Opinion Domestic Politics BF style

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ibd77 said:
AFL got a lot of exposure in the US during their pandemic shutdown. Maybe we should focus our efforts their instead?
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MALTSY said:
Would prefer to grow the game in a democratic country which respects human rights.
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Okay well that's the US out then.
 

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Sadly our State is dropping the ball re testing from this latest outbreak, I know of two people who attended 'hot spot' shops over the weekend but after lining up for over 3hrs today were turned away due to lack of resources to get the testing done - hope this doesn't become Vic like!
 
US sports journo and a few others appreciate this Aussies take on Trump. Doubt any yank would drop the C word in a parody song. Just sneaks in the 140 seconds an a lot yanks asking him to take Murdoch back to Oz.

Author at
 
Never got around to posting this article after Turnbull was sacked and a journo tweeted the link to this April 1991 SMH / The Age Good Weekend magazine article, which was reproduced in September 2014 as one of the 30 most celebrated articles of the first 30 years of the magazine.

His appearance on Q&A a couple of Monday night's ago and his stoush with the Oz's Paul Kelly got me thinking about this long article.

I have never read an article that starts off so bluntly, and so entertainingly about its subject. Turnbull was 36 at the time but he changed once he got into politics. Maybe Phillip Adams was right about him all those years ago.

I moved to Sydney in early 1992 and heard some great stories about him from people who dealt with him personally, or were one or two degrees of separation from those who did, over the first few years I lived there.

www.smh.com.au

Raging Turnbull

In his dual careers as lawyer and merchant banker, Malcolm Turnbull has earned a reputation that inspires a mix of awe, fear and, among some, downright loathing. John Lyons subjects both the facts and the hearsay to cross-examination.
www.smh.com.au www.smh.com.au

Suddenly, he can turn. The charmer becomes the menacer, the defender of freedom of speech its most sophisticated challenger. He laughs, and disarms, but always be on guard. Remember, he can turn. Malcolm Turnbull, at 36, is one of the most powerful lawyers in Australia, and inspires a wide range of feelings among those who know him.

"He's a prick," says ex-business-partner Nicholas Whitlam, who says he is being restrained in what he says so as not to fuel an ongoing feud.

"He's wonderful, kind, generous, warm and friendly," says actor Kate Fitzpatrick, a longtime friend.

"He's a turd," says former Labor senator Jim McClelland. "He's easy to loathe, he's a s**t, he'd devour anyone for breakfast, he's on the make, he's cynical, he's offensively smug. He's a good exploiter of publicity, although I applauded the way he ran Spycatcher against [Margaret] Thatcher. He wasn't fazed by who he was up against." (Says Turnbull of McClelland, "I'm very sorry that many years of excessive consumption of alcohol and professional disappointment have reduced what was once a sharp wit into nothing better than gutter abuse. He's a bitter old man.")

"Malcolm doesn't create neutral feelings," says Trevor Sykes, editor-in-chief of Kerry Packer's Australian Business. "I don't think you are going to find a neutral commentator. The merchant banking world is the most bitchy I know. Malcolm, being a particularly abrasive character who doesn't suffer fools gladly, was always going to suffer his fair share of detractors."

"Perhaps beneath this facade, Malcolm is really a pussy cat," says radio personality Phillip Adams.

It is quite something to experience the Turnbull presence; he can be devastatingly funny, breathtakingly arrogant. Having defamed one, possibly two, of his former colleagues, he will in the next moment give you a mini lecture on Section 22 of the Defamation Act, just so that, when you write about him, you will be extra careful.

Next day, he tells us he didn't mean to sound menacing. Of course not.

Phillip Adams has also felt the Turnbull presence: "There's a smell of danger around him. The air crackles with a self assurance and a sense of risk. Of the thousands of people I have interviewed, I have never sat in a studio with anyone quite as charming - and chilling - as Malcolm Turnbull."

That's it. it's the blend that's so disturbing. Malcolm Turnbull has a dominating presence, physically and intellectually. People who deal with him professionally live in hope he stays benign, at least until they leave the room.

His language says it all: he talks about "retaliation", how he is at "war", how certain fights are only "skirmishes", a smaller part of the bigger "battle". He says, "For some reason I exercise a peculiar fascination for some people in this city [Sydney]. The stories about me are unbelievable."

Armed with an awesome, carefully cultivated network of contacts, Turnbull roams the corporate landscape, a hired gun after the main chance; when he saw the Ten Network on its last legs, he approached Westpac, Ten's lead banker; when he saw the John Fairfax Group collapsing, he approached junk bondholders in America who had lent $500 million, offering to represent them.

