Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu urges removal of UN peacekeepers from Lebanon, claiming they are ‘hostages of Hezbollah’

Benjamin Netanyahu has urged the United Nations to remove its peacekeepers from Lebanon, claiming they are becoming “human shields” and “hostages of Hezbollah”.

The Israeli prime minister said he had asked for their removal “repeatedly” and been “met with repeated refusals”.

For 18 years the useless UNIFIL has been failing to stop Hezbollah firing at will into Israel. Now they are embedded in Hezbollah’s military infrastructure.

Cringing when Israel starts taking out the bad guys who have surprisingly somehow become located close to U.N. facilities. And appalled that the IDF is rudely shoving their concrete security blocks around with bulldozers and knocking HQ gates down with reversing tanks.

Newspoll.

Coalition in front of Labor on two-party preferred basis as PM Anthony Albanese’s approval ratings fall in latest Newspoll (Sky News, 14 Oct)

However, the latest Newspoll conducted for The Australian found the Coalition has moved ahead of Labor 51-49 to be in front for the first time since the May 2022 election. …

In the primary vote, Labor and the Coalition were unchanged from the previous Newspoll sitting at 31 per cent and 38 per cent, respectively.

Greens dropped one point to 12 per cent to be level with independents, including the teals, while Pauline Hanson’s One Nation rose to 7 per cent. …

Mr Albanese’s satisfaction level fell three points to 40 per cent, with his dissatisfaction rating rising the same amount to 54 per cent.

In the last survey he was sitting at -8 on negative approval ratings, but that has plummeted to -14 in just three weeks, which is his lowest score since becoming PM.

Mr Dutton also sits at -14, having moved up one point, while the Opposition Leader’s dissatisfaction rating is 52 per cent.

A bit surprising that Dutton is at -14 since my impression is that voters have tended to like the policies he’s been pushing, plus the support for Israel. I suppose that his lack of charisma is unsurmountable for some people. Usual stuff from the lefty MSM wouldn’t help either.

What is going on with the roads in BNE? Elizabeth St in the CBD is riddled with potholes.

Bruce, I doubt any Liberal leader in opposition has ever been rated well personally.

Is it just me, or does something about this rally seem fake?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwwRfu2Liv4

Indolent

 October 14, 2024 9:15 am

Hard to believe Moore has flipped so hard.

How big an influence on the leftards does he have?

Bill From the Bush October 13, 2024 7:45 pm

 Reply to  Winston Smith

At $125 a gram, the tiny specs that I pick up pay for the fuel and everything else is a bonus.

Do you pan or just use a detector?

Aboriginal Inc, predictably, attempts to rewrite history regarding the Voice. And, to be fair, Linda Burney is doing the right thing here:

Linda Burney, the member for Barton and minister for Indigenous Australians from 2022 until July 2024, has spoken to this column against what she calls revisionism of the process that led to the vote. Such rewriting of the facts cannot go unchallenged, she says.

Burney’s comments came after Megan Davis, one of the architects of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, revealed she was open to the idea of not proceeding with the Voice referendum once it became apparent it was very unlikely to win the public’s approval.

Today marks the one year since that referendum. Professor Davis says it has been a tough week for many Indigenous Australians who remain “devastated” by the No result.

“If the prime minister and others had really definitive information that it was going to lose, we were concerned with why that would proceed, given that it was apparent we didn’t have enough time to prosecute the case,” she says.

No, you had plenty of time. The Australian people simply realised they were being sold a pup and they didn’t buy. You could have had all the time in the world and the No vote would simply have solidified.

Honestly, these people. Do they have no self-awareness? Imagine if Albo had delayed the Voice referendum as they’re now insisting he should have. They would have gone absolutely apeshit over it. He would have been accused of treachery, betrayal, an enemy of Indigenous people. He probably wouldn’t have kept his job, to be honest. No, they saw the polls in the months running up to the big day but still believed they were going to win. This is just pure cope.

Burney, who is no longer the minister for Indigenous Australians, told me from Washington she was in every deliberation about how the Voice vote should proceed and not once was there any indication from members that a delay in the vote would be accepted.

Burney says the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, made a decision to follow the advice of Indigenous leadership even when political bipartisanship had failed.

“The notion of waiting was not part of the agenda,” Burney says. “Peter Dutton and David Littleproud had walked away [from the Voice] but there was no appetite for delaying the vote. Any suggestion that the referendum working group would have accepted a delay is false.”

