Hume agrees Leyonhjelm took things too far. "David Leyonhjelm is the most harmless individual," she says. "I don’t think he demonstrated particularly good judgment on this one. You shouldn’t talk about other people’s personal lives. I don’t care whether you’re male or female. Sarah was foolish to put it all on Hansard. She shouldn’t have made it a big deal."

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/he-s-the-most-harmless-individual-senator-defends-leyonhjelm-amid-sexism-row.html

Leyonhjelm isn't a "harmless individual"... He is a POLITICIAN !: 

"I’m surrounded by staff who can’t punctuate and who put capital letters in the wrong places..."

...

Dr Jill Tomlinson, a researcher on the Counting Dead Women project at feminist organisation Destroy The Joint, says the three murders over the weekend are similar to dozens of cases she comes across each year — cases where a female victim is murdered by a man who knew her, and where there are few details about the crime itself.

"There are many deaths where unfortunately we don't come across the names of the individual, and where the media reports are very short," she told the ABC's daily news podcast The Signal.

"The reports just mention that there was a woman's body that was found outside of somewhere, and somebody is helping the police with their inquiries, and in those circumstances, there will be very few Australians who actually hear of the woman's death, and it doesn't register in the consciousness."

Paul Bibby, is a freelance journalist and lecturer at Griffith University who used to cover courts for The Sydney Morning Herald, said a big factor in whether murders like those over the weekend were covered was how interested other media outlets were in the stories, what pictures were available, and what other stories beyond court were happening at the same time.

He said media organisations operated with limited resources, and editors prioritised stories that audiences would read and share.

"It's also, I think, a question of just purely what a journalist can manage on that day," he told The Signal.

"With tighter and tighter deadlines and fewer and fewer resources across the news media, a big factor in what's covered is simply sufficing — so simply picking something that I can get done to file by the time I need to file it, and to meet the expectations of my editor or producer."

Mr Bibby also thinks news editors and reporters had a limited interest in some kinds of domestic violence cases because their readers, viewers and listeners found them overwhelming, which might explain why some murders got relatively little coverage.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-10/the-murders-we-do-not-hear-about-a...

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From Mungo:

OUR OLDER READERS – the really old ones – may remember The Three Stooges, Larry, Curly and Moe.

These deliberately offensive American deplorables bumbled and bashed their way through a series of short movies designed to fill in the gaps at the newsreels, popular at the time.

They were supposed to be funny and perhaps trans-Pacific audiences may have found them so but in Australia, they were more annoying than anything else — an irritation until the real cartoons, the authentic Looney Tunes, came around.

The Stooges were seriously unloved and unlovable, but they were hard to ignore — rather like their fresh incarnations as David, Pauline and Mark. The Australian Parliament has allowed them to be born again.

We are referring, of course, to Mark Latham and his two latter-day mentors — Senators David Leyonhjelm and Pauline Hanson, whose combined nastiness has recently devolved into a kind of 1950s cheap routine, which has elements of farce, certainly, but of the most distasteful kind.

Whether it is Leyonhjelm’s misogynist bravado, Hanson’s incoherent xenophobia or Latham’s serial vendettas, our modern Stooges are determined to keep their own slapstick melodrama in the public gaze long after it has passed its used-by date.

And they are joined in the hip: having ratted on his Labor Party, Latham joined Leyonhjelm’s Liberal Democrats, only to desert him to campaign for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, for which he is said to be contemplating a political comeback.

He is polishing his credentials by parroting PM Malcolm Turnbull on Opposition Leader Bill Shorten (liar, liar, pants on fire) and making as many other enemies as possible. Hanson and the publicly-shunned Leyonhjelm are apparently cool about that — after all, we Stooges have to stand together. But why they would want to do so is less clear.

Despite their blunders and brutalities, none of the three is irrevocably stupid. Latham was considered both a protégé and a prodigy by former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who promoted him as party leader — he overcame the reservations of admired elders like John Faulkner to persuade his colleagues that Latham could and should be prime minister. And there was a time – admittedly a fairly brief one – when it appeared Whitlam could be right; Latham looked smart, politically savvy and above all, a rusted-on Laborite — until he self-immolated.

Mungo MacCallum is a veteran journalist who worked for many years in the Canberra Press Gallery. This article was published on 'Pearls and Irritations' 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/mungo-maccall...

What persuaded the Laborites about Latham was his thesis on Capital. He wrote, possibly first as a university thesis then expanded into a complex study of the way Capital was in need of a toilet brush clean: Civilising Global Capital was the title of the work... What has transpired since is that Latham seems not to understand a single word of what he wrote, possibly parroting a lot of other clever economists, in his own jargon, adding some present rudeness to his hubris. Here is the blurb for this book:

The Australian people are again looking to Labor for the next generation of public policy ideas and reforms. This is why Mark Latham's book is so valuable. It is a fresh and thoughtful assessment of the means by which Labor might renew its program for social democracy.' - Gough Whitlam

Global capital treats us all with ruthless efficiency. We are either consumers, factors of production, or a deadweight loss. Our human aspirations - individual and social - are feeling the pressure of globalisation.

Globalisation has left parties and politicians struggling for solutions. The political Right has not been able to show, once the active role of government is withdrawn, how individual liberty alone can answer the insecurity and remorseless inequity of an open economy. The choice between market freedom, with its army of working poor, and the failings and unsustainable costs of the welfare state, is barely a choice at all. It simply points to the need for a third way. 

Internationally, parties of the Left are responding by reasserting the public values and policies of a good and compassionate society. The choices made by the ALP and other social democratic causes will determine, perhaps permanently, whether these goals remain feasible.

In this book, Mark Latham declares as irrelevant the old politics of the Left/Right divide. He embraces a different set of values and policies - social responsibility, equality of opportunity and merited reward, public mutuality and the wholesale devolution of governance. Fresh solutions to the problems of unemployment, economic sovereignty, tax and welfare are available to us. Latham shows why they are needed, and how they might work.

Civilising Global Capitalism offers a rich and cohesive store of ideas to reconcile the global economy with the values of a decent society. To read it is to take part in the regeneration of Australia s social democracy.

Read more:

https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/books/academic-professional/politic...

Mark Latham's failure to inspire beyond piles of shit placed along his trajectory can be explained. You can do this yourself with a shovel. As far as the other two stooges, they believe in their hubris, as long as it sustains their income... 

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See also:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/where-does-ma...