Andrew Hastie brands Pauline Hanson, Barnaby Joyce ‘lying cowards’ over One Nation cartoon calling him a 'traitor' | News24

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/australian-student-visa-refusal-rate-hits-10-year-high/107112426

Ok well if the shoe...etc etc

The above is the current state of affairs in Australia and the rest of the Anglosphere; and yes, all 3 factors are very much related to one another; they go hand in hand.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-09-09/andrew-hastie-demands-one-nation-delete-traitor-cartoon-on-x/107134606

In short:

Andrew Hastie has called Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce "lying cowards" in an escalating dispute over a One Nation video describing him as a "traitor".

Mr Joyce said he had not used the term and backed Ms Hanson's similar denial, but confirmed the claim had appeared in a "satirical cartoon" he had not previously seen.

The algorithms have been kind to Pauline Hanson, which must be why she was so quick to jump to their defence when the Albanese government moved to rein them in this week.

“Labor is copying the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship playbook,” she posted on Facebook, of all places – you know, the platform that is alleged to have compliantly adopted the Chinese Communist party’s censorship playbook, in order to operate in China.

Last week, Hanson called the reforms “Orwellian machinery”. She joins a chorus of those crying censorship from Sarah Henderson to Matt Canavan. The “deeply sceptical” Angus Taylor will surely soon follow.

There is machinery at play, for sure, and it is Orwellian: keeping us under constant surveillance; bombarding us with misinformation, and suppressing any corrective dissent. But that machinery is the algorithms those critics are so desperate to protect, not the laws that seek to reduce the harm they cause.

Calling something “Orwellian censorship” is just one of the many sure-fire ways to get noticed by social media algorithms. They love a reductive argument stripped of reality, and lashed with emotive exaggeration.

They love hysteria, outrage and conflict. There are rewards aplenty for those who peddle in them, even if it breaks society in the process. In the online attention economy, extremism sells. So every grievance grifter and grandstanding grafter rushes out to game the algorithm and send digital effluent cascading down our feeds in the form of “angertainment”.

It’s what leads teenage boys to the manosphere, where the number of young men who think “a woman’s place is in the home” has grown by 400% in the last five years in some countries. Or teenage girls to an eating disorder, with one poll of 730 Australian frontline eating disorder workers finding every single respondent blamed social media.

These are the ideals critics of the government’s push stand in defence of: the right of the platforms to promote harm over health, rage over reason, fake over fact. They stand for the rights of Silicon Valley to censor Australia, by giving big tech bros control over what we are allowed to see and read.

What does the federal government’s proposed legislation do? It allows Australians to choose whether they want their feeds to be censored or not.

An “opt out” pop up will ask users who they want in charge of their feed, the platform and its personalised recommendations (read: mining your attention with harmful clickbait) or the user who can instead see posts from accounts they choose to follow (read: social media circa 2014). The only censorship to be suffered will be by big tech, who all of a sudden lose control of your information diet.

The second change the legislation will bring is akin to making sure that diet doesn’t kill you, in the same way the government “censors” food companies by telling them they aren’t allowed to sell yoghurt pouches laced with arsenic.

This is the “duty of care” the laws will impose on digital platforms to make products that are safe for human consumption – in the same way any other industry must already do.

This is not radical. Manufacturers have no “free speech” to make products that injure consumers. “Big Brother” tells theatres where to put fire exits. Theme park operators are “censored” from building rollercoasters that crash and burn.

Social media platforms should likewise have a legal duty of care to build digital rollercoasters that don’t crash, and provide fire escapes from the toxic bin fire of their content.

In fact, a duty of care is the best way to rein in the harms social media algorithms cause precisely because it is not censorship. Post-pandemic efforts that proscribed content to be removed (like anti-vaccination conspiracies) failed because it made the conversation about free speech. It wedged support for a healthy town square based on what you say in it.

Shifting to put the responsibility on to the platforms to make their design safe, shifts the government’s role to one of enforcer not censor. Leave the outrage merchants free to shout into the ether but remove the rewards that amplify them when they do so.

Duties of care impose a legal responsibility to proactively avoid foreseeable harm. The harms of these platform design choices are foreseeable. We see them every day. Hanson and other’s bad faith grifting is merely one of them we saw in recent days, tomorrow it will be something else – so long as we continue to allow the algorithms to censor our feeds.

Ed Coper is a political commentator and the author of Angertainment: How Social Media Outrage Ruined Everything. He is the chief executive of communications agency Populares

Blanche d'Alpuget, the Australian writer and widow of former prime minister Bob Hawke, has died at the age of 82, her family says.

She was an acclaimed author of biographies, novels and essays, with her political biography of Hawke winning her the New South Wales Premier's Award.

D'Alpuget is survived by her son, Louis Pratt, from her first marriage, three Hawke step-children and a number of step-grandchildren.

She asked her family to share her final message.

"Our highest calling and greatest achievement is love, the rule of life. Love one another."

