntysays:
June 10, 2023 at 8:40 am
Trump indictments unsealed. 37 counts of mishandling classified documents.

Trump โ€œstored his boxes containing classified documents in various locations at The Mar-a-Lago Club โ€” including in a ballroom, a bathroom and shower, an office space, his bedroom, and a storage room,โ€ the indictment charges.

Creepy Joe stored his in the garage, accessible to his gardener.

Reminds of the Di-Fi Chi-Spy business, where the geriatric senator had a known Chinese spy as a chauffeur, who was in a prime position to listen to “interesting” conversations in the back seat.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 9:07 am

try โ€œTicket to Rideโ€

When I were a young ‘un, a wee lad, my friends and I were going somewhere or other and they told me to get a single to Ryde station.

So I got to the ticket window and asked for the ticket from the attendant (for in those days we had people behind a little window who gave us our tickets – it was the style of the time).

My friends burst out laughing, and the attendant just looked straight at me as if I was the author of the joke. And I just looked back at him (confused), then at my friends (dawning awareness), then back at the attendant (apologetic).

For those of you not in Sydney, there is no Ryde station. (There is a North Ryde, opened in 2009 but.)

But, simply put, you cannot and could not ‘get a ticket to Ryde’.

Cassie of Sydney
June 10, 2023 9:08 am

“โ€œThe conversation was private and not intended to appear as it has out of context and in the public arena.”

I’ve just listened to it again, there was nothing “out of context” when you listen to the Amphibian, Svengali Shazza, the Ten producer and Higgins all ridiculing, mocking and sneering Price. NOTHING.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 9:09 am

I dunno Roger, what do you call a person who is caught on tape confessing to dozens of crimes worth 10-20 years in gaol each? Colossal idiot sounds about right to me.

Luckily for Trump, his arraignment next Tuesday is being handled by his pet corrupt judge Aileen Cannon. She will probably issue a fatwa on Hillary and appoint Trump as King of Moomba.

Johnny Rotten
June 10, 2023 9:13 am

I steal from every movie ever made.

– Quentin Tarantino

JC
JC
June 10, 2023 9:15 am

m0nty says:
June 10, 2023 at 8:41 am
Trump is also on tape as specifically saying he did not declassify these documents and that he knew they were national defence secrets. Confessing to the crimes, essentially.

What a colossal idiot.

What laws did he break, Fatboy?

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 9:15 am

Iโ€™ve just listened to it again, there was nothing โ€œout of contextโ€ when you listen to the Amphibian, Svengali Shazza, the Ten producer and Higgins all ridiculing, mocking and sneering Price. NOTHING.

Just imagine what’s said at the dinner parties.

These are all very nasty but insecure people seeking validation from each other.

Johnny Rotten
June 10, 2023 9:15 am

What breed of dog can jump higher than buildings?

Any dog, because buildings canโ€™t jump.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 9:15 am

Bot m0nty=fa is too blinded by his ideology to comprehend that simple fact.

Sorry, typo, should be “But m0nty=fa …”, but (poorly programmed) bot works as well.

Bear Necessities
Bear Necessities
June 10, 2023 9:16 am

I donโ€™t think itโ€™s a stretch to say that although Lehrmann might have been a flog, Morrisson is a dog, Higgins Pty Ltd is a sociopath, and Wilkinson, Sharaz, Gallagher et al are bog Trotskyists.
Unfortunately I conโ€™t see the coldest psycho in Parliament, Penny Wong is exposed at all.

Canberra attracts the worst of society. This is what big government looks like irrespective of whether they badge themselves as left or right. Until a majority of Australians realise that big government solutions peddled don’t work then this will continue. I’m 54 and I don’t see any change on the horizon in my lifetime.

Farmer Gez
Farmer Gez
June 10, 2023 9:16 am

Fiona Brown neatly described the over-promoted adolescents who occupy the offices of ministers.
Thereโ€™d be few here who would employ or seek the company of the likes of Lehrmann and Higgins.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 9:17 am

Unfortunately I conโ€™t see the coldest psycho in Parliament, Penny Wong is exposed at all.

I donโ€™t think kd will escape unscathed. I suspect she is too high up the Liars totem to end up as a head on a stick.

flyingduk
flyingduk
June 10, 2023 9:17 am

m0nty says:
June 10, 2023 at 8:41 am

Dont feed the troll..

Davey Boy
Davey Boy
June 10, 2023 9:18 am

Some off-topic amusement – a video from 16 years ago, now doing the rounds again, of Craig Foster in an interview trying to tell Ange Postecoglou that Ange Postecoglou is a shit coach who should resign.

