Are we on the way to transitioning from a migrant settler nation to a guest worker society? But if there is a shortfall in forecast NOM, what would be the implications for the Prime Minister’s job creation pledge and for its ten-year tax plan?
via Net migration levels increase under Coalition Government
THIS GOVERNMENT REFUSES TO BELIEVE SCIENTISTS AND WE ARE SUFFERING IN CONSEQUENCE!
*In discussing translations of the Bible, Matthew Vines indicates that the sort of same sex union which was referred to as unacceptable in the Bible was in fact pederasty or paedophilia, mistranslated, however, as homosexuality.
via When ignorance is a priority – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Hockey is the only thing different (ODT)
So there it is. Clearly, the economy is sinking, and anyone who points this out, to wit ALP backbencher Anne Aly, will cop it. When she suggested that the economy looked as if it was going into a recession, she was angrily reprimanded by Finance Minister Cormann for making assertions that were: “… recklessly irresponsible and wrong and show that Labor has learned absolutely nothing from the recent election outcome”. Cormann is a verbose master of denial.
The economy is sinking, but where is the lifebuoy?
via The economy is sinking, but where is the lifebuoy? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
So there was a problem a bigger one than they made Peter Slipper face, (ODT)
“Animal Spirits” will be unleashed, ScoMo proclaims, in a dreary rehash of clichés, Monday . The PM copies The Donald, conflating Keynes’ phrase with consumer confidence and laissez-faire economics. Why? “Animal spirits” will roar like a lion when we release the cage of “regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to businesses.” But why so late?
The Coalition has had six years to deregulate. Yet it still can provide no detail. Nor point to any record of success. Perhaps it’s just too modest. In the news currently is Private Security Company, Paladin, awarded $423 million to garrison Manus, without having to worry about an open tender. Or there’s the $444 million quietly slipped to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation a mob of Liberal mates headed up by a former CBA chairman, Dr John M Schubert.
Then there’s Fossil-fuel Energy minister, Angus Taylor, who’s held talks with federal environment officials over an issue at the centre of an illegal land-clearing action brought by the same department against a company part-owned by him and his brother, reports Guardian Australia. We should cheer the healthy disregard for regulation and the way the government appears to back the Taylor family in its alleged quest to bend the rules to help the Taylors to a better life.
Making Students Pay Forward not investing in their future but ours. (ODT)
The Money Managers the LNP
More than 136,000 young Australians are soon to join the ranks of 617,000 former students who are repaying their Higher Education Loan Program (HELP) – formerly known as HECS debt – as the income threshold for repaying the debt is slashed to just $45,881.
‘Repay debt for years’: loan changes to hit 136,000 students
IN CASE THERE WAS any doubt about the ties that bind Australia’s top coal lobbyists with the Federal Coalition Government, former Minerals Council of Australia CEO Brendan Pearson has been tapped as a senior advisor to Scott Morrison.
The appointment, revealed in The Australian on Wednesday, shifts Pearson up in the Coalition pecking order from the office of the Minister for Finance, Mathias Cormann, to Morrison’s inner sanctum.
things remain so dire that there is talk of importing gas, either the Australian stuff on sale so cheaply overseas, or supplies from one of our competitors, Qatar.
Back on the farm, our parents, who knew how to provide without running out of anything, would have been scandalised almost beyond words.
Only one-eyed Coalition supporters could construe the deteriorating state of our economy as somehow acceptable, as having nothing to do with the stewardship of the government. Instead, they will likely insist that the Coalition knows what it’s doing, has everything under control, and that we’re all doing fine. They will extract any morsel of ‘good news’ from the economic data to bolster their conclusions.
They will go on insisting that ‘The Coalition is the superior economic manager’, although the evidence inexorably leads to the conclusion: The Coalition can’t manage money.
via The Coalition can’t manage money – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Three long years, three crazy weeks, nine national disasters
The biggest lie during the election campaign was that the economy was strong. Now we know how bad things really are
via The government has run the economy into the ground | Greg Jericho | Business | The Guardian
My guess is News Corp was a False Flag the ABC was the real Target (ODT)
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, when pressed about Smethurst’s case, was untroubled. Having played the role of fatherly minder of the Australian nation, he was not going to let any alleged breach of security go by. Currently on a visit to the United Kingdom, he expressed little concern about the morning raid on a journalist’s home: “it never troubles me that our laws are being upheld.”
While News Corp has its demonic familiars (Rupert Murdoch’s influence hangs heavily), it was hard to disagree with the premise advanced by a spokesperson. “This raid demonstrates a dangerous act of intimidation towards those committed to telling uncomfortable truths. The raid was outrageous and heavy handed.”
The Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, voicing agreement, considered the police raid “an outrageous move that should concern all Australians who value their freedom in an open society.” With confidence, the statement asserted that it was “in the public interest for us to know of any plan for greater powers to monitor our messages.”
Chris Merritt, legal affairs editor of The Australian, saw the raid as an ominous signal to all investigative scribblers. “Welcome to modern Australia – a nation where police raid journalists in order to track down and punish the exposure of leaks inside the federal government.” But such an Australia was also chugging along merrily before the raid on Smethurst’s home. (Like the unsuspecting priest living in a dystopian surveillance state, the police finally came for them).
Should Assange ever make a return to the country of his birth, he is unlikely to find peace in this US satellite state, with its flimsy public disclosure and whistle-blowing laws, its mirage-like protections. Hunting publishers, journalists and their sources is de rigueur down under.
LNP policy of JOBS & GROWTH seems little more than a scammers slogan (ODT)
Sadly, the lesson for Labor is that policy formulation in advance of an election is a recipe for failure and it seems that the road to electoral success in this country is a bit like reality show, Married at First Sight ; you scheme, tell lies, defame and revile your opposition and pout a lot. If you can also rely on organised persuasive communication from a compliant media you are almost home. But, under our preferential system, you also need as many dodgy preference swap deals as your conscience will permit.
via Who Needs Policies ? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
A mandate to who the fuck knows they had no plan so the banks are overjoyed by the man who voted against the Royal Commission. The good start looks a concern banks are overjoyed and power prices surged (ODT)
Wholesale electricity prices shot up on Monday following a surprise election win by the Coalition on Saturday. Forward trading prices, which set the curve for future quarterly power costs, rose 13 per cent in NSW and shot up about 7 per cent in Victoria once markets opened. (see graph below)
Wholesale electricity prices account for about a third of power bills. Reducing this wholesale price has been a major focus of the Morrison government, which had pledged earlier this month to slash it by up to a quarter. The Age
He didn’t take much of an agenda to the election, so he can start a new term with pretty much a blank page. His campaign was mostly a demolition of Labor, and not much creation.
Morrison’s campaign tool of choice was the hammer and he wielded it relentlessly against Labor. By contrast, Bill Shorten carried around an Ikea flat pack of policy, assembly required. He’d take out his Allen key and start to fit all the pieces together as Morrison smashed away.
via Election Results 2019: Scott Morrison’s rare opportunity to shape the country
Was that all the Coalition has planned for the years ahead?
Frustrated, I looked again for clues, any clues, that might spell out the Coalition’s story, its vision and its intentions for the next three years. I ransacked the entire cupboard looking for more than the few scraps of paper that I had already found.
The cupboard was bare!
via The cupboard was bare! – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Australia’s Industrial relations has been unique in the world and has lagged behind most EU countries. Germany has been progressive since WW2 as has the rest of Europe yet Australia resists any change. Sally McManus should be on all boards and that would mean real progress. (ODT)
An ACTU spokesman said “Sally is not going to be on every board in the country – that’s impossible and ridiculous”.
“Scott Morrison is running a scare campaign because he is desperate.”
The problem with the Liberals and Nationals lining up with ‘crackpots and cranks’ is it’s not a cost-free exercise
Barnaby Joyce’s outrageous behaviour on ABC Radio National has made a Coalition victory next month even more improbable.
BARNABY JOYCE is not an idiot. He is something far worse. He is a moderately intelligent man who falsely believes he is smarter than everyone else.
The world is full of these sort of men. It would be easy to dismiss them, except somehow these dolts seem frequently to find a way of weaseling themselves into positions of importance. And once there, their unfathomable self-confidence, combined with their manifest ineptitude, invariably causes chaos and calamity.
The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) has strongly rejected the conspiracy theory being peddled by Queensland Senate hopeful Gerard Rennick.
The ABC yesterday revealed Mr Rennick’s unconventional views on pre-school, which were shot down by the Prime Minister.
Federal Labor is now calling for Scott Morrison to sack the candidate from his winnable position on the Liberal-National Party Senate ticket.
Mr Rennick last month accused the weather bureau of “rewriting weather records to fit in with the global warming agenda!”
“Our public servants are out of control,” he said on Facebook.
Billions of dollars of tax cuts to big businesses sound good, but they would have taken even more from the bottom line. As for the idea that they’d stimulate more economic activity, I’m yet to read of any CEO announcing that they would have invested more, but the idea that they’d be taxed at 30% rather than 25% if they made an extra billion, so they decided it wasn’t worth it.