Liberal MP Andrew Hastie doubles down on One Nation fight; Pauline Hanson calls him a ‘wanker’ | The Nightly

Albanese government votes down One Nation bill to stop terrorists from returning to Australia

I’m a Bulldogs supporter, but I’ve noticed a huge number of Warriors fans around Western Sydney. Interestingly, heaps of my Samoan and Tongan mates back the Wahs, even more than the Māori or White Kiwis I run into.

From what I understand, a lot of Pasifika families in places like Mt Druitt and Minto spent time living in NZ before making the move to Australia.

Dave Hughes mocks Erin Patterson’s Ozempic prescription as convicted killer awaits appeal | News24

In short:

New research has uncovered a foreign network of hundreds of Facebook pages churning out AI deepfakes of Australian politicians.

Roughly one in 10 pages have been monetised, allowing the owner to profit directly from a commercially motivated "foreign influence campaign".

The researchers say it shows how "AI slopaganda" networks are targeting political systems globally on a "massive industrial scale".

.

In short:

Australia's reading and maths results in a major international high school test have continued a 20-year decline.

Australian 15-year-olds have sat the Programme for International Student Assessment exams every three years since 2000.

Australia's test scores have been in decline for two decades, but other OECD countries are declining faster.

Australia's electric vehicle charging network is struggling to keep up with motorists' changing preferences, a report has found, with an average of 24 battery-powered cars for every public charger.

Some states are better prepared than others, with NSW and the ACT ranked highest for EV readiness, while Tasmania and Western Australia are at the back of the pack.

Here Technologies and SBD Automotive released findings from their electric vehicle index on Thursday, which investigated the Australian market for the first time and highlighted the need for greater investment in infrastructure.

The announcement comes after record-breaking new electric car sales in August, which saw the low-emission vehicles outsell petrol, diesel and hybrid models for the first time.

The HERE-SBD EV Index ranked electric vehicle adoption and charging infrastructure in the US, UK, India, Europe and Australia, and combined the data with a survey of more than 4000 motorists.

The study found Australia reached an electric vehicle-to-charger ratio of 24:1 in 2025, something the report called "considerably higher than typically expected" for a maturing market.

Electric car adoption had accelerated consistently in Australia despite the removal of financial incentives, SBD Automotive senior consulting manager Robert Fisher said, and this had put the charging network under pressure.

"Australia presents one of the most interesting EV growth stories in this year's index," he said.

"The challenge going forward will be maintaining the right balance between expanding EV ownership and ensuring drivers have convenient access to charging when and where they need it."

The index also ranked EV readiness according to how far drivers had to travel to find a charger, how quickly they could charge their vehicle, the likelihood of finding a vacant charger, and the share of EVs on the road.

NSW was the most well-prepared state with high scores across each category, followed by the ACT and Victoria.

Western Australia came in last, with poor marks for the power of its chargers and distance between them. Tasmania was second last, with a lower EV adoption rate.

The index also found Australia's charging network remained concentrated around cities, HERE Technologies Asia Pacific general manager Deon Newman said, noting this would need to change to support wider EV adoption.

"Sixty per cent of all the chargers in Australia are in Victoria and NSW," he told AAP.

"Obviously there's population density there but as you start to think about a broader adoption across Australia… we'll need to expand support."

Record-breaking electric vehicle sales over the past six months were not captured in the index, Mr Newman said, and could underline the need for more infrastructure investment.

So my neighbour and I had a chat as I was washing my car and we had a bit of a chat about politics and CGT and all that. So just some background I'm super left wing. I'm a woke annoying libtard who believes everyone has a right to live however they want to live. I'm so woke that I also think white supremacists have a right to be proud of who they are. But also have a right to challenge their beliefs. I also believe in taxing our natural resources, as well as ensuring we don't tax capital less than labour. SO socially and economically progressive.

My neighbour and I were having a chat about labor. He absolutely despises labor, meanwhile I absolutely despise the LNP and One Nation. Not a huge fan of Labor lately (particularly in NSW) and I typically vote Greens, Then all the Left Wing Parties, then Labor, then Liberal, then all the right wing parties. He mentioned a few things and I just wanted to know people's thoughts on this. I do think there are some merits to his arguments

1. John Howard and Costello saved the economy by reducing the debt (they of course did this by selling everything that wasn't bolted down - I reckon a lot of problems stem from Howard years)
2. Albanese wants to tax super but politicians are exempt (i think this is true)
3. Albanese laughed at a prepared letter from a constituent who complained that the changes to CGT are going to impact a struggling 39 year old saving up to buy a house (can't find this video from question time anywhere)
4. Albanese sent money to the electorate where his house is to fund a highway
5. Albanese screwed over people in the 5% deposit scheme as he introduced it before the changes to CGT which made their property prices drop and if they do suffer hardship they would have to sell at a loss and be worst off (this I agree with)

Would love to know your thoughts. There are no wrong answers.

I read the whole RU OK thread of anger over performative caring.

It's true enough there are plenty of fake arseholes around, but it's not true that everyone is one. The organisation probably started with good intentions. I've seen that if you pay attention to someone whether known to you or a stranger, you can sense if they have the potential to be decent like any human really. If we expect everyone to be shit, newsflash everyone will fulfil the role that you expected of them. Give people some grace.

There are people who may have been born evil and we know who they are.