If you watch the interview as it proceeds you’ll see all the usual leftist flog tactics of personal attacks, diversion, speaking over the target and so on.

Mr Postecoglou’s response is from the Cassie School of How to Respond to Leftist Flogs.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 9:20 am

On the RUOK stuffโ€ฆmy take is that Brown smelled a rat (like the corpse in the ceiling above my head right now).

She sounds experienced enough around immature numpties to suss it out, but couldnโ€™t quite pin it down. The โ€œrapeโ€ was always a possibility, but the stronger one was a bit of sly rumpy pumpy in the aphrodisiac-charged halls of power. Both worthy of dismissal.

A lie turned into a nightmare for everyone except the liarโ€ฆuntil now. It often happens that way.

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 9:20 am

Apparently, you had one job.
yates exhibits at the Canberra enquiry

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 9:22 am

m0ntysays:
June 10, 2023 at 9:09 am
I dunno Roger, what do you call a person who is caught on tape confessing to dozens of crimes worth 10-20 years in gaol each? Colossal idiot sounds about right to me.

Luckily for Trump, his arraignment next Tuesday is being handled by his pet corrupt judge Aileen Cannon. She will probably issue a fatwa on Hillary and appoint Trump as King of Moomba.

Meeeeeooowwww!. Saucer of milk for the Feral Pussy.

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 9:23 am

Vicki Campion:

Labelling David Sharaz as the puppet master may prove to be true, but if so, it was senior Labor Party figures who opportunistically chose to be marionettes and tied their strings to him.

His texts revel in his belief that โ€œwe exude powerโ€ but the puppets were in the chamber first and now face serious questions about their war-gaming rape allegations and cover-up. Now we are expected to believe โ€“ in Prime Minister Anthony Albaneseโ€™s denials โ€“ that Sharaz, a guy who used the names of Labor leaders as table numbers at his first wedding, didnโ€™t have any aspirations to endear himself to Labor?

That a guy whose digital footprint fawns over Labor luminaries, as far back as his reporting on Albanese playing tennis on the parliamentary courts, had only motives unguided by prejudice?

When someone is so enthused with a Labor identity that he tweets his deepest sympathies for their child catching Covid, you start to question their clinical analysis.

After nearly three decades in parliament and as head of Labor tactics, Albanese should have encouraged his team to engage in healthy scepticism before they tied their strings to Sharaz.

Only Sharaz knows what motivated him when he allegedly took his girlfriendโ€™s interview days before it aired and gave it to opposition senator Katy Gallagher to prime the explosion for question time.

But Gallagher wasnโ€™t taking it for any other woman alleging she had been sexually assaulted โ€“ just one so closely connected to her partyโ€™s political fortune.

If Gallagher and Laborโ€™s tacticians had wanted justice for a young woman claiming she had been raped in Parliament House, they should only have encouraged her to talk to her solicitor.

If you wanted the best for her in a pastoral form, the advice would have been exactly what her former chief of staff, Fiona Brown, did to support her to go to the police for justice.

Not to remonstrate it through TVs and the halls of Parliament but to keep her word confidential for the best chance of a fair trial.

Even now, in training delivered in Parliament House to deal with sexual assault, if someone confides in you, you are expected to keep it confidential, not to blab it to media elites and Labor figures so they can weaponise it for their political advantage.

Itโ€™s at odds with Brittany Higginsโ€™s complaint of being silenced.

But then again, after Labor won the election, she silenced herself by signing a non-disclosure agreement to pocket a seven-figure undisclosed amount from the taxpayer.

Still today, the same people are fighting to access Freedom of Information requests about investigations pertaining to their own cases. There were no gin and tonics with Lisa Wilkinson for them, no supportive phone calls from Lucy Turnbull, no offers to front the National Press Club or elites offering use of their mansion or promising access into airport lounges.

Out of the basket of cases bubbling in that building, this was selected because it had the potential to create the most political damage.

We believed her story because it struck similar tones to those we knew first-hand, only to learn not only were the allegations that she had received no support after disclosing the alleged rape not true at all, but that in casting them, the lives and political careers of those who offered every support โ€“ support others never had โ€“ were turned upside down.

Like most puppet shows, the trick was to hide the strings.

In this case, the marionettes got applause and were voted into office, where Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus quickly signed a seven-figure payout.

He claims this is in line with other payouts โ€“ which, if true, he should also disclose.

We know, in this instance, it was enough to go to London and the Maldives and for the โ€œpuppet masterโ€ to quit his gig reading radio news.