No, when someone tells you that the Liberals are good economic managers, you can remind them of the re-opening of the Christmas Island detention centre, only to announce it’s closure a few months later. Although anyone who still believes the old line about the Liberals being good economic managers will probably reply:
“But they’ve saved over a billion dollars by closing it! Imagine how they’ll be able to spend that…”
This PM has always been an Advertising Man a Persuader not a Aider of or an example of public service. Count the cost he’s spending our money $$$$. (ODT)
Taxpayers foot multi-million dollar advertising bill in final days before election is called
Not only are we seeing “captain’s calls” and Ministers jumping overboard but we are seeing a rush to appoint mates to positions, some favours owed others that will help to trip up any government that just might surplant them. (ODT)
Accompanied by the Liberal Party’s IPA stalwart Mitch Fifield, Morrison approached peak unctuousness as he welcomed Ms Buttrose to the top job.
In fact the appointment is a classic example of the dark art of psyops, practiced by this Government’s finest exponent, the Minister for Communications and Arts Mitchell Peter Fifield.
I assume most of the readers of The AIM Network know the meaning of psyops, but for the uninitiated it is characterised by this definition: “Psychological operations (PSYOP) convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, and objective reasoning, and ultimately the behaviour of governments, organisations, groups, and individuals”.
via Twilight of the sods – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Scamming your money to promote herself? (ODT)
Downer was rightly universally condemned for her actions, but think about what her action suggests. Firstly, she considered taxpayers’ funds her own to claim and present (the novelty cheque clearly said the Liberal Party on it and had her image printed on it as well). This betrays how the Liberals think about taxpayers’ funds — the funds belong to them, not the public. Which is why the Libs loathe welfare. Any welfare payment made is effectively less money in the pool for them to rort.
Secondly, under the media cover of wall-to-wall coverage of Cardinal Pell’s conviction of paedophilia charges, the Liberals quietly changed the rules around how sitting MPs can use their taxpayer-funded office expenses for political advertising in the lead-up to the election. Again, this rule change takes taxpayers’ funds and allows them to be used by the Liberal Party for political advertising, something in the past they’d have to pay for themselves. Given that in the Victoria State Election the Liberals ran much of their campaign claiming that the Victoria Labor Government was corrupt for accidentally using taxpayer-paid office staff for campaigning (the red shirts scandal), this is hypocritical in the extreme.
via Wren’s week: Liberal use of taxpayers’ funds and Pell’s support group
Toby Wright, writing for Nine media recently made a comparison between Mick Young, a Minister in the Hawke Government of the 1980’s and Scott’s Government. Young, who neglected to declare a stuffed Paddington Bear at Customs in 1984, was confronted with his crime and promptly stood down from the Ministry until investigations were concluded. Scott’s Government include Ministers that seem to be connected with a mindboggling litany of unethical actions; the current list includes Ministers Cash, Dutton, Cormann, Wilson and former Minister and current Ambassador Hockey. While some of the current scandals surrounding the government commenced before Scott became the Prime Minister, he is not blameless as resignations or ‘career breaks’ could have been requested or enforced while the facts were determined. Scott in contrast continues with his ‘Everything is Awesome’ routine.
Assuming for a second there are people that really do want to enter Parliament to represent their electorate rather than become one of the pigs in the trough, a piece of advice — Scott is not someone you should attempt to emulate; don’t be like Scott.
via This is Scott – » The Australian Independent Media Network
How many times were we told by this government there was no mistake made on our part it was all Thailand’s fault? We also heard the ALP ignored ASIO’s advice on the Medivac Bill from Peter Dutton on 2GB which ASIO has know declared a lie. The current LNP will do anything to hide Homelands and Peter Duttons incompetance. The worst Health Minister has transitioned to being the worst Immigration/Homeland Minister .(ODT)
The Australian Border Force has admitted “human error” by its officers resulted in police being unaware that footballer Hakeem al-Araibi was a refugee before he was issued with a red notice and detained in Bangkok for more than two months.
ABF commissioner Michael Outram said an officer failed to send a “true match notification advice” to the Australian Federal Police and the Department of Home Affairs, which would have alerted them to the fact that he was on a protection visa in Australia.
That fact, once revealed to the AFP the day after Mr al-Araibi was arrested in Thailand, prompted Interpol to cancel the “red notice” issued at the request of Bahrain. Had it been known to the AFP beforehand, the AFP-based Interpol team would not have issued the notice.
via ‘Human error’: Border Force admits it forgot to send crucial email in Hakeem al-Araibi case
Scott Morrison may believe compassion is some kind of affliction, but I believe it is important – just as I believe its absence is a glaring character flaw. And like anyone with any compassion, I was obviously happy to see the Phelps Amendment passed yesterday.
