“If you swing enough mud in an election, it sticks,” Jacinta Price.
“If Angus Taylor is the answer, it’s a stupid question,” Graeme Richardson.
Griffith is classified as an outer metropolitan by the Australian Electoral Commission even though it does have some inner city suburbs like West End and South Brisbane. The seat stretches out to Murrarie, Mount Gravatt, Holland Park, and Tarragindi.
One factor in the outcome not mentioned was the proposal by Lib/Lab state government to pull down the Gabba cricket ground for the 2032 Olympics. Max Chandler Mather opposed that, which won him a lot of support. Blinky Bill and with the notable exception of Blinky Bill and the Coopers Plains, anarchists opposed the stadium being built at QEII because it threatened their lifestyle.
For most of the past 100 years, Griffith has been a safe labour seat. Max changed all that.
I have lived in the seat of Griffith since 1996. During that time, I saw the Howard government elected for 11 years. I then saw a Rudd government win a landslide election with Howard losing his seat. In 2012 and 2019, we saw Abbott win then Gillard and Turnbull, followed by Scott Morrison who survived only one term. Each prime minister has proved to be worse than the one before. It’s been all downhill since Whitlam. Whitlam endorsed the genocide of the East Timor and Albanese has gone one better and endorsed Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians. He is providing coal, gas, and arms in support of the Israeli occupation. His government is providing political cover in the United Nations, his foreign minister voted against a ceasefire and is refusing to recognise of the state of Palestine. Albanese inaction has caused famine and disease in Gaza. Meanwhile back in Griffith, Max Chandler-Mather supported the struggle of the Palestinian people.
Griffith has bucked the trend towards the right. However, support for the Greens has peaked. People want safety, they don’t want as outspoken as Max against injustice.
The mistaken premise for the 2025 election was that Labor was likely to fall into minority and would depend upon the Greens to govern. Many people were undecided until up to the last few days and so the early polls were wrong.
Max Chandler-Mather won support from the renters in this electorate. As a result Max experienced attacks from the landlord class who claimed he was going to ‘abolish private health insurance’, ‘legalise hard drugs‘ and was “going to be a ‘nightmare’ scenario for the Albanese minority government over the economy.”
Despite this, Max held his primary vote experiencing only a 2.9% swing against him. This was against the trend for metropolitan Green seats that leaked 4% to Labor. What the pundits and the party boffins did not foresee was a gutting of the LNP vote. The erosion of the Liberal vote put Labor just in front of the Greens in Griffith. They won back some of the ground that they had lost during the disaster’s years of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd prime ministerships. In one election, Rudd even had a banner at the roundabout down the road from our place which read: “Vote for Kevin no matter which side you are on.” Rudd said he was ‘sorry’ but kept on taking the children away. He sought Murdoch’s approval and is now sucking up to Trump. What an embarrassment!
Labor and the ABC attacked Max for supporting the CFMEU’s right to organise and for supporting Palestine. Unfortunately, the CFMEU didn’t return the favor and hand out how-to-vote cards for Max. However, on May Day, the large and strong CFMEU contingent did support the Justice for Palestine solidarity contingent.
It was Max and Justice for Palestine Magan-djin 🇵🇸 that provided the basis for a remarkable campaign by a Palestinian Australian woman, Remah Naji, in the neighbouring seat of Moreton. Max provided that campaign with an office from where its unpaid volunteers could be coordinated. The Greens volunteers in Griffith and Moreton laboured tirelessly and outnumbered the LNP and ALP paid staff on polling booths during the week of the election. Remah won a 3% swing to the Greens.
By ditching support for key unions, the ALP machine won over Liberal voters. It was crucial that the Greens obtain more first preference votes than Labor to have a chance of winning. This made it difficult for Max who had already achieved the impossible by ‘doing a Bradbury‘ in the 2022 election, leapfrogging over ALP and LNP.
The Minister for Borders, Peter Dutton, did not survive in Dickson in Queensland and led the LNP even further into the abyss proving that Australia is not the United States and that a dumb cop from Queensland is not Donald Trump.
As for Labor, they will continue to make sure ‘life is not easy under Albanese‘. Although it is possible that towards the end of its second term, Labor may cynically introduce dental into Medicare and make some concessions to public housing, thus adopting Greens policies.
