Discussion then turned to former upper house MP Lou Amato, who campaigned against the Liberals for expelled party powerbroker Matt Camenzuli in his failed independent run against Labor’s energy minister Chris Bowen in McMahon.
The trio said that Amato hadn’t been disciplined because they thought Camenzuli, booted from the party after unsuccessfully trying to sue Scott Morrison over preselections in 2022, would actually win the seat (he got 9 per cent of the primary vote). The same generosity wasn’t extended to the 83-year-old mother of regional independent MP Andrew Gee, who was expelled from the Liberal Party on polling day for campaigning for her son.
The superannuated administrators did, however, agree with a comment from the virtual floor suggesting that ageism was the new sexism. That’s just what the Liberals need. Quotas for 80-year-olds.
Social snafu
Zoomers – great on social media, less so on history. Even when they are in the employ of the Australian Labor Party.
How else to explain the embarrassing snafu by the West Australian Labor Party this week when preening itself over the defection of headline-generating ex-Greens senator Dorinda Cox.
Regular readers will recall our item yesterday about Cox nuking her Instagram page after defecting from her somewhat troubled time with the Greens to the good ship ALP.
As we reported, Cox’s profile went dark on Monday, before defection hit the homepages, while her Twitter (sorry, X) account went private, no doubt to vanish all the times that the WA senator had attacked Labor policies, most recently the decision to greenlight an extension of energy giant Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project until 2070, which Cox had described when she was a Greens senator – that is, last week, as “catastrophic for many reasons”.
You say tomato and I say tomato – let’s call the whole thing off!
Now trouble with social media appears infectious. How else to explain WA Labor’s overexcited Facebook welcome to Cox?
“Making history as WA’s first Indigenous senator, Dorinda Cox is a proud Yamatji-Noongar woman, fierce advocate, and former police officer.”
A now deleted Facebook post from WA Labor welcoming Dorinda Cox to the party and mistakenly referring to her as the first indigenous WA senator.
Oops. In its rush to post, WA Labor had completely forgotten about senator Pat Dodson, who was appointed to fill a casual vacancy in Western Australia in 2016 and elected to the Senate later that year.
He’s only a Labor legend and was, among numerous other positions, special envoy for reconciliation and implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, before resigning due to ill health last year.
We asked Labor for a response. Given the younger generation’s consuming devotion to identity politics, we would have expected better.
Circus is in town
The Greatest Show on Earth arrived in Sydney with a bang.
We’re talking, of course, about the World Nuclear Fuel Market’s annual meeting and international conference held at the Shangri-La Hotel this week. Their description, not ours.
In fact, the organisers really leaned into the circus imagery in an official event brochure.
“With development not unlike the circus, commercial nuclear power has matured from its early days as a sideshow performance to a significant contributor in meeting the energy needs of the developing world,” it said.
Uranium producers were likened to “tightrope walkers,” other nuclear executives and lobbyists were likened to jugglers and acrobats, but nobody got to be the clown.
Perhaps the organisers thought the real clowns to be the Australian public, who overwhelmingly rejected Peter Dutton’s nuclear push at last month’s federal election.
That didn’t stop the Minerals Council chief executive Tania Constable for mounting a passionate defence of nuclear energy in her keynote address, arguing that it proved the path to net zero, voters be damned!
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