Now that there is a growing suspicion we have been treated as mugs, we should know on what grounds the payment was made and how much it was because those Comcare claims were not forthcoming to other victims of Parliament House, who were instead left with enormous legal bills.

Strings or not, part of the story is true. I still believe a young woman was taken advantage of by political animals โ€“ itโ€™s just not who we were told they were.

Chris
Chris
June 10, 2023 9:24 am

Yes Calli, ‘Ticket to Ride’ is an excellent game.
Monopoly gives a feeling of despair very early as you see others’ advantages compounding because that blighter had two good turns at the start; that felt bitterness probably created three generations of whining socialists.

But our kids have very strategic gaming skills, and introduce us to lots of great games.

We enjoyed playing a lot of Carcassonne. Pit your druid circles against my monasteries while building cities and see who wins…
Terraforming Mars – sophisticated, lots of changes to the starting opportunities so its never the same game twice. Schedule four to six hours, provide supplies.
Calico sucks (for blokes). Patchwork patterns, sleeping cats… ptahh. But Azul is awesome; draw coloured tiles, complete patterns to score.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 9:25 am

But, simply put, you cannot and could not โ€˜get a ticket to Rydeโ€™.

Unless you were catching a bus. Then you could have some fun.

Allegedly.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 9:27 am

Yes, Lehrmann doesn’t come out of Brown’s account very well either.
Somewhat entitled and self-absorbed.
The whole “important notes of secret business learned over drinks” thing reeked of bullshit. I am not suggesting he wasn’t writing up some notes of some sort, but the main objective was to project an image of “working 24/7”.
Very similar to Monique Ryan and her former helper Sally Rugg-Muncher.
“We were working soooo hard!”
Doing what?

rosie
rosie
June 10, 2023 9:27 am

I don’t agree that rape is always a possibility when two people enter a building voluntarily after hours, unless you believe that whenever a man and a woman are alone together, rape is a possibility.
Maybe it is.
Brown was being extremely cautious and may well have planted a seed, that not only could Higgins be in no trouble at all for her security breach but might even turn it to her advantage by dropping that little hint then getting preferential treatment as a brave yet silent victim of ‘something’.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 9:28 am

The kids have brought up Azulโ€ฆIโ€™ll give it a go.

Calico sounds very โ€œmeโ€โ€ฆexcept for the cats.

johanna
johanna
June 10, 2023 9:30 am

One thing that leapt out from Fiona Brown’s account is that Morrison misled Parliament when he said that he had spoken to her about the allegations. She says he hadn’t, and bailed her up afterwards to ‘remind’ her that he had.

Zero ethics from the alleged God botherer.

I can’t imagine Tony Abbott doing that.

pbw
pbw
June 10, 2023 9:33 am

Calli,

Alsoโ€ฆthank God for that surfer.

Calli, angels come in all shapes and sizes.

Farmer Gez
Farmer Gez
June 10, 2023 9:33 am

Wilkinson reckons her bitch up was taken out of context and she was only trying to expose the anti-chick culture in the LNP because she cares.
Itโ€™s nice to start the day with a good genuine laugh.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 9:37 am

Rosie, it has to be when youโ€™re an employer. Unlikely, but if a situation appears highly charged, you have to entertain the thought.

As for planting a seed that would grow into a full-blown accusation, I doubt that needed to be planted at all. Itโ€™s always there and has been since antiquity.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 9:39 am

She [Brown]says he [SloMo]hadnโ€™t, and bailed her up afterwards to โ€˜remindโ€™ her that he had.

You suspect that wasnโ€™t the first time. What a cesspit.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 9:40 am

JC, the unsealed indictments number 37.

31 counts for the willful retention of national defense information, one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, one count for a scheme to conceal, and one count related to alleged false statements.

Mother Lode
Mother Lode
June 10, 2023 9:43 am

I suspect the Amphibian is now holed up in her palatial waterside mansion at Mosman hiding.

There is an expression “Those who cannot beat the ass beat the saddle”.

It was quoted in I, Claudius as a proverb, but having had a quick Goolag search it is apparently claimed as a proverb by the Albanians and Greeks as well.

In case it is not obvious, those who cannot (or dare not) hit out at the something take it out instead on something nearer even though it is blameless and the violence pointless.

So, behind the high walls of her home in Mosman (j’ismists are very conscious of their privacy in the same way a burglar knows to lock up everything they own very carefully), at the side of her pool where the creeping light of the morning sun is just starting to encroach upon her sun lounge, Lisa will be seated, leaning forward, holding a tall but half empty glass in both her hands. A vodka and orange, although the orange colour is quite dilute. Her eyes watery, partly from self-pity and partly the fumes arising from her glass. She will be seething at Jacinta’s presumption, and leering with malicious intent at the black house maid.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 9:44 am

Mrs Beetrooter.

