Leroy
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leroylynch.bsky.social
Leroy
@leroylynch.bsky.social
1.4K followers 950 following 2.6K posts
ALP member. Social Democrat. Posts are mainly news, plus some history and general interest.
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leroylynch.bsky.social
Media Diary: Leadership change looms at Sydney Morning Herald as editor Bevan Shields faces exit
Multiple sources reveal the editor will not reach five years in the role, with a successor already lined up.
www.theaustralian.com.au/business/med... ($) #ausmedia
Bevan “Sheffield” Shields will next week mark four years as editor of The Sydney Morning Herald. The smart money says that he won’t reach the milestone of five. Shields, who is the first SMH editor in the masthead’s 194-year history to tell his cricket-adoring audience (out loud, anyway) that he reckons our national game is a dud sport, is apparently ready to relinquish the masthead’s reins, according to multiple well-placed sources inside Nine Publishing. The whispers are that Shields will be safely parachuted from the editor’s chair into another senior role at the masthead. Rumours of Shields’ shaky grasp on the editorship have been doing the media rounds for several months, but as always with this kind of chatter, one must be astute in assessing the motives of those spreading the tittle-tattle before publishing the murmurs. But as we enter killing season – not just for pollies, but for newspaper editors as well – the mail is strong: Shields will vacate the editor’s chair in early 2026, if not earlier, and will most likely be replaced by long-serving SMH scribe Jordan Baker. It’s understood that Shields’ decision to step down is not in any way related to a colleague’s complaint about his workplace conduct some time ago. But Shields’ time at the top of the SMH has not been without its missteps. Early on in his tenure, in February 2022, Shields put himself in the middle of a newsroom shitstorm when he instructed his journalists to describe a state government-enforced shutdown of the rail network as a “strike”. Strike One, you might call it. Later that same year, Shields initially rushed to the defence of his gossip columnist Andrew Hornery, who thought it was a good idea to reveal actor Rebel Wilson’s same-sex relationship before she had decided whether she wished to publicly discuss her sexuality. Classy! Two days later, the SMH issued an apology for its grubby attack on Wilson.
November 23, 2025 at 9:38 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
#Newspoll federal poll. Here is the table graphic as it appears on page 4 of The Australian, 24 November, including voting, leader approval ratings, better Prime Minister, and a preferred leader of the federal coalition question. A poll of 1245 voters, taken 17 to 20 Nov. #auspol
November 23, 2025 at 9:11 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
This was my 2015 Halloween twitter profile pic
November 23, 2025 at 5:33 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
November 23, 2025 at 4:44 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Da da da
I don't love you you don't love me
Da da da
I don't love you you don't love me
Da da da
I don't love you you don't love me
Da da da
I don't love you you don't love me
The pope is holding a microphone on a stand as if he is singing into it with his eyes closed, various reporters and a church official are right behind him.
November 23, 2025 at 4:28 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Deves is from the right edge of our main centre right party. Authorisation is by John Ruddick on that campaign website, he came from the same place, and now a "Libertarian." These are people plugged in the global fringe Right, looking for a way into the conversation (pics for those paywalled).
November 22, 2025 at 10:13 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Vale Richo
Picture of Graham Richardson on the Richo + Jones TV Show on Sky News Australia, doing the rude gesture known as giving the finger to illustrate some point he was making, a still from a Sky News video clip I saved on 12 Aug 2015.
November 8, 2025 at 1:31 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
#Newspoll: Majority of Australians want immigration cuts
www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/polit... ($) #auspol
Graphic of immigration questions from recent Newspoll, taken from page 4 of The Australian, Tuesday 4 November 2025.
November 4, 2025 at 12:09 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
#Newspoll federal poll. Here is the table graphic as it appears on page 4 of The Australian, 3 November, including voting, leader approval ratings, better Prime Minister, and some historical opposition leader approval ratings. #auspol
November 2, 2025 at 10:14 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Disenchanted chatter that sparked defence of Liberals’ broad church.
