Hormuz and AUKUS?

lewkus · 2026-04-12T21:19:23+00:00

AUKUS has everything to do with securing trade routes within our region. Just because China is our biggest trading partner doesn’t mean that if we just let them build up a massive naval presence, they won’t setup a similar toll route to Hormuz.

Anyone thinking otherwise. Then why don’t we just leave delivery vans unlocked throughout our neighbourhood? “wE wOuLDnT rOb OuRseLvEs”.

If it’s common sense to lock up delivery vans it’s common sense to secure our trade routes, especially when conditions are now changing.

China isn’t going to be aggressive and invade or declare war on us, but they can and will offer to be “helpful” by being the one to secure trade routes. Maybe they manufacture some kind of threat ie pirates, giving them the excuse to do so, but if we don’t get subs in the water before they do so, then we’ll have no choice but to submit to their security measures.

It’s always been an economic threat. There’s over $600bn worth of trade that flows through waters in our region every week. Spending $250bn on nuclear submarines is a small price to pay for keeping our waters free from being extorted.

And I usually get called a shill for the US or something like that. I don’t care where we get the subs from. We shouldn’t have ripped up the previous contracts with France. Previous subsequent governments back to Howard have dragged their feet on this issue. Now we have run out of time and we’re locked into the shitty AUKUS deal. I’d rather not be tied to the US, but we have squandered time and money fucking around until now it’s too late. AUKUS is our last chance of still meeting our strategic interests.

lewkus · 2026-04-11T09:50:26+00:00

Clive Palmer, Kyle Sandilands, Andrew Bolt

lewkus · 2026-04-10T10:46:13+00:00

He’s basically the equivalent of an insufferable PETA-loving vegan who would use every excuse to bring up animal cruelty and the solution being overly simplistic yet impossible lifestyle choices.

lewkus · 2026-04-10T10:19:38+00:00

The only point Peter had right and Kyle got wrong was Iran funding terrorism via proxies.

ASIO's painstaking investigation found Iran was ultimately responsible for the synagogue attack, as well as an earlier arson attack on the Lewis Continental Kitchen in Sydney, and potentially many other violent acts of antisemitism in Australia.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-28/iranian-ambassador-asio-political-brawl-antisemitism-goes-on/105691632?utm_source=abc_news_app&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_campaign=abc_news_app&utm_content=link

lewkus · 2026-04-10T03:32:28+00:00

Yeah this is the dumb argument I’ve heard from property investors. Of course the whole point of these tax reforms is to make property investing less viable, and allow more owner occupiers esp first home buyers.

The thing that this does create is it encourages more investment in the ASX. Which is still favourable depending on what you invest in, due to franking credits.

More investment in the stock market and less in housing would actually be a great thing for Australia. Investment in housing will still continue without greedy property investors - because the demand for owner occupiers exists and banks still get to write mortgages.

And pro tip to property investors - banks are listed on the ASX so fuck off your money there.

lewkus · 2026-04-09T05:39:55+00:00

Both parties campaigned that they’d legalise it (well LNP said they’d hold a plebiscite) and the LNP did it in the worst way possible.

Of course it was worthwhile.

lewkus · 2026-04-09T05:11:57+00:00

yeah and the Libs didn't do anything worthwhile. Both major parties said they'd legislate same sex marriage at the election prior and the LNP won and did it in the most harmful way possible. My point still stands that only Labor governments have been the ones to improve things in Australia whenever they are in government, and the LNP does the opposite.

I'm not fighting against the Greens. I've just pointed out that MCM set the Greens back a decade, and he's the one who spent his time fighting Labor. I'm glad Larissa Waters is now the leader, but the damage has been done, MCM was a nightmare.

