The latest Morgan face-to-face poll has Labor’s lead at 63.5-36.5 – down from the record-breaking 65-35 at the previous such poll early in the month, but up from 61-39 at the phone poll conducted a fortnight ago. Other conversation starters:
• Special Minister of State John Faulkner has announced a package of electoral reforms confirming moves to cut the campaign donation disclosure threshold to $1000 (which the Howard government outrageously lifted from $1500 to $10,000 in 2005), along with bans on donations from overseas companies and various other measures. It is also announced that the government will “kick-start a green paper process to reform and modernise our electoral processes”. The first part of this, to be released for discussion in July, will look at “disclosure, funding and expenditure issues”; the second, to be released in October, will examine “a broader range of options aimed at strengthening other areas of our electoral laws”.
• Morris Iemma has taken talk of reforms to campaign donations a step further by suggesting they be banned altogether, perhaps in conjunction with caps on electoral spending. Jack Waterford of the Canberra Times presents the case against.
• A big week for the New South Wales Liberal Party: charges laid against five over the Lindsay pamphlet outrage, rising star Scott Morrison deemed too civilised for membership of his local branch, and suggestions that Peter Phelps might emerge as a contender for the party’s state directorship. Would it be overdramatic to suggest that the forces of respectable conservatism in the state should abandon the whole rancid operation and start again from scratch?
318 Comments
Not just in NSW, what about QLD, WA etc.?
Disappointing that there is no PPM included in the poll.
Probably to allay the feelings of total despair that is permeating the Conservative movement at present.
It’s probably back to 7% again anyway.
Morgan doesn’t do leadership satisfaction/PPM in its normal polling.
William, I bet the Libs are very glad of that. lol
So I guess there will not be any coalition back benchers resigning this week.
Is the Honeymoon period ever going to end?
The Libs must be starting to think that with regard to the honeymoon period, that each poll is like living through Groundhog Day all over again.
The Americans will be pissed off at the ban on foreign donations
JP #8,
Let them be. I care little for their feelings, and it’s time that they got their grubby paws out of our electoral system.
The Liberals newfound ‘compassion’ has come to this?
Busted!
Who I’m sure will find some kind of creative way of beating the band, via a blind trust or somesuch mechanism.
Hi Guys, I thought people in this forum might appreciate Guy Rundle’s take on Tony Blair “New Labor”
Special. So f-cking special: The Blair decade
-
“Maureen wants to use the backroom later, so the press will have to clear out and move into the hall,” the flat-vowelled voice said. Noon, and the radio feed was coming from Sedgefield, Tony Blair’s northern constituency, and the man himself was being introduced by his agent, a man he said had shown total loyalty to “me, the party, and Sunderland football club, not necessarily in that order”.
Cue the sound of laughter in a regional hall. Pure political theatre, a man with his own nuclear arsenal announcing his resignation amid lace curtains and a steaming urn on a trestle table.
“Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down” he said, mixing metaphors, as he passed through the formalities. “On 27 June I will tender my resignation to the Queen,” he said.
What? June? Another month ? Bob Carr was out of the building while the TV journos were still doing their reaction shots after his tender of notice. We’ve already had the longest lame-duck premiership in history, one which has drained support from his successor, and Blair’s still hanging around?
Well, at least we have a date. And, until the doorstopper memoirs arrive, the most direct apologia pro vita gubernator that we’re likely to get.
“I’ve never put it this way before” he said, explaining that as he came to political maturity in the ’80s and ’90s (’90s – a bit tardy?) the country presented as something where you had to be in favour of EITHER aspiration OR compassion, EITHER tolerance OR conservatism, etc etc, and that the country was now a place where aspiration AND social justice, tolerance AND traditional values, etc etc …
There followed a defence of the domestic record, oddly couched in a rhetorical and defensive “ask when you last heard of people waiting a year for an operation, ask when you last heard of pensioners freezing to death in their homes …” and so on.
But it’s a measure of the disastrous path the Blair Government has taken that all this felt like a warm-up to the main act, which was, of course, a defence of Iraq. We got everything we thought we would — the deaths of hundreds of thousands defended on the grounds of sincerity: “Believe this — I truly believed in what I was doing” etc, etc.
What was extraordinary was the political justification:
“In Sierra Leone and Kosovo I took the decision to make our country one that intervened … and then came 9/11 and I thought we should stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our ally…”
And so Afghanistan and Iraq.
Read that again. Iraq. As a consequence of 9/11? Or as unquestioning support of US war-making? Or as both? In other words, a country destroyed for reasons that had nothing to do with either clear and present danger to the UK, or the sufferings of its own population.
Let’s remember again the lead-up to the war. The weapons-inspection process was terminated early, the “proof” (copied from Phd theses online) was an obvious farrago, and Saddam’s regime was a tinpot, nasty dictatorship with about 1000 deaths and disappearances a year — less than US/UK allies such as Uzbekistan. The decision had already been made.
For defenders of Blair, the focus on Iraq is simply a way of baiting a PM more centrist than they would have preferred by way of focusing on one among many policies.
And the record on domestic and social reconstruction policy is not insubstantial, but the point is that where you stand on such a question is an absolute test of your politics, and whether you focus on the narrow terrain of national politics or, in the last instance, have some sense of responsibility to human beings per se.
For the fact is that, under Tony Blair, Labour cut all ties not only with anything resembling democratic socialism, but also with social democracy, and even the most centrist notion of a left. It became a war party, buttressed at home by piecemeal social market programs and authoritarian control. Foreign and domestic policy were interconnected since the will to do what Labour governments should do — introduce irreversible progressive change — was never there. Instead, what was wanted was a disciplined population, increasingly subject to market forces, capable of serving Britain’s role of ongoing greatness.
Thus — and this is the other side of Blair’s failure — social mobility in the UK has decreased over the last 10 years. Under John Major, a kid from below the poverty line had more chance of getting out of it, of getting into university, to Oxbridge, to the professions.
Without increased opportunity, social welfare programs actually become regressive — they’re a sop to the poor, a consolation prize for their permanently shrunken chances. Because people start to get a bit angry about that — expressed these days in crime, booze ‘n’ drugs, violence etc rather than political activism — a huge surveillance apparatus has to be put in place.
So, Blair’s Government has become the one which has seen not merely millions of CCTV cameras, but now cameras with microphones attached to pick up conversations in a 20-metre radius, and, most recently, loudspeakers which bark at you if you commit “anti-social behaviour”. It’s the Government of the “foetal ASBO” in which children of criminal families are marked from before birth as potential criminals, to be tracked throughout life by social workers, probation officers, psychologists etc. The cumulative effect of these measures is simply to rot a free society from within. Public space becomes a place not of citizens, but of suspects. Trust and solidarity are undermined; fear and separation are enthroned.
It’s the Government which has turned primary education into a bizarrely over-regulated regime of testing so that by the age of seven, every kid is poked, prodded, metricated by 129 different benchmarks, and the actual process of education is lost. It has handed over control of education to “city academies” run by private companies — who are building schools without playgrounds because they see children as part of a “business enterprise” who should not have unstructured time.
Yet, it didn’t have the guts to legislate changes to the Oxbridge entrance procedure, to break the hold of the public (ie. private) schools on elite learning. In civil liberties, it has banned political protest within a mile of Parliament, and mooted a multibillion-pound ID card that will do little against serious crime, much less terrorism, but which may be denied to those without addresses — in other words creating a class of non-persons. The visible corruption around cash-for-peerages, dodgy dossiers, BAE arms deals with the Saudis has been as bad and more frequent than under the Tories. And overarching it all is gravity’s rainbow: the replacement of the nuclear Trident system has been authorised, contrary to prior non-proliferation agreements, committing the UK to an imperial future, rather than one as a citizen-nation of Europe.
In all, it has deployed the ideas and language of social democracy — using the coercive powers of the state against wealth, to improve lives through lessening inequality — to the practice of coercion directed against the poor, to maintain order in a market-dominated society. The surveillance state treats the population as guilty until proven innocent — whether in Iraq or Bermondsey. And I have no doubt that a Rudd government would not be substantially different in many aspects.
For what? For what? When I first came to Britain in 1997, I lived in Hackney, one of the poorest boroughs in Western Europe. When I go back there these days, the unbelievably shabby, dilapidated high street has had a new music centre built, a couple of rundown housing blocks have been rebuilt with better fabric, and the hospital has a bigger casualty department. The kids are going to Sure Start early learning centres, and while the schools aren’t “failing” as they were hitherto, the students still aren’t going through to GCSE (the year 12/year 13 equivalent), or even levels below. Why? Because they feel there’s no point. The fix is in. Blair never really inspired them to believe that a fairer society was on its way, one that would repay their efforts to find a place in it.
Social democracy means nothing if it is not about freedom — real freedom, the material freedom to make a meaningful life, rather than an existence in the surplus labour pool — as well as equality and security. Blair’s supporters continue to point to the myriad of piecemeal programs and accuse critics of being unrealistic. This is simply limbo-politics, always making you bend over backwards further, to go lower. There are other stories to tell about the Blair era — about economic stewardship, managerial competence, etc etc. But I’m of the left and Blair claimed to be of the left, and I can only judge him on those standards by which he himself asks to be judged.
In 1945, the Attlee government had a country that was broke, exhausted, faced the worst winter of the century, and was feeding a country — Germany — that had recently tried to annihilate it. And still they established the NHS, free education, a welfare state, nationalisation, decolonisation and much more.
The Blair Government came to power in 1997, on the wave of a Western global economic boom, with a majority of more than 160 seats. It entrenched privilege, reduced the poverty rate from 14% to 12% — before it started to climb back again – and helped cause hundreds of thousands of unnecessary deaths in a former colony. That is the Blair decade.
So, if Blair didn’t really believe in “irreversible progressive change”, what did he believe in? His parting words in the draughty room in Sedgefield say it all: “The British are special. The world knows it. In our hearts we know it. This is the greatest nation on earth.”
What a thing for a social democrat to say. What a thing. Not an expression of left patriotism, of love of country and community, of a hope that its virtues had been strengthened, that it had contributed to the greater human good. Instead, a braying chauvinistic triumphalism, a mixture of Kipling and cod-Americanism.
So vale, Caesar. Some have suggested an EU post is in the offing. God speed your passage to the new Rome, Brussels. May you sojourn there in a glass box listening via headphones while the Iraqi maimed testify against you.
bird
or we could go to http://www.plugger.com.au/news/Guy_Rundle/
I see the Family First guy, dressing up like a bong has actually doubled their vote.
Bird, please don’t paste entire articles like that.
ok
C’mon you conservative media type …not not doing enough for the cause!!! May be some digitally enhanced fangs & a black cape on KR might bring him down Or maybe if you put them on BN it might be an improvement! LOL
!!!
There is only one way to explain the polls at the moment, the Liberal brand is in dire straights right now but don’t be fooled that this will last forever. Clearly there is a possibility of the Coalition going backwards in 2010 or a DD election. There is just nothing going for them right now give em a decade and they’ll be back in power.
So what spin will Dennis Shanahan put on this poll?
These high polls for Labor are good for democracy.
May encourage the Libs to make some real changes and we really do need a decent Opposition party with decent policies and decent shadow ministers.
Then again we know it wont happen until they lose two more elections.
another one as bad as 2007 and heads will roll
It’s a Morgan, and the OO don’t comment on them.
But Tuesday is Newspoll day, and THEN will see how the Shamaham spin things.
Glen,
There is no ‘possibility’ of the Coalition going backwards in the next election. There is certainty.
Oh and here is the list of participants in the 2020 Summit.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23445668-5014046,00.html
One of my girls is on the youth summit. Good looking and smart.
Just have to make sure she doesnt marry a Tory one day lol!
Kina, have no grounds on which to comment on your daughter’s beauty, but after having read many of your posts, I’m sure “smart” would be a modest understatement.
Glen at 18
“There is just nothing going for them right now give em a decade and they’ll be back in power.”
There is an inherent assumption in this thinking that implies that the things that are not going right for them are external factors beyond their control and that the coin which seems to keep landing on heads at the moment will eventually come up tails.
But the Libs issues are not the product of random external variance but an inherent instability and directionlessness that comes out of trying to maintain two increasingly ideologically opposed constituencies.
There are two main axes to the Australian political landscape Glen, the economic left-right axis and the social conservative-progressive axis. There used to be an assosciation between economic liberalism and social conservativism but it is weaker by the decade and increasingly it is those on the economic right that represent socially progressive agendas and those on the economic left that represent conservative agendas. This means a separation of core constituencies that is getting ever wider – and Nelson et al are trying to straddle both.
They will do themselves an injury that will not be fixed by random variations in the sentiments of the electorate. By trying to do so the conservative parties exposed the middle ground on both axes which Rudd expertly took. This being the case, the conservatives need to do one of two things to become a viable opposition and real alternative government.
1. Abandon the economic right, leapfrog labor on the economic axis and attack them from the sure footing of the single constituency base of the economic left / socially conservative quarter. Some of the federal front bench seem to be giving it a good shot – carer bonuses etc – but lets face it, its not going to happen and nor does it make any real sense to in that they would clearly cease to be the party the espouse to be.
2. Abandon the socially conservative agenda, leapfrog labor on the social axis and attack them from the sure footing of the single constituency base of the socially progressive / economic right quarter. Turnball could do this but can the party as a whole?
Unless one of these things are done no random variation in voter sentiment will save the Libs as they will forever be undermining their own mutually exclusive agendas and will always look stupid for it.
Cool, Kina, About the girl.
Most irritated this morning listening to Fran empanelled with Peter Hartcher. Professor Hugh White, Andrew Shearer, Lowy Institute, former advisor to the Howard Government.
Criticism all round for the length of the trip, the duration of which was described accurately as firstly 17 days, then three weeks and at another point 18 days.
Then it was compared to Gough’s long trip, which happened to coincide with Cyclone Tracey. An apparently atrociously long absence. Maybe some memories are too long.
Peter Hartcher sets it up as, once a fortnight has elapsed, Kev will be in for severe criticism over his prolonged absence. So, we are prepared.
The next level of attack, Kev’s failure to visit Japan. Perceived insult. Not real, perceived. Therefore, a media event waiting to be trumpeted.
Then, attending NATO, Kev, according to the speakers,will find himself allegedly bearing a message from the USA. Purportedly to challenge to the Europeans over their troop contribution.
For which Kevin will find himself confronted, by the Europeans. Given the smallness of our own troop contribution. Supposedly.
Good to hear Kevin defending himself, since.
None of this taken up in any meaningful sense by Fran, of course.
Any comments on the cast of 1000? Some areas seem quite okay (not that I recognise all the names or have spent time googling them). Governance was an interesting mix of people, as was indigenous, but the environment seemed quite low key in who was actually on it (Of course, Tim Flannery or Graham Pearman are not low key!). Did note a few ex-MP’s – Michael Lavarch, Christine Sharp amongst them.
Also a spate of justices – Mary Gaudron, William Deane, Anthony Mason?!?!
All this twaddle re the length of the PM’s overseas trip. Does anybody know how long Ming was out of the country during his reign on one of his overseas junkets. I seem to recall him making visits to Lords for test matches on more than one occasion. Did he fly or go by ship? If the latter he would have been away for considerably more than 17 days. Even if he flew, a flight to the old blighty in those days was quite lengthy (three days or so I think – making 6 both ways).
This nonsense about Kev’s trip is not even worth a response, is that the best the MSM can do. Pathetic!
Kev’s a control freak – ooops no he’s not he is neglecting the budget – he’s overseas for too long – but he is ignoring India and Japan – he’s going to CHINA (get the canine whistles blowing) – will he raise Kyoto with Bush?
Shock horror he’s going to the UK when there is no Test Match. He’s meeting the Queen (Australia’s head of state) oh dear – the poor people with MS or Crohn’s will miss out on drugs – ‘cuase Julia won’t be Dept PM – the CSIRO will lose all its scientists – and a meteorite is about to hit Kirribilli.
And its only day one.
SJ at 30
At least David Flint didn’t get a gig.
bird Says: @ 12,
This will save everyone from having to buy the book!
The SBS Documentry on Whitlam where he is interviewed by John Faulkner includes a clip from the original A Cuurent Affair when it was a serious program and the TV version of New Idea, which ran a “story” mocking his extensive travel.
So it’s really nothing new at all.
That should read “and NOT the TV version of New Idea”.
Kev’s trip is foolhardy, as he is undertaking it before the balance of the ABC Board has been brought into equitable balance.
ABC News, just viewed, managed to highlight, not the intention for good, on the part of the PM, but any negatives it was able to find.
Latest on the credit sqeeze:
http://www.economics.com.au/?p=1387
Crikey Whitey @ 29 [Most irritated this morning listening to Fran empaneled with Peter Hartcher. Professor Hugh White, Andrew Shearer, Lowy Institute, former adviser to the Howard Government. Criticism all round for the length of the trip, the duration of which was described accurately as firstly 17 days, then three weeks and at another point 18 days.]
Well their criticism is a joke of course and they know it. This is just another go at trying to help out their Liberal party. We know where they are coming from and I guess it makes them feel good about themselves venting a pointless attack on Rudd.
They seem to think that the country is not run by government formed by Cabinet of Minsters but is a Dictatorship run by one person without whom all will fail. Well they don’t think that really they are just spruiking this nonsense to help the Liberal party along, IMO. These are supposed to be good journalists?
But while they think they have been so clever all they are doing is holding the Liberal party back from a much needed crash to the bottom, blood letting and repair. Wonder what Hartcher thinks of the bizarre state of the Liberal party in NSW, QLD now – where it seems like a competition between the ‘rightness’ of the hard-right.
And I notice today Nelson sprouting an Industrial relations position sounding pretty similar to Workchoices – cool more suicide stuff for them.
A some of rusted on uncritical Liberal party journalists won’t face reality. It must dawn on them soon that people like Turnbull, Nelson and Bishop are no where near the quality needed to win or run government.
Yes, Kina. Though I was somewhat surprised by Hugh White’s response. Perhaps he is in the nervous mode as I, among other, spoke of regarding Kevin’s early days.
The panel did seem to agree that the administration/country would fall apart in the absence of the PM. Despite the criticism that Kev is ‘too hands on.’
Why, though, they imagine the country is not left in good hands, ie Julia’s, is beyond belief.
That harks back to the incompetency of the former government in ensuring and enabling that no one, but no one was in a position to appear as ‘competent’ as the PM of the day.
Well, that worked.
Whilst i agree with everything said about Rudds’ trip, i have one criticism,
what is attending to achieve? Politicians and their trips, they tend to be costly and tend to provide little in the way of results.
Nonetheless, much of criticism by the media is silly and lacking thought. The media as usual tend to get together as a group and say the same thing.
Well I think the Liberal party is in the grip of terminal stupidity, terminal denial or simple arrogance of Australians. Having been beaten at the election where WorkChoices was the central issue they have again a policy which is basically WorkChoices over again.
The all pronounced this dead after the election…but now they have revived the rotting corpse.
Nelson in new U-turn on AWAs
Dr Nelson will today tell The Australian and Melbourne Institute’s New Agenda for Prosperity Conference that the Coalition will champion a form of individual agreement that has no reference to a collective agreement, such as an award or enterprise bargain.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23443873-5016654,00.html
However they have admitted this type of IR is bad…..
We got it wrong: Nelson
The Opposition Leader’s frank assessment yesterday came as new figures show many employers continued trying to use individual AWAs to slash entitlements right up until last year’s federal election.
The sample shows half the rejected AWAs sought to cut employee entitlements by up to $49 a week while 39 per cent would have cut entitlements by between $50 and $199 a week. Just over 10 per cent of the failed AWAs tried to cut the workers’ entitlements by between $200 and $499 a week, while 1 per cent sought to slash pay by more than $500 a week.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/we-got-it-wrong-with-awas-nelson/2008/02/28/1203788539562.html
AND Nelson said they had listened to the Australian people….
Life extinct: Nelson pronounces Work Choices dead
BRENDAN NELSON has pronounced Work Choices dead as the Coalition abandons the policy that cost it the federal election.
“We’ve listened to the Australian people, we respect the decisions that they have made, we’ve listened and we have learned and Work Choices is dead,” the Opposition Leader said yesterday.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/nelson-pronounces-work-choices-dead/2007/12/19/1197740380935.html
Well I might pronounce the Liberal party dead if they take this to the next election.
A brief history of WorkChoices
http://blogs.news.com.au/news/blogocracy/index.php/news/comments/a_brief_history_of_workchoices/
It is about time the Reserve Bank of Australia pulled its head out of the sand,
stopped propping up the four big banks to the exclusion of all other smaller banks and nonbank mortgage lenders. They should immediately begin forming an Australian mortgage market based on equity and fairness instead of cowering before it’s four powerful mates in the major banks. Swan needs to haul them in and give them a week to get their act together.
Who cares what Brendan Nelson has to say, he is the leader of a party supported by 29% of the population (according to Morgan) – why does he get so much media coverage? He and his party are an irrelevance.
When will the MSM wake up and realise that he is a peripheral player in Australian politics?
So the Dr thinks that businesses like Mitre 10 are right in stiffing 17 year olds by paying them a flat rate of $10 per hour for any hours worked whether it’s a weekday, weekend or public holiday.
They still don’t get it. Nelson will not be leader in 18 months. What are the odds?
On Sportsbet its $1.20 for an ALP win in 2010, vs. $4.05 for any other party…sadly, no odds on Horatio being the Admiral at that time.
Same old same old. Smooth sailing.
However, there does appear to be a very dark cloud in the distance. It is not ever day a stockbroker goes broke and has the client’s shares sold from underneath them. Given the Trillion dollars that Australian workers have tied up in super funds, this could became a much bigger issue than it is already is.
But even if there is a storm, the Liberal boat is sinking fast and is not looking like it could even mount anything more than a token election campaign at the moment. They can’t seem to object to anything now without looking like they are so far out of touch it is not funny.
If I was in charge of the Liberal party (I thank god I am not), I would try to out flank the ALP on a single issue that is going to cause Labor a headache. The main one I can see at the moment is the issue of Gay Marriage as the SDA faction (right of the Right) in ALP would have a fit. Plus a slim majority of the public support it (55% last time I noticed the Morgan Poll on the issue, with only 25% strongly objecting). But there is no way, the Liberal back bench would go for such a plan.
As for the Liberal National merger, it ain’t going to happen. I think the Nationals would be extremely smart to get out of coalition as quick as possible. If the Liberal party plans on eating you, don’t get into bed.
I think Kev is looking and sounding pretty cool on the overseas trip number. Every sound bite has been a Kevenish encapsulation of why it is needed in terms of worldwide economic problems, blah, blah. However, I suspect he’s up to establishing himself as a player. This guy doesn’t do anything without reasons, plural.
The Morgan result. Well, who would be surprised?
Demoralised and depressed? Glen, how are you holding up?
The Queensland State Council of the Liberal Party meets this weekend so it should be a fun time.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23440710-27197,00.html
The Queensland State Council of the Liberal Party meets this weekend so it should be a fun time…………in the phone box out the front of Brisbane town hall
52 Don’t exaggerate Red Wombat – there’s not that many of them, that’s why they get failed candidates to make up the numbers in front of the camera.
49 That is an amazing story about the stockbroking firm, BS Fairman.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23445711-601,00.html
BS Fairman, while the gay marriage issue may be one the Liberals could outflank the ALP on, it seems to me the electorate wouldn’t buy it. Especially given the fact the party changed the marriage act in 2004 to exclude gay couples. I think the public would see the back-flip for what it would be, playing politics. It’s not as if there were any Liberals lining up to speak out for gay marriage in 2004.
Glen
Just as labor had to get it act together to get back into power so will the Liberals.
The only way the Liberals had any chance to get back quickly was for the right wing nutter to pack up and leave. Didn’t happen and it is not going to happen.
I do agree, another loss is required to get things really moving. The Liberal party is going to go into the next election at a total mess.
This time it won’t be a DLP split that keeps the Labor Party out of power for 20 years, it will be a split in the Liberal party and my bet is 20 years or never ( I suspect the party will not hang together).
If you think a split is not going to happen, what do you think will happen when after the next election the more rational elements decides to deal with the problem by closing down all the current tiny branches ( Port Hacking as an example) and open up a few super branches that have enough people in them for there to be a small chance that they are ran in a rational manner.
And if they don’t make an attempt to clean the mess up, what in reality is the electoral chances of the Liberal party.
Hiding you head in the sand and chanting “we will be back” isn’t going to change things”.
Pardon me, marky marky at 42. Temporary distraction. I was cleaning the toilet.
‘Whilst i agree with everything said about Rudds’ trip, i have one criticism’
With what do you agree?
As someone who has traveled I admire the man. I knows what it is like, doing things while going around the would in 17 days, suffering from jet lag, eating airline food, suffering deep vain thrombosis, and catching god knows what from the air being recirculated through several hundred people . He didn’t have to do it.
And as for the ignorant behavior of the press, its the sort of thing I would expect from people who hasn’t traveled past their front gate, dream of doing so one day and who consider what Rudd is doing a holiday. It really is quite pathetic.
I really thought as a group they would been better traveled and better educated.
THey probably think it’s like an episode of Getaway, and like the late Richard Carelton, probably have their eskies with Smoked Salmon etc
Don’t think anyone suggested it was a holiday. Where did that come from?
Suggestion seemed to be that it is some kind of laxity to leave the country for such a ‘long’ period of time.
For my part, I am sure I will manage. As will the Government, in its capable hands.
I don’t understand how any member of the opposition can keep a straight face while commenting on Rudds trip. At least – as I think should rightly be expected when one is employed by the Australian people as a parlimentary representative – Rudd is going overseas to promote Australia and the interests of its citizens rather than going overseas to promote a corporation and the interests of it’s shareholders!!!
The media and the Opposition all know there is nothing wrong with this trip. Whatever thing Rudd or Labor take on now will simply an opportunity to build some credit points for the LNP it is just a matter of how extreme they want to be.
We saw the exaggerated Carer payments thing coordinated deal with the OO, ABC and Liberals run for 5 days. You have to figure that there are some who will unashamedly try to bring down Rudd’s rating using anything. Maybe they figure if they create a barrage of negative comments it will stick.
I can comment on Rudd’s trip…funny when the pendulam is swinging the PM is out of the loop.
Is he capable of leading this nation or is he the cardboard cut out that is increasing evident as the months go by.
I look on in amusement.
Ogmios
Do you really think that sort of stuff is going to get the Liberals back into government?
The recent Liberal campaign in the Gold Coast council elections must have cost them a motzah, mayor plus all 14 divisions, not one successful! And this in the heart of Libland.
Oh happy days, they will soon be destitute at this rate, especially with the new campaign funding rules, too funny.
Frank, it just proves how hopelessly bereft they are of ideas and relevance, they just like groundhog day
.
Frank Calabrese Says:
March 28th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
The SBS Documentry on Whitlam where he is interviewed by John Faulkner includes a clip from the original A Cuurent Affair when it was a serious program and the TV version of New Idea, which ran a “story” mocking his extensive travel.
So it’s really nothing new at all.
Charles
The conservatives are crap!
Yes they have done a pretty dam good job of destroying the Liberal party.
Rudd is now The Official “Man Of Steel”, according to Bush. Bush, in return has been made an “Honorary Queenslander”.
Howard must have choked on his Wheaties.
Charles
I’m not impressed with the makeup of the 2020 conference…Rudd preached that there would be people there with new ideas and what did we get…the same old faces that will deliver the same old ideas.
Honestly, can you see anything come out of this besides Rudd’s social networking to ensure his popularity with the doyens of no substance?
The coalition and the MSM will have a field day.
This must make a re-election very likely in McEwen.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/mcewen-rocked-by-dual-voters/2008/03/28/1206207413004.html
A lot of the usual suspects have been invited to turn up – a lot them being people (eg Philip Adams) who already have ample opportunity to share their views with us.
The inclusion of the Murdoch and the Packer brats, the latter of whom has no record of any cerebral activity whatsoever, in the “Future Directions for the Australian Economy” panel must be someone’s idea of a joke.
I am also nonplussed as to why 50 adherents of a particular brand of belief system are being allowed to have their own little gathering a week prior is beyond me. I would have thought that (a) their confessed need for an imaginary friend who has total control of our destiny (albeit with the input of an imaginary enemy) and (b) their apparent support of the proclivity of their co-religionists to take off for the Middle East to avoid prosecution for misdeeds would have disqualified them from any rational discussion of our future.
Ogmios
I think the MSM has made a fool of itself over the last few weeks. Given the poll results I think it might be reasonable to conclude that it is a widely held view. I’d say their influence and the importance of their opinion is decreasing rapidly.
I see the 2020 conference as an attempt to find a replacement structure for the parties, which have so spectacularly failed on all sides of politics. I think you have to give Rudd marks for trying. It is uncharted water. It’s interesting to see that for many their only contribution is rock throwing from the sideline.
Albert Ross Says:
March 29th, 2008 at 10:46 am
I’d prefer to see Harry Potter, I find his version of alternate reality much more entertaining, but Rudd is running the show and I think he is into the imaginary friend who has total control of our destiny thing. Each to their own really.
I think your only in trouble when you can’t put reality and the imaginary stuff in different bins.
55 – I don’t think a move by the Liberals to weaken their previous anti-gay stand would be seen as playing politics (at least not more than other move they have done in the last 3 months). I think it would be more likely to be seen as move to go with the mood of the public and reserving a position taken in 2004 that was in itself merely playing politics (get the Hillsongers onside, trying to wedge Labor etc.).
But as I said the Liberal backbench potplants would spit chips and there is no way it would happen. But my fundamental idea of needing to outflank the government is the ONLY way the Liberals are going to get back in the game. Just as Labor attempted to appear more Conservative in some areas the Liberals need to appear more progressive than the ALP on some issues. Always confuse the enemy.
Public Education is perhaps another area they could attempt to wedge the government on. Instead of complaining about the “Left wing teachers unions” and suggesting performance pay, they could pull a rabbit out of the hat and support a system based on the social economic background of the student body.
Bushfire Bill @ 69 -
Howard must have choked on his Wheaties.
I suspect Howard will have had more than one fit of apoplexy on learning that the Rudds are staying at Blair House. It took him years of arse kissing before he and Janette were accorded the same privilege, once again proving that sycophants don’t earn respect!
Probably not. Resistance is futile.
First you globalize the economy, then you globalize culture, ultimately you globalize politics.
If you didn’t like the idea, then why did you foist that total shit Murdoch on us in the first place?
That was what that weasel David Kemp did wasn’t it? A fine mess that got us into. Mind you something transparent payable only to public schools (so as to avoid the institutionalised rorting by the schools for the promotion of imaginary friends [see tody's SMH]) would be a good idea.
Here’s a really good article by Sean Carney which details the rampant hyprocracy of the many critics in the MSM and the LNP in relation to PM Rudd.
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2008/03/28/1206207406825.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap1
The significant point in Shaun Carney’s opinion piece is not the ‘rampant hyprocracy (sic)…in the MSM’, it is that “the media’s political orthodoxy doesn’t always accord with public opinion”.
78 – I think part of Kemp’s policy problems related to how they put the lines in the socio-economic indices as where was disadvantaged and the belief that parent’s contributions should be rewarded, which doesn’t assist the poorer areas at all.
But the story about rorting of the current scheme could give Nelson an excuse to admit that past mistakes have occurred and suggest something different and attempt to wedge the ALP.
28. I agree with Eratosthanes that there are two axes to Australian politics as outlined, but given the binary nature of Australian politics, one of the major parties will always be a coalition of interests in reaction to the coalition that forms the other.
In Britain’s party system, the Conservatives have historically been the party that the other parties define themselves against, i.e. the SNP defines itself as the party of romantic Celtic nationalism against Tory unionism, Liberals (and now LibDems) define themselves as compassionate but anti-statist against heartless acolytes of Adam Smith, and Labour through its class base against Eton toffs.
In Australia, it is against Labor that the other parties define themselves. Labor’s core, rock-solid vote are a combination of non-Anglo blue collar workers (blue collar domitory seats in Sydney and Melbourne), and white collar public sector progressives. This coalition has been a constant of the ALP’s history. Against it, the conservatives form their curious but similarly enduring combination of Turnbull-style free marketeers and often-rural Anglo-traditionalists (regardless of socio-economic class).
Australian conservatism needs both to prosper – and it is this fact that seems to annoy so many outside the Liberal and National parties, and how they work.
The Coalition’s Work Choices own-goal spectacularly destroyed this coalition, by forcing outer metro Anglo voters – both blue and white collar, and almost entirely in the private sector – back to Labor.
If the Coalition wants to rebuild, it needs to understand how to reconnect with these voters. They are not socially progressive, and they are by and large not public sector workers. Right now, the polls show they also find Rudd a comfortable fit, and in the absence of a change to the political landscape, I think they will continue to do so.
A story in the Age today about Fran Bailey’s (current) seat of McEwen. Apparently eight people voted twice, observing the rule ‘Vote early, vote often’, and given that the seat first went to Labor by 6 and then to Fran Bailey by 12, it looks as if this might be the kind of evidence that triggers a byelection. If so, it’s surely bye bye Fran:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/mcewen-rocked-by-dual-voters/2008/03/28/1206207413004.html
I think that the Federal Court will order a bye-election, the last thing they want to do is set a precedent of deciding which votes are valid or not.
Back to the ballot box is the only way. Will Fran contest the election again? Will there be other bye-elections on the same date?
I might have a bit of fun and get a stamp ‘Liberal Party Gazette’ made up, take my daily trip to the Newsagent and give some of The OO a prominent and suitable imprint in blue ink. But then again that might just be childish.
84- There will be no more than one by-election at a time as Nelson wants to do himself slowly.
Also it’s by-election as the by- is like the by in byway, meaning secondary or minor.
“There will be no more than one by-election at a time as Nelson wants to do himself slowly.”
That’s a corker of a line Mr Fairman!
Packer will have some brilliant input into future directions, how about turning Australia into one gigantic casino for starters, although come to think of it we probably already have!
William, does typing the name P*cker (of mega casino fame) get me put in moderation?
86 BSF, it could also be bye as in goodbye Fran
No, “casino”. I get lots of spam about gambling, poker etc.
90 – Sorry, I didn’t see the pun before.
87 – Thanks Possum. I fully expect it to be stolen by someone with more coverage then me.
By-election and Bye-Election are both legitimate spellings.
And the hyphen is not compulsory. Bye the bye, I’ve got first dibs on the pun. (83)
Amazing isn’t it, that such numbers, O.K., it’s just Morgan, should result in such a blah result from bloggers here? Mind however, the Kevinator just keeps powering on. And Therese shimmies, when excited! Has anyone else apart from Tracey Hutchison noticed?
Great joke, B.S. Fairman. Also Liked Rudd’s joke about Queensland being bigger than Texas in response to the glove puppet from Texas claiming Rudd as the new ‘man of steel’. What a cretin.
Yes, Harry, I noted Therese shimmying and compared her favourably with Laura the glove puppet’s wife. I note too that Uhlmann seems not so comfortable reporting on the Kevinator’s progress in foreign parts, perhaps because he can’t rely on his usual snide expression. All good.
Poison Dwarf’s at it again
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23451733-2761,00.html
And hey presto right on que here’s the hard done by pensioners’ story to go with it ,( a pair of signed up members of the local Lib branch no doubt)
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23450990-2761,00.html
“he warned that scores of seniors would make their feelings known at ballot boxes at the next federal election if the Rudd Labour government failed to act. ”
As if this bloke ever voted Labour in his life! Give me a break, and how come he never wrote to Howard with the same ultimation?
And by how much did Howard raise the Pension when HE was in power ?
Vera,
You forgot this little gem.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23451820-2761,00.html
And note these stories came out as soon as Rudd has left the Country ?
re 99,
Guess who wrote the story
Frank
That Poison Dwarf is a gutless little dwarf as well, don’t turn your back on him!
This is the guy that tied his hopes to Costello all those years, I guess they recognised gutless losers in each other. Now he is stuck trying to promote the Nelson LNP bunch of no hopers.
Just goes to show how low News Ltd standards have fallen, they promote trash writing as journalism. They have a fool trying to interpret polls and a bunch of second-rate liberal party writers trying to appear as serious journalists.
The only thing I ever saw Milne do well was stagger, drunken.
And another Strawman
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23452357-2761,00.html
Amazing.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23450545-5005361,00.html
Geee…stop promoting murdoch papers by putting links to their stories…they love you for it. Just tell us what they are on about.
Amazing allright
trying to give the impression that all these pensioners were living the good life, happy with their lot until that unkind, uncaring Mr Rudd came along and now they’re all living on the streets lining up at soup kitchens
And note that they are targeting aged pensioners, who were getting the Utilities allowance on their own before Rudd extended it to ALL Pensioners/Carers.
And what those on the DSP – aren’T we deserving as well ?
And what’s the bet these “pensioners” spend their payments on the pokies etc.
Oh and the Poisened Dwarf now adds the evil unions.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23416088-5007190,00.html
Frank I noticed in one of those stories that the pensioner couple in question were paying $300pw rent. I don’t live in WA, are rents really that high for a 1 bedroom flat/villa? I would have thought that they would also be able to get pensioner accomodation or rent assistance
Frank, that last Dwarf piece was a few days ago. Old and forgotten as is his article.
108
We’re coming back! we’re coming back1
Yep, they are that high here, and yes they would qualify for Rent Assistance.
There is an acute shortage of Homeswest Housing as well.
And I think Wilson is in the Federal Electorate of Tagney, a safe Liberal Seat, and a pretty upmarket area – hence the high rent.
And don’t Veterans get free medical care, heavily subsidised phone etc ? At least a lot more than your normal aged pensioner.
that figures
I live 2hrs south of Sydney and you can rent a brand new 4 brm house for $280 here. 2 brm flats start around $145
A good guide for rental prices by surburb is here.
http://reiwa.com/for-rent
oh and one of the Readers Comments what about the children of these pensioners, why aren’t they helping their parents ?
Rent prices for Wilson.
http://reiwa.com/for-rent/Wilson/
117
I’d love to drop people like that into one of those “third-world hellholes” with “those third-world outcasts” and leave them there to starve or be hacked to death with a machette.
oh yes racism is alive and well here in OZ
thanks frank
yep they are a bit pricey aren’t they
Same for those people who whinge about Hospital Emergency Dept waiting lists when they go in with a splinter, or being all boozed and spaced out.
Yep, thanks to the “Mining Boom”.
Oh and pensioners can atrtend cheap day centres where they can get a meal free or at a small cost, plus they get pensioner discounts on public transport and Seniors Card holders can ride free on Sundays and Public Holidays.
What more do they want.
some folks aren’t happy unless they’re having a bitch about something
This was debunked by Media Watch
http://www.abc.net.au/mediawatch/transcripts/s2191987.htm
Unbelievable
the fact it was circulated and condemned as an email scam back in August and has surfaced again for another rerun. Along with all these pensioner sob/outrage stories seems like another “carers fiasco” type campaign is getting into gear while Kev’s back is turned
Friend of mine found this page re the WA Coalition and Waste.
http://www.multiline.com.au/~johnm/waste.htm
Yep, and the timing is exactly the same, wate for Kev to piss off, then start the rumour mill.
That is the Opposition Orificie’s modus operandi at present, and despite their falling circulation, this stuff gets picked up by the rest of the MSM and spreads like wildfire.
A bit of Wink Wink nudge nudge going on there at “WA WINK”
“The ongoing saga of deceptive practices keeps the news media well-supplied with newsitems”
that’d be where the poison Dwarf and Newsltd gets all their rubbish
Goodnight Frank it’s1.30am here, time to hit the hay
Any body who lives in the same area as these journalists should go knock on their doors and confront them, to see if they can explain themselves. These guys hide behind their desks thinking they don’t have to face the public.
Clever girl, is Vera.
I note that the Sunday Times are the only paper in the News Ltd stable to run with the Pensions story.
I wonder if this is designed to sure up Julie Bishop’s support so she can take over as leader ?
Or even better, it’s Newspoll week, and I think some people are still being polled on Sunday – hopefully it’s designed to give Nelson a boost.
It is still a long way out from an election for the main stream media bias to be a concern to Labor. However, these people do need to be careful, especially the Murdoch press.
If the liberal bias continues in most of their papers over a long time then, Mr Rudd and friends may take the view that no matter what they do they will still get blackened by the press. He will get calls from within the ranks to change media laws on ownership and concentration. Certainly we need more owners of main stream media print/digital.
If Mr Rudd feels he has nothing to lose and his poll position is still quite strong, he may take the opportunity to break them up in some way rather than wait for the inevitable, the Murdoch campaign for the Liberal party at election time.
Certainly the Howard govt was dabbling in a little ‘corruption’ when it changed its media laws last time around.
I also expect Labor to make major changes at the ABC while increasing its funding, the smoke screen.
I think this is interesting
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23446644-601,00.html
The poor Australian trying to justify their rubbish. The media seems to becoming more shrill and the stories more irrational. What is their problem.
Did anyone have the misfortune of seeing the beat up by the “Sunday” program this morning re taxing super? Based on a few utterings by the super minister they conclude that change is on the way and how mean that would be on the over 60’s.
These utterings were very general by the way.
During this beat up they admitted there would be no change this budget, that the change would actually be beneficial financially if it was made and that it would take a brave government to do this. Ross Greenwood made the point that the government caved in on the pensioner and carer changes (the fact that that was a beat up in the first place didn’t enter his head of course) and could very well do the same on this.
Another such story being sprouted now that Kev’s overseas.
#133 The Australian’s Media Watch story is salutary of the latest trend in obnoxious journalism by the anti-Rudd forces.
Summed up, this is: it’s not the story it’s the derivatives of the story.
Milne
Milne runs around looking for “cover-ups” based on innocuous acts, e.g. who sent prefectly proper emails to whom three years ago, who met whom perfectly legally and publicly three years ago, who went to a strip club and might have (or not) behaved badly? All legal, normal, unremarkable, but Milne tries to trip Rudd up in the post-fact details so he can claim Rudd has “somethng to hide” i.e. a cover-up. He might even get a “misled Parliament” out of it if the tiny detail Rudd omits to mention, or gets a teensy-weensy bit wrong was uttered in response to a question from the Opposition.
Shanahan
Shanahan runs the dual “hypocrisy” and “poor judgement” lines. Someone trips over a pebble on the footpath. Shanahan uses this to say, “If their judgement about pebbles is so bad, what will their judgement be like when it comes to [jet fighter planes/the economy/pensioners... take your pick].
Or Shanahan will take the fact that Rudd is wealthy and turn it around into “Rudd is uncaring about carers because he’s rich”. See? “Hypocrisy”. “Honeymoon over”.
These are the ways Shanahan makes his molehills into mountains (Pies does a good line in the “millionaire Prime Minister” stakes too).
Today’s Installment
Journalist gets a story completely wrong. The entire factual basis of the allegation – in this case that a minister stayed overnight in swanky resort-style accommodation rather than sleep in a tin humpy and is thus a hypocrit – falls over when it is revealed she got a special cheap rate at the resort, and thus did not pay “exclusive high-priced rates”, and that there was nowhere else to stay anyway. So they leverage this total, erroneous beat-up into one about… Media Watch! “We got it wrong, but the government used pressure on the ABC to prove it.” Suddenly a wrong story about where the minister slept for one night becomes a corruption investigation into who leaned on who.
These are all different methods of leveraging a nothing incident, a mere bagatelle of half-baked facts, a cooked-up snide inference of “more to come” when the cupboard is (and was) always bare, into something more allegedly “serious”.
The slightly disturbing thing is that these crackpots have all the time in the world. Combine this with their possession of no shame or ethics whatsoever, and that they are prepared to prostitute their craft for the meanest reasons without any comeback at all from their publishers, and one day there could well be something that gets more than ten seconds’ traction.
Charles & BB. Journalistic integrity (sounds like a contradiction) @ the OO is par excellence for their standard. Milne & Shannas have to justify their existence by clutching at straws & shadow boxing (must make a sweat) as any tilt at real journalism would require being honest & unbiased.
These two Liberal trolls are more compromised than street hookers & to their shame they love the notoriety (sorry to street hookers) as they get their jollys trying to “stick it up” the Rudd Government.
As this modus operandi unfolds the reality is it is not the biased journos that stink as much as the piss weak opposition that hide behind them for lack ability to make an effort to find relevance as a meaningful political entity as they now stand for nothing in mainstream Australian politics & so these two “props” must carry the can! Whats the world coming too?
135 Bushfire Bill – great posting, one that is too good just to be restricted to this excellent site. I really believe something needs to done to expose this nonsense. We need to shine the light on these tactics. The journalists need to become the news over these tactics and then maybe, just maybe, the government will receive a fair go in the press, and that is all any of us truly want, a fair go. If the government genuinely deserves a kicking by all means give it to them but this type of journalism is just BS.
Is there a journalists standards council or some such that John Citizen can complain to about this nonsense? A beat up is one thing but getting the facts wrong or leaving them out altogether is something else.
Bushfire Bill should be the columnist, not those bum-licking Liberal beetles.
what surprises me is that murdoch sticks with such IMO poor quality journos like Milne. Not only does he write about minor trash his actual writing is quite a poor standard. I can only assume they keep to do what real journos wont.
I thought that Steve Price was the poisoned dwarf. Is Milne the PD mark II?
Pies’ article today is another case in point. http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23450922-5001031,00.html
It’s so venemous, so negative that I wonder what he hopes to achieve?
It starts off:
… and just gets worse after that. Suddenly the Prime Minister going overseas to see the leaders of some of our major trading and security partners is “a lap of honour.” Of course, when Howard did the same thing this was great statesmanship. Any criticism of Howard’s many laps of honour was cheap, sour grapes by an ineffectual Opposition too irrelevant to do anything else but carp and whinge.
Seems Labor can’t get anything right, according to Pies.
They’ve stuffed up the medical profession, treating them as some sort of “elite” (one of Pies’ favourite words, except he usually applies it to Labor, not doctors).
They totally ruined the Murray-Darling. Even though agreement was finally reached, they could only get it by caving in to a greedy state Labor government in Victoria. Never mind that Howard couldn’t get the states to take his proposal seriously, and that Rudd has succeeded, against the odds, most likely because Labor governments are more likely to co-operate with each other than not (the exact antithesis of the common wisdom before the election). Suddenly co-operation between governments is a bad thing. Getting 9 governments around Australia to agree on a plan to save the Murray is “a pea-and-thimble trick”.
Moving on, Rudd’s foreign affairs vision is now “dementia”, redolent of Doc Evatt at his worst. While Evatt did some curious things, he was also regarded as the Father of the UN and a champion of the rights of smaller states over the superpowers at the time. Pies even manages to re-introduce the Downer Line: that all Labor foreign policy since Federation has been appeasement and cowardice, mixed in with simple mindedness. Let’s put to one side Labor’s forming of the American alliance, the successful defence of Australia in the Pacific, the establishment of ASIO after the war. Labor was and is and will always be “soft” on National Security, and somehow or other the crazy link between Doc Evatt, Kevin Rudd, and ussian spies in the 1950s somehow “proves” it.
Oh, and while Pies is at it, he disses the “Australia as middle power” theory, which Pies calls “the mediocrity of middle power status”. He should have thought of this a little more deeply, as it was Howard’s main claim that Australia had indeed become a “middle power” under his stewardship.
But where else is there to go if we’re not a middle power? Presumably, we could buck for spuerpower status. This seems to be Pies’ line of thought as he berates Rudd for not invading China to punish them for recent oppression in Tibet. I know the SAS are good, but are they that good, Pies?
By the time the article groans to its incomprehensible conclusion, Pies is flaunting words like “hypocritical”, “Kremlin-like” and “cesspit” to describe the United Nations and, by implication, anyone who supports the “unelected” psychopaths that work for it (read: “Kevin Rudd”).
Labor, according to Pies, has always been against elites like doctors (while paradoxically being themselves a chardonnay-sipping elite). They have always failed on National Security, from back in the days of Doc Evatt’s UN-influenced dementia. They are failing to this day. And how in the hell could they ever fix water in the Murray? They’re not even farmers!
That such a vitriolic bag of malignant wind as Pies actually exists is a shocking thing to contemplate. That it writes a regular column for a major newspaper makes me worried. That it has a permanent position on a national political TV show, Insiders, boggles the mind. That it has not been carted off to a rest home for the permanently deranged, or else just taken outside Sydney heads and dumped overboard, alarms me. That it dares to lecture others on their excesses (and Glen Milne gets a guernsey here too) is truly obscene.
By God, just what did Rudd say to Pies when he had that lunch with him a couple of years ago? The man seems to have taken great offence, whatever it was.
I just saw the Dead Tree version of The Sunday Crimes and that “Campaign” sounds a lot wose – it even includes a coupon “Petition” to the PM which doesn’t even meet the standards needed to table it in Parliament.
I’m waiting for tonight’s news.
Perhaps, hopefully, we are witnessing the unravelling of this pious gutter-level pile of bile. “Tired and emotional” after what we can assume was an intensely-felt election loss, and subjected now to the unrelenting reality of Labor in office federally and in every state, everything this canetoad cherishes has been dynamited, and Labor, the embodiment of his practically unlimited hatred, prospers as never before.
His emotional investment in the Liberals’ holding of power has seen him bankrupted and cruelly evicted from his psychological comfort zone.
It can only be a matter of time before the group therapy afforded by employment by Murdoch no longer mollifies and he completely unwinds and spins out of the public eye, to retreat to a personal hell, there to spend the rest of his life hating hating hating.
Brilliant work Bushfire Bill. Your description of the bumble-brained correspondent as “a vitriolic bag of malignant wind” has set me up for a reasonably cheerful Sunday afternoon. Thankyou.
I reckon Rudd, in a gesture of fraternal compassion, might have leant over the table and whispered to Piers that the old boy was looking a little ragged, that his insecurity and foolishness were not only splashed over the front of his shirt but that some of it had begun to seep out from under his chair.
BB,
The fire is burning heartily today. This is an absolute classic.
“That such a vitriolic bag of malignant wind as Pies actually exists is a shocking thing to contemplate.”
Describing that “vitriolic bag of malignant wind” as a “Canetoad” is rather insulting to the amphibians I think.
Did anyone see him on Insiders this morning.
What a wast of valuable broadcast time. The man is almost totally unhinged. The panel spent most of the time talking over each other in their eagerness to outdo each other in attempting to belittle and ridicule Kevin 07.
Most probably the last time I waste time on watching such rubbish. Half Nelson was at his appalling worst as usual. What a waste of space.
BB,
Have you taken out a copy right on that yet.
Love it. So appropriate and describing the creature so aptly too.
Check this out for a sook having a good old whinge and trying not to come across as juvinile and petty. Good old Steve Price.
split
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23450915-5001031,00.html
And do you blame Rudd after what Price did with Peter Garrett during the Election Campaign ?
Oh and Price isn’t rating as highly as the man he replaced, John Laws.
Scorpio,
I don’t think Kevin and Co. give a toss actually.
Don’t you just love Shrek.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23455122-5005361,00.html
This guy is as nuts at the rest of the RWDC media spin merchants.
Why would Rudd at a PPM of 65% and with Labor at around 64/36 2PP, bother to give these cretins any oxygen whatsoever.
Surely they can’t be so brain addled as to think that Rudd is not intelligent enough to sidestep their feeble, self promoting bigotry.
I’ve given up on Insiders too.
It offers nothing more relevant than gossip and opinionation. As the panelists snigger amongst themselves you wish you had a silicone ashtray – one that would bounce off – to throw at the screen. Even shouting into the speaker does no good nowadays.
The irony is of course that the likes of Pies are demonstrably not “insiders”. Nor is Fran Kelly, continually bemoaning Howard’s absence, saying that whatever it was, the old man would have done better. Mischa Schubert? Who’s she? Paul Kelly? A has-been who never was. Barrie Cassidy? Could’a been a contender, but lost the plot (and his soul) long ago. Viewers expect more than weekly circle jerks nowadays.
More irrelevance on the ABC: this morning’s radio news had a minute long excerpt of Fishnets ranting on about “Mr. Rudd’s” failure (indeed inability) to succeed on the diplomatic front. In 12 long years of watching this wanker berate Lateline viewers from the lounge room studio at his home in Adelaide, I never saw Downer accomplish any of the things or solve any of the problems he expects Rudd to have solved in four short months.
Their hatred of Rudd is the hatred the schoolyard bully feels for the school swot as he, the bully, realises that the best he can hope to achieve in adulthood after ten years dodging lessons and bashing other kids is a life of menial labour, six screaming kids and perennial problems paying the bills every first of the month for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile the kid he used to pick on forges ahead, goes to university and comes back (if he ever does come back) so successful that he could buy and sell the whole town if he chose. Worse than that, all the mums are glad he made it. That rankles terribly.
Downer, Costello and Howard were all bullied by others. I’ve read somewhere that Pies moved from college to college when he was a boy, looking for peace. Milne? Why wouldn’t a short, baby-faced dwarf with pretensions to intellectuality cop it big time from every fat-arsed big noter around? They’d have been queueing up to “do” little Glenn.
In turn all of them, bullied as children, have become bullies themselves, except the world has moved on.
The meek (and smart) have inherited the Earth.
Here’s another one who seems to have totally lost the plot since Howard’s demise.
If this is Tim Blair’s best effort at “satire” or a mixture of comedy with “news” reporting, I think it falls flatter than a cigarette paper.
Some of his targets deserve better also. I don’t think they would be at all pleased.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23446091-5001031,00.html
Tim Blair might be “Glen” in disguise? We know how much he likes “wax”.
And this!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23446126-5001031,00.html
I can’t believe that any half intelligent person could part with their hard earned to buy this sort of rubbish.
Most of the other on-line articles are in a similar vein. It is not just the sub-editing of the headers and intros, it’s the content of the articles too.
And note where Today Tonight/A Current Affair get their “Stories” from – nuff said.
I hope Conroy kicks butt over media laws.
I agree Frank.
I think the whole bundle of media in this country needs to be tossed in the trash can and the whole exercise begun from scratch.
Well put BB. I think you have nailed it very accurately.
Just read the Hockey article. Funny how nobody seems to put their name to rubbish such as this.
http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,23455122-5005361,00.html
The News Ltd publications are starting to make “Mad Magazine” look like ultra serious journalism.
They’re just writing the first thing that comes into their empty heads.
There are a few decent ones still around… Shaun Carney comes to mind. Almost every column of his nowadays is a minor gem. Mike Carlton, SMH Saturday, for his ascerbic wit (but accurate facts). Megalogenis. That young finance chappie who’s on Friday’s Lateline. Kerry O’Brien when he’s not trying to be “tough”. A few others who at least try to develop cogent arguments based on reality.
For the rest, you wouldn’t use their “work” to wrap fish and chips.
BB – Good posts.
There is an Insiders feedback form here that I’d encourage using: http://www.abc.net.au/insiders/contact.htm . I can handle the gossip and adversarial setup – it is by no means a heavyweight show but I think it realises this by now. But Piers is so tedious. He still hasn’t grasped that the job of the analyst is not to be a snide partisan. He doesn’t have the intellectual faculties to follow the discussion and just snipes from his little lair at the end of that couch. Send a get rid of Piers message today!
I loved these two comments on the Price article.
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23450915-5001031,00.html
Good link Pancho.
I’ve been getting more and more fed up with Insiders since they started up again this year.
I shall take a little time and make my feelings known.
There seems to be a number of Shanahans working for News Ltd.
Are they related?
This one here, Brandan Shanahan, doesn,t have a somewhat warped sense of humour.
This sort of stuff is seriously “sick”!
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23441178-5001031,00.html
That’ll show ‘em!
Hi General Budgers
(as opposed to US primary bludgers),
the commentary on the poor standard in the MSM is absolutely on the money. I don’t even bother trawling the Oz msm anymore ; tend to come straight here and follow the posted links as the diversity of views and the breadth of articles is great. If anything of major importance is happening someone aludes to it. And it’s fun too.
I hope these has-beens like Ackerman , Milne, Albrechtson, Shanihan and the other liberal hacks that have held the reigns for so long aare destined to sink into the obscurity they so deserve.
Cheers-
back to the US Primaries thread where the insults fly thick and fast.
The MSM clearly have rocks in their heads sometime. Has anyone else worked out where the supposed “one billion” live viewers of the stations of the cross at World Youth day are? Yet they keep going on about the one billion people as if it is true.
It is like the time they report 300 million people watch the AFL grand final. Where are all these people and why isn’t there something more interesting on TV for these people?
what we are seeing is only a sample of the avalanche that will come 10 months out from an election. i f anything is to be done to change or neutralise the liberal party press it should start soon.
in truth only one thing needs to be acheived to negate the effectiveness of the neocon press. get it into the minds of people that a particular paper is trying elect the liberal party. the auto filter then gets applied. this is where murdochs well known right wing leanings is a help.
The “Journalists” or rather commentators that we are so upset about will fade into irrelevance.
They have made their reputations on “background briefings”, “off the record chats” and Govt. leaks.
Unfortunately for them the supply of information has dried up and they are “not happy Kev”.
The next stage is when the “preferred” Govt. “journalists” suddenly start getting the good stuff. The Milnes and Shanahans will of course fight like hell to retain their status as media gurus but without being spoonfed the “insider tips” they will eventually become like Pies and Bolta.
Until this change happens we are in the politics “silly season”. Just like the Liberals have yet to come to grips with the fact they lost the election – the media has yet to realise the Govt. has changed.
Oh yes – he had to do it sometime.
Hockey has finally had to raise his head over the parapet on a health issue:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23455372-29277,00.html
Look, he might or might not be a good bloke, but shadow health fits him like Heather Mills on the front cover of “Frugal Living”.
Sheesh! From the Hock on Binge Drinking article cited above:
So they’re not abusing alcohol… they’re abusing drugs. That’s OK then.
What.a.dill.
regardless of journos the murdoch media will assist the LNP next election whgt their usual methods
How the US press see our PM.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/29/AR2008032900322.html
Gotta love our ABC’s headlines
“Rudd owes US popularity to Coalition: Opposition”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/30/2202839.htm?section=australia
what a mob of sooks (Libs that is not the ABC)
Bushfire Bill, what joy you have given today, still smiling at gems like this:
“That it has not been carted off to a rest home for the permanently deranged, or else just taken outside Sydney heads and dumped overboard, alarms me.”
Keep it up, you are a sorely needed antidote to the venomous toads infesting our MSM.
i dont think nelson should mention past relationships too much-it was Howards pet dog relationship that caused the liberal govt to lie us into Iraq.
from onimod 174 article
“I think most Australians are very responsible when it comes to alcohol consumption,” Mr Hockey said, adding he did not think Australia was in the grip of a binge drinking crisis.
“There is a bit of an issue out there but I don’t think you should overplay it,” Mr Hockey told Sky News.
“Let’s not go over the top. I don’t accept there’s a crisis.”
After reading this maybe his theme song should be “no no not responible”
http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/gday-kev-its-russ/2008/03/29/1206207485693.html
“The best form I ever saw Costello in was at a millennium year Easter soiree hosted by financial services minister Joe Hockey in his Parliament House office. To this day I don’t know how Hockey managed to smuggle so much booze into one office, but with a pair of white bunny ears stuck to his head, he made sure no bottle was left unfinished.”
According to the sadly departed antonio (Tony Jones?) on this blog this is a perfectly acceptable headline.
While it may not be true, it is true the Libs claim it.
Good enough for “balance” at Your ABC.
And note Mark Scot last week saying that he wants to model ABC News & Current Affairs on the Sky News model re staffing levels.
Says it all really.
Robot cameras. Robot brains. I’m convinced.
The less staff they have the more they will reprint press releases and call it “balance”.
I still can’t get over them playing Alex Downer on this morning’s news as if what he thought about Rudd meant anything.
“ABC News delenda est”
*** Speaking metaphorically, of couse.
Bill Bowe.
I sent you an email but you seem to have missed it. Your link to my site still points to the old test site.
The new url is http://www.politicsau.com
I see the Qld consevative merger talks are going as well as ever.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/30/2202918.htm
Ahh the QLD Niberals.. still as entertaining as ever.
i reckon the OO have been sitting on a honeymoon over storey for about 12 months which the sham has been aching to run given the pasting he has recieved from possums.
maybe his big this week.
That is a quotable quote..
Bushfire Bill Says:
Perhaps your not the first to use the line “vitriolic bag of malignant wind”.
And did you see CH 7 playing up the Japanese Journo “Grilling” rudd over not visiting Japan, with the follow up footage of Nelson expressing same ?
good old Xenophobia.
You wouldn’t know it form the recent posts but there has just been an election which could actually change people lives – Zimbabwe. Early reports show the opposition claiming victory. Despite the vote rigging and intimidation could it be possible – let’s hope so.
Does anyone have any links to what is happening – most of the reports I can find are hours old.
Anybody care to venture an opinion on the NT Council elections? I know some here are dismissive of local govt, but it WAS an election…and apparently there could be some changes in the make-up of the Council in Darwin from what I’ve heard.
Any comments from NT people?
While driving up to the local Coles’s, have just endured 10 minutes of Alexander Downer (interviewed by Monica Attard on ABC radio) indulging in the greatest dummy-spit of modern (or ancient) history.
Why she called him “Mr. Downer” I cannot fathom.
Why he was let anywhere near a microphone while it was switched on and hooked up to a recording apparatus, I will never guess.
He actually accused Rudd of playing “party politics” with (presumably) a straight face. We all know, of course, that Ol’ Fishnets himself was never guilty of that. No, no, no, no, no…. he was a Philosopher King, loftily allowing himself to serve only for the good of the nation, selflessly soaring above politics in his quest for Eternal Truth and well-being of the darker races.
Now that I have heard everything, I can die in peace.
Thank you, Lexy. I needed that.
Robot cameras. Robot brains. I’m convinced.
Why not robot talking heads? Bound to be more sensible than many of the human variety Auntie has been employing recently!
Winston. Try this site – http://www.zesn.org.zw/ It is slow loading up!
Winston @ 193 – If someone has indeed stuffed up on rigging the election, the question is what will Mugabe and his cronies do? Could they really afford to hand power over? I have this sinking feeling that it will end in tears..and bucket loads of blood
Thanks Aussieguru but been there. Nothing recent.
Seems the military are backing Mugabe which spells trouble. But perhaps the people have finally had enough of him. Any change would be better.
Limited options in dealing with persistent media bias Such as – ‘Get Up’ undertakes a campaign to petition the government to decrease media concentration; a well funded independent media review panel of media academics and a judge with crew operating daily reporting weekly with the right to recommend/refer sizable penalties for papers and journalists showing a ‘pattern’ of dishonest reporting and partisan presentation; Legislate some new standards in honesty and balance to media news and opinion; A national paper cannot own state papers; one person/company can own only two state papers and no regional papers, no radio or tv stations.
And so on.
Papers seem to think that when they put a piece under Opinion that it can then be partisan and unbalanced as you like. But Opinions in the papers should be well argued and supported by data and alternative data/interpretation presented and reasons given for the conclusion/opinion thus reached.
Or try this Winston – http://www.lompocrecord.com/articles/2008/03/30/ap/headlines/d8vnmqn80.txt
Winston
Mugabe has lost the election several times, lets wait and see if he takes the hint this time.
196 BB
That’s the second time in a week I’ve heard Alex the Irrelevant commenting on his FORMER portfolio. Anyone would think he wanted it back, or at least the shadow version…..
I can hardly see him and Robb taking the time to make sure they’ve got their stories straight, or maybe the lowest common denominator is low enough to suit both of them.
On second reading I’ve decided that Jason Koutsoukis’ article deserves to be saved for future reference. I reckon it was probably a toned down version of his first draft, but he definitely served Costello a burger with the lot. And he either did it well enough to avoid direct outrage, or even fewer people than thought give two hoots about the former unopposed future leader.
Good luck in Jerusalem Jason.
Going to be a lot of sore heads, and a frustrated Nelson.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/nelson-vows-to-knock-heads-together/2008/03/30/1206815310631.html
Maybe they should invite them all over to Hockey’s place and get them p***ed first.
They maybe able to get a reasonable degree of co-operation out of them or else it could just develop into an all-in Barny.
With a bit of skin off here and there and a few loose teeth, they might just come up with a resolution.
Then again, maybe not. I don’t hold out any hope for them. Sad really.
It seems that Hilliary wasn’t lying about being shot at after all.
More here.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=uHVEDq6RVXc
Did anyone see this documentary?
Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism
Documentary on reported Conservative bias of the Rupert Murdoch-owned Fox News Channel (FNC), which promotes itself as “Fair and Balanced”. Material includes interviews with former FNC employees and the inter-office memos they provided.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0418038/
I caught my young fellow looking at a youtube clip earlier in which Bush was denying ever saying that the US cannot cut and run from Iraq.
Thought I would have a look for myself and typed in “Bush lies”. There is only 4150 clips in which Bush, Chaney etc are telling lies about the war in Iraq.
John Howard sure got off lightly.
http://au.youtube.com/results?search_query=Bush+lies&search_type=
There are some real lulu’s here and well worth an entertaining hour or so to have a look.
Yeah, Kina. I think it got a fair bit of coverage on the BBC web site not long back.
They had a full report on it. I was not impressed at the level of control of information exercised by this man.
Does media bias affect voting? A report – you may wish to skip to the conclusion unless your into the mathematics.
The Fox News Effect: Media Bias and Voting
Part of the conclusion here:
The audience estimates imply that exposure to Fox News induced 3 to 8 percent of its non-Republican viewers to start voting for the Republican party. The size of this effect is consistent with the findings of field experiments on voter mobilization, and are lower than most laboratory evidence of media effects.
http://cbdr.cmu.edu/seminar/DellaVigna.pdf
This is a short clip and well worth a look. Says it all really.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=rHYb9rf2BBQ
Now the Opposition Orifice are raising the dreaded Public Servants facing the axe.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23448324-2702,00.html
Like I think I have said before I believe Rudd Labor has nothing to gain by paying any attention to the print media. He is obviously on a hiding to nothing with them so may as well press on with all original plans. By going overboard the murdoch crew have dealt themselves out of the game.
And the danger for murdoch is that if Labor comes out states a need to deal with a partisan media through concentration/ownership laws much of the population would nod their heads – especially if the name murdoch is associated with it.
And for those that cant sleep:
Media Mergers and Media Bias with Rational Consumers
http://www.virginia.edu/economics/papers/anderson/murdochs070308.pdf
In some circumstances they can manipulate political outcomes by distorting the information that consumers of news receive. They can do this, even though
news consumers are perfectly rational and know the bias of the publishers, because the consumers do not know how much information the news organization has. However, there are also conditions under which a media monopoly is politically disadvantageous, because of the suspicion that rational consumers attach to the behavior of a politically-motivated news monopoly.
This one’s a bit scary. Check out the flash and the mushroom cloud still shining brightly in the distance.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=GtTQ8O7mH08&feature=related
More Poison Dwarf.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23456621-33435,00.html
I wont go there unless I get some hint what it is about. In fact give me a hint what it is about and I wont have to go there because I automatically will know the sort of thing that will be written…and that is one less click helping the OO along.
For you Kina
Milne finally admits it…
Doing their leg work for them, eh, Glenn? That’s a fairly naked admission, I would have thought. Sort of confirms a lot of things written in these pages in the past few days.
Milne of course amplifies the significance of the “missing” $1 billion. while being careful to say that Penny Wong was genuinely mistaken, and reporting that the government tried to correct the story that the $1 billion was “new”, he ignores all that anyway and reprints the Opposition’s summary of the facts as his own (two admissions in one day? Good for you Glenn!):
I can see that there might be a case against the Victorian Premier, but how does Glenn make it stick against Rudd? Where’s his proof that Rudd deliberately set out to skewer Howard on water (as, of course Howard tried to do to Rudd, on the same subject)?
Forgive me for my poor memory, but Rudd has only been PM for four months. Victoria has been holding out (if that is indeed a fair description) for fourteen months. Where was Rudd in this time? Pulling the strings? I thought he agreed with the scheme and said so at every opportunity.
And anyway, as far as the Victorian Premiers involved are concerned – Bracks and Brumby – can’t a couple of blokes change their minds? I mean, it’s easier to agree with someone who’s “here to help” than it is with a desperate, failing arm-twister trying to score cheap points with a scheme dreamed up over a scotch and jotted down on the back of an envelope, isn’t it?
Further to my point… Milne alleges that ALL the Labor Premiers were in on the scam. Again, where is his proof? Five of them (except Victoria) signed up to Howard’s scheme months ago, well beofre the election. There was even talk of cutting Victoria loose, I seem to recall.
If I was Rudd, I’d start to get angry at about this point. Milne has (once again) amplified a snippet of conjecture into a 1000 page novel. He has issued a blanket condemnation of every government in Australia, alleging a conspiracy over a vital national resource. This conspiracy lasted fourteen months, and involved all six Premiers consistently lying over that period, even to the point of formally signing up to the scheme… except Victoria. All based on one ambiguous fact.
Gee, that’s guaranteed to make him even more of an “insider”, right?
Rudd should just ignore turkeys like Milne and go along with a change to media laws that pit turkeys like him up against genuine journalists and genuine competition.
Also a continuous operative ‘media review panel’ would pick up these things daily and, report the deliberate errors/corrections as they arose. People might get into the habit of referring to the board’s on-line site on a regular basis just to see how they have been lied to …and when they see how often it is they may make it a habit. If only such a thing existed.
Just think within hours of a story’s publication its faults can be immediately published. With much embarrassment to people like Milne and the OO.
Re Kevin Rudd not having to have spoken with the Japanese PM, not even on the phone.
Well I thought that protocol would be that after the election and we had a new PM in Kevin Rudd, it was up to the Japanese PM to contact Kevin Rudd and congratulate him on his win and welcome him and also invite him to Japan, not the other war round.
So it should be the Japanese who are embarrassed.
Er… and who was responsible for putting the ’spin’ on reporting of the M-D agreement?
Journalists.
If you look at the actual media releases and interviews, no pollie went out there claiming it was extra money. The media did.
So either the media were spinning the story or didn’t understand it or didn’t do their research.
Concentrating on the billion dollars ignores the fact that for Victoria the M-D agreement was not about money (except that we weren’t getting a fair share of it – only $1 billion of the $10 b was going to Victorian projects) but about long term decision making on water issues.
Milne laments that the govt did not do enough to correct the story and therefore are complicit in the spin. But when the govt went all out to correct the story in the case of the carers’ allowance, the media either didn’t run with the correction or treated it as irrelevant.
And in another media story that’s been getting a run in regional Australia (the EI levy) the media has blatantly ignored the Departmental media releases.
If the media is going to spin stories and ignore Government corrections, they have no right to complain when the Government doesn’t correct them vigorously enough.
I found Milne’s opening sentence deeply ironic.
Senator Sherry to make major Superannuation speech today.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/superannuation-to-cop-a-caning/2008/03/30/1206850745718.html
A lot of doom and gloom here today. Well here’s some more. I heard on Radio National this morning that Islam is now the largest religion in the world, presumably due to their higher birth rate. I personally blame the Catholics who have slipped into second place. Popes have been quite specific – plenty of jigajig, no condoms, no pills, and no vasectomies, but no one took any notice.
This point was half made today by Richard(?) Jennet, the ABC’s guy travelling with Rudd.
His statement was full of “sort of”, “it could be argued” etc. etc. when talking about the definite diplomatic protocol which says incumbent leaders (e.g. Japanese) should ring and congratulate freshly elected ones (e.g. Australian), not the other way around. In the end, however, the point was made: Japan should have rung Australia (sometimes I get the impression that ABC reporters are so used to looking over their shoulders at a conservative dominated government watching their every move that they just can’t shake the “qualification” habit).
Without the formality of the “welcome to the leaders’ club” phone call it becomes difficult to invite yourself and your entourage (e.g. Australian) along to the offending leader’s country (e.g. Japan).
GrannyAnny – ah, that would be the fault of our atheistic Western world, which has rejected the sound values of the Church and instead adopted a hedonistic lifestyle filled with recreational sex and the consequent use of contraceptive devices.
If only we threw off the shackles of materialism, renounced Protestantism and returned to the embrace of the True Church! Women would once again know their place (convent or home) and be content to raise broods of 20 children whilst their man went out to run the world.
I blame Martin Luther, myself.
I didn’t know you where a comedian Zoom!
219
Bushfire Bill Says:
Further to my point… Milne alleges that ALL the Labor Premiers were in on the scam. Again, where is his proof? Five of them (except Victoria) signed up to Howard’s scheme months ago, well beofre the election. There was even talk of cutting Victoria loose, I seem to recall.
Just shows you the true extent of their machiavellian machinations, BB. Those commie premiers are weally, weally evil scam artists! But they weren’t smart enough to fool ol’ Glenn.
With the Democrats pretty much finito we need someone who’ll keep the bastards honest. Ain’t we luck we got a genuine genius like Milne willing to step into the breech?
I posted above some research and analysis that showed:
‘The audience estimates imply that exposure to Fox News induced 3 to 8 percent of its non-Republican viewers to start voting for the Republican party. The size of this effect is consistent with the findings of field experiments on voter mobilization, and are lower than most laboratory evidence of media effects.’
Though it is not Australia it does raise the question of what effect does consistent exposure to murdoch press and Sky News have. The 3% to 8% above is actually a big deal, it can decide who is President. It appears that the current tactic is of negative saturation by the ABC and Murdoch media [OO] over a period of time to force a change in voter thinking.
#230
Sky News has seemed reasonably balanced most of the time when I’ve watched it, which is only now and then, and it was the place to be for politics junkies during the 2007 election campaign.
Kina. Here in QLD last The Courier Mail had a “sweet ‘n sour approach to Rudd & Labor & yes they did try to put some wind in the coalitions sails but even they figured out which way the wind blew. No mattered how many times they tried the public was telling them how it was going to be. Hence the largest swing to Rudd in his home state & the CM jumped on board & gave a positive editorial on election day. I guess they had to save face!:-D
I’ve probably posted this before, but it seems to me that the media should have similar foreign ownership restrictions as Qantas and Telstra.
Its no secret that Murdoch often uses his shrills to further his international business interests. Interests that may not necessarily be to our advantage here. The American’s wouldn’t let him play in their sandpit unless he became one of them, I don’t see why our standards should be any lower.
Re the water deal -
Isn’t this whole argument about the states ‘holding out’ a furfy?
Wasn’t it Howard that picked a fight with the states by reneging on a verbal agreement? Which in itself was a strategy to back up his election platform of unco-operative Labor governments?
Having an agreement with them on the water deal would have destroyed that argument ergo – the coalition gave it the kybosh themselves…..a truly magnificent demonstration of ‘not playing party politics’…..not.
This man seems to run out of ideas if anybody sees him on the listening tour could they be so kind as to give him a few of their ideas. He’s travelling to a servo near you.
http://www.grods.com/post/2223/
Note the contrast between Howard and Rudd. Rudd is actually explaining something to Bush, they seemed to be involved in ‘intelligent’ conversation.
http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200803/r236552_952902.jpg
Can anybody make any sense of this? What sort of businesses can’t be bothered with a business plan?
“Few small business owners are making any plans to survive an economic downturn despite worrying about the prospect of a recession.
Eighty-three per cent of respondents consider planning and preparing a business to ensure survival through an economic recession to be important, but only 44 per cent actually have a business plan.”
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/national/small-business-fears-recession/2008/03/31/1206850762263.html
At the risk of starting off a war I wish to express a slight concern regarding the Future Forum, or at least the announced list for it. (I didn’t apply and that is not the reason for concern).
When it was first announced it was to include a discission on Infrastructure, which I was pleased to hear. But now that has been subsumed into a category called “Population, Sustainability, Climate Change and Water”. There are some excellent economists in the list (Garnaut, Quiggan), good climate and water scientists (Pearman et all), but hardly a social or urban planner in sight, and no transport engineers I am familiar with. World ranked experts like Newman and Kenworthy (WA), Troutbeck (QUT) and even Paul Mees (Vic, for a dissenting view) are all missing, as are public sector demographers who know more than Bernard Salt about population trends. (I am not suggesting Salt knows nothing, but most of his work is popularising the results of research by others.) Rather than a list of the “best and brightest” this seems to be a list of the “Highest Profile and Best Connected”.
I do not see how such a group will possibly come up with any new ideas in infrastructure. They might “discover” economic policy options that have been all over European Parliament websites for years, but were ignored by the last government. That is not a bad thing, but doesn’t go far enough. In transport, climate change and infrastrucure we are dealing with technical issues, that need technical solutions, as well as economic ones. Economics alone won’t solve it. So why invite a room full of economists and business players prominent in the current system, when that system is itself part of the problem?
About the only recognisable transport name is (unfortunately) Everald Compton for “Future Directions for Rural Industries and Rural Communities”. Compton has been pushing an inland rai project for years, but it is hopelessly uneconomic. The inclusion of people like him suggests actions to appease rural voters rather than face reality.
Maybe the other sections will be better, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for this lot to do anything about transport or infrastructure. Indeed, I can’t really see them making any hard decisions about climate change either, as the numbers are heavily tilted towards the status quo.
“GEORGE W.Bush’s first appearance with Kevin Rudd as Australian Prime Minister was almost embarrassing to watch as the US President ate political dirt and performed tortuous linguistic contortions in the name of the alliance.”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23457512-2702,00.html
Shamahan feels sorry for Bush – not that he feels great that we have a leader who has finally made the Texan village idiot talk sense. What vitriolic wind bag….
Yes, poor Bush. The tragic victim of his own lies and arrogance.
The poor doctor’s Union is a bit miffed too.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/31/2203449.htm
Socrates @ 239, I agree with you. I am not expecting much to arise from this 2020 summit. Annabel Crabb had a good idea on insiders yesterday which was everyone who wanted to go should have been made to nominate their big idea for the future before the summit. The focus of the summit would then have been about discussing these nominated ideas rather than spending a weekend pitching buzzwords at each other over a cup of tea and a milk arrowroot.
239
Socrates, can’t see yoiu starting any wars over it but it does seem that there are some persons on the list that a lot of us would rather not see there.
It may be that a lot of those that we may wish were there could not be bothered nominating in so far as they had to stump up their airfares and accommodation for the privelege.
I understand if you did not nominate then you do not get picked to go.
I for one would be completely s*#t off if i stumped up $5,000.00 to go to it and found i was on a committee sitting next to some ex cocaine snorter like Pies or that other insider, Lightning (bolt, thinks he is very flash). I do not know if they are starters but i believe there are a couple as brain dead as them going.
243
I think you will find Iced Vovos on the menu, perhaps only on the chairpersons table
Interesting how Jennifer Buckingham got a guersay for the summit – I wonder what ideas the CIS can come up with other than economic rationalism?
Kina @ 237 -
they seemed to be involved in ‘intelligent’ conversation.
Yes, but one of them is faking it!
steve @ 238 -
What sort of businesses can’t be bothered with a business plan?
The sort that blame the government when they inevitably go bellyup.
As will many of those who’ve borrowed against the increased equity in their homes to buy shiny baubles, most of which have long since gone to the dump.
I think it must be written into their AWAs – ‘no positive mentions of Labor in any article’
Funny the Sham would take a rediculous angle like that as there is nothing to support it except, maybe Bush and Howard dancing around in nightgown and skimpy jocks in his own imagination. Obvioiusly Sham thinks Bush feels embarassed because he feels he is two-timing a lover, Howard. Sham must be one of those guys who thinks the nightclub pole dancer really and truly loves him.
It is a wonder he didn’t mention Brown and the withdrawl of British troops and suggest they have a tortured relationship because Bush feels he is being unfaithful to Blair.
The Sham ought to take a closer look and wonder if the Howard Bush relationship is because Howard agreed to do whatever the President told him – a codependent relationship.
Sham should have taken the other line – Bush had to for a change enage our PM on an intellectual level.
On Zimbabwe:
http://www.sokwanele.com/thisiszimbabwe/
I have suspected that Mugabe has in the past held strong rural support, more recently aided by fraud and intimidation, but hopefully they have shifted.
“Convicted terrorism supporter David Hicks…” This in The Age. Is this description accurate? Was he convicted?
It is a wonder they left out the word ‘muslim’ – must be getting slack out their in bs land.
Gary
I guess it depends on if he ever went before a proper court. Which in my view he did not.
Regardless of jurisdiction, Hicks never could have been charged, much less convicted in Australia, as it was a retrospectively defined offense, which breaches our legal conventions.
I don’t recall Hicks ever being before a court.
I see Brendan (that’s what he wants us to call him) is starting his chat tour. I wonder if the same political commentators criticising Rudd for having a talkfest and using arguments such as – “isn’t that what members of parliament are for?” “Doesn’t he have ideas of his own?” etc. will criticise Brendan. Me thinks not.
He went before the murdoch court of summary execution.
Looks like a rift could be developing in the Qld Libs with the failure of the Pineapple party to get off the ground.
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/queensland/mcardle-urges-disgruntled-mp-to-stay-with-libs/2008/03/31/1206850774761.html
231 Triton – I wish I could receive that version of Sky News, mine’s as biased as it gets.
Gary
He reached a plea bargaining agreement with the US military tribunal, which effectively represents pleading guilty before a (military) court. I don’t wish to quibble about that.
The real question is whether the process would have met any standard of justice or fairness, to which independent legal observers from US, UK and Australia all said “No”. Thus anywhere else, the conviction would have been quashed on appeal. The US chose to invent (after the fact) an offense (supporting terrorism) and a legal process (the tribunals) which were outside the normal legal processes (hence no recourse to Australian or US appeal Courts) and used methods (retroespective offences) which are not normally permitted in the legal practice of any of the three countries. Still, I guess it was good enough for Phillip Ruddock to decide that one of our citizens could be tried under it.
I’ve just been going over the polling figures before tonights Newspoll comes in – using a revolving Morgan/Newspoll two party preferred average and looking at the difference between the first 18 weeks of the Howard and Rudd governments poll results, the highest result for Howard is less than the lowest result for Rudd.
The average two party preferred gap between Rudd and Nelson has been 21 points compared to the average gap Howard held over Beazley of 15 points.
What’s interesting is that these results aren’t new for Rudd – they’re just a repeat of his poll highs leading up to the election being called.
I wonder if these polls might not not be exaggerating the level of support for Rudd that most (dare I say it) “Honeymoon” period polls do for any new government?
If these polls are only exaggerating the true political margin of Rudd by 50%, it makes it a high probability that the talked about imminent by-elections of Gippsland and Higgins would fall to Labor, Mayo would be tight and Lyne would be really really open to an independent taking the seat if they could come third in a three cornered contest.
Steve,
A defecting MP is surely a blessing for the Qld Libs – it breaks the four-all deadlock amoung the current eight MPs. Besides, then they’ll be able to cal them “The Magnificent Seven”. ROTFL
The Qld Libs will soon need a mirror to hold a meeting.
Steve at 257
If Dickson jumps ship to the Pineapple Party, at least the Libs wont have to contemplate tossing a coin to decide the party leader in the near future!
I can see the headline:
Leadership Stability – Odd Numbers Deliver!
Doh – I’m channeling Socrates!
Keeping with the theme: “I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live.”
It truly is rediculous. The Qld Libs who are almost extinct still cant unite, the NSW Libs have gone tribal and the Federal Libs cant stand each other as well as having no ready talent and still unable to let go of Workchoices type IR.
Why on earth is the media supporting these people? All they do is encourage them to continue unchanged. They ought to be honest and tell the public that the State and Federal Liberal party are a total faction riven mess lost in sundry ideological caverns and, that they must sort themselvs out to be a viable and healthy alternative government.
If there happens to be a judicial inquiry into any one of the dodgy events of the Howard years god help them. The muck will come to the surface very quick. Odd that Downer has poked his head up over the barricade given that the AWB bribery scandal could still get a further judicial going over.
Possum
To think they made jokes in 1986 that the Qld Liberals didn’t have enough members for a cricket team (ten members!). There are so many great headlines if Dickson leaves the Liberals:
- The Magnificent Seven
- Become a Liberal, and you too can be a Shadow Minister
- Eight is too much
- They can still form a Netball Team!
- Where is Snow White?
Six of the … err, Best.
“Where is snow white?” – Roflol!
“Sunshine Coast Federal Liberal MP Peter Slipper says he is also disappointed a full vote was not authorised, so he is staging his own plebiscite of local party members on the merger issue.”
But he knows about swapping partys, he was once a Nat.
“Where is snow white?”
That would be Fiona Simpson – who claims to be the first “maiden” to give a maiden speech.
The typical stuff that Crickey seems to serve up now days is decidedly anti-Rudd a childishly so. No wonder people have stopped subscribing.
The fact that we have no managed to get a seat is therefore an even greater shame. We can’t get a seat because we are in the Western Eupore and Others group and the Europeans tend not to like the Others to get a look in too often if so, it is Canada or NZ.
Crikey has been a rag since Mayne sold up (or should I say more of a rag).
Meanwhile for the WA Libs.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/31/2203973.htm
And note the attendance of a certain whinging Union Boss posted here earlier
Anyone wanting to have a guess on tonights Newspoll? Nelson PPM rating?
1?
Kina, sorry don’t agree with your crikey assessment, I find it balanced.
Here is one of Crikeys’ stories today-
http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20080331-political-funding-reform.html
Regarding Rudds’ trip overseas- yep he certainly is rolling out the big ideas,
talks to Bush about making it quicker to travel to America for Australian tourists and a seat on the security council, yep lets be a part of United Nations security council which rarely does anything and come up with immediate decisions and if it does who really takes any notice..
Rudds’ trip is about one thing showing himself to the world, how important he is, that he is the Prime Minister of Australia.
And Horatio Nelson response – typical Nelson childish and juvenile, Nelson you are an dill. Carping about not visiting Japan, fair dinkum who really cares about our leaders we have here, the vision they provide is breathtaking.
#258 Gary Bruce
There was an Agenda a few weeks ago in which David Speers seemed to relish sticking the boot into Labor over carers, calling it a backflip or the like when the government hadn’t actually made a decision yet, and he pushed it a bit when his panellists (I forget who) didn’t quite share his enthusiasm for the task. Maybe I’m not watching with enough of a critical eye, but that sort of attitude hasn’t jumped out at me very often, and during the election campaign they gave plenty of time to both sides. I don’t think they’re another Fox News yet.
Hmm, B.S.F. What about Nelson PPM being 10%, still arguable given our friend the MoE. What about Primary being about what it was at the election, and TPP being about the same. Interesting Possum’s earlier comments. Probably bugger all movement I’d guess, despite the wholesale negative garbage emanating from the OO and parroted by the ABC, despite protestations from people saying they work for the ABC and it’s not really like that. If all you can do is parrot the OO, the ABC has become rubbish, and is likely to become even more so under Mark Scott’s signalled changes.
276 marky marky,
You really are a drop kick.
How else do you expect to influence the decisions the security council makes? By protesting here at Poll Bludgers? For %$#@’s sake! Get real!
So you really think one seat on the security council will make a difference Steve K, fair dinkum what next. Yep as usual resort to crude comments when someone criticises the party, just like the factional thugs.
Steve K get out in the real world.
Nelson should have improved and so should have the LNP simply because of gravity and, also because of the concerted effort in some parts of the media to misrepresent Rudd and Labor and provide continual negative reports.
If the LNP figure doesn’t improve noticeably then the people really have categorised and filed them under unelectable loonies.
I think becoming a member of these things is simply becoming part of the international world. Involving ourselves in these things at least gets us some increased voice. It I gather fits with Rudd’s plan to make Australia more active.
Found this link at Uncle Kenny’s RTS. While slightly off-topic, one posts it in order to enhance via the mechanism of humour, trans-Tasman relationships going forward.
“Man sentenced over wombat rape claim
A New Zealand man has been sentenced to community service after telling police he had been raped by a wombat and the experience had caused him to start speaking “Australian”.”
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/28/2201791.htm
Gary @ 258, Triton @ 231
I think I must get Gary’s (biased) version of Sky News. I thought it pretty clearly favoured the Coalition at the last election. David Speers was and is the most blatant culprit but it shows in general story selection and slant. It’s not always obvious – the Australian 24-hour-news audience isn’t large and segmented enough for Sky to explicitly target conservatives, as Fox News does, without affecting its ratings – but it’s there in all the Murdoch media.
Keiran Gilbert is an honourable exception – for example, today he seemed to go out of his way to mention that the PM was keeping up a hectic schedule in the US, and didn’t say “day x of 18″ or some similar snide remark like so many have. (There are other honourable exceptions too.)
The media focus on the length of the PM’s mission is not just proprietor-driven political bias though. The overriding focus for all the commercial media is ratings (or circulation or hits) because this drives advertising revenue and profitability. There’s nothing illegitimate about this, but the profit motive creates an incentive to promote and appeal to existing beliefs and prejudices, because it helps attract and keep viewers (or readers). One of the oldest examples is the “pollies’ lurks and perks” story, of which the “overseas jaunt at our expense” is a variation. They come out every year, like clockwork, when updated travel registers are released or when there’s a new menu at some Parliament’s dining room. It’s a real pity the ABC gets infected though.
Getting back to Sky News and the last election campaign, I seem to remember the nightly Election Agenda show suddenly being co-hosted by both Speers and Gilbert during the last few days of the campaign, instead of just Speers. I wondered at the time whether this was a bit of backing-off by the Murdoch media, perhaps after some irate phone calls from the Rudd campaign. As someone else mentioned above, the Murdoch papers did this too, going at Rudd the whole way through then editorialising for him at the last moment when the result was beyond doubt. How they could do it with a straight face is beyond me. The hide!
I don’t think the answer is to ban foreign investment in the media though, MayoFeral. Murdoch excepted (and he is a special sort of foreigner) I tend to think that overseas proprietors are actually less interested in promoting their own political agendas than Australian proprietors, either because they’re personally just not that interested in Australian domestic politics or to reduce sovereign risk. Foreign investment in the media broadens the potential pool of proprietors. I’d rather a foreigner in it for a buck than James Packer, who reportedly joined the Liberal Party Point Piper branch as one of Turnbull’s stacks when the Wentworth preselection was being contested.
I have no problem with involving ourselves with world affairs, or trying to influence the decision making process. The united nations is so irrelevant these days, to me it means little, it continues to make decisions regarding Israel, and rarely are they ever taken heed of to me the United Nations is a waste of time, and if one thinks that Australia will tell me America to take a different stance on international affairs or siding differently to America than they are kidding themselves. Decisions made will be in Americas’ or British interests. Independent stance i doubt it.
I think one of the key points is this: if politics becomes (?continues to be?) as one-sided as it currently seems to be, what will all the political journos do? After all, people lose interest quickly in any game where one side appears to be winning.
So it’s in the journalists’ interest to make it look like a contest, assuming they want to keep their prominence (and ultimately, their jobs).
Another point is this: it’s generally only the government that actually does things at this stage of the electoral cycle. Sure, Nelson gets his weekly or fortnightly humiliation in the polls, and the Liberals keep the slapstick coming in places as diverse as Qld, WA and Sutherland, but at the end of the day they don’t have to have settled policies yet, so the ALP is the only major party with any actual positions that can be criticised. And the currency of political comment is complaints, not too many people are going to pay to read a story that says Rudd had another good/ok/nondescript week. But they might pay to read that the government are ripping us off, even if it turns out to be a beat-up.
The only thing the Coalition can actually do is use its Senate majority. But that will be sparingly used, at the most.
Dyno says
The ALP is the only major party with any actual positions that can be criticised.
That is exactly right Dyno, they are the party in government and if you cannot criticise the policy decisions they make it basically means you do not care about the future decisions that are made. That is why i come on here and say my bit.
Marky Marky you say ‘you think one seat on the security council will make a difference?’ then you say ‘I have no problem with ……trying to influence the decision making process.’ So you thihnk we should just lobby from the sidelines and not get a vote, whereas having a seat will get us a vote and more influence…. Yes the UN has been sidelined under Bush, but in reality the Republicans aren’t going to be in the White House next year, so everything will change (hopefully).
Part of Sarkozy’s and Brown summit last week was spent discussing the reform of the UN SC (permanent seats for Brazil and Germany etc. etc.) – if they want it to happen it probably will.
Usually the Mexicans would have given us a Newspoll result from Lateline by now.
No early glimpse tonight?
Nothing online. Might not be any.
Dyno, I agree. There are all sorts of pressures and factors at play at the same time. Regarding [So it’s in the journalists’ interest to make it look like a contest] I think you can add that “conflict” stories and angles rate better more generally. “News with a pulse”, it’s called on Fox News according to their promo.
Just listening now, Possum. Swan on. Will let you and the Bludgers know, if anything is announced.
Nothing on the Australian website. No report on Lateline. Nothing on the wire services. Dennis is talking about Bush eating crow.
Oooh Aaah! Swan is actually arguing with the redoubtable Tony (let’s take a swipe at vulnerable failed Labor candidates) Jones. Geez, that was a class act on election night, was it not?
Molesworth @ 284 – My comments about foreign ownership were directed mostly against Murdoch. Apart from
Prisoner 12345Conrad Black we’ve not had much experience with others.I don’t have a problem with Rupert pushing his political views, per se. For all I care headline in all his papers could be ‘Kevin Rudd is the Antichrist’ everyday from now until the heat death of the Universe. Nor do I have a problem with him using all legal means to get he best deal possible out of our governments for his Australian businesses.
But I do have a problem with him using his shrills to apply political muscle here (and elsewhere) to, for example, go easy on the Chinese over human rights abuses when he was trying to move into the Chinese market a few years ago. He did much the same thing in supporting the case for war against Iraq in Britain and, to a lesser extent here, at least partly to cement his relationship with sections of the U.S. political system (and partly for $20/barrel of oil).
Gawd, are we going to have to call him the ‘downward pressure swan’? Heads down and bum up is a pretty dangerous position, I would have thought.
No matter who is in power in America Chris, Australias’ stance will be the similiar to the United States. My view is about Australia taking an independent stance and this i doubt.
And spending money to get their, my thinking it should simply be not on the agenda, when we have so many problems regarding the economy and inflation, yep lets get on the security council meanwhile we are cutting government spending and retrenching people for budgetary savings.
Some of these people may have mortgages to pay or credit cards to service, sorry doing this should be just left alone the timing is poor.
After watching Four Corners i come to realise that the next economic meltdown will be a depression, because of our debt. And yep it is the banks and other financial organisations who are to blame. Again why did ever privatise the Commonwealth Bank?
I nearly own a home and have continued to receive phone calls for further credit, equity loans, and not forgetting the credit card letters in the mail, and the bank teller trying to get you to take another loan. Of course i hang up on them or tear the credit card letters up, but many others cannot say no to their persuasive tactics and actions.
These people who ring or get you in the bank cue have targets to meet and if they do not meet expectations their chances of bettering themselves in the workplace is reduced.
All of this is because governments no longer own assets or do anything, that we leave everything to the market to do, the exactly same consequences before the 1930’s depression. Luckily unlike the 1930’s we have welfare but in the years to come many Australians will be living of welfare unless Governments start taking responsibility for the economy again.
Nup, nothing on Lateline about Newspoll. Perhaps it’s become very precious. Can only be interpreted by those who own it. Sniggle.
LOL, Ruddster broke Newspoll.
Is it too, too dreadful to even think of not, not listening to ABC?
And not watching ABC?
Particularly in its current affairs coverage.
Am I playing into the hands of those who wish the viewing audience diminished to the point that ABC no longer matters?
I note, the television. It is April. It is only eight months away until the ABC shuts down again, and begins its repeated repeats, not only the latest year, but well before.
Apart from the currentest of affairs, I have, over the last two years, not bothered to listen to ABC Radio on an ongoing basis, confident that I will hear everything that was to have been heard, repeated over the summer months.
Excluded are programs as excellent as Life Matters, Book Talk, Bush Telegraph, National Interest. A credit more to the presenters than ABC itself. Philip, natch.
Cannot include Australia Talks, still craven. That’s it.
And now, even in April of this year, the ABC continues to feature ancient repeats. And we finally have the beginning of an Australian series. However short and perhaps short lived.
Mark Scott needs a good, hard shove. