#vicpol

This is Mohammed Sharab. He is a pro Palestinian Australian living in Melbourne. He is not calling for peace or ceasefire, he is calling for Intifada - a holy war. He wants the war here in Victoria. He has been charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, intentionally causing injury and assault. He is bringing the war to Australia, and is still loose on our streets

This is AUSTRALIA today 🇭🇲

As if the job of the police, A) has value, and B) said value is on par with some societies most valuable and loving people.

But anyway, all of this just to say I took this photo cause this is so funny

I hate Labor but like, this feels like advertising for them. I fucking wish. I would happily trade every police station for one moderately sized train station in the outer suburbs that doesn't even get 400 passengers annually and is skipped by most services and also the station smells like piss.

Ugh, this is so shitty.

Victoria has Australia's tightest set of rules around political donations - both about disclosing them, and limiting how much any one person can donate to any one group (so that, for example, mining billionaires can't just drop a casual million dollars towards the LibNats' campaign, or whatever). Groups that go around paying for political ads are supposed to report all donations they receive above a certain threshold, with (theoretically) sharp penalties for failing to do so.

Anyway, now there's this group Advance Australia, a name that raises my hackles almost as much as ones like One Nation or Family First, and as far as I can tell their politics are exactly what you'd imagine - they love the Liberal Party, hate Labor and the Greens.

Which brings us to the Prahran byelection. Advance Australia have been running a bunch of anti-Greens ads - which is, in theory, fine. It's the kind of thing they've been established to do. The only question is...

...with what money?

Because they aren't allowed to use any out-of-state money, so in theory, any donation above the threshold needs to be disclosed within three weeks, a deadline that's rushing up fast (even if we assume that money was donated right before they started running their ads). And while in theory they might only have received donations that are below the threshold, in practice that...never really seems to happen. It would be kind of weird, honestly, for an organisation to go out to a bunch of donors, whip them into a frenzy about the evils of Green Totalitarianism or the latest political panic, and not get a single donation above $1200.

So it's not a sure thing that they're breaking the law. It's not definite that they're bringing in money from other states to try and oppose the Greens. We can't be certain that they're blatantly ignoring funding laws on the assumption that they won't be penalised in a way that matters.