The good ole boys in the Liberal Party were outsmarted by middle class professional women in favour of climate action and an end to misogyny in their party and in government. Prominent women in the media challenged the outright sexism of the Liberal Party and made sure grievances by women abused, harrassed and sexually assaulted in the parliamentary workplaces were brought to light. The Liberal Party will lose its way completely if it can not find a way to bring back the TEALS. They need those Liberal women because they are smarter than the good ole boys.
An important factor both in Griffith and more so in Moreton was the Muslim votes Matter movement that supported both Max and Remah. Listen to what they say:
Ian Curr
6 May 2025
I challenged you to seek an Aboriginal opinion about your colonial attitude to immigration. You were promoting Coco at the time so I suggested you ask him. I can’t remember what you specifically said at the time but what you have just said now is enough to make my point. You say the working class has no country and Aboriginal people are working class. You will find no Aboriginal people who say they have no country, that is your own colonial illusion. Always Was Always Will Be Aboriginal Land.
The migrant working class has always been the primary colonial occupation force in Australia. . The Aboriginal working class is a recent thing and it is still very small, until the 1980s Most Aboriginal people were dispossessed peasants or urban lumpen proletariat or slaves, dispossessed of their land for mining and pastoral industries that created the Australian working class. At the time the unions were forming Aboriginal people were being rounded up into missions and reserves and the unions said fuck all. Truth telling applies to the Left as much as to the Right. Pretending Aboriginal people are working class is telling colonial lies.
I am not disconnected from struggle, I wish I could, I live it every day. I find hope where I can find it, but if it is not real it is not hope, it is just escapist delusion. I have disconnected from futile gestures and proselytising. I have disconnected from fake notions of solidarity that do not involve sharing the real struggle but just expressing a moral view about it and calling that the struggle. That whole mode of objectifying and ideologising the suffering of others and reducing it to a campaign is itself a trait of colonial consiciousness that manifests as much in solidarity demonstrations as it does in Christian thoughts and prayers for the poor – the ethereal ideational alternative to real engagement in real struggle. I’m too old for hobby politics.
My own opinion is that the reconstruction of conservative thought along Trump lines peaked with their victory in the Voice Referendum. But the Right over read this victory and set about widening the attack on the First Nations people. The heckling of the Welcome to Country speaker at the Melbourne Anzac Day Dawn Service was a strategic disaster for the Right.
One of the key elements of Trumpism is the demand to “protect our borders”. But in Australia how can you protect our borders from the people who were here first, as in 60 thousand years ago? See Narcissus in Australia
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price voted consistently in federal parliament in favour of immigration detention on Nauru. She was not after the aboriginal vote, Jacinta is after the racist vote. I suspect there is a long-term plan for Price by switching to the Liberals. Her backers may be thinking Jacinta can lead the Liberals, not now but later.
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price was a key player in the Voice No campaign. You could hardly call Price progressive. There is no such thing as a progressive No vote. How does NO advance aboriginal land rights or Treaty?
Treaty has its own processes. How can 3% of the population win any ground towards land rights using ‘electoralist’ agendas? The only way is if aboriginal people find support, and where is that most likely to happen? I say it is in the working class, people who understand exploitation through their own lived experience.
Really, John, Blinky Bill is living in a dreamworld. Tell Blinky the people he is calling koala haters are nothing compared to the real koala killers only an hour’s drive west of Toohey Forrest.
Please warn Blinky that there are people who want to shoot him first and then take his habitat. Blinky needs to talk to koalas out at Purga. The farmers out there still want to shoot koalas on sight. Don Davidson spent his life trying to provide refuge for koalas at the old Purga mission.
Why do you think the biggest koala hater’s vote is so strong at Mt Walker, Peak Crossing, Kalbar, Boonah, Harrisville, Rosevale … right through the Fassifern Valley?
The last koala I saw out in the Fassifern was in 1978. That koala was hiding out in a clutch of Brush Box in a small farm near Roadvale. She was feeding her young on the 🍃 🍂 of the Brush Box because farmers had been shooting her clan in a nearby Eucalypt forest. A local ranger can verify this. I can’t give you his name because he has to live in a community of koala haters. He did tell me that he admired Blinky’s stand in Toohey Forest but thought he was barking up the wrong tree, putting his faith in the environment minister Tanya Plibersek.
