Just when you thought Steve Fielding’s bong stunt was as low as this muppet could go in trying to attract attention to himself, he goes and does something like this.

Angry pensioners and a Family First senator have stripped off and stopped traffic on one of Melbourne’s busiest intersections in a protest against a lack of support for seniors in this week’s Federal Budget.

[…]

Mr Fielding stripped off his shirt in support of the protest, while two elderly women wore only their bras.

Several men also stripped to the waist after the protesters walked from the steps of Flinders Street Station into the intersection with Swanston Street.

Aargh! My retinas!

Fielding flagged this hideous act in one of his notorious home videos last week, but I honestly couldn’t see him going through with it. And the irony of it all is that Fielding baring his chest to a handful of bemused pedestrians in Melbourne’s city centre won’t help one bit in getting him re-elected. Face it, Steve: you and your Pentecostal mates are headed for the political dustbin of history and no stunt on Earth is going to save you.

Serial goose, Family First’s Steve Fielding, is still proudly posting videos of him being a goose on the intertubes (remember his brilliant ANZAC insult?) One of his latest efforts is a rambling mess of a monologue and interview about his proposed national recycling scheme, and it is aptly entitled Steve down on the Yarra talking rubbish.

Steve’s been taking camera lessons from Brendan Nelson’s media people

Check out one of these rubbish quotes.

I’ve just stopped a couple of people here, I don’t know them. What are your thoughts about having a five cent or a ten cent recycling on the bottles of recycling?

And remember Steve’s Parliament House bong stunt? Well here is Steve telling us all about his Cash For Hash proposal.

Steve displays a plastic bottle about to be recycled into a bong

ps/- The page title of the talking rubbish clip is “Steve says hold your horses hear (sic) comes Family First”. What?

UPDATE (5.30pm): This image was just emailed to me by one Mr A. Rogenous, although I’m having trouble working out how he’s altered the original.

Perhaps this is the ‘after’ recycling shot?

I know that independent and minor party MPs and Senators need to try a bit harder than most politicians to get noticed. And I know that Steve (1.9%) Fielding, with his total lack of a mandate and even greater lack of a chance at re-election, needs to try harder than anyone else. But could he be any more of a joke if he tried?

Steve Fielding arrives at Parliament House dressed as a bong to highlight his party’s policy of a 10 cent bong recycling scheme.

Last week we told you about Pastor Danny Nalliah’s faulty hotline to God and AV has been doing a great job following up on that story since. Today AV summarises some of the more hilarious responses to a Nalliah blog post on his horribly wrong prophecy about the coalition winning the election. In the spirit of GrodsCorp’s long record of sensible and mature debate here’s a prank comment I may or may not have left on the blog.

That’s www.g[r]od[s].com

UPDATE (6/12): Prophecy correct! Comment now deleted.

Steve Fielding’s latest Uncle Arthur-style home movie is up on his website, and its good to have a new dose of his folksy, self-shot stupidness to focus our minds a week out from the election.

In this installment of Uncle Steve’s home movies we meet a mother holding a baby who has been doorknocked by Fielding in suburban Melbourne and, magically, agrees with everything he says. Reduction in petrol tax? Yep. Increase in baby bonus for third child? Yep. You see, it’s all about “families”, or “for the little one’s future” as the doorknockee says.

However, I can’t help but wonder what the poor lady would’ve said if Steve was upfront about Family First’s real policy agenda. Total abolition of women’s right to choose to have an abortion? Ummm. Ostracism of homosexual people? Ummm. Creationism taught in schools? Ummm. Total alignment of Australian public policy with the values of the Pentecostal Church? Ummm.

I can’t tell you how much I hope Steve knocks on my door next week.

The location choice for yesterday’s Family First campaign launch has been explained.

Senator Fielding launched Family First’s campaign from an abandoned petrol station at Lower Templestowe yesterday to emphasise the party’s key election policy of a 10-cent cut in petrol taxes.

(I still fail to see the connection between an abandoned service station and the cost of petrol tax, but anyway…)

Fielding reckons that the Pentecostal Church party’s policy of a 10c per litre reduction in petrol tax to ease the “burden” on families would cost $2.8 billion.

In a completely unrelated statement, Steve Fielding called The Greens “economically reckless.”

