10 terrorist targets that are better than Parliament House

Our politicians are worried about their workplace being a potential target for a terrorist attack so they have beefed up security to make themselves feel better and our citizens safer, or at least the few thousand that work and visit each day can feel a little more safer than they otherwise would have going through the layers of security that already existed before the #TerrorHysteria invaded.

As much as many of us would enjoy seeing the demise of a few upon Capital Hill, we actually like our billion dollar flagpole and some of the people we elected to sit under it. So, with tongue firmly planted in cheek, I offer the dummies guide to 10 better targets for prospective terrorists to leave their mark on Australia.

Graphic sourced from www.smh.com.au

10. AFL/NRL clubs or stadiums
You can't get much more Australian than sport, and you won't get more Australians enlisting in the defence force to fight against your fundamentalism than if you target their beloved national religion. It's also one of the few places you can be assured of getting tens of thousands of innocent people in one location as well as live media coverage of your attack sponsored by alcohol, gambling, interest charging banks or burgers with crispy bacon. But be careful of which team you target; an attack on Collingwood might get you more thanks than vitriol, especially if you take out Eddie McGuire in the process.

9. Australian Christian Lobby

As its name implies this is a lobby group comprised mainly of conservative, fundamentalist pseudo-Christian fanatics. It has been often argued that they may be one of the most, if not the most, influential lobby group in Canberra. They regularly garner the attention of politicians from both sides of the House to speak at their functions and conferences, where issues like abortion, sexuality, marriage and the sanctity of the 'family' unit is never up for negotiation. Please, take them. We don't like them either.

8. The Tall Poppies

Basically we would like those on our rich list to be taken down a peg or two:

Rupert Murdoch - he still thinks he is Australian and is able to influence our politics even though he technically doesn't get a vote.

Gina Reinhart - amongst other things she is renowned for the fourth worst poetry in the universe, unless you believe the rumours that she is actually a Vogon, in which case she rises to third place.

Andrew Forrest - seems to mean well, but can't keep his pesky nose out of Gina's anal gland and seems to have an unbelievable simplistic solution to every social and welfare issue known to humanity. 

7. Catch the Fire Ministries

As one of the most deplorable and bigoted 'Christians' in Australia, particularly focusing his hate speech towards Islam and homosexuality, Pastor Danny Nalliah is deserving of a fatwa, a jihad, a crusade or an untimely death from venereal ebola. He is the founder and President of an evangelical pseudo-Christian church, leader of the Rise Up Australia party, self-proclaimed healer and resurrector of the dead and a moronic young earth creationist amongst many more failings as a modern hominid. Danny recently celebrated his 50th birthday by thanking his mother for not aborting him. If only we could go back in time and convince her otherwise.

6. Adolf Hitler

Speaking of time travel, instead of being a terrorist you could use your boundless energy, endless resources and merciless martyrdom to perfect time travel and go back to the 1930s to kill Hitler, thereby preventing world war 2 and the Holocaust. This would allow the Jews to remain in Europe, Israel would never be established, the Middle East would never have been unfairly conquered and divided and Islam could remain a peaceful religion without all that nasty baggage. 

5. Australian Family Association

Founded by fundamentalist Catholics, notably the infamous B.A. Santamaria, as the National Civic Council, the core premise of its existence is similar to the ACL in attempting to 'promote the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society'. Unmarried cohabitation, children out of wedlock, single parents, non-heterosexual relationships and access to IVF or adoption by anyone other than a married couple is offensive to them. Their most vociferous spokespeople have previously warned the public of the secret agenda to turn your boys gay, your girls into prostitutes and to legalise pedophilia and bestiality.

4.Australian Defence League

A nationalist and xenophobic rabble that was once anti-Semitic but found an easier and more popular target in Islam. Apart from racist and Islamophobic rants across the Internet, particularly through its social media accounts, the organisation has come under recent scrutiny after the revelation that members of the Royal Australian Navy involved in the divisive 'Operation Sovereign Borders' are also members of the ADL. 

Because of the apparent lack of a single hierarchy or formal structure of this movement it is a difficult target, but one whose annihilation would receive resounding secular and cross-party applause around the nation.

3. Political arsehats

Pauline Hanson, Cory Bernardi, Jacqui Lambie, Mark Latham and Christopher Pyne to begin with, but we could easily list a hundred more. Yes, they are only morons and hardly anyone takes them seriously, but that potentially makes them very dangerous, especially if they were to team up like a nightmarish pack of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.

