Major story out of the election this week has been candidates dropping like flies. The Liberals have lost a couple in Victoria yesterday. One for anti-muslim comments, another for being hopelessly homophobic.
Labor hasn't fared well either. One of their NT candidates is accused of being an anti-semite, whilst their candidate for Melbourne (a Greens seat) has had to apologise for making rape jokes in the past. Of course the Greens have form here too (they refused to disendorse a candidate who rapped about raping and abusing women), but so far they've gone ok.
The Liberals also earlier dumper their candidate for Corio (based in Geelong) because he said he actually quite liked his Labor opponent and didn't think unions were all too bad.
A number of other candidates have caused a stir but haven't been dumped. Gladys Liu (Lib, Chisholm VIC) made homophobic and misleading comments about Safe Schools and also said that the work practices of other migrants are inferior to the Chinese. Kate Ashmor (Lib, Macnamara VIC) has had four major gaffes...she criticised her opponent for not being Jewish enough because he doesn't have a mezzuzah on his campaign office, insinuated that Chloe Shorten is a pig, said that public schools are inferior to private schools and encouraged defunding them and, finally, said that leaders without children invariably lack empathy.
The pièce de résistance has to be Jessica Whelan (Lib, Lyons TAS). Among her contributions to the public debate is a social media post in which she encouraged Donald Trump to cut off their clitorises of feminists and sell them to Muslims in Muslim countries. The liberals response to this is that she didn't make the posts, and they've referred them to the AFP because they believe they've been doctored. Watch this space. I suspect she'll be gone soon, but it'll be tricky because ScoMo campaigned with her today (which was breathtakingly stupid by his campaign team).
This issue of dodgy candidates has been a really prominent one around the western world. There's a suggestion that it might be such a prominent issue now because of social media providing an avenue to dredge up stupid shit people have said.
It's been a particular problem in the UK, with the Conservative party dumping candidates left and right. The Labour party there, which has been captured by the far-left under Jeremy Corbyn, has arguably been beset by the same problems but, tragically, has been less willing to do something about it. They've had a terrible rise of anti-semitism within the party and have thus far steadfastly refused to do much about it, leading several Jewish MPs to quit.
Also, I haven't talked about One Nation, Fraser Anning's merry band of Nazis or Palmer United because having fuck wit candidates in those parties is par for the course.
Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.
Another ringing endorsement of the Rhodes scholarship