No matter how hard Kevin Rudd tries to lose the next election, the Coalition keep handing him big plates of gold. Abbott admitted to being, effectively, a compulsive liar. Joe Hockey delivered a budget reply with no figures, despite Abbott having promised them in his budget reply. Then, when poor Andrew Robb finally handed out some costings, they were shown to be largely rubbish.

The mining industry are rightly or wrongly screaming blue murder about the new Super Profits Tax; the government’s lack of consultation and inability to sell the RSPT properly should be a great opportunity for the Opposition. Just as they start to get into the swing of it, we get Abbott and his ministers saying different things about how much tax miners currently pay. Then, there’s Julie Bishop, and her embarrassingly stupid comments after the expulsion of the Israel diplomat.

Not only did she break a convention that politicians never publicly discuss intelligence operations, she made a lame attempt to politicise the expulsion, claiming that it was just to curry favour with the Arab bloc and get Australia a seat on the UN Security Council. Then, of course, she released a statement saying that she didn’t actually say what she was on TV having said. Oh, wait a second, she didn’t understand the question: “What – we do?” apparently was too much for her tiny brain to cope with.

Abbott decided that the best way to deal with this was to refuse to comment, referring the questioner to Bishop’s idiotic statement.

What else? Hmmm, Malcolm Fraser quit the party in disgust at the rise of Abbott, who responded by (and this is not hyperbole) promising a new White Australia Policy as an election platform. Comedy Gold, all of it, and yet more breathing space for a Prime Minister who currently couldn’t sell a beer at a ute muster.

Things aren’t looking much better on the state front, either; the trains are even more fucked than they were under Connex, and the Bushfires Royal Commission looks set to drop about a gazillion tons of poo on the heads of Brumby and all the bureaucrats he allowed to mismanage our emergency services in the years leading up to Black Saturday.

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Australia is about to lose an important media voice: New Matilda, an independent, unashamedly leftist online opinion site, went out of business, a victim of stagnant advertising revenues. It’s a sobering thought for those of us trying to turn a buck out of our undeniable brilliance, that hits on your website and a loyal readership don’t necessarily translate into rivers of gold.

That aside, the real tragedy of New Matilda’s passing is that, whether or not you liked its leftism, it’s one more independent voice that’s been silenced, and when you look around at the shit that mainstream media has become, it’s a tragedy.

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Christ Almighty, you throw together a few hundred words on federal politics, look away for a day or two, and more shit starts flying around that just increases your desire to secede and start calling yourself King Jobayabaya of the Independent Principality of FuckOffYouWankerstan.

Apparently it’s now a National Emergency that the mining companies aren’t happy about the RSPT, so the lame-arsed rules the government kinda sorta put in place to stop taxpayers’ funds being used for party political purposes are set aside. $38 million to tell us that miners are bastards who pay no tax and should be made to pay some so all us working families and our kiddies can have hospitals and roads and new buildings in our schools.

Of course, their hypocrisy is only matched by that of the miners: according to them, they already pay 120% tax on everything they earn, and if the RSPT goes through in its current form we shall all be living in a ditch, fighting over bits of dirt, and a potato will cost a hundredy-billiony dollars and the poor little mining companies will have to pick up their shovels and find minerals in all those other countries that, um, don’t actually have the minerals that they want to dig up.

Tony Abbot will manage to combine scare tactics about another Great Big New Tax, with something about boatseekers stealing minerals from the plates of little baby miners and taking all the jobs that will no longer exist when the Australian economy ceases to exist after BHP Billiton stop donating to the Liberal Party, and Scott Morrison will finally say “darkie”.

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You may have noticed that our usual genius cover art has been replaced with a different kind of genius. Brad, our resident ‘toonist, is full of painkillers after hurting his back, and so we’re indebted (oooh, we love debt!) to Little Brother Morgs, who put together this month’s cover on a train between Zurich and Hamburg. If you don’t get the Two Girls One Cup reference, look it up, it’s ace! Actually, don’t, unless you’ve got a bucket of Brain Bleach handy. Srsly. [take the srsly very seriously, it’s very very NSFW and it’s really really really gross - Eds]

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It’s impossible to not mention the Gaza Flotilla; there are plenty of people ranting about the bastard Israelis, or calling those on the flotilla terrorists, but I won’t. There’s no way I can, because there’s no way we’re ever going to find out the truth. The Arab nations will tell us that it was only hippies and grandmothers on the flotilla, and the IDF started shooting from a mile out. The Israelis will tell us that the flotilla was crewed entirely by Al Qaeda operatives, armed to the teeth.

Somewhere in between may lie the truth, but here are a few things to ponder: Why didn’t the flotilla agree to dock at another port and have their cargo delivered by road? Is the blockade legal or illegal? Why did the IDF choose to board by heli-drop, in the dark? If the crews weren’t armed, how did they apparently kill or injure four commandoes? How were civilians able to disarm commandoes? Were the weapons found later planted by the IDF? If the IDF had done everything right, why the immediate freeze on internet access and ban on reporting?

Love to those who love us, and a week cleaning the spittle off Mark Regev’s (look him up) chin to those who don’t.

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