No surprise that in the aftermath of its embarrassing loss, the government has doubled down on its dishonest scare campaign about the poor victims of its abuse. Enthusiastically abetted by a media – who seems wholly uninterested in the fact that the boats never stopped and record numbers of asylum seekers have entered the country by plane under the current Liberal Government – ScumMo et al took their lies and rhetoric to a whole new level.
Of course that probably would have happened anyway (I actually said a few months ago I was waiting for the scare campaigns and partisan headlines to start properly).
via How did we get here? – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Which is pretty cute, coming from the first government in this country’s history to have comprehensively betrayed Australia and its people. Think Abbott, Turnbull, Morrison; think destruction of the environment, the unprecedented damage done to the country’s essential river systems. Think the results of a Banking Royal Commission whose findings are apparently so dire that Morrison refuses to release them until he and his criminal spivs have had an extra three days to spin the story they will try to put to the population.
Think the decline of living standards for ordinary Australians as wages flatline and fail to keep up with rising prices and costs of living; think the huge increase of labour-hire companies who seem to prefer to have foreign visa-holders on their books instead of locals; think the sacking of Australian seafarers who have been replaced by cheap labour from overseas, and finally think the rhetoric around job creation in a landscape where anyone who works just one hour per week is considered ’employed’.
They never understood it, this mob. Worse, they never understood the difference between truth and untruth, or even why there ought to be any difference.
via The LNP can’t see the difference – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Over the border in NSW, the Barwon and Darling rivers are a series of muddy pools, and fish are dying
Mundine changes Parties like he does suits. How close a marriage should there be with Murdoch’s Sky News? (ODT)
The Coalition government gave Warren Mundine’s company $220,000 as a grant for his show on cable TV news network Sky News, BuzzFeed News has confirmed.
Mundine was announced this week as the Liberal candidate for the marginal NSW seat of Gilmore at the upcoming federal election. Mundine had previously been the ALP national president, and had later considered a tilt at NSW parliament with the Liberal Democrats. He joined the Liberal Party this week.
AdvertisementBefore his return to politics, Mundine had been a Sky News host and frequent commentator on the cable news channel. Mundine’s show, Mundine Means Business, was launched in 2017 as a vehicle for showcasing Indigenous businesses, and aired on weekends on Sky.
The show is partly funded through a Commonwealth government grant awarded to Mundine’s business Nyungga Black Group, through a closed non-competitive selection process, according to the grant information.
The grant, running from June 18, 2018 to Aug. 1 this year is for a total of $220,000. The Department of Prime Minister & Cabinet confirmed to BuzzFeed News that the grant was for Mundine’s Sky News show.
Warren Mundine’s Sky News Show Received $220,000 Government Grant
Abbott, the Pillock of the Pacific destroyed Radio Australia with his cuts to the ABC. Radio Australia was the heart beat in the Pacific for over 75 years. Now they want it back and handballing it to the likes of Murdoch or any other commercial enterprise none of who want it or understand what to do about it. (ODT)
The Morrison government is set to hand $17.1m to the commercial networks to provide TV programming to Pacific nations but the TV industry says it did not seek the funds and does not know what content to provide.
Murray-Darling gross mismanagement
While then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture and Water Barnaby Joyce was busy building up his “private” media brand enough to rival the Kardashians, under his watch, management of the Murray-Darling Basin was steadily careering out of control.
Perhaps the most damning part of this whole stinking mess is best summed up with this one little detail concerning the chief beneficiary of Coalition Government water policy, Webster Limited:
‘Webster, a Tasmanian company, is also one of Australia’s biggest water traders. Its shareholders include Australian Food and Fibre, which is controlled by the Robinson family, a major donor to the National Party.’
via EDITORIAL: Something stinks in the Coalition and it’s not just dead fish
failure to act on climate change;
the ongoing persecution of refugees;
the destruction of the NBN;
a million dead fish;
rorting politicians;
draconian surveillance legislation;
towns without water;
withdrawal of funding from frontline agencies that offer protection to women and children fleeing violence;
the torment that Centrelink has become;
the rise and rise of the far right-wing;
nurtured politicians whose goal is to incite discontent and xenophobia;
contempt for concepts such as truth, morality and ethics — replaced by religiosity and ideology; hypocrisy in personal lives, masked by the propaganda of “family values” and “traditional marriage”;
a destructive focus on internal disunity and power struggles at the expense of good governance; and
lies, lies and more lies.