MPs are aware it will only take the defection of seven Liberals to flip the balance of the Coalition. Such talk has prompted the defence of the party’s broad church.
www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/polit... ($) #auspol
Image of first part of "Disenchanted chatter that sparked defence of Liberals’ broad church" article as it appears on page 1 of The Australian, 16 October 2025. It includes an insert of another article, "Ruddock urges Libs not to surrender on multiculturalism" Image of second part of "Disenchanted chatter that sparked defence of Liberals’ broad church" article as it appears on page 4 of The Australian, 16 October 2025. It includes an insert of another article, "Ruddock urges Libs not to surrender on multiculturalism"
October 15, 2025 at 11:25 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
This looks interesting, a book by Colin Kidd due next year.

Twilight of the Dons | Princeton University Press
press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
The rise to power and eventual fall from grace of the Oxbridge intellectual
After World War II, the academics of Oxford and Cambridge—the dons—formed an unusual kind of university-based, establishment-connected intelligentsia. Unlike intellectuals in other countries, often antiestablishment outsiders, the dons of Oxbridge enjoyed secure and even cosy connections with those in power. In Twilight of the Dons, Colin Kidd examines the golden age of Britain’s Oxford- and Cambridge-based intellectual elites—and how their influence waned when Oxbridge’s links to the establishment began to fray. Kidd explores a series of episodes and themes that range from the dons’ confrontations with student protesters in the 1960s to their reaction to the rise of Thatcherism in the 1980s. The cast of characters includes many of twentieth-century Britain’s most famous intellectuals—Elizabeth Anscombe, Isaiah Berlin, Edmund Leach, J. H. Plumb and Hugh Trevor-Roper, to name just a few. Kidd describes the multiple important roles played by dons in World War II, the countercultural force of convert Catholicism and the strange phenomenon of Tory Marxism. He examines the dons’ attitudes toward America and France—as seen in their engagement in the debates over the Kennedy assassination and the awkward reception of Lévi-Strauss’s anthropology. When Oxbridge came under assault, it was first by a modernizing, technocratic Left in the early 1960s, then by student radicals in the late 1960s and finally by the Thatcherite right—in whose rise, Kidd shows, some dons were complicit. As deference to Oxbridge intelligentsia declined, a reassessment of the place of dons in British public life began.
October 13, 2025 at 9:46 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Resolve federal poll
TPP: ALP 55 (0) L/NP 45 (0)
Primary: ALP 34 (-1) L/NP 28 (+1) GRN 11 (0) ON 12 (0) IND 9 (0) OTH 7 (+1)
www.theage.com.au/politics/fed... #auspol
(+/-) changes since September, sample 1800 voters
TTP is respondent allocated preferences
Image of poll graphs taken from page 10 of The Age, 13 Oct 2025.
October 12, 2025 at 10:43 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Kos Samaras on X has given us more details on the #Redbridge federal poll #auspol
The call for a Coalition Right turn - may end up being the longest U-Turn away from government. Our latest RedBridge–Accent National Survey for the Financial Review reconfirms the deep structural realignment underway in Australian politics, one that’s generational, geographic, and ideological in nature. The implications for the Coalition are profound. The challenge is no longer about messaging or leadership; it’s about demographics, geography, and time. The Generational Realignment The age profile of each major party tells the story: •Greens median age: early 30s •Labor: early 40s •Coalition: mid 50s •One Nation: early 60s This generational divide is not just attitudinal, it’s structural. Every electoral cycle, around 700,000 younger voters join the roll, while older voters, predominantly Baby Boomers, leave it. In effect, the Coalition’s voter base is ageing out of the electorate faster than it can replenish it. The younger cohorts, meanwhile, are not drifting rightward with age as previous generations did. They are staying put and with Gen Z, moving further left. This creates a demographic current that runs against the Coalition’s long-term viability unless it redefines what conservatism means to a younger generation. The Ideological Compression The second major shift is ideological. When asked how they see themselves politically, Australians now cluster heavily in the “Left” and “Moderate” categories. The “Right” has become smaller, older, and more fragmented. Within this self-definition: •Left voters break 80–20 Labor–Coalition (2PP) •Moderates split 56–44 Labor’s way •The Right is 70–30 Coalition, but it is shrinking. The challenge is arithmetic as much as ideological. The moderate middle, once the decisive battleground of Australian politics, now tilts towards Labor. The Coalition’s reliance on its conservative flank keeps it electorally alive, but strategically paralysed. Every attempt to modernise risks revolt from the populist Right (One Nation), which we can see here in this data but every concession to the populist Right drives younger, urban and female voters further away, which we can see here in this data.