We believed her story because it struck similar tones to those we knew first-hand

We did?
Who is we?
You and Beetrooter?
Call me old fashioned, but I was waiting for a trial.

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 9:44 am

Strings or not, part of the story is true. I still believe a young woman was taken advantage of by political animals โ€“ itโ€™s just not who we were told they were.

Cut it out, Vikki. You might believe it, I donโ€™t.

She wanted to keep her job. The End.

At any time in the process, she could have told the truth. She could have said โ€œNoโ€. She didnโ€™t, but instead enjoyed the spotlight as โ€œthe face of the movementโ€.

132andBush
132andBush
June 10, 2023 9:45 am

Black Ball says:
June 10, 2023 at 8:50 am

What a colossal idiot.

Coming from someone who defends drag queens reading to kids, conservative teens run down in SUVs, coordinated attacks on women and Supreme Court Justices with whom he has differing views, supports abortion, the above statement from the fat lesbian is extraordinary to say the least. FMD

Cassie of Sydney says:
June 10, 2023 at 8:57 am

coordinated attacks on womenโ€

The pervert apologist supports physical attacks on women. He expressed here on these pages support for the violence in that Auckland Park in March against Kellie-Jay Keen. Quite frankly, heโ€™s a disgrace. A creepy and very grubby black shirt fascist, no different to the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s

And lets not forget his wife.

m0nty says:
April 25, 2023 at 10:19 am

And she is a stalwart of the Church! She shares my politics though.

Feel sorry for the children.

Ed Case
Ed Case
June 10, 2023 9:46 am

The looming federal election soon consumed Brownโ€™s attention. Higgins was asked if she wanted to work from the Gold Coast or go to Perth for the election campaign where Reynolds, a WA senator, would spend her time.
So, why didn’t Higgins accept the offer to work from the Gold Coast [where she lives] rather than go to Perth [where she knows nobody] for the Election campaign?
Was it because Brown told her if she did that she wouldn’t have a job to return to?
Heavens no! shrieks Brown, that would be corruption.
Yeah, she’d been an Apparatchik for 35 years, now she says she was a babe in the woods all that time.
Bottom line:
It’s a tough business, whatever brilliant work she’d done previously [if any] didn’t matter after the bad call she made in the Higgins episode.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 9:47 am

Lisa will be seated, leaning forward, holding a tall but half empty glass in both her hands. A vodka and orange, although the orange colour is quite dilute. Her eyes watery, partly from self-pity and partly the fumes arising from her glass. She will be seething at Jacintaโ€™s presumption, and leering with malicious intent at the black house maid.

Mr DeMille, I’m ready for my close up.

Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 9:51 am

Like most puppet shows, the trick was to hide the strings.

Excellent (verging on brilliant) Saturday column by Vikki Campion.

Thanks for liberating it from the Daily Tele paywall, Black Ball.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 9:52 am

From todayโ€™s edition of the Medium mass email.

The World Would Have Been Fine if My Mother Had an Abortion

I love my life, and my mother still deserved a choice

Not the strongest argument for abortion.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 9:52 am

Strings or not, part of the story is true. I still believe a young woman was taken advantage of by political animals โ€“ itโ€™s just not who we were told they were.

There were 2 people there that night. They didnโ€™t get there by accident.

Boambee John
Boambee John
June 10, 2023 9:53 am

m0nty=fa

Is that all they’ve got? Compare with Shrillary deleting classified government documents from her “bathroom” server.

And don’t crap on about “risotto recipes”, that dog won’t hunt.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 9:53 am

I still believe a young woman was taken advantage of…

Yeah…nah.

(Adopting the contemporary Australian vernacular for the sake of politeness.)

At every step on the way she had moral agency.

Crossie
Crossie
June 10, 2023 9:56 am

Thereโ€™s another long pause as sheโ€™s reminded of the words with which her old boss condemned her, in the building that was once her life.

โ€œAnd an apology from the Prime Minister and the former prime minister for the terrible things that happened to me in that place.โ€

Fiona Brown will never get an apology because she is not from the Labor or greens. She is the one who should be compensated, $20 million at least, by the government and The Project people.

Crossie
Crossie
June 10, 2023 9:59 am

Roger says:
June 10, 2023 at 8:04 am
Meanwhile Labor and the left are defending chief grub Katy Gallagher to the death.
A case of hang together or hang separately.

I suspect none of them โ€“ Gallagher, Wong, Albanese, Dreyfus โ€“ are sleeping very well at night.

