Thank god for Bridget McKenzie, that’s all I’ll say. In times of tariff mayhem, when politics is at its most gloomy and the campaign at its most grinding, you can always count on the National Party senator to give us a laugh — even if it’s a rueful one.
McKenzie has that much-treasured political quality called grit. Or shamelessness. Or, in plainer terms, the hide of a rhinoceros. This means it doesn’t matter what lines she has crossed. In McKenzie world there is no yesterday, only the present moment. Maybe it’s the ultimate survival skill. After all, the Victorian has been on the Canberra scene for close to 15 years. Her public disgrace over the sports rorts affair five years ago is a distant memory.
School daze
McKenzie brought out her A game this week. In television appearances she has achieved the campaigning trifecta of refusing to provide detail, bashing Labor and hinting at draconian measures. It’s the latter which is the most alarming. Like pretty much everyone else on the Coalition team, it seems she spent the summer break at Mar-a-Lago taking Project 2025 lessons.
The topic at hand this week has been the issue of the indoctrination Australian kids supposedly undergo in schools. Peter Dutton dropped the loaded word into the public discourse earlier this week and then slinked away. But what exactly is this “indoctrination”?
Under questioning from Patricia Karvelas on the ABC’s Afternoon Briefing it was apparent McKenzie could not say. She might have been itching to go the full Donald J. Trump and raise the spectre of kids going to school and coming home a different gender. But Australia’s conservatives just can’t go there.
Empty threat?
Unable to give examples of “indoctrination” in schools – beyond the example of a member of her own family – she steered the conversation to anti-Semitism on university campuses, while making the point that universities are ‘federally funded”. The inference is that a Dutton government may use its funding power to punish universities it deems to have permitted anti-Semitic behaviour, or remove funding from any courses or research it deems anti-Semitic. It raises the spectre of the draconian actions taken by the Trump administration which last month pulled US$400 million in research grants and other federal money from Columbia University and threatened to cut billions more over the university’s handling of protests against the war in Gaza.
McKenzie didn’t elaborate on using federal funding as a weapon against universities. Nor was she asked. Hopefully a journalist will put the question to Dutton or McKenzie — and soon. Will they get an answer? Probably not. A pattern has emerged with the opposition during this campaign whereby it is happy to hint drastic Trump-like action, but won’t give any detail on the where, why and how. Voters have to fill in the blanks and imagine the worst, or best, depending on their politics.
Cut and thrust
Dutton promises to cut 41,000 public sector jobs but won’t say exactly how, beyond a generalised swipe at the health and education departments. He will look at cutting the ABC if there is any “waste” of funds at the broadcaster, raising a popular conservative jihad also backed by the Murdochs against public broadcasting. But he won’t be specific. Jacinta Nampijinpa Price will be assigned to identify government inefficiency, but it is not a DOGE operation. Nor do we know if there is a target dollar amount.
Hinting at being a version of the Trump administration without going into detail has not worked for the Dutton campaign, especially with the damage being inflicted on Australia by Trump’s tariffs, revealed in full today. All it has done is allow Labor to make the charge that the Coalition seeks to “Americanise” government in Australia, a handy catch-all which invokes the horror of Trump and Musk without naming either. McKenzie’s tough yet specifics-free talk on university culture is yet another example of flirting with Trump and his dangerous ways.
Superb headline – totally terrifying female
As Roy & HG call her: Gunslinger Mackenzie. Always shooting from the hip(pocket). Goose!
Full of hot air Trump’s puppet
Shotgun McKenzie
Why would anyone want to be a teacher. Undermined again and again leave teaching to those trained to teach
As opposed to those trained to indoctrinate?
David. Well put. But and an unfortunately, this level of shamelessness for specific details and relevant actions, goes right through our governmental system from local to state and finally to federal government.
Accountability right from the getgo must be the benchmark and ideally with some type of bonus / reward system to help consolidate the practice.
Will that ever be the case – maybe just maybe if we have a fair dinkum go.
How helpful it would be if the members of the Coalition, especially the Nationals had benefited from the excellent education they could have had … like so many Australians did .. if they had attended good academic schools and Universities. Perhaps then they could have been taught to research and question everything before pontificating on a subject.
A group of people who do not wish to engage with scientific advancement; medical research; and truthful analysis through debate and learning …. do not deserve to be considered as serious .. and certainly not have their out-dated, intolerant and ill-informed opinions listened to and repeated by ‘media’ interests … especially those who wish to benefit financially from policies they have a vested interest in
The amazing thing is most of them went to expensive, elite, and entitled Private Schools in the cities.
Apparently, science is not taught at these snob factories.