October 11, 2025 at 7:53 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Bank of England: Record of the Financial Policy Committee meeting on 2 October 2025 (note comment on AI risk)
www.bankofengland.co.uk/financial-po...
Despite persistent material uncertainty around the global macroeconomic outlook, risky asset valuations have increased and credit spreads have compressed. Measures of risk premia across many risky asset classes have tightened further since the last FPC meeting in June 2025. On a number of measures, equity market valuations appear stretched, particularly for technology companies focused on Artificial Intelligence (AI). This, when combined with increasing concentration within market indices, leaves equity markets particularly exposed should expectations around the impact of AI become less optimistic.
October 8, 2025 at 10:03 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Defeated oppo leader Peter Dutton has laid significant blame for the Coalition’s election loss at the feet of MP Andrew Hastie in explosive secret submissions to the party’s election review that accuse Hastie of going “on strike” and fumbling key policies.
www.theage.com.au/politics/fed... #auspol
Defeated opposition leader Peter Dutton has laid significant blame for the Coalition’s election loss at the feet of Liberal MP Andrew Hastie in explosive secret submissions to the party’s election review that accuse Hastie of going “on strike” and fumbling key policies. Hastie’s shock exit from leader Sussan Ley’s frontbench on Friday has fuelled speculation about her leadership as MPs return to Canberra this week, likely dulling the opposition’s attacks on the government on the Optus saga and the repatriation of so-called ISIS brides. The West Australian’s social media musings on net zero by 2050 and migration have excited some colleagues but they have led others to question his strategic nous and his interest in keeping the party on the rails. Dutton, who spent years alongside Hastie as senior leaders of the Right faction before losing his seat, was scathing about Hastie’s performance in his arguments to the Liberal Party’s election review probing the historic loss. “It was inconceivable to Dutton and his senior colleagues that Hastie effectively went on strike during the last term,” said one source who is familiar with Dutton’s submissions, but not authorised to speak publicly. “Someone who should have been a powerful voice in the media tearing strips off Labor was absent, scared to do media, or lazy.” Dutton was interviewed by election reviewers Nick Minchin and Pru Goward in July as they tried to unpick the devastating loss. Dutton put to the election probe that Hastie was tasked early in the term with doing a review into how the Defence Department spent money on procurement. The aim was that when the Coalition released its defence policy, it could pledge to upgrade military hardware with better bang for buck than Labor. Hastie did not complete the work, according to Dutton’s submissions. The opposition’s $21 billion defence spending policy, announced late in the election campaign, was criticised for being too late and lacking in detail.
October 5, 2025 at 10:32 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
The #Newspoll federal poll was taken between 29 September - 2 October 2025, sample of 1264, online survey. Here is the table graphic as it appears on page 4 of The Australian, 6 October, including voting, leader approval ratings, better Prime Minister, and a question on house prices. #auspol
October 5, 2025 at 10:20 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Peronism is a good analogy. As an another option, in Jan 2025 John Ganz suggested it was a kind of Vichy moment.
www.unpopularfront.news/p/welcome-to...
If you want an analogy for the present state of America it’s perhaps not an out-and-out fascist regime, but a Vichy regime. It’s partly fascist but mostly just a reactionary and defeatist catch-all. It’s a regime born of capitulation and of defeat: of the slow and then sudden collapse of the longstanding institutions of a great democracy whose defenders turned out to be senile and unable to cope with or understand modern politics. It’s a regime of born exhaustion, nihilism, and cynicism: the loss of faith in the old verities of the republic. A regime of national humiliation pretending to be a regime of restoration of national honor. It claims to be at once a national revolution and a national restoration. It’s a hybrid regime: a coalition that includes the fascist far right, of course, but also technocratic modernizers who might have once called themselves liberals, the big industrialists, and old social conservatives. Even some disaffected socialists and leftists for whom liberalism was always the main enemy want to give it the benefit of the doubt. It’s a regime of collaboration and sympathy: the #resistance may have dominated the political style of the first Trump administration, but now, as Trump says, everyone wants to be his friend. People are quickly discovering what they once professed to find unacceptable might not be so bad. And it will be felt as a relief. No longer will they have to echo bien-pensant hypocrisies, they can engage in frank, honest assertions of their self-interest. Maybe refugees are not so welcome here after all. In this house, maybe we believe in nothing but our property values. “Plutot Trump que le Wokisme” seems to be the slogan of the center-right that once whinged about the Constitution and our sacred norms. It will be a regime of bad faith: it will attract all those who do one thing while pretending to do another. Afterward, when the full shame of the situation is revealed, the collaborators will claim to have been secret resistants
October 1, 2025 at 3:41 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
A comment from @sydney.yimby.au on last nights Inner City Council vote.
#nswpol
October 1, 2025 at 1:27 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
From the SMH's CBD section today, on Liberal party staffer movements
www.smh.com.au/cbd/sue-chef... #auspol
Get staffed And now to our friends in the Liberal Party, who continue the slow, painful work of crawling out of the depths of opposition. New leader Sussan Ley has been too busy putting out fires on the home front of late, in the form of Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price (banished to the backbench) and Aussie car enthusiast Andrew “Tasty” Hastie (sidelined on a quest to find the reactionary holy grail: an election-winning constituency of local MAGA enthusiasts who definitely exist). Once those fires are out, the party’s first female leader faces the immense task of bringing women voters back to the fold. To help that task, the Liberals have recruited a couple of senior female staff to high-profile positions. Ley has picked up Annabel Clunies-Ross as a senior media adviser – she’s previously held roles with frontbenchers Josh Frydenberg and Angus Taylor. Most recently, she was a principal adviser at the Minerals Council of Australia, who very generously lent her to former leader Peter Dutton’s disastrous election campaign. Meanwhile, opposition health minister Anne Ruston has a new chief of staff in Sheradyn Holderhead, a former News Corp scribbler and Liberal apparatchik who returns to the Canberra bubble from Washington, DC, where she worked for former federal treasurer Joe Hockey’s lobbying firm, Bondi Partners. To be honest, we’d probably want out of Donald Trump’s America too.
October 1, 2025 at 1:15 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Wealthier graduates who deserted Dutton warm to Ley but not to Liberals
(Resolve poll quarterly summary of combined fed poll data July - Sept 2025, 5911 voters, not a new poll)
www.theage.com.au/politics/fed... #auspol
Image of hard copy of The Age article "Wealthier graduates who deserted Dutton warm to Ley but not to Liberals" which takes up most of page 15, Saturday 27 September 2025. Text and bar graphs.
September 27, 2025 at 12:52 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Do you ever wonder who are the "They" people speak so ominously about? It was all explained in Harry Harrison's satire "Bill The Galactic Hero" in 1965.
September 21, 2025 at 11:04 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
The #Newspoll quarterly aggregate federal polling summary (not a new poll) of data from 14 July to 11 September 2025.
www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/polit... ($) #auspol
Federal Newspoll table of the quarterly summary of previously released aggregate polling including voting figures, leader performance, and preferred PM, broken down by various states and demographics as it appears on page 4 of the hard copy of The Australian 22 September 2025. Online polling voter sample of 3811 over 14 July to 11 September 2025.
September 21, 2025 at 9:07 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
Techno-pipe dreams
Thirty years ago, nanotech was about to change everything.
"I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both."
aeon.co/essays/no-su...
You might have noticed that none of this has happened. No cures for cancer, no mind-uploading immortality, but no grey goo either. This is because Drexler’s vision of nanotechnology was a chimera. It was like the philosophers’ stone of the alchemists: magic dressed in the science of its time, by means of which almost anything becomes possible. I call these oneiric technologies: they do not and quite probably cannot exist, but they fulfil a deep-rooted dream, or a nightmare, or both. These are not simply technologies of the future that we don’t yet have the means to realise, like the super-advanced technologies that Arthur C Clarke said we would be unable to distinguish from magic. Rather, oneiric technology takes a wish (or a terror) and clothes it in what looks like scientific raiment so that the uninitiated onlooker, and perhaps the dreamer, can no longer tell it apart from what is genuinely on the verge of the possible. Perpetual motion is one of the oldest oneiric technologies, although only since the 19th century have we known why it won’t work (this knowledge doesn’t discourage modern attempts, for example by allegedly exploiting the ‘quantum vacuum’); anti-gravity shielding is probably another. The oneiric technologies currently in vogue in Silicon Valley include the notion of terraforming other planets, transforming their geosphere and atmosphere to render them inhabitable; cryonic freezing of your head after death so that your consciousness can one day be rebooted; and the related idea of mind-uploading to computer circuits. These techno-fantasies are central to the utopias regularly forecast by tech billionaires. They interconnect in a nexus to which Drexlerian nanotechnology is central. It is worth looking into that particular dream, not just because of the parallels with the fantastical claims and fears about AI today, but because even now Drexlerian nanobots have not gone away. Kurzweil still cites them as the reason why his singularity is even ‘near…
September 20, 2025 at 1:55 PM
leroylynch.bsky.social
‘Don’t mention Hitler and you’re sweet’: The great March for Australia deception
www.theage.com.au/politics/vic... #auspol
First part of article "Neo-Nazis secretly led marches on immigration" from page 1 of The Age, Saturday 20 September 2025. Second part of article "Neo-Nazis secretly led marches on immigration" which takes up the whole of page 4 of The Age, Saturday 20 September 2025. Third part of article "Neo-Nazis secretly led marches on immigration" which takes up the whole of page 5 of The Age, Saturday 20 September 2025.
September 20, 2025 at 12:33 AM
leroylynch.bsky.social
From @kossamaras.bsky.social at the other place on the new Victorian state level #Redbridge poll.
TPP: ALP 52 L/NP 48
Primary: ALP 32 L/NP 37 GRN 13 OTH 18
#springst
Our latest published poll. Victoria: The Coalition’s uphill climb This week’s state poll, published in the Herald Sun, has Labor leading 52–48 TPP. On those numbers the Coalition is well short of the 16 seats it needs. Even if the statewide vote were to rise to 51–52%, much of that swing would be concentrated in rural and regional Victoria, areas where the Coalition is already strong and where the correction will most likely occur. However, the path to government runs through Melbourne, where 80% of Victoria’s population reside and here’s the problem: •Inner & middle suburbs: Labor leads 54–46 •Outer suburbs: Labor 52–48 •Provincial cities: Labor 58–42 - Ballarat, Bendigo and Geelong. •Rural communities: Coalition ahead 52–48 To win government, the Coalition would need to crack into Melbourne seats that Labor currently holds on margins above 5%. That means not just a statewide 51–52%, but a Melbourne two-party preferred closer to 52–53%, a swing of up to 7 points in the city is required. And the demographic headwinds remain: •Younger voters and renters backing Labor and the Greens. •Diverse, multi-lingual communities in the outer suburbs anchoring Labor’s base. •University-educated professionals in the inner suburbs locked in for Labor/Greens. In short, even if the Coalition improves statewide, without a decisive breakthrough in metropolitan Melbourne the arithmetic to 16 seats remains out of reach. Image of various demographic breakdowns of the Primary and Two Party Preferred vote figures.
September 17, 2025 at 2:44 AM