The minister told Sky News on 14 December 2023 that Blinky was anti-koala and that Bill was using innocents as koala shields. She blamed Blinky for the situation in Toohey Forest saying Blinky was responsible: “for the shocking attacks launched on humans that began this part of the conflict.” See with Interview with Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek on “Keeping Humans alive and having the 2032 Olympics.
Meanwhile, One Nations leader Pauline Hansen told Sky News that there have never been any koalas in the Fassifern.
I’ll pass all that on to Blinky. I am surprised the human shields incident didn’t come up in the election. The Blinky Bill campaign consisted of about four facebook posts about the Olympics and QSAC site, the one significant one being on the local community page. When the 100 day review was released, Blinky then withdrew from the race in victory. I don’t think you could accuse him of electoralism. However if you do critique electoralism, why were you handing out how to vote cards?
You say and ask – “There is no such thing as a progressive No vote. How does NO advance aboriginal land rights or Treaty?” What do you call Lidya Thorpe, or Gary Foley, or Michael Mansell who all spoke out against the voice? 60% of people supported the full agenda of truth, treaty and voice when Albo was elected. When he cut out truth and treaty 20% of people swung from YES to NO – that is the progressive NO vote. How could Albo’s Voice advance land rights or treaty, he specifically excluded them both? Mark Textor, architect of the “Stop the boats” campaign, ran the YES campaign for Albo, he seems to have sucked you in.
The working class is as racist as the ruling class, it is an Australian colonial thing. There is no electoral or democratic path to Aboriginal sovereignty. The colonial society will give nothing, all gains have been and will in the future be taken by non-violent force. Hawke was forced to create ATSIC. Keating was forced to create native title. The royal commissions into deaths in custody and stolen children were forced on. The return of stolen wages was forced on. The unions had a big part in that but that is because Aboriginal activists put years into educating them and cultivating relationships with them, there was nothing inherent in their class that motivated them to support Aboriginal agendas.
One of the reasons for the Aboriginal protection Acts was to deal with the problem of Aboriginal “scab” labour. The bosses wanted to keep their slaves but the immigrant workers wanted to be paid good money to do the same work. The Chinese and South Sea Islanders blacklegs were deported by the white Australia policy but what do you do with slave Aboriginal labour? The solution was to regulate the black labour force by putting them in missions and reserves as a pool of labour to be used when required on farms and stations, all negotiated with the unions to ensure they don’t threaten white jobs. How’s that for class solidarity comrade?
Tell Blinky that I am for bread, peace, and land . Bread for the starving refugees cast out of country, peace to stop the bombing, land for Palestinian and Aboriginal .
Tell Bill that CFMEU comrades were down at Musgrave Park last Friday trying to stop Schrinner from casting out homeless Aboriginal people from their special place.
My how-to-vote cards were leaflets opposing the genocide because that is what Remah’s campaign was all about. In contrast, Wong has been saying all along Palestine supporters can’t do anything, and if we do, we are being antisemitic. Remah scored a big swing in Coopers Plains. I’m surprised that Blinky didn’t see the jfp people handing out how to vote cards. It was their energy that caused the swing for Palestine at your booth. I’m worried about Blinky, he needs his eyes tested.
Tell Blinky to be wary of false victory. This is the first message I received when I opened up Facebook this morning:
“SHAME ON LABOR. Don’t give us this bullshit about it being hard to judge from afar. Israel is deliberately starving two million people – – how is that difficult to judge? Is the UN lying? Is Amnesty lying? Is Doctor’s without Borders lying? Are these pics of a flattened Gaza fake news? Is Bernie Sanders lying? Is Jeremy Corbyn Lying? Is the ICC lying? Is the ICJ lying? Is your silence the price for a few votes and donations or are you also a psychopath?”
Fact check. Blinky Bill opposed an Olympic stadium in Toohey Forest, Victoria Park and the Gabba (or anywhere else). The Greens promoted Toohey Forest as the alternative to Victoria Park and the Gabba. Jonathan Sriranganathan, the Greens Moreton campaign coordinator, submitted to the 100 day stadium review that the international tourism potential of Toohey Forrest was an advantage to the stadium going there. That’s what motivated Blinky Bill to enter the debate.
ATTENTION BLINKY BILL
Submission into the LNP’s Brisbane 2032 Olympics venue review.
“The Nathan site’s location adjacent to Toohey Forest also tells an important story, offering an opportunity to showcase a unique Brisbane feature that sets it apart from other Olympic cities. With approximately 640 hectares of intact, multi-layered forest, the combined area of Toohey Forest and Mt Gravatt Outlook Reserve makes this green space one of the largest urban forests of its kind in the world. Few large cities can boast such a densely vegetated natural green space just 8km from the central business district.
In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers could find no evidence of koalas in Toohey Forest – they were deemed locally extinct. However in recent decades, the cross-suburb migration and reintroduction of a few individual koalas from other bushland reserves has resulted in a renewed, growing koala population within the reserve. Environmentally speaking, this is borderline miraculous. For koalas to be surviving and breeding in a forest reserve on the cusp of the inner-city, surrounded by residential and industrial development on all sides, is a positive news story about ecological recovery that ought to be shared with the world. For a relatively small investment in restoration, the ecological value of Toohey Forest could be further enhanced significantly. From a tourism perspective, the optics of athletes jogging around the warm-up track, mere metres from where wild koalas are feeding in the trees, is hard to beat. Spectators would be able to stroll through the forest on koala-spotting tours before and after watching events. – Jonathan Sriranganathan 9 Jan 2025.
Yes, that is the submission I was referring to. The Greens should have opposed any development that threatens the Toohey Forest ecology. Jonathan is either ignorant or dishonest to describe Toohey Forest as healthy, it is very damaged, sick, endangered, vulnerable, poorly managed and any infrastructure developments, let alone sending millions of tourists through it, would accelerate its destruction. Jonathan cannot tell the difference between “green space” and ecology.
How did Blinky Bill allocate his preferences? To the Indigenous Party in the Senate and to Remah or to Labor in the house of Reps?
So what about in the Senate? Remah delivered many thousands of her preferences to the Indigenous Party, so how many preferences did Blinky Bill give to Coco Wharton? Think carefully, Wayne has been known to growl at Blinky on occasion.
BTW the Indigenous party did not get back to me on your suggestion that I ask them about immigration.
JFP and APAN hand outs for Federal Election 2025
If you followed the Blinky Bill story you would know he did a preference deal with Tanya Plibersek for a koala crossing over Toohey road. I warned him the ALP has a long history of selling out grass roots movements but he assured me he will keep campaigning for the crossing.
Blinky said he voted for Coco in the senate but was disappointed the indigenous party had no strategic direction or purpose. However he did notice Coco did very well in the booths in discreet Aboriginal communities, averaging 30%. Blinky did not preference the Greens, he said he could never forgive them for threatening Toohey Forest.
I imagine the indigenous party did not answer your question about immigration because it is a ridiculous question. For 230 years the Aboriginal struggle has been against immigrants. Remah’s open borders policy is terra nullius and it shows either ignorance or disrespect of Aboriginal perspective. Until a real treaty has been settled then all non-Aboriginal Australians, with the exception of refugees, are illegal immigrants in Aboriginal law. The ALP and Greens “Big Australia” policy is continuing the unlawful colonial project just as much as Israeli settlers in Palestine do.
The working class has no country. Aboriginal people are part of the working class, as is Remah, whose family is stateless. Remah gave up rights in Jordan, hard fought rights for Palestinians who had been caste out of their homes during nakba. Her family is trying to get rid of the whole colonial project here and there. Remah invited Coco and other Aboriginal people onto a platform Palestinians here forged with supporters in JFP.
Blinky Bill is so disconnected from struggle that he has lost his way in the bush blinded and blinked in a dark morass of resentment. Especially sad while the occupation is lashing out in every direction, destroying the lives of generations to come.
John, it is important not to lose hope. Hope must be rooted in solidarity with workers of all countries.
Why did you tell me to ask Coco about immigration if you thought it a stupid question? Or are you playing games. I’m not here to play games. You should know that by now.