They will all survive because they have the numbers and the media.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:01 am

Oh but Medium gets yet dumber.

Family names, or surnames, mean a lot. Sometimes those names indicate where youโ€™re from, where youโ€™re going, to whom you belong, the family you recently joined, or the family who treated you like chattel property. But one poignant essay argues that itโ€™s not the family name youโ€™re born with that matters the most.

โ€œNeither of us will take the name of our spouse, neither of us will take a name from our family history or our personal history together, and as parents our children will not take on our names,โ€ writes Lottie. โ€œInstead, we are taking our childrenโ€™s names.โ€

Thereโ€™s a rich backstory as to why they made this choice. They decided to question whatโ€™s so-called โ€œnormalโ€ and flip it sideways.

Yes itโ€™s true your honour, this man has no balls.

pbw
pbw
June 10, 2023 10:02 am

Roger,

First rule of political skulduggery: regular emails are not safe.

Something Malcolm Turnbull understood, hence his early adoption of Telegram (which turned out not to be so safe. Ask Glenn Greenwald and various Brazilian officials.)

Gilas
Gilas
June 10, 2023 10:03 am

My $0.02 on the Fiona Brown article upthread.

We are expected to believe that a senior political hack like Brown, with years of experience in politics, working in the cesspit of the Nation for decades literally “fell out of the sky” over the excrement thrown around by Haggins in February 2021.

Pull the other one, sweetie!

Having previously worked in a woke cesspit for years, I have had ample experience of the Chinese-whisper-like policies and procedures around complaints.
The @rse-covering-above-all imperative is the first thing one thinks of when dealing with an innocent ingenue laying a potential mine at your feet ie. always, always assume it’s a mine!
At the first whiff of H2S gas ie. within seconds of the first meeting, ask to have a witness present, take contemporaneous notes and record the conversation. Never take the ingenue’s version of events as anything other than florid BS.
Nod sympathetically, refer Sweetest Snow-white to support services, politely end the meeting and then email your superior to begin the “spread-the-blame-around” process that will enmesh people who will have more to lose if/when the proverbial hits the blades.
Brown would have known all that.. with bells on… to the power of infinity.

She now counts on sympathy by playing the victim.
But I didn’t hear the violins.
I read of a middle-aged woman, with a f@ucked home life sacrificed to Satan’s rectum in Canberra, who realised she got played by her sistaz, including a much younger version of her.
If she gets away with this, it’s just more celebration and support of abject failure, just one of the many reasons that the West is fucked.

Gilas
Gilas
June 10, 2023 10:07 am

Dover, I have corrected my post, please discard the moderated one.

shatterzzz
June 10, 2023 10:08 am

I suspect the Amphibian is now holed up in her palatial waterside mansion at Mosman hiding.

If Lisa has any sense she’ll do what any “houso” would do .. have a good laff whilst reading her bank statement and have another martini …..
She may never work in “show business” again but she ain’t gonna go hungry, either ..!

Indolent
Indolent
June 10, 2023 10:08 am

The bottom line is that no-one really knows why.
But the studies will find out why at some stage.

The wild card here is the wide disparity between batches. And the different standards of handling. Ironically, the more degraded it is, the less dangerous.

Razey
Razey
June 10, 2023 10:11 am
MatrixTransform
June 10, 2023 10:12 am

moral agency

they all do, apparently.

on the semantics of ‘morality’, last week some small-talk here highlighted the gulf between the rationalists and the absolutists

MotherLode’s parody “Her eyes watery, partly from self-pity and partly the fumes arising from her glass” is funny but doesn’t ring true.

more likely that the fumes will be whispering something like … nah, it’s time to speak power to truth

every good Arts Student these days gets to consume Freud’s Totem and Taboo early in their course
and Tucker Carlson touched on taboo yesterday

watch while suddenly nothing happens in the greater Lehrmann imbroglio

it isn’t about good, or right, or wrong … its about power

eat the bugs

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 10:13 am

If Brownโ€™s account of her conversation with Morrison is true, then his โ€œwe have spokenโ€ was simply a box ticking exercise so that he would not be seen to be misleading Parliament. In other words, the hallway conversation was the beginning and end of the consultation/discussion. As someone mentioned up thread, a Pharisee performing the minimal requirements to fulfil the task.

It makes him look conniving and cowardly. We deserve better from our parliamentarians. I have zero doubt that the same episode is repeated dozens of times on the other side of the political divide as well, possibly with even greater enticements to remain schtumm and toe the line as required.

He has no one to blame for his waning star but himself.

