LNP will do anything to take media attention off Robodebt
it takes the media’s attention away from Robodebt and the slim chance that they’d report the obfuscation, the inability of people to recall basic information and the obvious fact that it wasn’t incompetence that led to legal advice not being attached or passed on: it was a design feature of the standover merchant tactics that were employed by almost everyone involved.
Sydney is now one of the most tolled cities in the world. Every time you pay a toll, much of the money now flows oversees. Some people now pay hundreds of dollars a week in tolls, these pseudo taxes. It wasn’t that long ago that governments borrowed money to build this kind of infrastructure. The Harbour Bridge and Snowy Hydro come to mind. Sure, we were paying it off through our taxes for many years. Now we do it by paying tolls. But the taxes we paid for our infrastructure were far cheaper per person than the tolls.
From African gang violence to persecuted white South African farmers, Peter Dutton has history when it comes to race-baiting and the craziest of claims. And ones, I suspect, that are baseless.
George Pell’s funeral in Sydney has shown clearly the divisions within the Australian community at large, the Catholic Church itself, and the conservative side of politics. It all boils down to whether or not Pell was a decent human being. Aside from the well-known path from obscurity to eminence, there is the ongoing debate as…
The verdict on Pell
George Pell has divided the country, and he will continue to do so. He was found to have facilitated the actions of known pedophiles, by consciously ignoring criminal behaviour, and by moving them on to fresh pastures.
He was charged with sexual offences against children, and eventually acquitted. This does not mean he was innocent. It means that the case was not proved beyond reasonable doubt.
On a moral basis, he spoke of having “not much interest” in hearing accusations against what were his ‘staff’. He seems to have had no understanding of what it takes to manage people, and to protect children. He appears to have had no insight into victims’ suffering, nor that of their family and friends.
For the conservative politicians who are swarming to support Pell, take a look at your own, contradictory position. Abbott, Howard, even Dutton are singing Pell’s praises, while apparently totally ignoring the findings of a Royal Commission.
As politicians they are aware of the legal and moral power of a Royal Commission, and yet two prime ministers and someone wishing to become one, dismiss the institution. I would call that contempt for Parliament, or contempt for logic.
A saint for our times? I would describe Pell as a rather shabby individual who failed on every measure. The fact that the conservative side of politics is now rallying around such a man, proves there is something rotten in our fair land. Children are our most precious resource, and look how they were treated.
“Know your place” is a phrase used in the past by members of the Liberal Party when they observed, in their view, members of the Labor Party acting above their station.
The lessons of the last election should have left an indelible scar on those involved in the Luddite politics of the past decade. Have they not understood that the people, in their judgement, said they had had enough of their rancid unempathetic behaviour? Yet they go on unmoved as if nothing transpired while trying to give the Leader with a public image of a racist bigot a personality transplant. Queensland excepted.
But the attacks led by the Opposition leader Peter Dutton could have a fatal effect on the proposal. He knows that history tells us that without the support of the opposition, the referendum won’t pass. That is unless the people vote as they did in the election and decide to confirm their thoughts of May 21 2022, with a resounding yes vote that shatters conservative negativity for decades to come.
When Julia Gillard was Prime Minister, after every government announcement, action, or inaction the first line of most mainstream media articles on the subject – with predictable and monotonous regularity – began with; “Tony Abbott says …” or “The Leader of the Opposition says…”.
We haven’t been subjected to the same tedious announcements as much since the last federal election, but fear not, it is making its anticipated return.
Hannah Dickinson, an asylum lawyer from the Asylum Seeker Rights Centre, is reported in The Canberra Times to “have rubbished suggestions people are seizing on huge backlogs of asylum applications to lodge bogus claims for protection”.
Public subsidies for coal plants are merely the icing on the cake of a triumphant year for multinational fossil fuel corporations operating in this country. Michael West and Callum Foote report on Fossocracy Australia.
Josh Frydenberg as treasurer and Scott Morrison as secret treasurer made a motza for foreign vulture funds in last year’s takeover boom and mega-sell-off of Australian assets. Who knew what when, and why are we flogging essential monopoly services to cuff-linked tax crooks? Callum Foote and Michael West report.
