There’s always comedy gold to be found in an election campaign: stumbles, fumbles, gaffes and just plain bizarrities. Election 2025 isn’t letting us down.
First up, there’s Teal MP Allegra Spender, making the weird boast that she was instrumental in freeing hundreds of murderers, rapists, paedophiles and drug dealers from immigration detention. That’s right: turning loose hardened foreign criminals, dozens of whom went on to immediately reoffend in the worst possible ways, was a ‘major success’ according this Harbourside mansion multimillionaire nepo baby.
When asked by local publication the Beast whether refugees would still be languishing in immigration detention without the teal independent wave that unseated six moderate Liberals in 2022, Ms Spender answered “absolutely”.
Opposition home affairs spokesman James Paterson seized on Ms Spender’s “bizarre” remarks in the video interview, accusing the Wentworth MP of “boasting about her role in the release of more than 300 violent non-citizens into the community by the Albanese government”.
Then there’s this howler from the gold-plated bint:
Ms Spender on Sunday told the Australian: “Refugees who are not a risk to public safety should not be held in indefinite detention.”
Apparently she needs reminding that she is claiming responsibility for turning loose 300 violent foreigners in Australia without any form of monitoring. As the coalition’s James Paterson reminds her:
More than 100 of the former detainees have been charged with new offences since their release from immigration detention, including an alleged home invasion where a grandmother was violently bashed.
Just the sort of thing to warm the cockles of a tilty-headed Harbourside cretin’s heart, apparently.
It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that Spender has abruptly pulled out of a debate she had previously agreed to against her Liberal challenger Ro Knox.
Where Spender might have the excuse of being just an idiot, gold-plated, nepo-baby, the award for bare-faced chutzpah has to go to the Chinese government.
Beijing has warned Australia not to discriminate against the country’s businesses amid a push by both sides of politics to strip Chinese-owned company Landbridge of its lease over the Port of Darwin […]
Late on Monday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian called for Australian authorities to ensure a level playing field for Chinese businesses.
“We urge the Australian side to provide a fair, non-discriminatory and predictable business environment for Chinese companies’ investment and operation in Australia, and not to generalise the concept of national security or politicise normal business co-operation,” Mr Lin said.
This is the same Chinese government, remember, that summarily banned Australian imports, from beef and rock lobster to wine and barley, from 2020 to 2024, all because then-PM Scott Morrison dared suggest that the Covid virus originated in China. Which, as we now know, was 100 per cent true.
This is also the same Chinese government that, while it was still covering up the initial outbreak in Wuhan, secretly pillaged global stocks of critical medical equipment – including in Australia, where the crews of visiting Chinese warships loaded up pallets of masks and surgical gowns, even as Beijing lied that there was any outbreak at all.
Having plundered the world’s desperately needed supplies, China proceeded to flood markets with shoddy, useless supplies of its own. Countries like Italy, one of the hardest-hit by the pandemic, found themselves loaded with gowns that fell apart as soon as they were opened and masks that simply didn’t work.
So, yeah, shove your ‘fair, non-discriminatory and predictable business environment’ where the sun don’t shine, China.
