you know you have an image problem.

I think you'll find most mods have a pretty keen interested in the state of the sub, and are generally always looking for ways to improve it. Most of the time we do this is by creating new ways to foster discussion on a diverse range of content, e.g. we actually spend our spare time looking for popular people to do AMAs, we brainstorm popular topic themes to encourage non-political content, we've nixed political self posts, we've created a custom flairs so that we draw more attention to non-political content that we find cool, and we recommend those only there pushing an agenda find their way to one of the political subs.

Funnily enough, if you look at the exact top comment on the /r/aus pic of that same topic, you'd find an identical comment calling out the shitposters gilded multiple times. I'm not really sure what it tells you precisely, except that there are definitely more opinions than assholes in the sub (and that's a good thing). [Here](www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/2goyqt/asio_and_hundreds_of_police_raid_sydney_and/) is the thread for reference. The post I'm talking about was gilded more times than the worldnews comment.

... removing it also removes nothing.

At some point, you need to ground your mod actions in rules so that we're all moving in unison. Again, I'd consider that a pretty shit post - just not one that requires mod intervention. We trialled removing posts like "Joe Hockey is a fat fuck that had lapband surgery" and were met with disdain from the usual suspects crowing of "censorship" and "thought police". How can we win in this scenario when a user likes you wants our rules to be more reflective of the academic political subreddits vs those that cry censorship at any sort of moderator action, and how does that get us any closer to being a national subreddit that just likes to shoot the shit about Australian content?

I wasn't aware that TTBO...

That's sort of my point. You'll generally have no idea who is banned for what unless they pop up on circlejerkaustralia or openaustralia to complain and/or boast about it.

... what should you do about said user. MedowbankMujahideen, CULL_THE_SHARKS and others have been permanently banned.

MM was banned & shadowbanned for doxing. CTS isn't permabanned at all: here he is posting a day ago. Now while I am not averse to the notion of permabans, you do have to toss up if it's worth doing it for long-term redditors. My general experience is that they just create another account in about thirty seconds and go back to doing what they're doing. In the case of TTBO, while he still posts many things I personally find outrageous, again: posting disagreeable, outright lunacy about politics isn't a bannable offense. The recourse here is to have a switched on userbase that downvotes shit posts. That's it.

With that said, more than half of your gripe here is about things that moderators literally have no control over. We can encourage and curate content; we don't directly control what heads to the front page and we're not going to outright ban or restrict politics without the support of the userbase. The sort of curation you're asking for here is what I suggested in my first post: the sort of heavy-handed moderation we see in academic-based subs. While not a bad suggestion, you've gotta get the userbase onboard for it to work.