Tom Marshall-Davis

This is serious business and we are not amused.

It's only March, I should not be (and have never been) this close to filling all the squares in my joke 2026 Auspol bingo card.

Of all the knuckles in all the fingers, I suppose the thumb's are the most pea-like. The chant is apparently "Peaknuckle, 1 2 3, I declare war on thee," too, which sounds just as much like a thing people with too much time on their hands'd come up with

So do you New Zealanders call your thumbs "peaknuckles"? How quaint.

I have added some comments on the Farrer uComms TAI poll here. Noting that Milthorpe was named and her opponents were not, there is some chance that if the respondents actually voted, the Liberals would get over her and win on preferences in this sample.

kevinbonham.blogspot.com/2026/02/farr...

Oh, and we're coming up on our second consecutive Friday the 13th. Just in case the sky bleeding wasn't omen-y enough.

Last blood moon for almost three years stuns stargazers Australians looking to the sky on Tuesday night saw the Moon turn a reddish-orange hue, in the last total lunar eclipse until 2029.

We interrupt our ongoing escalating military conflagration to bring you a very angry sky.

www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03...

One weekend. Can we not just have one weekend where I can get home and turn on the news without some stupid "oh btw we're nuking The Gambia" shit. This year has been weird as hell, even by 'twenties standards.

Should unis ditch group assignments? Opposition education spokesperson Julian Leeser says universities should get rid of group assignments, branding them ‘unfair’.

I THINK this is them trying to reconnect with youth. Like, I can see this idea coming out of some Young Liberal uni club with a few high achievers who blame every bad mark in every group task ever on layabouts (probably Greenies, too!) and international students. theconversation.com/should-unis-...

Australian TVs get Kohli and sandpaper scandals like everyone else. I'm not sure what we're missing.

I am unfamiliar with the discarded seventh state's achievements in cricketry. Good for yous, kiddo

Team King Dick would have entered the Commonwealth as state instead of two, and you'd all be Tasmania'd like the rest of us

Oh is Team Dickie Seddon lecturing me on the nature and efficacy of representative democracy now? My apologies

Expansion an excellent idea, although doesn't sound like it goes far enough - even ignoring population growth since '84, without constitutional reform to ditch the nexus provision the best solution is to increase seat numbers until the 5-seats-per-state House minimum doesn't over-represent Tasmania

"She's got the guts to say what you're thinking" onlh worked as a slogan because nobody really paid much attention to what, specifically, she *said*. Even racists like some deniability, that's why they started talking about "social cohesion" instead of "white Australia".

I feel like with all the polling hype the commentators aren't quite capturing, at a time when One Nation seem to believe they're going mainstream, how deeply stupid, offensive, and even just factually wrong the party's branding still is.

If they're fresh out of high school, just treat them like adults - helps to set expectations about how they ought to conduct themselves, and builds up rapport with them, but also jolts them out of that high-school mindset (it's not "class", you're facilitating a discussion) and gets them to TALK

#BREAKING 🚨 Independent candidate Michelle Milthorpe has confirmed she will recontest Farrer at the upcoming by-election, setting up a possible five-cornered contest following the resignation of Sussan Ley

Milthorpe received 43.7% of the two-candidate-preferred vote in 2025

Milthorpe did well partly because Farrer's home to the biggest solar farms in Australia, so as much as climate's divisive in the country, renewables investment brings money to areas with declining primary-industry economies. But anyone-but-Coalition candidates have done well for more than a decade.

In 2025 a *pro-climate* independent dragged the Coalition margin down to its lowest point in decades (maybe ever - it's been a while since I've looked). So if, say, Helen Dalton runs, she'll win - just saying.

The folks at Wikipedia seem ... pessimistic.

I remember back in 2018, last time It was On, I was watching Murder on the Orient Express, where everyone was the killer. This time It being On interrupted Blue Moon, a movie about a pathetic has-been desperately trying and failing to cling to his relevance. I guess providence has a sense of humour.

She does seem to sit squarely on the conspiratorial right. Interesting what it says about the SA AJP - is this a genuine vetting failure, a choice to run in as many seats as possible (where candidate quality is secondary), or is conspiracy-tinged environmentalism just something they're OK with?

The Kuhlmann candidacy's very interesting - since the other AJP candidates range from respectable environmental activists to the kind of new-ageism that's at least conspiracy-adjacent, Kuhlmann kinda only looks like an outlier, if they emphasise a Christian whole-life ethic or nature-spiritualism.

Bolt isn't all that relevant; more interesting because, even if there are right wingers who find him gross (and they do exist), it indicates the kind of thing those people will tolerate-but-not-"agree"-with. Which is what helps these maniacs drag everyone else down to incrementally crazier extremes

I always go back to this Andrew Bolt nonsense - "Malcolm Turnbull in a skirt," which sets up Ley's gender as the only thing that differentiates them, and might make her worse, but implying Turnbull's allegedly feminine characteristics actually makes them the same.

www.skynews.com.au/opinion/andr...

A shockingly large number of people from my hometown were white South Africans who happened to arrive in or around 1994. So it is very possible.

Also, based on Dr Brian's newsletter, it's clear he wanted an Orange-free state, so

No like the fruit.

Where I grew up there was this guy Dr. Brian who used to warn us kids that the Oranges could see inside our minds. And every election - he ran in all of them - he would hand out flyers detailing the Oranges' plot.

I don't know why I told that story, but it feels relevant.

Here in the Libertarian Party, we believe in free speech. We also believe people should be arbitrarily stripped of all their meaningful rights if they say stuff we don't like, but, y'know, they should still be allowed to, like, *do* it. Because we believe in free speech.