So, this hardworking team – officially known as the Bi-Annual Liberal Strategy and Campaigning Secretariat (BALSACS) – is currently meeting in Biarritz to develop new and innovative strategies to promote Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party.
The Liberals consistently overlook the fact that their views on a number of issues are inconsistent with the majority. They’ve been elected on a number of occasions because of their perceived ability to manage the economy. This is like when your hairdresser gives you a running commentary that you ignore because you like the way he cuts your hair and the rest of it doesn’t seem important enough to find a new one. However, with their inability to actually deliver the Budget surplus they promised and the blowout in government debt to triple what it was when it was an emergency have left people feeling like they’ve been given a mullet they didn’t ask for.
It’s all very well to blame Labor, the pandemic and various other things, but if Labor do actually balance the budget the Coalition will have a long road back to government.
Witness, written long before the Lehrmann trial. It was the issue about which she was invited to speak to the Women Lawyers Association of the ACT at their gala dinner on 21 October this year. It is a matter of obvious public interest. But Milligan has now found herself under attack, not only in The Australian and on Sky News, but in the Commonwealth parliament, for things she did not say and does not believe.
This is News Corporation’s version of “cancel culture” – a phenomenon it has so often condemned.
Its army of culture warriors see themselves as defenders of free speech – especially against the Twitter guerrillas and student censors who ‘cancel’ people of whose views they disapprove. For The Australian’s Janet Albrechtsen it has been a favourite topic.
A Call for women to defend the indefensible is just that, and will continue to be no matter who is asked.
A few more women here, a slightly richer range of cultural backgrounds there, and what would change? Colour, gender, a subdued tolerance for LGBTQI+ will gradually be true for some. But on the most fundamental matters of human dignity and decency for all, or unconditional protection of people and planet before profits, those “conservative” resistances to questioning “culture” will almost certainly remain the same.
What’s a promise or, more specifically, an election promise? Is it a guilt-edged set-in concrete commitment made during an election campaign? What if the circumstances change after the campaign making it impossible to fulfil? Is a promise a legal commitment? Is it nothing more than just a proposal? Tony Abbott said this about promises
“It is an absolute principle of democracy that governments should not and must not say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards. Nothing could be more calculated to bring our democracy into disrepute and alienate the citizenry of Australia from their Government than if governments were to establish by precedent that they could say one thing before an election and do the opposite afterwards.”
That is an unambiguous promise that one couldn’t take any other way than how it is written or spoken.
Yet:
“The day before the 2013 election, Tony Abbott said there would be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no changes to the pension, no changes to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS,”
You reap what you sow. Dutton told them to go home and they did and aren’t coming back
LNP in Opposition to the ALP Government have left not just the buildin but Australia with an Abbottesque NOPE NOPE NOPE and yes “the sky is falling ” shreik. Nothing new to be seen from the Liberal Party!
Jobs summit: international students should get four-year visas
The previous Australian government told this cohort to “go home” when the pandemic hit. Students who chose to remain were locked out of JobKeeper and JobSeeker.
These actions have tainted our reputation as a global student-friendly destination and mean we need to act now to welcome more international students.
As bad as it is, Scott Morrison’s surreptitious circumvention of Australia’s parliamentary and Cabinet processes might have got worse.
Had the former prime minister been re-elected, it is reasonable to assume he would have continued to mislead his Cabinet, the parliament and the public after amassing multiple reserve powers.
We won’t let the Hazaras in Indonesia come here. Yet they have few other options. They certainly cannot go back.Worse, the Hazaras kept at our behest on the streets of Indonesia for a decade are still not obtaining solutions or even adequate day to day support from Australia.Rather than let them arrive and thrive, Australia flips thousands of taxpayer dollars per stranded refugee to IOM rather than bring them here. IOM in turn sell the refugees to the lowest cost service provider or contractor. After a while, these practices resemble people trafficking for profit.I spoke to a couple of Hazaras in Indonesia over the weekend.One, Ghaznavi, is a gorgeous young chap who turned his hand to baking bread and tiling, despite work bans and his very apparent higher education.