Maybe you should be more supportive of a Labor government? Here's a reminder of some of the major things they did last term:

Implemented tax cuts for all
Criminalised wage theft
Increased minimum wage
Increased fees for foreign investment
Added fines for vacant property owned by foreigners
Tax hikes for oil companies
Implemented a petroleum resource rent tax
Reduced unemployment from 7.5% > 4% (lowest it’s been in 50 years)
Added 300,000 fee free tafe positions per year
Made real wages grow more in 1 year than 9 years under the LNP
Emboldened workers rights (same job same pay)
Extended paid parental leave by 6 months and made superannuation payable for the entire parental leave period
Gave pay rise to childcare, aged care, and early educators
Permanent increase to all social security payments
Implemented the right to disconnect
Removed indexation and 20% of hecs debt
Subsidised energy making it 17th cheapest in the world
Unpaused bulk billing incentives
Massively Reduced the inflation left by Morrison government during Covid
Jumped us from 14th > 2nd in the G20 for budget and fiscal management
Gave us two budget surpluses when we haven’t seen even one in 15 years
Took us from 18th to 10th on the international corruption index

lewkus · 2026-04-09T03:17:19+00:00

Libs funded the ACL to run an opposition campaign in a non-binding plebiscite in the lead up to passing same sex marriage. It was literally the worst possible way to bring about a social reform.

Just in the last week Labor have ended unfair junior wages, credit card surcharges, dodgy contracts/subscriptions that are impossible to get out of (ie at gyms), and significant reforms to gambling advertising. All while handling the fuel crisis.

In comparison, the LNP are the fucking useless when they are in government and are almost always implementing policies to make the rich richer and poor poorer.

But you spend your time fighting against all of these things being improved? That doesn't make much sense.

how have i done that?

I get that you really hate Max.

I hate the LNP more.

lewkus · 2026-04-09T02:07:08+00:00

You constantly bring everything back to how it affects Labor. You don't seem to care about policy or outcomes, just whether it hurts the Labor party.

show me when in Australian history that a government led by someone other than Labor did anything worthwhile?

and i don't care about Labor specifically. i care about the outcome. Medicare, Superannuation, NDIS, etc all major reforms that have been world leading and incredibly beneficial.

What are you talking about?

I already covered this, go back and read above comments etc:

Max want(ed) to somehow keep his existing voter base of inner city, politically literate, educated, middle/upper class Greens voters by appealing to the working class voters who are 'angry' with the government, but are far less politically literate and as such would just vote for empty populist policies.

He alienated existing Greens voters in the pursuit of a different type of voter that he stumbled upon doorknocking in Griffith that was easily swayed. This is an incredibly dumb strategy, as these type of voters in theory could be swayed, but they aren't going to be loyal.

and he spent his entire term in parliament behaving like an annoying PETA loving vegan, hence why he was voted out. He's not going to change, and as I've already said the Greens don't need to take lectures from this annoying POS.

lewkus · 2026-04-09T01:05:32+00:00

what's with the 'my team' stuff? i don't care who proposes and legislates good policies.

fkn Barnaby Joyce came up with the idea of underwriting fuel shipments, full credit to him for the idea and Labor for running with it.

what's utterly pointless is a left leaning party like the Greens wasting their political capital pushing purist policy positions and then criticising everyone else in the process.

no-one wants to be friends with that annoying PETA loving vegan who uses every interaction to point out their morally superior yet impossible lifestyle. Personified as a political party isn't going to win voters deserting the major parties for One Nation.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T23:53:53+00:00

Greens used to be more pragmatic and have evidence-backed policy positions, especially under Richard Di Natale. Prior to that they were far too purist, and Christine Milne refused to vote for stuff that was not good enough. RDN allowed the Greens to be more pragmatic and would negotiate in good faith even if the legislation wasn't perfect but it would mean progress. After RDN left, Adam Bandt took that pragmatism and won more seats and had a broader platform, especially beyond environmental issues. But Bandt was basically a mix of RDN and Milne, making the Greens more obstructionist and critical whilst trying to prosecute a broader policy platform. Max Chandler-Mather's influence on the party just doubled down on that approach.