“Recent estimates figures again demonstrate that the program is failing young people, with only 2,918 participants finding employment with their host organisation,” she said.
“Not only is the government failing to get young people into work, but it is failing to protect them from exploitation under the program.”
What seems so hard for Liberal politicians and supporters to acknowledge is that it’s the culture of the Liberal Party – so masculine, white, and uninterested in listening to scientists or policy experts, to young people, to women – that has created the current rolling fiasco. Bullying is one index of this. Even in the wake of allegations by Julia Banks, Julie Bishop, Ann Sudmalis, Lucy Gichuhi and others, the party has done nothing to address its “women problem”. It will have even less female representation going into the next election. Candidates in the Liberal Party are selected according to merit? By what standard, though? They can’t even say why Scott Morrison is the prime minister. And yet, he’s exactly what they want: a leader who enacts their brand of paternal condescension while sticking to the same narrow politics.
“Ysaiah Ross: Yes, I think there’s some truth about that. The fact that lawyers are in people’s minds all the time is probably very good for the profession, it probably generates more business. The Howard government, its Cabinet has more lawyers than any other Cabinet in the history of any Australian government. And it’s also the one which is least responsible for human rights. I find that very strange.”
Here we are, more than a decade later, with a parliament full to overflowing with tertiary qualifications. The abundance of lawyers is staggering, as is their mediocrity. It is the most unfunny ‘lawyer joke’ ever told, against which Duddo’s legal advice pales into insignificance.
via Lawyer jokes? As always, the joke is on us. – » The Australian Independent Media Network
The Morrison government’s $10bn pre-election budget “war chest” is the biggest in 15 years, two and a half times larger than the Howard government’s surprise cash splash on pensioners and retirees during the 2007 election campaign.
via Morrison trumps even Howard with size of pre-election war chest | Australia news | The Guardian
Now, it’s been suggested that one of their members has been travelling overseas to indulge in “sex tourism”.
Nothing illegal in that, of course. I mean, the AFP have investigated and made it clear that it’s not a crime. And there’s no Scott Morrison Tourism Australia promotion for “sex tourism” in Australia where some model asks, “Where the bloody hell are ya?” After all, one could hardly indulge in a seedy Australian sex tour, and that’s not just because the wages here aren’t competitive.
It’s because of fellow Coalition members who support family values.
Members like Tony Abbott, Andrew Broad and George Christensen…
Ok, Andrew Broad looks a bit of a hypocrite at the moment, but nobody could criticise the other two. Well, not without a defamation action, anyway.
Bill Shortens’s announcement of a plan to construct 250,000 new homes over ten years is exactly what is needed. It won’t do much to arrest falling house prices, but it will inject some much-needed activity to help offset the anticipated fall in employment.
What won’t help, is budget surpluses which starve the economy of money. How hard can it be to get this message across? How hard can it be to explain this to supposedly intelligent men and women, successfully?
The one saving factor is that neither Morrison or Frydenberg are likely to realise their overly ambitious forward budget estimates. No prime minister or treasurer over the last eleven years has been able to achieve that.
In all likelihood, the status quo will be preserved. And while a coalition in opposition will see this as Labor’s failure, this time, it will be their credibility that is well and truly discredited.
via Scomo and the Fry: The Great Pretenders – » The Australian Independent Media Network
Anyone can do NOTHING and wait (ODT)
After the disastrous political reception to its first budget in 2014, the government made no further serious attempt to reduce the budget deficit, instead quietly resolving to wait until the passage of time caused the economy to strengthen and tax collections to recover.
The government’s net public debt has doubled from the $175 billion it inherited in September 2013 to $355 billion this October.The first politician to show us a projected return to surplus in the next few years was Julia Gillard in 2010. Since then, the Coalition has had to revise down its own projections countless times. We’ve learnt the hard way not to believe any budget number that’s not an “actual”.
via The truth behind the Liberal Party’s MYEFO budget update
When pressed to give examples of religious discrimination today, Scott floundered until Christian helpfully stepped in recounting how a person who had expressed opposition to marriage equality on Facebook got sacked and had to sue for unfair dismissal. Which was kind of ironic as he was announcing the government’s support for religious schools to sack teachers if they express support for marriage equality.
Scott then remembered that someone had been blocked from entering a meeting somewhere because of their religion…then remembered they want to enshrine the right of religious groups to stop people from entering their premises so kind of mumbled something about exemptions.
via Nice try guys but I don’t think anyone’s buying it – » The Australian Independent Media Network