Our involvement in the Afghan war makes us accountable for the wellbeing of Afghans. It is no different from the accountability of allied troops for Jewish war orphans in occupied Europe, or those affected by the bombing of Japan, Korea or Vietnam*. The Allies used their homeland to settle scores rather than our own. Even a hardened warrior like Jim Molan should be able to comprehend that.
On Tuesday afternoon, O’Brien tweeted: “Sick of dodgy politics? So am I. It’s why I’ll fight for more power and more funding for our anti-corruption watchdogs.
”Coalition MPs expressed nervousness about the potential political damage that could be caused by the episode. In particular, they were worried that Guy was susceptible to attacks on political integrity because of the “lobster with a mobster” dinner, where he dined with an alleged mafia boss, and scandals as a planning minister in the Baillieu-Napthine government.
Federal Liberals were also worried if Guy could withstand any further revelations about his involvement in the proposed arrangement with Catlin.
Whatsmore it all began with Murdoch media and revenge for having been kicked out of China. While Abbott was celebrating his leapfrog over the ALP’s relationship with China and the FTA. Murdoch press was on the attack and the crescendo came with Trump.
China’s Foreign Minister told Penny Wong that inflammatory statements by the Coalition government soured diplomatic relations that led to Australia being cut off from official communications, according to a statement issued from Beijing on Sunday.
1 Apparently, after being soundly defeated at the election, the Coalition still thinks there is mileage in continuing to oppose climate change while supporting coal. This sort of talk takes us back to the Neanderthal age. It’s flat Earth stuff.
Refuting critics who say the Coalition is ideologically opposed to solar energy, Shadow Treasurer and former Energy Minister Angus Taylor has announced a new energy policy that would take advantage of the sun’s rich resources by opening it up to his friend’s mining companies.
He couldn’t tell the truth before he was elected how could he be expected to tell it before this recent election? Energy prices were going up despite the Ukraine not because of it.
On 30 April, less than a month before the election I penned this piece, about the foreshadowed spike in energy prices, about to hit Australian consumers: Coalition promises higher electricity costs! I wrote it because it was quite clear that the Coalition were not going to come clean before the election and it was a known major factor that was going to hit Australian businesses and consumers as winter came on.
3 ways Australia could have been a Renewable Energy Super Power & 100 ways how Morrison’s LNP ignored it but for only 1 Reason “Power”
Australians will bear yet another blow to our cost of living in July when electricity prices will surge up to 18.3%, which amounts to over A$250 per year in some cases.
The new federal MP for the Queensland seat of Flynn was a founding member of a club formed to promote climate science denial, and was a signatory to an international statement claiming “there is no climate emergency”.
Climate polluter Woodside is building its business strategy around the absurd notion that the very thing driving the climate crisis should continue as part of the emergency response.
Morrison puts on a white coat and says ” I’m like you dentist you don’t have to like me” He’s nothing like my dentist. I like my dentist. He’s just a moron in a white coat pretending to be her. If I didn’t like my dentist I’d change dentists. If she pulled the wrong teeth I’d sue her for malpractice.
Morrison is just the idiot in the sandpit spoiling my kid’s day, my day, in fact, everybody’s day pretending to be something he’s not and needs to be removed.
Despite the move, senior Liberal Party strategists apparently warned against the stunt, saying Scott Morrison acting as a Prime Minister would not be believable to voters.
With inflation on the rise, Australian unions are calling for a modest pay increase for minimum-wage workers. The government, backed by bosses and bankers, says such a move will increase inflation, but the truth is they just don’t want to pay.
The Publicly owned broadcaster of our media News and Information service is the conservative’s enemy as far Morrison, the LNP, the IPA and Murdoch media are concerned. They are a coalition in Australia that simply view the ABC as the enemy of government rule. As far as they are concerned the ABC as News and Information service shouldn’t exist. Morrison’s and Abbott’s relationship with the ABC has been fractious and so for the past decade, their primary aim has been to extract revenue via an annual “efficiency review” which translates to always breaking the LNP promise of no cuts.
Scott Morrison has shown an aversion to appearing in ABC interviews, preferring to be represented by the right-wing mainstream media, writes Jeremy Epstein.
