That was then, this is now: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other senior Labor figures on Senator Fatima Payman after she defected from Labor to the crossbench in July 2024:
Answering questions about her defection, Albanese said it was ‘very clear’ West Australians wanted to elect Labor to the Senate seat, rather than her specifically.
‘Fatima Payman received around about 1,600 votes in the WA [federal] election, the ALP box above the line received 511,000 votes,’ he said.
His remarks followed comments from senior ministers Katy Gallagher and Bill Shorten who said if they were in her shoes, they would quit parliament because they were elected with ALP next to their names on the ballot paper.
ABC
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on former Greens Senator Dorinda Cox after she defected to the Labor Party this week:
‘[What] struck me as we were sitting down having a discussion about this, that the reason why Dorinda has made this decision is the same reason why all those years ago, as a very young man, I made a decision to join the Labor Party,’ he said.
‘You want to make a difference, that the way that you make a difference is by being a member of a party of government, that the values that Dorinda has are perfectly consistent with the values of the Labor Party.’
The Sydney Morning Herald
Then Green Senator Dorinda Cox on Labor, last week:
The Australian Greens have said the new environment minister [Murray Watt] has spectacularly failed his first test in the job, after approving the climate-wrecking North West Shelf dirty gas extension to 2070.
… They add the minister must be wanting the title of Australia’s dodgiest environment minister, after rushing out the decision mere hours after a damning UNESCO report was released.
The report to UNESCO by its World Heritage advisory body warned that pollution from the North West Shelf threatened the Murujuga rock art, jeopardising its World Heritage nomination.
Joint statement signed by Cox
Senator Dorinda Cox on Labor after her defection yesterday:
I have reached a conclusion after deep and careful reflection that my values and priorities are more aligned with Labor than the Greens.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Graham’s crackers: It’s a strange little lacuna; those mourning the lack of civility in some Gaza protests never have much to say about casually bloodthirsty rhetoric like that from US Senator Lindsey Graham, who this week fantasised about activist Greta Thunberg’s humanitarian aid ship sinking.
This is a veteran senator in the US government, cheekily dreaming about a boat carrying civilians being sunk by Israeli forces. The allusion is unmistakable; the flotilla has already alleged that it has been attacked by drones in international waters, and who can forget the fate of the Mavi Marmara? Graham will likely face no real consequences for this bon mot, in the same country pro-Palestine protesters are facing deportation.
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Type O: A reliable delight of former prime minister Scott Morrison’s post-politics career is that he’s been given control of his social media again. So we get treats like him posting “Wa great to be involved” in response to Tim Wilson’s announcement of his appointment to the shadow ministry.
Well indeed. Morrison deleted it, and may have been intending to post this similarly worded and unrelated post. Regardless, it’s a nice reminder of his earlier days in parliament, when he clearly was in control of his own typo-ridden posts:
Then there was his heroic reply-guying of every meme that followed the revelations of his secret self-appointment to various ministries: “As Aussies we can always have a chuckle at ourselves,” he said, tagging himself as “feeling amused”. The post also featured a punctuation-free, out-of-context “have a good evening” floating in the middle of the paragraph:
Spotted: Speaking of Liberal leaders who turned out to have comically underestimated how unpopular they were, Peter Dutton has been spotted flying commercial.
Dutton was taking what the poster, Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung, Kalkadoon and Yirandhali singer Miss Kaninna cruelly/hilariously pointed out is currently “the only seat he could get“.
Regan-ing confidence: It’s quite something when the people who put themselves forward as capable of regulating society reveal themselves to be unfamiliar with basic tenets of language. So it was with former Scottish National Party MP Ash Regan, who, having failed to take over the leadership after Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation, defected to the socially conservative pro-independence Alba Party. In an interview about her push for laws instituting a “nordic model” approach to sex work in Scotland, she was asked whether there was a risk sex work would be unregulated and “driven underground” by the laws.
She answered: “There is no basis for any of those assertions. If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would punters get to them?”
The interviewer clarifies that people will continue to pay for sex if that’s what they want to do and asks if that makes sense. “No. It does not really make sense whatsoever.” Regan replies. Glorious.
