(Image: Tom Red/Private Media)

Tudge won’t budge Our Education Minister Alan Tudge cried “freedom” yesterday, describing the anti-vaccine mandate rally that assailed the CFMMEU offices and then billowed west in the following terms:

Basic freedoms are denied. The community is fracturing. Whole industries, like construction, shut down at random. Kids are not allowed to go to school or play with their mates. My office is inundated with desperate people, who are often in tears. Sometimes grown men because their business has been decimated. It is not right and cannot go on.

Law and order be damned. The rally which saw journalists and police cars attacked and has resulted in scores of arrests clearly attracts Tudge’s sympathy. As we know, he’s no fan of contested history so he may not like us bringing this up, but we can’t help but wonder what has changed since the Extinction Rebellion protest of August 10? Those guys weren’t decent folk moved to extreme action by the urgency of their cause, according to Tudge. They weren’t even activists. They were “just criminals”.

Rebel songs Still on the rally, ABC breakfast host and guy you assume was born wearing that suit Michael Rowland decided yesterday that he didn’t care much for the tone people were taking regarding the anti-lockdown protests. “Let’s not crack gags about what is unfolding on the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne,” he said. “This is the least funniest thing I have seen in a long time.”

On this we must differ with Rowland. True, there was much about yesterday that was not funny — the vague “failed state” vibe of it all; a motley crew of conspiracy theorists and far-right activists exploiting the anxieties of working people to oppose the only thing that could get them back to work; the horrifying funhouse mirror image of distorted solidarity, a collective action in the service of undermining some of the most successful collective action in recent memory.

But! The events on the West Gate Bridge, where several hundred or so adults made a political point by belting out the kitsch classic The Horses like they were about to be booted from the karaoke bar, were objectively funny. While we’re on the subject, though, Daryl Braithwaite must be confused. Why insist on murdering The Horses when his back catalogue contains songs such as:

  • Freedom
  • Free the People
  • Life is Living
  • Breakin’ the Rules.

Just goes to show that, above all else, the commitment of this movement is to horse paste.

What the hell is this? What is it with the mainstream political left in this country and its absolutely incomprehensible use of Photoshop? First, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese gives us these monstrosities, and now this from Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, which apparently aims to criticise the AUKUS treaty by comparing it with inaction on climate change:

What can that mean?

AUKUS Prose Predictably, the AUKUS trilateral agreement has attracted all manner of take and countertake, and we’re pretty sure we’ve found the most florid from our friends at The Economist . In this moment, the writer sees the “tectonic plates of geopolitics shifting” in front of his very eyes. AUKUS isn’t merely the prolonging of Australia’s entanglement with dying empires, an avoidable international incident or a continuation of a quite remarkably botched series of deals, people — it’s the fall of the Berlin Wall.