With much discussion recently over the Seven Mountains Mandate and Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate’s appointment of a “spiritual advisor”, the Pentecostal Church has crept its way into our governments and caused genuine concern to anyone believing in our country’s dire need for separation of church and state.
The history of the IPA is curious. Many of the key players in its early years are either still around, or their children are. Its ideas haven’t really evolved much, but if you want to characterise them, they are crudely elitist, ideologically stunted, narrow-minded, science-phobic, greedy, and in most cases, fully imported. For a charity that pays no tax, they have very few clients in need.
The only reason they are of any interest to anyone is that they have captured the Federal Government, by stealth, and their inane policies are the reason this country is so conspicuously underachieving.
There is not one thinker of note amongst its membership. Some of the current members appear to be the offspring of former members; a sort of self-replicating supply of not-so-bright apparatchiks. If you are searching for the reason behind the diminishing sense of pride attached to being Australian, the IPA is to blame.
Current or ex-members in Parliament
For a roll-call, these are some of the current members of the IPA, or their affiliates; Institute for Progress (AIP), Australian Taxation Alliance (ATA), who are current, or recent members of the current Parliament: Abetz, Birmingham, Cash, Christensen, Cormann, Evans, Fletcher, Frydenberg, Hawke, Hunt, McGrath, Morrison, Paterson, Porter, Roberts, Ryan, Stoker, Dean Smith, Tony Smith, Tehan, Tudge, and Tim Wilson.
All part of the global Atlas Network. That would be where we get the passion for no minimum wage, and no health care. Past members include Abbott, Howard, and let us never forget that our current PM is a fervent member.
They have been effectively bought by a handful of robber barons, who pay no taxes, and have no commitment to what was, twenty years ago, a democracy to be proud of.
They are all about to benefit from stage 3 tax cuts the rest of will be left to watch.
It was pointed out, too, that politicians’ salaries have not suffered from the near-decade of wage stagnation that has afflicted the rest of us. Their pay has gone up 30 per cent over the past 10 years. The annual base rate for a backbencher is now $211,250 (ministers and shadows get more), and the prime minister’s salary is $550,000.
Morrison, his media backers and the business lobby were horrified at the thought that the wages of the poorest workers should meet inflation – which is to say, workers should not take a pay cut.
“Morrison supports decline in living standards” should have been the headline
Stuart Robert has said he does not know where the education minister Alan Tudge is, and bizarrely claimed to have been doing Tudge’s job for “almost 12 months”.
From a Liberal who knows the inner workings of the LNP
Even in his early days as prime minister, Morrison had many moments that were characterised as ‘Trumpian’ and ended up in the international press for all the wrong reasons. One was when he said: “We want to see women rise. But we don’t want to see women rise only on the basis of others (i.e. men) doing worse.”
He actually said that. And worse still, it wasn’t off the cuff or a case of the words coming out wrong. It was in his written, prepared speech for International Women’s Day in 2019. At a time when his government’s women problem was under the glare of public scrutiny.
Over the past three years, Morrison has failed to act on this problem, on climate change (think Glasgow) and on integrity (recall the broken promise for a federal anti-corruption commission) to name a few issues. And this has given rise to independent campaigns across the country in what are regarded as safe Liberal seats.
This despite their claims that taxes will fall. They will fall however for top income earners who, under Stage 3 tax cuts, will get thousands of dollars back in their kit. These are the sad facts of the Coalition , performance. But what of vision for the future? There is none. All is based on a spurious, spun line, “trust us, we are superior economic managers”. The transfer of public wealth from poor and middle income earners to wealthy Australians continues apace, as does the $12bn in subsidies for fossil fuel companies, mostly foreign multinationals which pay little or no tax.
Australia’s PM Morrison wants our manufacturing to become a much more active participant in the global Industrial Military Complex about which questions can’t be asked. Just as he created an “On the Water Matters” to brush off embarrassing information about the treatment of asylum seekers. Making government supported manufacturing a ” National Security Area” a zone of privileged information exclusive to the LNP and its friends.
The boards of defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing are encouraging their shareholders to vote against transparency measures. Maybe the US government shouldn’t fund companies whose profits would be harmed by the collection of human rights data?
olddogthoughts 