Simon vs Simon

Simon Kennedy would be a pretty funny choice to replace Scott Morrison as the Liberal candidate for Cook in any circumstances. The Morrison era was characterised by, among other things, ongoing problems with women (both levels of representation in Parliament and the treatment of those who made it in), and canyon-clogging wads of dosh thrown at behemoth consultants. Meanwhile, the party’s shift to the right has been rewarded by losses in the Aston and Dunkley by-elections.

And so the Liberals thought the best way to conclusively move on from that was by passing over a woman in favour of a bloke from the right faction once employed by McKinsey and backed by Tony Abbott. Kennedy is to Cook what MC Hammer is to trousers, having moved back to Bennelong in 2022 to watch the Liberal margin completely wiped out by the Morrison government’s rhetoric on China.

Our commiserations to Gwen Cherne, who had to find out that the endorsement of Liberal messiah John Howard wasn’t enough to overcome her lack of a Y chromosome. But perhaps the biggest victim in all this is comedian Simon Kennedy who, once again, is going to have to field a lot of dietary requests for some profoundly grim-sounding fundraisers. Kennedy, a Bennelong voter, embarked on a “don’t vote for Simon Kennedy” campaign last time out, telling us at the time: “There is no Simon Kennedy that can do any good for the electorate. And as a Simon Kennedy, I feel pretty qualified to say that.”

Just in keeping with the whole “not learning lessons” vibe, Kennedy the comedian confirmed to Crikey this morning that, just as he did in 2022, he had received a bunch of emails from Google-averse local Liberals congratulating him on his preselection victory. Given that the Liberals hold the seat with a decidedly comfortable margin, Labor are unlikely to field a candidate, and there is no teal on the horizon, Kennedy might wish to prepare himself for a few years of this kind of thing.

Fetch the Bolt cutters

If it were up to News Corp’s writers, no machine would ever fail the Turing test. Following The Daily Telegraph’s fury at “biased woke robots” and the New York Post grilling a White House chatbot about cocaine like it was in Frost/Nixon, now we get Sky News furious at Gemini, the Google AI platform, refusing to write a poem in praise of Andrew Bolt, which it reportedly said would cause “potential harm” on account of Bolt’s “controversial” and “divisive rhetoric”. We actually agree that, if true, it’s kind of a dumb feature, if not quite the catastrophe Sky paints it as.

“The irony is that I have actually written poems and had them published in two anthologies of poems called Youth Writes,” a philosophical Bolt told Sky News digital editor Jack Houghton in response.

“Far from causing ‘harm’, they deal with uncertainty and the dangerous temptation to join the mob in a pack attack just like Gemini has,” he said, again, confusing a machine with no thoughts, feelings or aims with an actual person being mean to him.

He then took out the gold in the “insufferable dude at a party” Olympics by recounting a line from a poem he wrote when he was 13: “But fear sealed my mouth, Held me back. And soon I was yelling with the rest.”

That’s from “The Fear”, his first piece of published writing — about the horrors of witnessing and then joining the bullying of someone based on their skin colour.

As it turns out, there’s more — a tipster got in contact to show off what appear to be a few more pieces by the young scribe in An Australian Youth Anthology, compiled by the late Marcia Kirsten who also put together Youth Writes. There is “Conformity”, which really does carry a “child is father to the man” vibe, expressing sentiments easily heard in a voice slightly more prone to screechy breaks than his current one:

Take that sheeple. Then there’s “Indecision”, which I will present without comment except to say that knowing Bolt wrote sad poetry about girls when he was 16 is the most I’ve ever related to him.

Taylor’d

We in the bunker are great fans of what we’ve come to call “Tayloring” — named after then energy minister Angus Taylor’s exquisite moment of carelessness when commenting “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus” on one of his own posts, which left very little interpretation available except that he was intending to use an alternative account to inflate positive feedback. Not to be confused with “Ballsing it up” where you accidentally post what is clearly a search for your own name, or being “hacked” when hackers like a single pornographic tweet and then disappear.

Former MP for Goldstein Tim Wilson appears to have joined Tayloring’s storied history. Responding to criticism of a piece he co-penned with Jason Falinski arguing there is a path back to government in regaining seats lost to teal independents in 2022 (something he and Falinski would certainly *want* to be true), someone felt the need to defend Wilson’s expertise, pointing out “Tim wrote a book on this topic: read it!”

That someone was none other that Tim Wilson himself.