He has some powerful enemies - he nicknames himself "Satan" - but even more powerful friends: his first patron, Australia's wealthiest man, Kerry Packer; his business partner, ex-NSW Premier Neville Wran; his father-in~law Tom Hughes QC, perhaps Australia's most eminent silk.

He once wrote: "My connections with Packer and my father-in-law all helped my progress."

........


1606052250136.png
Cover of Good Weekend, April 13, 1991.
 
That meme you may have seen encouraging Trumpers to "write in" Trump's name on the Georgia runoff ballots (i.e. potentially costing the GOP the Senate)... comes from Trump supporters :tearsofjoy:

www.salon.com

Roger Stone-linked group urges voters to write in Trump in Georgia

A fringe group of Republicans is trying to sink the GOP's Senate hopes as retaliation after Trump's loss in Georgia
www.salon.com www.salon.com

Even better, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger:

...said Trump had already cost himself the state by "suppressing" GOP votes, noting that 24,000 Republicans who voted in the primaries by mail did not vote at all in the general election.

"Those 24,000 people did not vote in the fall, either. They did not vote absentee, because they were told by the president, 'Don't vote absentee. It's not secure,'" he said last week. "But then they did not come out and vote in person. He would have won by 10,000 votes. He actually... suppressed his own voting base."
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Food for exciting thought but Michael West (of Michael West Media) believes that Uncle Rupert appears to be in trouble financially in Australia. Maybe Foxtel divested.
I will believe it when it happens, but as is the favourite line of of the satirical Betoota Advocate:
"More to come"

 

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Lockhart Road said:
Thank you, mate.

I may have been slightly ‘knowledgable’ at some point ... but now I sit with my oldest mate Heineken in Pro Drinkers Corner, shaking my head, accepting that I still know far too little, despite my half-century of personal experience in Asia and especially Hong Kong, China.

One thing I have been taught, over and over and over again, is that everything always changes. When you start to feel confident the project you have been sweating pints over for years is finally threatening success, that’s when red lights start flashing and the whole thing starts crashing; when you feel the crashing has reached a crescendo and the only sympathetic ear within reach is that of old mate Heineken ... that’s when the crashing stops, something wholly unpredictable comes on the TV news, and the green shoots of success-after-all start poking their heads out of the scorched earth.

This cycle is endless. What propels it in its perpetual motion helter-skelter around its axis are the imperfections of that demographic of the human race who are last to admit they are less than perfect, and who call themselves ‘leaders’.

Prime example: Donald J. Trump, alias Agent Orange, Putin’s most obvious mole. Who, looking back, can believe he could ever have been POTUS? Well 70 million-plus Americans for a start.

PAFC’s China Stategy was in big trouble the instant Trump was elected, in more trouble the further his knees trespassed into the sacred shadow under that power desk gifted to the White House by Whitehall, crafted from the timbers of HMS Resolute, subsequent to her discovery stuck fast in the ice of the Northern Passage and her repatriation to the Old Country in 1856.

We were in big, big trouble the moment such shonky thick-headed Trump ‘advisors‘ as Steve Bannon started travelling the world, squirting toxic international Trumpism upon such fertile fields of quasi-intelligence as existed in the corridors of Canberra’s national security and military intelligence agencies. Still exist. Bannon, after all, was being quoted on the front page of Murdoch’s ‘The Australian’ a few weeks ago, despite publicity he has attracted as an arch spiv selling square inches of Agent Orange’s Mexican Wall to the gullible - you know, the same type of innocent that voted to re-elect The Donald.

Trump is out. A paradigm shift beckons. A watershed looms. A likely excuse for a 180 between Canberra and Beijing takes shape. It’s happened before.

My first visits to Hong Kong were in 1969: a few days R&R from Vietnam in May, and a two-week real holiday on my pre-discharge leave that September ... during which I stood on a hill overlooking a double-row fence topped with barbed wire and peered into Red China. What I saw is called Shenzhen today. In 1969 I saw a small village, a few people wearing farming garb, and a noisy pack of wild dogs. Things change.

By December 1971 I was back and I had landed a job. Ping-pong diplomacy had taken place across the border and, two months after I started in that job, Nixon was in Beijing cuddling up to Mao, and fumbling his chopsticks at a table in Shanghai next to Zhou Enlai - the greatest statesman in Asia’s post-war history.

Things change.

