From the Crikey grapevine, the latest tips and rumours …

Beware of Twitter reporting. By now it’s likely that many of you have heard about that poster. Politicians at both state and federal level have taken the time out to denounce an anti-marriage equality poster that says “Stop the fags” and quotes from an easily debunked study about children of same-sex couples. But how has the poster got so much attention? Is it legit? And who is behind it?

Here’s what we know so far: The image of the poster was tweeted on Saturday by Melbourne childcare manager Dan Leach-McGill, who labelled it as being in Heffernan Lane in Melbourne, which is between Little Bourke and Lonsdale streets, in the Chinatown area.

The tweet blacked out the name of an organisation associated with the poster, but Reddit users traced it back to neo-Nazi forum Iron March, where a user posted it to a chat on March 4 this year, asking if they should add the website name. The user claims to be based in Florida, USA and has tweeted victoriously about the poster in the past 24 hours. What this tells us is that, while hateful, it wasn’t created especially for the Australian marriage equality debate.

On Monday, Leach-McGill tweeted that the poster had been removed and replaced by artist Rose Steele — with an image that showed the bottom corner of the poster still stuck to a window, although the tweet by Steele about replacing the posters is at a different location in Chinatown, on Little Bourke Street. Melbourne City Council has told the ABC it sent an officer to Heffernan Lane, but didn’t find the poster.

There are still no other photos of the poster in Melbourne, and when a Crikey reporter went to Heffernan Lane, we could find neither the remnants of the poster nor of any other posters that support marriage equality, but we did find a window that matches the photo tweeted by Leach-McGill. The poster hasn’t been reported on by The Age or the Herald Sun’s local teams.

So what does this mean for the national debate about marriage equality over the next two months? Hateful and incorrect propaganda only needs to be seen by one person in a dirty Melbourne laneway to get national attention.

Google has the answers. Facebook and Google have been crowding out competitors in the online space for a while, and now they are crowding out space in Senate inquiries. First up, Google’s Australia and New Zealand managing director Jason Pellegrino and head of public policy Ishtar Vij were due to face the blowtorch of the Sam Dastyari-led inquiry into the future of public interest journalism, where Facebook was also due to be represented by its Australian head of policy Mia Garlick and head of Facebook journalism partnerships Aine Kerr. The two tech giants have been earmarked for review by Senator Nick Xenophon as part of the concessions he wants for voting for the government’s media reform laws. This afternoon Google and Facebook will also be hauled before the Economics References Committee looking into corporate tax avoidance at the same location as the other hearing in Sydney — two birds, one stone, etc, etc.

There but for the grace of God. One of the more interesting what-ifs in Canberran politics is what if Zed Seselja hadn’t knocked Gary Humphries for the top spot in the Liberal senate ticket in the ACT in 2013. Not that it would have made any difference to the 2013 and 2016 federal election results — it would take a monumental collapse in the Liberal vote to allow the Greens accumulate enough preferences to seize the second Senate spot behind Labor — but rather the effect of Seselja on the ACT Liberal Party’s electoral prospects. Given the low profile of ACT politicians, who are in effect glorified local councillors, Seselja is the public face of the Liberal Party in the ACT. Humphries was generally regarded as a moderate, despite his longstanding anti-abortion views, but was also prepared to stand up for Canberra, and he became the first MP or senator to cross the floor under John Howard when he voted against the Howard government’s killing off of ACT same-sex union legislation.

Seselja is anything but moderate, hailing from the hardline far right of the Liberals and thus far outside the mainstream of the ACT electorate. Humphries, who was treated shamefully by his party, later left the Liberals, which he said had lost touch with the Canberran community, and he was vindicated by the 2016 ACT election, where the Liberals managed to lose their fifth election on the trot, meaning by the time of the next election, there’ll be voters who weren’t even alive when the Liberals were last in power. But with Seselja taking an aggressively anti-marriage equality position, he’s become a constant reminder that the ACT Liberals occupy an almost entirely separate ideological space to Canberran voters, particularly on social issues. With young fogey Alistair Coe leading the party locally, the capital Libs look determined to stay in the wilderness into the 2020s.

The Sex Party is over. This morning it was reported that Fiona Patten’s erstwhile Sex Party will be renamed as “Reason Party”. In a way this isn’t surprising — the Australian Sex Party has long had a wider party platform than their name would suggest. But still, this is a sad day for subs everywhere (perhaps we should clarify we mean headline writers), who now one less excuse to insert lascivious puns in the news cycle. As a commemoration, we looked back over coverage of the Sex Party and picked out a few of our favorites. There are the obvious, like “Sex Party’s naked grab for attention” from the Herald Sun on November 29, 2015, “Support for Sex Party a turn-off” in the Gold Coast Bulletin in May 2015, one of many outlets telling us the party was “stripped” of its registration around that time (a word they might have used for any party in the same situation, but, come on …). Our personal favourites, the first for creativity, and the other for relative subtlety: 

“Brush-off leaves Sex Party deflated” in The Australian on May 8, 2015, and “Nearly there; Sex Party credits wider range of policies” in Canberra Times on December 1, 2014.

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