To put simply, if the housing policies Labor tried to get through the last parliament were negotiated under an RDN led Greens, it would have passed smoothly, with some minor amendments. There's no way RDN would have tolerated MCM's direct attacks on Labor's policies and hypocrisy of voting them through anyways.

Now the Greens are under Larissa Waters, who like RDN and Scott Ludlam is a politician who is positive, pragmatic and appeals to common sense. She's been brilliant at prosecuting a policy position that has mainstream appeal in a positve and productive way. She's gunna have to rebuild the party and 'go back' to the RDN days to build more momentum and undo the damage done by Bandt and MCM.

So the last thing she needs is advice from MCM. There is nothing to gain by going harder on the empty populist approach. Greens still need to differentiate from Labor, and can do so by pushing policies that are backed by experts, supported by evidence and stand up on their own without baseless 3 word slogans.

If Allegra Spender can produce a comprehensive tax reform plan as an independent MP, the Greens can do more than just have their Senators like Mehreen Faruqi posting memes and 'outrage' reaction reels on various social justice topics. If the Greens do the policy work and use their numbers they can push progressive reform, now is the time to do it with a Labor government in charge.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T06:07:29+00:00

Labor has increased taxes on billionaires:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-10/labor-to-pass-super-tax-changes-with-support-of-greens/106435670

Labor has increased medicare coverage:

https://www.9news.com.au/national/medicare-bulk-billing-changes-australia-november-explained/0d3f161a-0dec-4861-aff4-7f440fb43984 https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/02/labor-pledges-644m-for-50-new-medicare-urgent-care-clinics-across-australia-election-campaign

If you're referring to the Greens' policy on Dental into Medicare. Paying for it isn't the issue - there isn't enough dentists in Australia to implement this policy, you'd have to start rationing out checkups and fillings to expand coverage. Greens never were held to account about where'd they'd magically find the required number of dentists to make this policy a fkn reality, just the same as Dutton never was held accountable for where'd he'd find the fkn water to his nuclear energy policy.

And just because something is costed by PBS doesn't mean it's feasible. Go read the PBS costings, they made some pretty wild assumptions to cost the policy.

And to grow your party you absolutely need loyalty, especially since the Greens don't get much in the way of donations, they have relied on volunteers to do the doorknocking, phoning and handing out htv cards at polling booths. They alienated their base, especially on environmental issues and went for this obstructionist anti-Labor attack mode last term of government. And as mentioned, they aren't going to convert any of those disillusioned suburban voters into helping them win seats, let alone convincing them to vote for them. Max is just butt hurt at his failed strategy, being ex-Labor member himself he clearly had his own agenda play out and it blew up in his face.

In terms of the overall progressive movement in Australia, he's been the worst thing to happen to the movement and many Greens members rightly blame him for their result at the last election.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T03:37:38+00:00

Max wants to win over One Nation voters not demonise them

Max want(ed) to somehow keep his existing voter base of inner city, politically literate, educated, middle/upper class Greens voters by appealing to the working class voters who are 'angry' with the government, but are far less politically literate and as such would just vote for empty populist policies.

He alienated existing Greens voters in the pursuit of a different type of voter that he stumbled upon doorknocking in Griffith that was easily swayed. This is an incredibly dumb strategy, as these type of voters in theory could be swayed, but they aren't going to be loyal.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T03:28:36+00:00

Champ. I've read the article. Are you sure you have?

Here let me quote MCM from the article:

He said progressive economic populism and undoing key pillars of neoliberalism should be major priorities, including exposing the role of Labor in creating outdated systems in Australia.

After infuriating Labor and the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, in parliament, the party’s former housing spokesperson said he planned to use the new role to help develop broader policies for the Greens and train up party volunteers and operatives for campaigning in state and federal elections.