H B Bear
H B Bear
June 10, 2023 10:16 am

Something Malcolm Turnbull understood, hence his early adoption of Telegram

After the Godwin Gretch episode he would have been well advised to give it away entirely. Alas, this did not happen.

Tom
Tom
June 10, 2023 10:20 am

We deserve better from our parliamentarians.

But we’re not going to get it.

Muddy
Muddy
June 10, 2023 10:24 am

Salvatore, Understaffed & Overworked Martyr to Govt Covid Stupidity says:
June 10, 2023 at 1:06 am

Thanks for posting that.
Wow. Just WOW.
If everything claimed in that article is factual …

Credit where credit is due, though … (I cannot believe I’m about to write this; I feel dirty) … congratulations to the Janet A. and Stephen Rice, and to their paper for publishing it. It’s as though a schism in time has opened and we’ve slipped back 30 years or so.

What an extraordinary story as a whole.

MatrixTransform
June 10, 2023 10:25 am

snap. Tom

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 10:26 am

They will all survive because they have the numbers and the media.

The media is breaking, Crossie.

It’s just too juicy a story for them.

That being said, they may yet survive, but they’ll be forever tarnished by their perfidy.

johanna
johanna
June 10, 2023 10:26 am

calli says:
June 10, 2023 at 10:13 am

If Brownโ€™s account of her conversation with Morrison is true, then his โ€œwe have spokenโ€ was simply a box ticking exercise so that he would not be seen to be misleading Parliament. In other words, the hallway conversation was the beginning and end of the consultation/discussion. As someone mentioned up thread, a Pharisee performing the minimal requirements to fulfil the task.

Nope, as I understand it he claimed to have discussed the allegations with her, not just that he ‘spoke’ to her. If she is to be believed, that was a lie and he misled Parliament.

On another note, Greta Thunberg has finally graduated from high school, aged 20:

Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg has skipped school to draw attention to climate change for the last time โ€” not because she no longer wants to protest, but because she has graduated.
Key points:

The 20-year-old has been striking for climate action since 2018
Students all over the world were inspired to do their own strikes
The activist has vowed to continue protesting after graduation

The 20-year-old started staging Friday protests outside the Swedish parliament building during school hours in 2018, inspiring teenagers from around the world to follow her lead.

This created an international student movement called Fridays for Future.

The activist staged her final protest outside parliament on Friday, wearing a cap high school graduates typically wear in Sweden.

Because she would no longer be a student, Ms Thunberg said her future Friday activities “technically” would not be school striking.

But in a tweet, she vowed to continue protesting, saying: “The fight has only just begun.”

Graduating aged 20? Bit of a slow learner.

Rabz
June 10, 2023 10:27 am

Craig Foster in an interview trying to tell Ange Postecoglou that Ange Postecoglou is a shit coach who should resign

Postecoglou’s early managerial record was nothing to write home about, but then neither was Sir Scottish Drunk‘s.

Postecoglou has certainly had the last laugh, especially given his new gig at Tottenham. Foster will always be a stupid sanctimonious mediocrity.

Roger
Roger
June 10, 2023 10:27 am

It makes [Morrison] look conniving and cowardly.

Erm…what do you mean, “look”?

C.L.
C.L.
June 10, 2023 10:28 am
Gilas
Gilas
June 10, 2023 10:30 am

Just my $0.02 on the Fiona Brown article upthread.

We are earnestly expected to believe that a senior political hack like Brown, with years of experience in politics, working in the national cesspit for decades, literally โ€œfell out of the skyโ€ over the excrement thrown around by Haggins in February 2021.

Pull the other one, sweetie!

Having previously worked in a woke cesspit for years, I have had ample experience of the Chinese-whisper-like policies and procedures around complaints.
The @rse-covering-above-all imperative is the first thing one thinks of when dealing with an innocent ingenue laying a potential mine at your feet.
Always, always assume itโ€™s a mine!
At the first whiff of H2S gas ie. within seconds of the start of the first meeting, ask to have a witness present, take contemporaneous notes and record the conversation.
Never take the ingenueโ€™s version of events as anything other than florid, liquid BS.
Nod sympathetically, refer Sweetest Snow-white to support services, politely end the meeting and then email your superior, to begin the โ€œspread-the-blame-aroundโ€ process that will enmesh people who will have more to lose if/when the proverbial hits the blades.
Brown would have known all that.. with bells onโ€ฆ to the power of infinity.
It is simply the only way to survive in a bureaucratic, woke environment.

