- The Guardian
- Issue #2200
Difficult
ALP MP Basem Abdo has said about Palestine that it’s “been an incredibly difficult few years on what is an already difficult issue.” This is weaselly, but also clueless. We’re sure the people of Gaza share the ALP’s pain.
Petulance
Some gutless wonder who’s a “senior Labor official” thinks Ed Husic is petulant because he’s not falling into line about Palestine. It’s only a genocide Ed, please be grown-up about it!
On track
Richard Marles on AUKUS … the government has now spent $8.5 billion on the Osborne construction yard in Adelaide.
Stakeholders
The administrators for Pilot Energy, now responsible for an oil rig off Dongara in West Australia’s Midwest have said that they “WORK constructively with all stakeholders”.
Guidelines
Anyone remember the scene in the original Ghostbusters? Bill Murray tells a sexy demon that they have rules against romantic involvement with the demonically possessed. She gives him a huge kiss and he says “Well it’s more of a guideline.” it’s funny because guildelines are so vague.
Adelaide Airport has been banning ads from green groups while letting ads from fossil fuel organisations go on. The ad company says the green ads are too “political,” the airport says they have guidelines.
Claims
Nine’s Paul Sakkal and Matthew Knott, describing attempts to get the ALP to be more pro-Palestinian have talked about “claims” of genocide and apartheid. This makes it sound like someone just dreamt up those claims, where in fact UN authorities and genocide scholars have agreed that genocide and apartheid is exactly what Israel is doing.
“Claims” was not what Knott said when he helped write nine unhinged pages of ‘Red Alert,’ according to which Australia should be at war with China right now.
Rooted
No, not the Australian term whose uses can range from describing extreme tiredness (after that marathon, I’m rooted), dysfunction (the printer is rooted, we need to buy a new one), to sex (use your imagination), but the original, meaning ‘based in’ or ‘derived from’.
Donald Trump has taken time off from announcing that he’s won a war he hasn’t in fact won to claim that the Smithsonian Museum of “extreme political activism, rooted in Marxism, to divide, dispirit, and discourage” the people of the US (who are pretty rooted after having Trump as president).
Purpose
‘We choose purpose over chaos.’
Albanese waxing lyrical at the ALP conference in Adelaide. They also choose progress over protest, unity over division, and outcomes over outrage
Purpose sounds better than chaos, but what makes this weaselly is that Albanese didn’t explain what purpose. There are loads of purposes and not all of them are better than chaos. The Ku Klux Klan has a purpose.
Contracting out (not)
The Albanese government commissioned a report by the Islamophobia envoy. They’re not going to implement all the results, particularly anti-terrorism laws focussed on Muslims (check this). Albo doesn’t want to have a public argument with the envoy, and doesn’t want to piss off a lot of Muslims. What to do?
‘We’re not contracting out government’ he said, trying to sound firm and decisive. He then undermined it by saying that the govt would be guided by security agencies, so contracting out to them is ok
Disproportionate
Liberal leader Angus Taylor has described the mainly female workforce of the care industry as “disproportionately unionised.”
‘Disproportionate’ is often weaselly because it begs the question of why something is disproportionate. Taylor didn’t say what the right proportion of union membership should be.
Anyway, we quite agree – if the level of union membership in the care sector is less than 100% it’s disproportionate.