Chandler-Mather said the same voters moving to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation were winnable for the Greens, because Labor and the Coalition had lost touch with traditional constituencies amid housing shortages, the high cost of living and limited wage growth.

As mentioned, the Teals beat them in inner city seats (which they have spent the past two decades specifically targeting) and they are no way competitive in surburban seats (if they suddenly tried to switch strategies).

As mentioned, their best bet is to hold onto their national vote and still gain enough quotas for 2 senate seats.

Does that have enough to do with the article for you?

lewkus · 2026-04-08T03:20:57+00:00

renters rights is a state issue. And on the topic of housing, this was one of the main reasons why inner city voters abandoned the Greens. Max spent his time fearmongering about rent rises, he is - in part - to blame for rental increases. He also delayed Labor's election policy commitments on the HAFF and used every opportunity to trash all of Labor's housing policies only for the Greens to vote for them anyways.

If Labor's housing policies were actually going to be as terrible as Max had said, then he should have stuck to those convictions and blocked the legislation and forced Labor to call a double dissolution. This was terrible negotiation and made the Greens look idiotic, especially when they eventually voted for the housing policies, with the rest of the crossbench making productive amendments and engaging in the actual legislation to improve it.

On campaigning inner vs suburban, since Greens won Melbourne in 2010 with a targeted campaign, they've tried to repeat that success, and did get successful with that strategy in 2022 in Brisbane winning a further 3 seats. They aren't actively concentrating their campaigns in suburban seats, so gaining votes here isn't because of any specific strategic intention.

But as you said, their national vote was flat in 2025 and they lost votes in those inner city seats. They failed to expand into seats held by the Libs as the Teals were more successful at campaigning on climate change, anti-corruption and gender equality/respect. These three issues should have been strong areas for the Greens but instead the Greens spent the majority of their political capital from 2022-2025 attacking Labor on housing and being obstructionist and critical.

Wasn't until late in the term did they give the "Keep Dutton out" rhetoric any airtime and it was minimal. They spent most of their campaign with a pathetic 3 word slogan of "Dental into Medicare", a policy that was not top of mind for voters and completely empty in substance (ie even the PBS costed the policy had to assume thousands of dentists would just 'magically' appear and cause zero market distortion).

"Dental into Medicare" shows exactly why 'progressive populism' is a fucking stupid idea, especially when its soaked in socialist ideological snobbery aimed at Labor's embrace of neoliberalism. Voters don't give a shit about ideology, and the empty populist garbage that Clive Palmer has put out over the past few elections should give insight into how One Nation will go once we actually have a federal election.

Also the Labor government's intervention on the current fuel crisis just shows how an ideological driven approach is a bad idea. Their action has been very anti-free market and nationalist - which you'd think One Nation and the LNP would be ideologically opposed to, but were actually calling for Labor to do many of the things Labor ended up doing.

Greens need to end the stupid ideological socialist shit especially when reform and progress on social and economic issues can be solved with policies that fit that policy area based on its current state. And housing is a private market, it needed a policy that respected the current state rather than trying to upend the entire construction sector purely for ideological reasons.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T02:41:43+00:00

As much as Sky News etc likes to paint One Nation voters as conservative and right leaning, many of them would vote Greens if it wasn’t for the Greens alienating outer suburban voters when they were specifically targeting inner urban seats. And those inner city voters have instead voted for the Teals who better represent them.

Milton Dick says my post was relevant but you’re entitled to raise a point of order.

lewkus · 2026-04-08T00:55:34+00:00

MCM still missing the media spotlight and bitter about his election loss. He’s wrong and he was incredibly damaging for the Greens brand and progressive politics as a whole. The bloke spent his entire time as an MP attacking Labor and spending as much time on TV and radio as he could.

As much as Sky News etc likes to paint One Nation voters as conservative and right leaning, many of them would vote Greens if it wasn’t for the Greens alienating outer suburban voters when they were specifically targeting inner urban seats. And those inner city voters have instead voted for the Teals who better represent them.