More statesmanship is needed to make change reappear. ScoMo needs to stop insularly over-reacting and to read a few books on China’s history and the Chinese mind. He needs to hire a few real China minds for himself, and strike a balance with the national security and military intelligence spooks to whom he’s gifted too much priority, and in the process has made himself look, from up here, not too wordly-wise. He can learn. He can change.

So can Emperor Xi, at whom an equally sharp finger of critique can be pointed.
He can change, too. Or he can, maybe, be purged.

It’s happened before.

So El Zorro my good mate we wait. We do not run. We keep our ear to the ground ... and we wait.

Our chance will come again.

It’s happened before.
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So this is Trump's fault? Right. Got it. Yes, let's all kowtow to glorious China... they're as pure as the driven snow... as their recent conduct has shown. While we’re at it, let's just sell them more of our ports, land and infrastructure... as a gesture of goodwill - couldn't possibly hurt, right? The heck with it.. let's let Huawei build our 5G network... nothing could possibly go wrong there... right?

Mate, you should forward that post off to CNN - I'm sure they'll love it. What an immaculate piece of literature... it must've come to you straight from the divine. Hell, you may even get a Nobel prize for it.
 
VineValerian said:
An expensive turd nonetheless.

Worth over $10mill per year in sponsorships and partnerships, if I recall KT saying a few months ago.

Without this, the PAFC does not exist anymore.
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id like to see that $10 million per a year accounting spreadsheet, it would be about as fake as the love affair Mr Gui has for the PAFC, we have come to the bottom of the barrel when we find ourselves pandering to the communists
 
Too many hypocritical idiots here falling for the media "yellow peril" spin. China no worse than the USA and many western and European countries all tarted up as being "democratic."

Sure, lets cut off ties with China ... But first, stop the hypocrisy, & cut off all sales of iron ore to them. Then lets see how long your pathetic little bubble of privileged lives last without Chinese money propping up Australia's economy!
 
Tibbs said:
Too many hypocritical idiots here falling for the media "yellow peril" spin. China no worse than the USA and many western and European countries all tarted up as being "democratic."

Sure, lets cut off ties with China ... But first, stop the hypocrisy, & cut off all sales of iron ore to them. Then lets see how long your pathetic little bubble of privileged lives last without Chinese money propping up Australia's economy!
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Sadly Australia is a welfare state so we need to sell off the ore to them to pay for our generational lazy welfare needy.
 
Tibbs said:
Too many hypocritical idiots here falling for the media "yellow peril" spin. China no worse than the USA and many western and European countries all tarted up as being "democratic."

Sure, lets cut off ties with China ... But first, stop the hypocrisy, & cut off all sales of iron ore to them. Then lets see how long your pathetic little bubble of privileged lives last without Chinese money propping up Australia's economy!
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China is far worse than the USA etc etc, you know nothing of history if that is what you suggest and you are blind to there objective as well. as for Chinese money you are correct, we should never have been on it in the first place. It wasnt that long ago that we had virtually no trade with China and the average Australian was far more wealthy for it. Chinese money is a choice made by politicians desperate to cover their own failures and the public too stupid to keep electing the same idiots
 
WhyAlwaysMe said:
So we had to undertake this whole China experiment for four years to get, by AFL standards, what is a low-mid tier level major sponsor.
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the MG sponsorship is a perfect symbol of how fake the whole thing is, "a british car company now owned by the chinese trying to sell cars as if they were british" I guess there Great Wall brand didnt really take off
 
manureid said:
We should have stuck with mYAtM!
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if we didnt buy 80 percent of our products from China we might have an Australian company that could sponsor us. But i guess we would rather post on facebook the $10 we saved at Beijing Bunnings than pay a fair price for an uncompromised product. ...the real problem is most people dont even know what im talking about
 
AFC AFeederClub said:
if we didnt buy 80 percent of our products from China we might have an Australian company that could sponsor us. But i guess we would rather post on facebook the $10 we saved at Beijing Bunnings than pay a fair price for an uncompromised product. ...the real problem is most people dont even know what im talking about
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you're typing on a keyboard made in china

staring into a monitor made in china

complaining about buying from china
 
Tibbs said:
Too many hypocritical idiots here falling for the media "yellow peril" spin. China no worse than the USA and many western and European countries all tarted up as being "democratic."

Sure, lets cut off ties with China ... But first, stop the hypocrisy, & cut off all sales of iron ore to them. Then lets see how long your pathetic little bubble of privileged lives last without Chinese money propping up Australia's economy!
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Add a couple more exclamation marks. Might make it more believable.
 
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