This is so true. All that education and ….what?
But the fact remains that education in public schools and universities does attract a disproportionate number of people who lean to the progressive left. They see education as the way to change social structures, increase social justice and help achieve greater equality more broadly. People who do not wish to advance those agendas can feel pretty isolated in the typical public school in Australia today.
It could be argued that those agendas are really what public education is about. But is there a place for the person whose only agenda to improve students understanding of maths or English?
Power corrupts. It is that simple
And absolute power corrupts absolutely, as Donald J Trump is showing us all.
They may have gone to schools like Kings (Gassy Gussy’s alma mater); that doesn’t mean that they got an education. Sadly, all they do is show their ignorance whenever they open their yaps.
The fact that they are educated doesn’t mean much, they are simply employing the Bannon patented shit mist/fog approach. Good ol’Bridge isn’t too serious about anything except herself and enjoying the spotlight.
I think it is actually a “Grunge gun” they borrowed from Musk which unfortunately or not malfunctions and sometimes discharges all over the Dutty team.
👏👏👏👏👏💯
Exactly Pam, these ppl do not deserve recognition because of their belligerent attitude to the real in Aust today. ‘If they had attended good schools/universities?? That only comes with curiosity Pam, when you want to learn. This mob don’t want to learn what it is like being in the 21c, they are more than happy living in the 1950’s. And yet, they still are given seats in both house of OUR Parliament – go fucking figure!!!
My sentiments exactly, Pam.
This would be the same Senator McKenzie who was given a $2 billion slush bucket to play with before the 2022 election (the ‘Regional Accelerator Program’), who celebrated by asking regional universities to submit $20 million infrastructure bids by WhatsApp so she could announce them during the campaign, and then complained because she couldn’t actually hand out the money because pesky public servants were insisting on proper process, program guidelines, applications, business cases …
What a waste of space is Bridget McKenzie – the quintessential oxygen thief. She is almost matched by Karvelos who is one of the worst political interviewers in Australia and a key member of the ABC’s election team which is the weakest ever assembled. Thank god for Laura Tingle who for her sins is lumped with the likes of Karvelos. The LNP is incapable of an original thought or coherent policy and just have to follow someone else’s script – and along came Trump!!!
That’s not quite true.
The Liberal and National parties have two coherent policies, cut personal and company taxes and fees the masses to the ‘market’
The coalition policy is to increase income tax not reduce it
Mick you have nailed it. Yet they want the punters to take them seriously.
I suspect most of them attended private schools – like I did in the 1950s (to the detriment of my education). It was only once I’d left school that I learned it wasn’t wrong to question the outdated, intolerant and ill-informed opinions spruiked by many conservatives to this day. Thank goodness for distance learning, which enabled me to obtain a science degree to keep me happily questioning right up into my eighties. (I sent my children to public schools and have never regretted that decision as they are well-balanced adults with questioning minds.)
Good point, and disinformation certainly wasn’t restricted to private schools. Many of the things that were drilled into us at the public school I attended in the 60s and 70s, mainly with respect to Australian history, have turned out to be euphemistic at best, or downright fabrications at worst. This is what should be labelled indoctrination.
The electorate would benefit from those in the media who engage with the likes of McKenzie applying a more forensic cross examination style. Allowing such interviewees to use the occasion to babble and spray and not answer the question renders the occasion solely to their benefit. If interviewees baulk at being pressed for specifics, terminate the interview. Afterall it is only they who benefit from what is often a useless, vacuous presence.
100 per cent agree
Bridget’s shenanigans a decade or so back when she had an office in Bendigo but was living in Brighton inspired me to vote below the line on theVic Senate ticket, a practice I’ve maintained. By doing that I can ensure that Bridget is absolute last on my ballot paper. She is the ultimate hypocrite.
Did she really. Sadly I am not surprised. Brazen doesn’t begin to describe her. Fingers in your throat material…
Thank you Mr. Hardaker. Bridget only gets worse. Wish I could write like you.
Thank you, Bruce. My favourite comment!
We were warned about the shallowness of this campaign, and we haven’t been disappointed.We have a half arsed, gutless Labor government, and an execrable pack of liars and halfwits, the remnants of a party who might have once had some sort of integrity and belief in something other than attaining power.
The people the LNP now have ,have nothing other than the ludicrous songbook they are required to sing.It is as insulting as it is preposterous.
It beggars belief that they are allowed to get away with the horse shit they keep spruiking..allowing for the trash that the Murdoch morons specialise in.Dutton is everything this country doesn’t need.
Bring on a minority Labor government…perhaps some spine will be rediscovered.