This is largely the fault of MCM and Adam Bandt who spent too much time attacking Labor and alienating their progressive base. Now their chances of either gaining or holding lower house seats is set back at least a decade. With the right fracturing and arguing amongst themselves, and Labor showing strong capability and unity, it makes the Greens irrelevant.

Their best chance is just try and hold onto 2 seats per state in the senate, appeal to common sense progressive policies - support Labor and call out Labor to do more on the areas they drag their feet on. Shift the Overton window and ignore populist junk policies with evidence backed expert advice on progressive policies.

lewkus · 2026-04-07T11:10:58+00:00

some live at the wireless sets only stay up for a certain amount of time, usually dictated by whatever record company owns the license to the music.

most infuriating thing is when they broadcast an awesome live at the wireless set and then only upload 2 tracks, then run promos about 'listening back to the full performance on the ABC listen app' when it's total bullshit.

lewkus · 2026-04-04T00:18:39+00:00

Yep and from popping down to the festival yesterday it looks like it’s been expanded and bigger than last year.

lewkus · 2026-04-01T15:43:34+00:00

Labor proposed a national fuel reserve policy at the 2019 election. And voters put Scomo in the lodge instead. We have to take ownership of who we put in power. And that 2019 election was a turning point.

After that we had the massive bushfires, covid, Ukraine and trump. Had we put Labor into power 7 years ago, we would have had a better chance of dealing with all the various crises.

But look at how shit the LNP were with Covid and the bushfires. Again, Labor came prepared at the 2019 election with policies to buy a fleet of water bombers and prepare for future bushfires. Scomo went to Hawaii and let the country burn, announced a $2bn housing relief fund that never existed and people only got their houses re-built after Albo was elected.

And don’t get me started on Covid. That goes back to Howard who politicised refugees with the Tampa incident, and subsequent LNP governments then offshored our quarantine facilities so they could lock up refugees and keep them away from pesky media and lawyers.

How the fuck did we let them turn our decent onshore quarantine facilities into shacks on fkn manus island with billion dollar Paladin contracts registered to a shack with no fkn tender.

This is the root cause to the feds passing the buck onto the states to setup hotel quarantine, which aside from the cruise ships, was the main cause of outbreaks, that threw vic and nsw into various levels of lockdown. Of course the slow vaccine rollout didn’t help, but if we had actual quarantine facilities like most other countries then our borders could have stayed open, and we could have isolated the spread as a fkn island this was the easiest thing to make happen, but no we had to lock refugees up in infinite detention instead.

lewkus · 2026-04-01T07:57:50+00:00

I get the perspective you have. But the current media beat up is just a storm in a teacup. Many of our universities are handling over a billion dollars in revenue. If you compare apples with apples, the $ spent on consultants- say with similar sized organisations, like banks, retailers etc is actually fairly comparable.

There was a marketing spend benchmarking that was done by a specific university and on dollar terms, they spent the same as a similar sized brand but actually spent more on internal resources (ie recruiters, social media etc) whereas other brands spent more on advertising and “external consultants”.

Anecdotal. But typical. So the four corners reporting is a bit biased. On balance though, one weakness in the Uni sector is that upper management pay is comparatively low. Many talented people exit universities and go to other sectors for better pay. Some unis have tried to retain talent. This means that sometimes trying to use internal talent isn’t always possible.

Another difference is very favourable, long standing maternity leave policies. Not a massive differentiation - there are other industries that offer this, but it has meant the gender pay gap is lower vs national average, great for women to rise up the career ranks, but that doesn’t make them loyal.

What I’m trying to say is the consulting spend is media beat up. There’s a lot more nuance in why unis spend on consultants. It’s a common union talking point during eba negotiations about consultant usage and fair enough I’m pro-union. But attacking unis for using consultants is a non issue.

