He might have been popped very late into our nominations barrel but Peter Van Onselen has been judged The Bug’s Media Glass House Arse-Licker for January 2024 winner!

Our judges simply couldn’t go past a couple of late contributions from The Australian’s contributing editor and they could only imagine Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch’s eyes popping with delight at the ring mastery of Van Onselen as he cleaned their cloacas with his anti-Labor tongue lashings.

Oh, what masterful words. Labor’s word is shown to be utterly useless! The cost of PM’s duplicity yet to be fully measured.

Probably what impressed our judges most is Van onselen’s breathtaking epithany that “if Labor is rewarded for breaking its word on the stage-three tax cuts, the lesson for future generations of politicians will be that lying works”.

Yes, this from a bloke who supposedly is also a lecturer in politics at the University of Western Australia.

It’s taken Labor’s tweaking of the tax cuts – and yes, it is a broken promise – for Van Onselen to finally see the light and decide that lying governments can survive. Heavens to Betsy! Who would have fucking thought, hey?

Van Onselen, in his one-eyed pursuit of Labor on behalf of his bosses at The Australian, has apparently never told a university auditorium of the countless election promises broken by the Abbott government in its 2014 horror budget – a bull rampaging through a china shop couldn’t have broken more things – and yet that government was reelected, albeit under a different leader.

The academic Van Onselen clearly has never confided in his students that while Scott Morrison always preferred lies to escape from his lips than the truth, he managed to get re-elected in 2019. Labor’s death tax pledge, anyone?

Really, POV? It’s taken Labor’s broken promise in 2024 to help you reach the conclusion that lying politicians can win elections?

Van Onselen’s risible, right-wing rubbish, penned exactly as his Newscorpse masters would expect of him, crumbles under any objective scrutiny.

Now it’s true that opinion polls exposing his musings as Tory tripe came later, but we suspect some other equally highly trained politics academic or mainstream media politics analyst could easily have written about how the Albanese government’s changes to the stage-three tax cuts had wedged the Opposition, just as Labor in Opposition had been foolishly wedged on the issue way back when.

A different politics analyst not beholden to pitching an editor’s line might have employed some common sense – a gut feeling – on top of their learned skills and foreseen how Albanese’s broken promise might have been received out there in voter land. Tax cuts for more! Dangerous tactic, right?

We suspect such observers could have predicted the Guardian Australia’s Essential poll conducted from Wednesday to Saturday last week – at a time when the LNP and their MSM publicists were screaming “Broken promise!” and “Liar! Liar!” – that showed one on two voters backed Labor’s tax cut changes. Only 22 per cent of respondents said the tax cuts should have gone ahead unchanged.

And on today’s ABC Insiders program, host David Speers has informed us that two polls – an internal Labor one and one independent of the major parties that is still in the field (Newspoll, perhaps) – have support for Labor’s broken promise at 66 per cent.

Powerful findings that totally undermine the very thrust of Van Onselen’s essays that portend enormous electoral damage for the ALP moving forward. Well, he wishes, hey?

These three polls suggest Van Onselen is miles away from reality as he arse-licks his senior editors at The Oz and the Murdochs.

Lick away, Van Onselen. You give politics academia and MSM politics commentary a really bad name and leave an equally bad taste in all our mouths.

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