We're Initiating Repairs
Well, Tucker Carlson had been and gone, a fascination in itself for a tiny country like Australia. His disparaging of the local corporate media had half the country laughing, well, those who followed these things, "My God, it's like going back in time" as the approximate response to one idiot question, while he called the state broadcaster journalist, from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, "dumb", and you've got to say the questions she did ask really were dumb.
So many things were on the turn, including the media in which he had worked for much of his life.
Was there nothing else?
Well, these were just reflections on a pond, and the pond was increasingly exasperated. Taking the temperature. Testing the mood. Here in this enclave, driven by the white flight from Sydney as much as anything, the building and rebuilding, the comfortable world outside the mess that was life in much of Sydney, beyond the glittering harbour and the staggering, offhand beauty of the place.
The eternals were grateful, or relieved, or indifferent, soaring, once more, way overhead, the same slow ethereal stingray like shapes that had haunted him before, the same time machines flickering into view, only to disappear if spotted, the ones that recorded everything, here, now, before, after, forever, or for how ever long the planet lasted.
I wouldn't be surprised if the universe was full of extinct civilisations which had never made it beyond their own solar systems, which had never become a truly interplanetary species, declared Elon Musk.
And now we were blessed with the best and the brightest, as the pundits declared the civilisation on the edge of its greatest step forward since the invention of writing and agriculture.
Well, we'll see now. Within it all, as within this country Australia, lay the seeds of its own destruction.
HEADLINES
GUARDIAN AUSTRALIA
Fatima Payman leaves Senate chamber after 'brutal' questioning and heckling from Coalitin - video
The opposition has focused on newly independent senator Fatima Payman in her first Senate session after leaving the Labor party. Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie, in her second question to Penny Wong about Anthony Albanese’s role in 'disciplining' Payman, asked how the prime minister could be taken seriously when he has been so 'comprehensively outplayed' by Payman. While the exchange between McKenzie and Wong took place, Payman watched quietly and impassively from a crossbench seat at the back of the chamber. A few short minutes later she left the Senate alone.
Fatima Payman says she is “grieving” after deciding to quit Labor to sit as an independent, a move the party’s president, Wayne Swan, claims will “empower Labor’s opponents on the far right”.
Payman said on Thursday she felt she had no choice but to quit Labor after her advocacy for the Australian government to recognise a Palestinian state. She claimed voters were “frustrated” at Labor’s position on the war in Gaza, and that she was displaying “Labor values” in the positions she had taken.
Payman’s announcement she was resigning from Labor and would remain on the crossbench as an independent was met with mixed reactions, with government MPs expressing disappointment while the Greens and crossbench praised her decision. A number of staffers for Labor, Greens and independent politicians attended Payman’s press conference.
Payman was indefinitely suspended from caucus on Sunday after giving a television interview in which she said she would cross the floor again and vote against her party on issues of Palestinian statehood.
SKY NEWS AUSTRALIA
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant accused of 'crying wolf' on extent of online abuse targeting Indigenous Australians during Voice
Australia’s cyber abuse watchdog, who famously became embroiled in a failed legal stoush with Elon Musk, has been accused of spreading “misleading” information about the impact the Voice to Parliament referendum would have on Indigenous Australians.
The woman in charge of policing misinformation on Australia’s social media platforms has been accused of pushing a “misleading” narrative about online abuse linked to the Voice referendum.
eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant made headlines globally for her failed legal battle with billionaire Elon Musk over footage of a violent stabbing on his platform X and is responsible for stamping out misinformation on the internet.
In the heat of Australia’s Voice referendum debate, Ms Inman Grant claimed her agency had recorded a spike in cyber abuse complaints from Indigenous Australians, while warning the Voice debate would likely lead to an intense increase in racial attacks online.
However, documents obtained through Freedom of Information laws show Ms Inman Grant may have exaggerated the prevalence of complaints.