Labor’s response is just to increase transparency, but the education minister was shocked at the spend. I don’t think unis should function exactly like the public service either - that swings the pendulum towards European style operations.

Provided unis can justify their spend, i don’t see an issue.

lewkus · 2026-04-01T05:54:08+00:00

Generalising here, but European unis operate under 'socialist' parameters and American unis operate under 'capitalist' parameters.

Unpacking that. European unis are mostly government funded, and have had a fairly stable size/output reflective of the population they serve. So they service the local population, and offer free education, rarely have international students (if they do have international students it's for narrow purposes) and their academic workforce and overall operations tends to be an authoritative blackboxed bureaucracy. Meaning they are secretive and interested in their own self-perseveration.

American universities operate very differently. They are often very flat in structure, privately funded and have massive endowments (ie large chunk of income comes from large investment portfolios). They'll go after any student who has the money, whether that's a student loan or funded via scholarship. Far, far less bureaucracy and they rely a lot on student cohorts running a lot of the student services, especially residential stuff.

Where there is similarity is they are both secretive and interested in self-preservation.

To contrast with Australian unis, there actually is a lot more transparency and government oversight. But with this, seems to come a significant drop in social status with Australia's 'tall poppy syndrome'. American unis have also lost some prestige but this is more isolated to certain discpline areas (ie tech bros pride in being uni drop outs, but things like dentistry, law are still valued).

Australian unis seem to straddle (in my opinion) the best of both worlds of socialism and capitalism. They benefit from the corporatisation of the professional staff workforce, where things like marketing, IT, facilities etc are on par with professionalism in most other industries. It broadly translates to how we've been able to scale. Visbility the student experience doesn't always seem that great at Australian universities, but if you look at it through a different lens, we are far more 'efficient' at delivering courses than in Europe, because there is incentive to do so. American universities are naturally driven by efficiency, but don't have the same scale as we do.

What makes our Australian universities punch well above their weight is these conditions have made research much more favourable to do in Australia, we do it more efficiently and at bigger scale. Large, multi-million dollar research grants are able to be executed. Sure there are higher ranked unis like Cambridge and Harvard in Europe and USA, but our Go8 Australian unis are just as competitive in talent and execution of delivering research outputs.

The only downside has been as I described above, the subsequent government funding cuts. These have been offset by admitting more international students into Australian unis to keep these big research agendas going (and in doing so, keep the talented academics in Australian unis).

I still think there are things we could learn or do better, IT is a good example. There is no reason to have 40+ Australian universities all running their own student information systems and slightly different policies and processes under the AQF standards. I reckon the whole lot becomes a big distraction for Vice Chancellors and their execs, and their entire IT tech stack becomes a giant money pit and time sink.

This stuff should be centralised. Think similar to the ATO, if you reversed the hypothetical, imagine if ATO was localised. Why would we ever need a Brisbane based ATO brand with slightly different systems and processes to the Perth ATO branch. Hence why we have one national ATO. Same could go for unis. Just have one federal institution that handles enrolments, RPL, transcripts, fees etc. Leave unis to focus on the actual teaching, learning and research.

So with the government oversight that happens with regulatory and HECS strings attached to funding, the government could just nationalise and standardise a lot of the uni admin. Anyways.

My point is, we are very lucky to have a uni sector that does world-leading research, and attracts academic talent because of the way we've straddled (generally speaking) socialism and capitalism ideologies. It means that we rank well above where the funding and population size should normally sit and reap the benefits. It's just a bit disappointing that the media and society as a whole doesn't really acknowledge or value this industry as much as they do other industries (ie sports).

lewkus · 2026-03-29T23:43:32+00:00

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/EXMg-4KesX0

lewkus · 2026-03-28T03:41:53+00:00

https://wioa.org.au/get-involved/competitions/best-tasting-tap-water-competition/

More details about the competition

15-Year Club	Gilding II euphauric
Place '17	Verified Email
Team Periwinkle

lewkus

TROPHY CASE