Albanese never expressed his political view, she says. “The prime minister made a decision to listen to what the Indigenous leadership wanted.

“He did what the Aboriginal leadership asked. It’s exactly what happened and you can’t rewrite history.”

Well, they’re experts at rewriting history. For many of them, it’s literally their day job. Why change now?

At the time, I spoke to some members who told me testing the question in a referendum must go ahead regardless of polling showing it could fail.

The magnitude of what a No vote would mean for the country was not at the centre of the conversations I had.

However, with the benefit of hindsight many believe the deep consequences of a No vote should have been considered.

That is because these are some of the most overindulged people on the planet. No one ever says no to them. That this would happen over an issue they made clear was rooly rooly rooly super important to them was inconceivable. They just assumed they’d get their way, as they always do.

We will never know what would have happened if the vote was shelved or delayed.

Well, we can hazard a pretty good guess. There’s a decent chance it never would have happened. However, I suspect it would have been put on the backburner, the ALP would have crashed out of power, the LNP wouldn’t have touched it and the next ALP govt would hold it. And would have got the same answer.

But we do know now what some of the consequences of the No vote have been beyond the constitutional change, and more broadly, the impact on First Nations people.

Yet one year after the No vote, Australia still hasn’t worked out what it is prepared to say yes to.

First Nations people are still dying prematurely and still being incarcerated at record levels. The stark statistics and reality remain unchanged. In fact, they are getting worse.

Ah, the old chestnut. A Yes vote would have magically turned all this around somehow. Absolute hogwash. And Australia doesn’t need to decide what it will say yes to. The question was posed – a question formulated by the very people now with a monumental case of sour grapes – and that question has been answered. It is settled. Deal with it.

The reality of what that historic and thumping No vote means more broadly is only now being fully understood.

It has generated timidity within the government over a wider suite of Indigenous rights reforms. And it has been used by those who fought for No to assume a broader set of messages.

First Nations people have been subjected to racism, not just during the campaign that was often toxic, but in the year since.

Over the weekend, a group in Corowa, a small town on the border of NSW and Victoria, dressed in black, with some wearing sunglasses and face coverings, gathered in front of the town’s war memorial.

They were seen holding a sign that read “white man fight back” and could be heard chanting the same words along with “Australia for the white man, the rest must go”.

You have got to be shitting me. This is absolutely bonkers. There is zero evidence that this probable group of glowies assembled for reasons connected to the referendum result. They were training, that’s my guess. Overtime plus weekend penalty rates for the feds. Cha-ching!

Queensland’s historic Indigenous truth-telling and healing inquiry has commenced in Brisbane, nearly two centuries to the day after a penal colony was established. But its life will be short lived if the LNP wins the election this month.

Under legislation passed on a bipartisan basis in 2023, it will run for three years. But after the referendum led to a backflip last year, Queensland’s Liberal National Party opposition plans to overturn the inquiry if it wins government at the state election on October 26.

Queensland had the highest No vote in the country. The vote was about constitutional change but the messages that have been taken by politics are a lot wider.

No, they’re limited to any Voice-related bodies or institutions. The nation has spoken and resoundingly rejected these entities. Qld LNP promising to pull the pin on theirs should it win is a reasonable, legitimate and commendable effort to reflect the will of the people. Victoria and every other state with any such truth telling boondoggles ought to shut them down immediately. It is clear these have been implicitly rejected by the voters. Okay, sure, let the ACT have theirs. Whatever.

Jacinta Price, the shadow minister for Indigenous affairs and the most prominent leader of the No vote, accused the government in an interview of ignoring the voices of First Nations people.

“They’re not interested in hearing the voices of Indigenous Australians who want practical solutions and their voices heard through our democratic parliamentary system,” she said.

She is absolutely correct. And she is right to differentiate between Indigenous Australians who want practical solutions and the Aboriginal Industry who want ever more power and resources directed their way. Proponents of the Voice, the lot of them. This was always an elite project for the tiny, hyper-privileged group of Aboriginal Inc leaders, who stood to be the main beneficiaries if they were able to get their way. Their ongoing meltdown merely reflects their dismay at not being handed the keys to the kingdom. Sorry, not yours.

Yet while the government has not announced plans for how to progress the issues that drove the Uluru Statement from the Heart and support for a Voice to Parliament, the proponents of No are also still trying to frame the messages it left behind.