2. Shock Jocks

Andrew Bolt: Convicted perpetrator of hate-speech, self-affirming bigot, general egomaniac and rabid conservative douchebag.

Kyle Sandilands: Moron. Enough said.

Alan Jones: a rabid conservative and, unfortunately, popularly divisive celebrity talkback radio host with a mouth like a 17th century syphillitic tavern wench with Tourette's. He tops this list because of his unmatched ability to excite the masses and potentially incite violence and atrocities against innocent people.  His demise can not come too soon, particularly if it is caused by being put in 'a chaff bag and thrown into the sea' as he once suggested be done with former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard.

1. Yourself

Seriously, if you want to make a public statement using martyrdom to promote your cause then just blow yourself up in a wide open space with no one else around. I am happy to post your message on YouTube and ensure that you are remembered as a complete douchebag along with everyone else on this list. Please accept that as a small token of my appreciation for making this world a better place by your absence.

The by-election that wasn't

This was not a by election, it was a wake up call for all of Canberra and each of the state governments. And the message is clear; ignore the citizens at your own peril. 

There are undoubtedly a few sore political heads in the wake of he Western Australian Senate re-election held over the weekend. Counting is still in progress, and will continue for some time. It will probably be a couple of weeks before we know who has gained the final seat but we can be fairly certain that we have two Liberals, one Labor, one Green and one PUP, with the two old parties competing for the final seat.

While each party will be claiming its own victories, putting whatever small spin they can manage into action, the rest of us need to take a step back and assess what might have actually happened. It is all guesswork obviously, we cannot make any conclusions on the motivations of voters, there are only assumptions.

So what went wrong and what went right? Let's look at each party in detail before we assume to understand the big picture.

Liberal v Labor

It is fair to say that a big swing against both parties is always expected when viable alternatives are present. We have seen it when the Democrats were in their prime and with the rise of Pauline Hanson or Family First. These are the real swinging voters, not simply disaffected followers of the two old parties. Many political boffins put the swinging vote as high as 20-30%, but I believe it to be about 15% as I prefer to exclude the recidivist protest voters, like myself, who never vote for either major party. 

The Liberals, particularly Eric Abetz, were premature to claim that the ALP had a greater swing against them than did the Liberals. The current state of play is that the swings are fairly close with the Liberals down 5.5 and Labor 4.8. 

What is more discerning is the combined results of the traditional allies. The Nationals felt a big blow losing a third of their base meaning the Coalition vote decreased by a total of 7.5 percentage points against the combined ALP/Greens vote, which increased by 1.6 points. Even if you assume that the right shifted into the hands of Palmer United Party it leaves the right with a zero change and the left with a slight increase.

Part of their woes also relied on the fact that the Liberals were busy attacking Labor and failed to deal with the real competition, PUP. In addition both lead candidates for Liberal and Labor were noticeably absent from the campaign. Whatever you may think of the average voter, one thing for sure is that they do not appreciate being taken for granted.

It is also clear that the ALP ostracised some of the left with the painful antics of Joe Bullock. Revelations in the last few days of the campaign would have seriously damaged the Labor vote and I suggest that a great many loyal ALP voters went below the line to support Louise Pratt while some others just moved elsewhere, mostly to the Greens. I predict that Louise Pratt will acquire the final seat based on a strong below the line vote from those voters.

Unlike some pundits, I don't think that this had anything to do with the state Barnett government, but no doubt the shark cull policy has attracted some support towards the Greens. 

The Greens

Regardless of your politics it is fair to say that The Greens ran one of the best campaigns of their history. Scott Ludlam was everywhere and he stayed on message. It paid out in big dividends with a full quota in their own right and left he ALP's Louise Pratt reliant upon the remainder, as well as strong preference flows, to potentially secure a second Labor seat. 

Scott Ludlam's tour de force was undoubtedly his Senate speech to the Prime Minister which gained viral momentum akin to Julia Gillard's misogyny speech. Tony Abbott now seems to have the record for being the subject of the most watched videos of any Australian politician, all negative.

Palmer United Party

PUP was always going to be strong and they have managed to capture the vast majority of protest votes against the coalition. They had the second biggest media presence and again ran a decent campaign appealing to their core constituency, whatever that might actually be - the jury is still out on that one. 

Many, including myself, have criticised Palmer for running ridiculous advertising messages promising taxation and other reforms that will be undeliverable and sometimes just pure mathematical fantasy. However, the popularity of the party seems to indicate that fiction is more trustworthy than fact to the politically uneducated. There is clearly an element of Australia for whom Palmer has found a heartwarming, but perhaps fickle, kinship.

Are you listening?