In 2006 Catch The Fire Ministry’s Pastor Danny Nalliah was awarded the “Annual International Capitalism Award for Melbourne” by Prodos‘ Celebrate Capitalism project for supposedly standing up for free speech in the face of a religious vilification charge (that was later dropped). How slagging off Islam is standing up for capitalism I’ll never work out. But Prodos was so enamoured with Nalliah that he immortalised him in his alarming anti-Islam tune Under Sharia Law.

Today The Age revealed that Pastor Nalliah addressed a meeting of the extreme right-wing and proudly anti-Jewish League Of Rights in 2005, despite being warned about their racist views. Prodos, proudly pro-Israel (just this morning he posted a piece on his blog that ended with the line “May Israel Prevail”), must be spitting chips that he has publicly supported somebody who has been dumping on the wrong religion. Will Prodos now retract the Capitalism Award? We wait with our collective breath held.

Steve Fielding being a dick just now on ABC’s Insiders, jousting with the leaders of the Democrats and the Greens. He trotted out all the usual quotes about how evil the Greens are, including my personal favourite: “free heroin”. Fielding crapped on about petrol prices, grocery prices and bank fees, firmly positioning his “party” (let’s be honest about his “party” — it consists of one Parliamentary representative representing 1.88% of Victorians) as the consumer affairs micro party. Surprisingly, he only said the word “family” twice (excluding when he said his Party name) in contrast to Kevin Rudd’s now ad nauseum chanting of the “family” mantra. So maybe Steve Fielding should get in touch with the AEC and lodge an application to change his micro party’s name to the Today Tonight Party.

It was also revealed on Insiders that Family First in Queensland having been discussing a preference deal with Pauline Hanson which raises a very interesting question: is Pauline Hanson a Pentecostal?

And in a non-Steve Fielding aside about Insiders, Piers Ackerman said the Kyoto Protocol was “so 1990s” which was hilarious in the context of the 1970s haircut, shirt and jacket that cloaked his toad-like body.

Come and get me, laydeez

None whatsoever. Just watch this video taken at the Pentecostal Southland International Christian Centre.

Maybe I’m the last guy in Australia to know about this but the Gloria Jeans coffee shop franchise is co-owned by two men with close links to the Pentecostal Hillsong Church. In addition to this, Gloria Jeans is a major corporate sponsor of Mercy Ministries which “is a non-profit organization for young women who face life-controlling issues such as eating disorders, self-harm, drug and alcohol addictions, depression and unplanned pregnancy.” Mercy Ministries is strongly anti-abortion and views “lesbianism as a sin that their residential program assists girls to ‘walk in freedom from.’”

Even though Mercy Ministries (and therefore Gloria Jeans) fights for women’s freedom from freedom*, their possession of a MySpace page means they aren’t interested in fighting for freedom from bad web design.

* Thanks to Bruce for giving us this awesome phrase.

Support mandatory filtering of the intertubes at the ISP level? (Steve Fielding & Fundamentalists First, I’m looking at you (PDF).) Read Slipheed’s scientific review of the Federal Government’s free filtering software and reconsider your sanctimonious stupidity.

I’ve recently been highlighting some examples of politicians hitting the YouTubes in an effort to communicate their message. The stuff we’ve seen so far hasn’t been fantastic but it’s been promising. However, I stumbled across Fundamentalists First’s Steve Fielding’s Video News section on his website and found something that you must watch.

You simply must.

Steve capture’s (sic) the excitement at the Swimming Championships

The World Swimming Championships are underway in Melbourne but if you missed out on tickets you can share in Steve’s excitement as his son wins the day for his House at their School Swimming Championships .You (sic) won’t get a much more excited bunch of kids as they cheer on their House Captain in the final race. A proud moment indeed for any parent. Congratulations to Blue House!

Please, I implore you, click on this link and watch one of the most cringeworthy political video efforts ever. What begins as an innocent home movie of a kids’ swimming race turns into a pathetically setup and politically shameless example of amateur-hour with a flick of Fielding’s wrist.

The Democratic Labor Party sez: Put 1 in the DLP box

GrodsCorp sez: Why bother? Put 1 in the ALP box above the line and let dirty Labor preferences elect unrepresentative nutcases from loopy organisations such as Family First and the DLP.