Lol this Karvelas broad is really something. Listen, Patsy. We don’t need to frame shit. You insisted on your referendum. It isn’t our problem that you can’t deal with the answer. We’ve all moved on.

Such sore losers.

And sorry, there will be no progressing of any Voice-related issues. The Statement from the Heart has been resoundingly rejected. All of its proposals are dead. All election promises to enact these have been nullified by the referendum outcome.

Honestly, can someone buy this Karvelas woman a dictionary so she can check the definition of ‘no’.

And First Nations people are still begging to be heard.

Again with this furphy. If only they had been listened to! The Voice would have been overwhelmingly supported and all of the problems facing Indigenous Australians would have melted away. But no one would listen to the Voicers (again, important to distinguish between this elite group and Indigenous Australians more broadly). And the rest of Australia still won’t listen. How terrible!

The fact of the matter is these people have one of the largest megaphones in Australian political discourse. Arguably the largest. It is just about impossible not to hear them. They are about as far from ‘not being heard’ as you could get. They are being heard, all right. However, the majority of Australians don’t approve of what they say and aren’t willing to give them what they demand. They need to deal with this reality. This incessant revisionism over the Voice referendum outcome is getting them nowhere.

Enough with the shoulda coulda woulda. The Voicers had every advantage imaginable. They started the campaign with massive public goodwill. Even with full establishment and media backing AND a virtually unlimited budget to sell the Voice to the public, it was overwhelmingly rejected. No amount of additional time for the Voicers to make their case would have changed the result. Once the Australian people learnt what a Yes vote entailed, it was doomed.

And the Voicers can say until they are blue in the face that we were lied to about what the Voice truly meant. That in itself is a lie. We understood all too well what it meant and voted accordingly. The Voicers were the ones trafficking misinformation and falsehoods about what they were proposing. Their whole campaign was an effort to persuade the electorate not to look under the hood of what they wanted us to vote for. They failed. They need to come to terms with the fact they aren’t going to get what they want.

The Yes campaigners blaming the ABC, Labor and the voters is hilarious. Zero acknowledgement of their own role.
Incidentally I note Megan Davis daughter Allira is making it a family business as she is one of the next generation of leaders. Her Uni mate Bridget Cama is another.
Gotta keep that gravy train running.

Incidentally I note Megan Davis daughter Allira is making it a family business as she is one of the next generation of leaders. Her Uni mate Bridget Cama is another.

Yeah the nepotism is astonishingly brazen. You just have to look at the Aboriginal universities within the universities. They have a very high degree of autonomy from the chancellery – vastly moreso than ordinary faculties. They generally have a foundation hero (perhaps two) for whom a vast body of pseudo-scholarly work has been performed in order to deify and mythologise them within the institution. Most if not all of these people are dead now, but vast numbers of their children and grandchildren ‘work’ there.

Is it just me, or does something about this rally seem fake?

The fact that Thomas Sewell was leading it means it is real and those masked men are actual neo-Nazis.

Thomas Sewell is mates with Cranky’s TERF mates including Kellie-Jay Keen. Nathan Bull was probably present as well, the son of a VicPol rozzer. The lack of arrests is of a piece with VicPol policy.

A very good article IMO albeit long:

The End of the Age of Hitler – First Things

In February 1943, the American troop ship Dorchester was torpedoed off the Canadian coast. Four military chaplains—two Protestants, a Catholic, and a Jew—were aboard. According to survivors’ accounts, the chaplains worked together to hurry men into lifeboats, then distributed lifejackets. When the lifejackets ran out, they gave their own to four young soldiers. They then joined hands, singing and praying together as the ship sank. Reportedly, all four were reciting the Shema, the Jewish affirmation of God’s oneness, as the waters took them. The “Four Chaplains” were swiftly commemorated as symbols of America’s war for Judeo-Christian civilization.

What are the remaining 12,000 Australian citizens doing in Lebs?

Avoiding plod.

Fugitive Nassif owes $1.9bn as Toplace records handed to ICAC (Tele, paywalled)

$1.882 billion: That is the figure creditors claim fugitive property developer Jean Nassif’s Toplace owes them – as it can finally be confirmed the NSW ICAC and NSW Crime Commission are investigating the wanted man.

Somehow I don’t think he availed himself of one of the evacuation flights.

Quite a few others I believe have over the years fled back to the old homeland to escape the police.

San Francisco is even WORSE than I imagined

Avi Yemin