Fiona now counts on public sympathy by playing the victim.
But I didnโ€™t hear the violins.
I heard a middle-aged woman, with no career and a home life sacrificed to purveyors of Satanโ€™s rectum in Canberra, who realised, too late, that she got played by her sistaz, including a much younger version of her.
She simply failed at her job
If she succeeds in this deflection, itโ€™s yet more evidence that abject failure is OK.
Just more evidence, if any was needed, that the West is f@cked.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:31 am

Graduating aged 20? Bit of a slow learner.

She’s a Downie.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 10:31 am

Cut it out, Vikki. You might believe it, I donโ€™t.

She wanted to keep her job. The End.

Her and Beetrooter were all-in with the story from the get go.
Reaching out.
Reaching around.
Touching me.
Touching you.
.
Oops sorry.
Went a bit Neil Diamond there.

MatrixTransform
June 10, 2023 10:34 am

she got played by her sistaz, including a much younger version of her

** chuckles

Razey
Razey
June 10, 2023 10:35 am

The leftards might be more careful about importing muslims in the near future. I have no beef with muslims.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 10:36 am

No, that is not all that Plod have on Trump. Election fraud, business fraud and seditious conspiracy indictments are all coming.

Meanwhile, Hillary is having fun selling But Her Emails merch.

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 10:37 am

One more article before heading out, Phillip Benwell in the Hun.

As soon as a person has been accepted as the governor-designate for their state, it is imperative that they abide by the obligations of office.

Their privileged position requires them to leave any hint of politics behind.

As the independent constitutional umpire, and the protector of the peopleโ€™s constitutional rights, any vestige of previous partisanship on any issue needs to be discarded.

Under our system of constitutional monarchy, fine-tuned over many centuries, the King is above politics and is an independent umpire protecting the constitutional rights of the people.

If prior to his coronation, King Charles had said that he supported a particular political party but would now be independent, the outrage would be heard across the Commonwealth with calls for him to abdicate.

Similarly, outrage is being heard around Australia because Monash University vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner broke all protocol by declaring that she was a republican following the announcement of her nomination as governor-designate of Victoria.

There is no difference.

A governor-general or a governor is more than the representative of the King, for he or she is the King in the country or in the respective state, and must always remain above politics and be totally impartial on any matter which may invite controversy.

In this manner a viceroy can have no private opinions for he or she speaks with the voice of the people as a whole.

Our late Queen was the embodiment of how a constitutional monarch should act.

It is an example that our governors should follow.

This is the strength of our constitutional system, which was drafted by Australians for Australians, and which has served Australia so very well over 100 years.

It is totally unlike any sort of republican system that Professor Gardner says she prefers, and it is to be hoped that in no way would she consider herself to be akin to a president of a republic, for that she is certainly not.

Upon her appointment, she will represent the Crown and her entire term must thereafter be dedicated to protecting the freedom and the democracy of her people whatever their politics, their religion or social standing.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
June 10, 2023 10:37 am

Greta Thunberg has finally graduated from high school, aged 20

Passing biology, physics and chemistry would’ve been especially tough for her.
Also history, economics and anything technical.

feelthebern
feelthebern
June 10, 2023 10:39 am

Something Malcolm Turnbull understood, hence his early adoption of Telegram

Turnbull’s original app of choice was Wikr.
Similar to what Signal is now.

Bruce of Newcastle
Bruce of Newcastle
June 10, 2023 10:40 am

Monty Beria is permanently priapic today.
Doesn’t seem to be interested in Biden, Pence or Hillary though.
Ok no one breathing would be interested in Hillary. Eww.

Rabz
June 10, 2023 10:40 am

We deserve better from our parliamentarians

This Hoggins imbroglio seems to become more tawdry by the day.

Two drunken appallingly ignorant utterly useless young imbeciles incorrectly admitted to a federal government minister’s office at 2:30am on a Saturday and people are still obsessing about it years later.

You would have thought that a staggeringly stupid braindead lamestream media mediocrity such as the amphibian could not have made itself look even more ridiculous than it already was.

Yet here we are. Casual racism and hypocrisy, leavened with speech patterns that defy description.

Our ruling caste is beyond preposterous, entirely fitting given we are now existing in the most stupid age in human history.

And on that note, it’s time to adjourn for some exercise and then some gardening.

Black Ball
Black Ball
June 10, 2023 10:42 am

Monty mustn’t be getting any from her mrs. To come and spray diarrhoea the way she does is her sexual gratification. Change my mind.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:44 am

Enjoy the decline, rabz.

Ed Case
Ed Case
June 10, 2023 10:45 am

Brown says Lehrmann was leaving the Office in a few days anyway?