It is my conclusion that the result of this unprecedented Senate election was a direct message to the Abbott government; the voters of Western Australia are disapproving of the current two-party political system and especially of the Abbott agenda. 

However, while they disapprove of the Coalition, they remain uncertain of Labor as a viable alternative preferring to support a third way. 33.7% of Western Australian voters support the Liberals while 21.8% are behind Labor. Neither party has a mandate and only barely make a majority between them. 44.5% of the state prefer an alternative to the traditional parties. These are undeniably strong figures that should not be ignored. 

They should also ignore at their peril the clear fact that two strong contenders for alternative governance are emerging in the years to come. The Greens are clearly filling the gap left by the defunct Australian Democrats and PUP are following in he wake of One Nation to provide an alternative for the right.

We live in interesting political times.

LinkedIn but LockedOut

When we send a customer service request to an online entity, particularly a social media platform, one expects to encounter a small degree of difficulty. Often these services are outsourced, which means there will be time zone delays, language nuances, cultural barriers and the inevitable aspect of dealing with someone who isn't interested in your level of technological literacy. They have been trained to follow the manual and not actually use their brain to work through an issue with any form of logic or assistance from the customer.

This week it turns out that I was due for the latter with LinkedIn. And I am now locked out.

It began on Tuesday afternoon. With a glance at my email inbox I notice two messages from LinkedIn confirming that my password had been changed. That had occurred at 9.26am. It was now 1pm! With thoughts of "I've been hacked" pounding through my skull I quickly reviewed the email links and headers to ensure it was legitimate. It was. 

I then dashed across to my LinkedIn app to discover that I was locked out. My password had indeed been changed. 

The obvious step was to request a password reset; email received, password changed and a quick review of my account ... all looked fine, no changes. Perhaps this wasn't a hacker, maybe a glitch of some kind. Or perhaps someone gained access through my old work email? No. Would they?

Better be safe than sorry, I deleted my old work email from my authorised address list. It was only there as a means of allowing previous colleagues to discover me through the Outlook add-on. It never occurred to me that someone would use it to acquire access to my account.

Ok. Breathe! Tiny, inconsequential crisis averted I now begin to wonder about who had changed the password. Time for a fishing expedition. I contact LinkedIn Customer Help. And now the real fun begins.

I send a simply worded request asking for info on how my account was accessed and by whom. I partially knew the answer but I just wanted proof. I also informed LinkedIn that I had reset my password to assure them that I was back in control of my account. They responded with a request for screenshots of the emails and their headers.

I understand they must follow the basic procedures to ensure that moron X has his computer turned on, modem plugged in, monitor on, keyboard plugged in etc. but it is always an eye-rolling exercise to bear with. In this case they were checking that it hadn't been a phishing email - it wasn't as I had already verified.

Anyway, I persevere and comply. Screenshots sent. Again I reiterated that I had changed my password, was in control of my account and that I suspected what had happened but just wanted information from them to substantiate my claim.

It was now mid afternoon and I received a final response for the day stating that it had been passed to the 'Trust and Safety Team' for review. It took 24hrs for a response while they 'investigated'. But when they did I was flabbergasted (don't you just love that word?).

Suffice to say, that response was a clear indication that they had not investigated. A quick look at my account would have seen two separate requests for a password reset and two subsequent password changes - one from my previous employer and one from me 4hrs later. 

According to LinkedIn it never occurred. 

Further this was a stock standard answer for the question of "why did I get a password reset link?", not "why did I get a password change confirmation?".

So, here I was with a service provider that I could no longer trust to adequately investigate a security matter and come up with anything other than a lie. What am I to do.

My retaliation was swift. 

The reason I know that it was my former employer is that I had communication from them enquiring why the access they had acquired was now gone. Yup. They admitted what they had done (albeit in order to edit the organisation profile that I had created) and wanted to get access again. Hell no!

By now you may be thinking that this was my own fault. That because I left my my old email address attached to my account that it gave rise to this situation being possible. Yep. I admit it. I failed to see that my former employer would use my old email address to gain access to my account. That is like blaming the rape victim for walking down a dark alley. Yes it was a mistake, but the perpetrator still remains responsible for their actions. 

So what do the authorities do after my latest response and a few terse posts on Twitter? They do what any dog does when it is backed into a corner. They bite!

Can you actually believe that they have suspended my account and are now asking me to provide personal identification and a sworn affidavit that I am the owner of my own information to which they have been replying to via the email listed on the account and through Twitter.

Can you actually fucking believe it?

Neither can I.

*facepalm*