Tom Marshall-Davis
PhD candidate, Monash University. Works on Australian political culture (I write junk about the Liberal Party). World expert on Brendan Nelson I guess.
- 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.
- If, tomorrow, Joyce went on live TV and announced a new We Should Eat Live Human Babies Party, ~40% of the press gallery would divine that the reason the Coalition doesn't have a supermajority is that the Liberals didn't think to make eating live human babies official Coalition policy ten years ago.
- I mean, I'm not *shocked* that Tony Abbott thinks the best way to remind people what it means to be Australian is to show them a 58-year-old ad for an oil company, but... he's joking, right? This is- he's being cheeky, he's leaning into it, he must be. Because what the hell, dude
- This one goes out to all the 60something blokes who've spent the last 20 years saying "we had 50 degree days all the time when I was a kid" when what they mean is someone left a thermometer on an airport tarmac in the desert once and it said 50, probably, they reckon. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...
- Again, the problem (and this has always been the problem) is that both these guys are, uh, clowns. They're relying on the fact that, eventually, "only the impotent are pure" won't matter when, in two-to-eight years, enough people are mad enough at Labor to vote for literally anyone else.
- I'm about to lose the plot
- Reposted by Tom Marshall-DavisKeith wuz robbed
- Reposted by Tom Marshall-Daviswww.joxleywrites.jmoxley.co.uk/p/airport-bo... Great piece on “airport book brain” - the tendency of politicians to swallow simplistic solutions. Latest example the Jonathan Haidt book shaping policy on teens and social media
- Well this is just gold. www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...
- Since quarterly Australian GDP growth recently is barely in the black because of AI datacentres (which, I suspect, is why the Albanese Govt is so hot on AI right now), it's worth revisiting the "Poowoomba" referendum debacle, and how it basically killed the idea of waste water recycling forever.
- The world has entered “an era of global water bankruptcy” with irreversible consequences, according to a new United Nations report. cnn.it/4qxGTNX
- Just so we're on the same page, this is the government that periodically implied it'd amend s18C of the Racial Discrimination Act whenever it thought it was losing the "Free Speech" crowd, only to back down whenever people pointed out doing so would enable Holocaust denial? That government, right?
- Honestly a little disappointed Sky haven't worked the phrase "Labor hate speech" into everything they've written about this. A golden opportunity for subliminal messaging, and they let it slip right through their grubby little fingers.
- Imagine screwing up so badly that your own party agree with you that the stuff they wrote about is so nasty it might break the law. www.abc.net.au/news/2026-01...
- Great Brendan Nelson representation on Hard Quiz tonight. It's nice to see him mentioned on TV for being a Liberal leader once, and not for insisting that Australian soldiers should, as a rule, never be held responsible for war crimes.
- Is the beard important? Did they have to engineer some kind of special spacesuit to deal with static electricity in a high-oxygen environment or something? I get that he's, y'know, The First, but why is THIS a first that's important enough for paragraph one?
- NSW Government now allowing police to remove face-coverings at protests for any reason (as opposed to, y'know, an actual reason). "Face-coverings" is supposed to make it sound scary (balaclavas); but lots of people, in COVID times, wedged in crowds of thousands, will be penalised for wearing masks.
- Tony Abbott's just released a statement on the "Bondi Pogrom". It's understandable, I guess, that, since the most significant pre-Bondi attack within Australia was Lindt, the scale of Bondi is genuinely shocking, but this death-spiral of increasingly extreme rhetoric is getting a little frightening.
- Feels appropriate that, when "post-Howard" turned 18, the Liberals celebrated by playing to anti-immigrant rallies, dumping even the most half-assed of commitments to climate action, and scrambling for the leadership, while Barnaby Joyce was jumping ship to One Nation. Talk about path-dependency.
- Reposted by Tom Marshall-Davisa friend reminded me of the existence of Conor Court publishing and after twenty minutes on the website I discovered it: the perfect Christmas gift for young and old, friend or foe
- Anyone see the Amazon War of the Worlds movie? Where the moral is that the 24-hour surveillance state is actually good so long as you get rid of the bad apples, and the Amazon delivery-guy son-in-law is an incompetent clown who only saves the world cos of Amazon's new same-day-delivery drone? Wild.
- Reposted by Tom Marshall-Davis[Not loaded yet]
- Seems to reflect, more than anything, how little name recognition any of them have. Price and Hastie making a fuss seems to have swallowed up whatever support Taylor might've had (even though Price is a Senator, and a Liberal of convenience).
- This is all very exciting - I guess that's the word - but remember that defecting to (and, inevitably, becoming the parliamentary leader of) these far-right parties is a well-established way for right-wing Coalition MPs to make what (to them) is meant to be their graceful exit from politics.
- Reposted by Tom Marshall-Davis[Not loaded yet]
- The party's at a low ebb when the best endorsement for a guy people are actually talking about as a leader is still "he thinks war crimes are bad, sometimes". www.abc.net.au/news/2023-06...