So, did he officially get the sack or not?
And what about the new job?
Did he take it up or not?

And the first “Security Breach” was over a Document, not over unauthorised entry as we’d been told.

Here’s what looks like really happened:
Reynolds and Brown got an early heads up about events.
That’s just common sense, do you think Security woulda kept their jobs if they’d waited 2 days to tell the Minister that a naked woman was found in her office.
Then there’s the Industrial Steamcleaning that happened 10 minutes after Higgins exited.
Do a thorough search for condoms, the cleaner was told.

Bottom Line:
Reynolds tried to manage Higgins out the door, through Brown, but they found out the hard way that Higgins was made of sterner stuff and put she her Media Adviser experience to good use.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:46 am

Election fraud, business fraud and seditious conspiracy indictments are all coming.

How do you know? What election fraud?

Indicting him for the January 6 nonsense is a complete and utter joke.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 10:49 am

Yet here we are. Casual racism and hypocrisy, leavened with speech patterns that defy description.

Bwah ha ha ha.
Yes.
The tapes sounded like they were reading verbatim from the Department of Administrative Administration’s Gender and Equity handbook.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 10:50 am

Higgins was made of sterner stuff and put she her Media Adviser experience to good use.

And how is that working for her now?

calli
calli
June 10, 2023 10:51 am

Thanks Gilas. Thereโ€™s always that great big pachyderm in the corner called โ€œIfโ€.

What intrigues me is that she kept quiet for so long. Orโ€ฆwas no one prepared to print the story until now?

On your depiction of Canberra – a family member is working for one of those hideous secret squirrel agencies down there and has to attend meetings every so often. Canโ€™t wait to get out of the place. Offered a huge promotion with certain โ€œclearance requirementsโ€ but will not touch it with a barge pole.

Too much integrity Iโ€™m glad to say.

Chris
Chris
June 10, 2023 10:51 am

So Powerline refers us to a British tankie who says that high-morale Ukrainians have eight weeks training in Combined Arms Operations, and will go through no-hope Russian conscripts in a massive roll-up.
Reminds me of John Masters on the subject of young officers just back from Machine Gun School. evangelism.
But I am not thinking of it in terms of the Uke-Russia war, but local politics. Imagine if there were a system of combined operations capable of getting disgruntled conservatives, ordinary religious types, a gaggle of reformed libertarians and rational middle-of-the-roaders to act for the same purpose, and correctly liberate the chancers and self-serving arses to live their best lives toward the end of managing the future of the country well.
Just imagine.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:55 am

reformed libertarians

No thanks. Once you take the classical republicanism pill you can never go back to “normal” representative democracy-style politics. It’s retarded.

m0nty
m0nty
June 10, 2023 10:56 am

How do you know? What election fraud?

There is an AG in Georgia working on it. Also one in NY working on business fraud. Plus the Feds working on further J6 charges, off the back of a very long string of convictions of militant Magadonians.

Pay attention, Dot.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 10:58 am

“We’re working on it”

Bragg’s case was a jacking folk. I want substance monty, not rhetoric.

Sancho Panzer
Sancho Panzer
June 10, 2023 11:00 am

Regarding the Beetrooter Dynasty.
I posted here the other day how he gave Plibbers a free pass on Sunrise on Monday but was beating the drum about the $3 meg payout on Sky on Wednesday.
Why the turnaround?
Well, his meeja adviser (Mrs Beetrooter 2.0) tells him which way she percieves each audience leans, and he then leans in unison with them.
No doubt Beetrooter will be leading the charge against Gallagher and Co in QT at the first opportunity.
Will that increase my respect for him?
Nup.
He will only be doing it because of perceived political advantage for Beetrooter.
He was prepared to “reach out” to Britnah and throw Lehrmann under a bus because he thought it would look good for him.
Equally he will pile on The Liars, not because it is right or wrong, but because he thinks it will boost The Great Beetrooter.
As someone once said …
FCK OFF BANANABY!

Pogria
Pogria
June 10, 2023 11:02 am
Razey
Razey
June 10, 2023 11:02 am

Munty is the sole source of truth. Just ask him.

Dot
Dot
June 10, 2023 11:03 am

Sir Scottish Drunk’s greatest coaching miracle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hedUBy_w8g

Trying to take out Viera like a long-firm hitman in a dodgy Ford Sierra, not so good.

Ed Case
Ed Case
June 10, 2023 11:03 am

And how is that working for her now?

Pretty well, I’d say.
She didn’t say anything while Wilkinson and Sharaz were droning on about Jacinta Price, which shows common sense and good taste, and she’s made no comment on Brown’s wailing either.

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