The Democratic Labor Party sez:

GrodsCorp sez: Not even the DLP webmaster would’ve believed that claim when he typed it into Microsoft Frontpage.

Blissfully ignorant of any DLP policy before 4pm this afternoon I have spent some time navigating through their Lachlan Connor style website. I’ve now come to suspect that the DLP is actually a front for the Extreme Family First and may be directly connected to Steve Fielding and the Pentecostal Church. Check out these DLP policies:

* An end to radical-feminist affirmative action policies whose primary social and economic effect is the disemployment of male breadwinners and the youth. Freedom of occupational choice for full-time homemakers and removal of the tax penalty on one-wage families that virtually conscripts the homemakers into outside employment, consigns their infants to be minded by strangers and deprives their school-age children of the parental care and supervision they need in the after-school hours. (Women belong in the kitchen. End of story.)

* Abolition of the dishonestly named Family Court of Australia, exposure of its destructive ideology and its harm done to children through easy divorce and the court-instigated break-up of their families and recision of all court rulings that serve to undermine marriage or degrade it by conferring on homosexual, lesbian and transsexual pairings equivalent standing with marriage. (Poofs aren’t allowed to belong to families.)

* Statutory recognition of the principle that no child should be conceived to be borne and reared deliberately deprived of a father as in the cases of single women and lesbians accessing artificial reproduction technologies including IVF. (And they’re not allowed to start one either.)

* An acknowledgement in all legislation affecting families of the need to preserve and protect the institution of marriage and of the need to maintain the moral, social, legal and economic support of the traditional family unit as the most effective (including cost-effective) means to safeguard children from the harm of exploitation, violence, pornography, drugs and crime. (Because no child raised in a nuclear family has ever been in a fistfight, read Playboy, smoked a joint, or burgled a store.)

* Establishment of an Australian Family Theatre Company to promote alternative avenues for artistic training and expression and provide opportunity for sponsorship and promotion of quality family entertainment. (There’ll be queues around the block for that.)

* All free-to-air television programming until 10.30pm to come within classifications suited for family viewing. (I belong to a family and I want to watch South Park at 8:30pm. I will defend this right to my death.)

What about these DLP principles:

* The sacredness of human life, from its inception until natural death, as the fundamental basis for all human rights. (Anti-abortion.)

* The historical indispensability of the family as the primary guardian of personal freedoms. (Family, family, family. Blah, blah, blah.)

And these DLP objectives:

* To establish, under Almighty God, the political, legal, social and economic foundations for a just, free and democratic society and for a self-reliant and secure Australia. (But we’re not a religious party, we promise. Oh, and that bit about freedom only applies to people who want to do things we plan to let them do. Forget the freedom to be in charge of one’s own body by having an abortion.)

* To advance the rights, welfare and status of the natural family, founded in traditional marriage, as the primary provider in the nurturing, rearing and educating of the young and in the care of the infirm and the aged. (Pay particular to that bit about “natural” families. That means none of you filthy poofs.)

And finally, this small policy snippet is particularly ironic right now:

* Fair elections with proportional representation at all levels of government.

Of course they support proportional representation. It’s the only way they could possibly have been elected. Oh, and with the help of the ALP, of course.

Lower house:

Upper house:

Forgetting to ask themselves “what would Jesus do?”, Family First operatives have unethically flooded the radio talkback airwaves this morning in a last minute attempt to discredit The Greens.

At a few minutes past 9am on Jon Faine’s ABC774 program, caller Michelle spoke practically verbatim from this (PDF) Family First press release. She started by saying (I’m paraphrasing) “John, I’m disillusioned with the major parties and I was thinking about voting Green until I heard their candidate say something that I found really offensive to families.” She then read aloud the three-year-old quote from Greg Barber contained within the press release before crapping on about about how this anti-suburbs attitude is anti-family. Her speech was littered with the word “family” which was always emphasised. My suspicions about Michelle’s Family First connections were confirmed when she concluded her call by reading out the last paragraph of the press release almost word-for-word.

I can’t wait until my post-election blog on Sunday morning when I can crow about Family First being rejected wholesale by the electorate. I can see the headline now: Family First rejected by families.