Linda Tirado Profile picture
Aug 23, 2018 8 tweets 2 min read Twitter logo Read on Twitter
Happy to! Here is your primer on what the hell is happening in Australia, as retold by me, who is not an Australian!

First thing to know about #auspol (which is their national political hashtag) is that Aussies are just insanely backstabby, politically speaking.
Also these people hold grudges so strongly that any Appalachian would be impressed and a bit worried.

Australia has a multiparty parliamentary system with ranked voting, which means it’s nearly impossible for one party to hold power alone. They form coalitions with others.
Just at the moment, the people in charge are the Liberals, in coalition with right-wing parties like the Nationals and One Nation. Libs are basically Bush Republicans with a lot of Paul Ryan tossed in. Nats is sort of Tea Partyish and One Nation is racist and also fully bonkers.
So Malcolm Turnbull is the Prime Minister for at least the next twelve seconds, as the leader of the Liberal Party. But he’s a fucker and the far right wing is challenging him for not being enough of a fucker, so they spilled him. (A spill is an early leadership change.)
A couple days ago, a man called Peter Dutton (who is actually evil personified, like if you somehow forced the spirits of Dick Cheney and Jeffery Dahmer into a single Aussie politician) challenged Mal for leadership and lost narrowly. it was a collapse in confidence in Mal.
Since then, half the Cabinet has resigned and there’s another leadership vote coming which has new candidates as well, and in the chaos they’ve shut down Parliament rather than have the normally scheduled session. Which also means there’s no Question Time.
Question Time, btw, is a delightful bit of Parliaments where electeds can yell insulting questions at their opposing Cabinets. Shutting down a scheduled debate at the last minute would be the closest US comparison I can think of.
This is all made far more hilarious by the fact that the Liberals won in large part by promising governmental stability after Labor spilled their leaders once too often while they were in power.

And this isn’t the first spill the Libs have done since.

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More from @KillerMartinis

Oct 7, 2018
I think the thing that’s confusing me is that these men seem to think that women are kind and docile

And like

Some of us are quite happily violent shrieking harridans and just keep that shit in check most days
Like I hold the power of creation in my abdomen every day, do you not think that I can easily destroy you?
Anyway y’all city ladies might not know this song but I vote we make it inescapable

Just to make em nervous

Read 4 tweets
Oct 7, 2018
Aww look you guys they thought they could destroy the rule of law and people wouldn’t get lawless on them

This is gonna be fun to watch
Them, running around screaming THERE ARE NO RULES thinking they had the house to themselves

And then just thousands of pissed off leftists melt silently out of the shadows and say oh really now?
Anyway here’s hoping every right winger is going to bed terrified that they might have to meet us in public. May they never rest easy and may they increasingly become trapped in their own paranoia until they develop debilitating agoraphobia.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
I am so tired of people telling me how difficult changing the fate of a nation would be.

I wrote an actual book about what you can’t afford to do on low wages. It was a memoir.

Now is when you strike. It will never not be sacrifice so you save it until you need it.

That’s now.
There is no easy way to stop the collapse of a nation. There is no path that doesn’t involve risk and sacrifice. You cannot comfortably upend a society.

Stop looking for ways that people can fix the apocalypse in their spare time without spending or sacrificing. Can’t happen.
You know who will absolutely blow up their own futures on principle alone when they get fed up? Poor people.

If you’re out there working on low wages you don’t have that much to lose. But you damn well know how much you can lose for them, how much you can cost them.
Read 10 tweets
Oct 6, 2018
I’ve not the foggiest. Make friends with farmers, maybe, or call your Senator and register your discontent.

There’s plenty we *should* be doing, but we’re not going to. We are collectively keep waiting for a good plan, while they bankrupt the nation.
(I continue to ask why, exactly, we don’t just not go to work on Wednesday. Yes, it’s a harmful thing for a lot of people, but one considers that that is precisely the point, and maybe we should think about just staying home on fucking Wednesday and crashing their markets.)
(I keep asking myself why we don’t just go fucking occupy things. Clearly we can get millions of people out to march for a thing if it’s bad enough, and one would think that we’d be able to find enough people to just stop them doing business.)
Read 5 tweets
Oct 2, 2018
I’m just enough bourbon in to be able to consider writing this piece about how all these dudes keep talking about the trauma of public repudiation

Because, actually, the thing they’re going through and describing is basically hell. They’re not wrong about that part.
We have not in this millennium stopped to consider how important we’ve made one’s virtual reputation, nor the cost someone pays when we collectively rescind someone’s good name.

I’ve honestly never been through anything more abjectly terrifying.
I don’t know how, even if it was justified, you go through that without being scarred. I have spent years trying to explain what it’s like, and I can’t say that I have a good comparison.

I’ve been through bad things, but this is somewhat unique and not a common experience.
Read 9 tweets

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