One little thing that really bothers me is that in our parliament and among the candidates for election we have a number of experienced women medical doctors. You do not get to be a medical doctor unless you have suoperior intelligence. Yest, blessed with this intelligence, they just parrot the brain dead (and untrue) speaking points handed to them by the party apparatchiks. I think that I will be looking for an independent candidate with some good science or engineering background.
Why is it that these 2nd rate lnp “politicians” only target senate seats? could it be that they only have to receive way less than 10- 20% of the primary vote? to be “elected”? I have always wondered? Hume, Cash McKenzie, Reynolds, Price, etc!
Add Sarah Henderson to that egregious list. Lost H of Rep seat and sucked up wickedly to that vile hypocrit Scotty who put her top of the Senate ticket for Vic Libs…..lucky us. And so representative of the excrement laden features nad practises of the LNP.
Have I missed something? Looking at LNP conflates and messages etc they are proposing they are the better party to control INFLATION. They must have missed the fact that when they lost the last election inflation was north of 6%. Now it is 2.7%. Now it is a long time since I studied maths but I am sure 6%+ is higher than 2.7%. Please explain!
The person about whom you write makes me feel sick. so much hypocrisy.
But for the election campaign, could we encourage journalists to actually ask hard questions, not to let people like her get away with such obfuscation?
Questions which need to be asked could follow up on Malcolm turnbull’s interesting address to the national press club. What about AUKUS….get it high up on the agenda please? Letting the pollies determine the agenda is wasting opportunities.
Other questions: about the sidelining of the environmental protection laws? We were promised an update of the EPBC act – not happening.
What about our Paris targets, while the govt. continues to support more gas projects?
What about ensuring that the anti-corruption commission actually does its job?
Many more questions of course, but it grieves me that we just get twaddle each day, about where the leaders are, journos looking for gaffes. they really need to lift their game.
David, you might have some mates you could encourage to probe further into what really matters. But I thank you for your excellent daily pieces.
Thank you, Jo. I will ask around.. unfortunately media management is at its tightest at these times..so much gets unexplored
David, I agree 100% with Jo. Two instances stick in my mind. Just prior to the 2022 elections Jim Chalmers was debating Josh Fydenberg, at the National Press Club. After Josh had made the usual claim of the Libs always being the better financial managers, Jim Chalmers looked straight down the barrel of the cameras and at the assembled journalists. He said,” The Treasurer has just lied to you, because he knows…..” as Chalmers reeled off some statistic to evidence the opposite was true. Frydenberg was dumbstruck. He had no answer. I would have thought that to have made the evening news but, no the press back were busy with gotcha questions for Albanese.
The second instance was last week when Peter Dutton made the claim that inflation would always be lower under a Coalition Government. No Journalist asked the obvious question, “At the end of the Coalition’s last term in Government, the inflation rate was 6.6%. At the end of the this term of the Labor Government the inflation rate is 2.5%. Could you please expain how 6’6% is lower than 2.5%?”
As someone not politically aligned, The reticence of the press to challenge (particularly the Coalition) is so very disappointing.
Keep up the good work, David.
Well stated, Chris.
And Dutton said : “What does the Federal Dept of education actually do?” THIS IS appalling! Totally inconsistent with his desire for a change in curriculum…he shows his ignorance, the feds write the National Curriculum and test it, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) is a federal, independent statutory authority responsible for developing and managing the national curriculum, the National Assessment Program, and national data collection and reporting. How about a vision!!! instead of a slash and burn approach… EDUCATION is foundational for any society to flourish. It is how we share values (democratic and socially beneficial, truth) Let us set up a vision for a unified national policy for education that supports state depts… that would be amazing. Jason Clare please!
Seems Bridgette was able to pick up something when she attended the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conferences, along with a number of other coalition MPs.
So Bridgette Bang bang McKenzie says it’s not what is said or done in the classroom but it’s all the things that are not done or not said. That’s pretty wide open …. And moronic. Does she realise how dumb that statement is, thank god she’s not longer teaching kids
Another dumb statement made by Bridget was one she made when speaking with Patricia K, which was that Albanese would be useless in a bar fight. I mean, really, what’s she on about? I tell ya, they’ve got absolutely nothing of worth to offer!
Clearly, her schooling failed to indoctrinate her in the standards traditionally expected of public servants, elected or appointed. But perhaps she received some extracurricular tuition in pork-barrelling as compensation?
Remember her maybe 15 years ago when she was a partner of the Bendigo hospital ceo. They got together to skittle the state Labor government’s plan for the new hospital and substituted an inferior plan under the lnp which we see today.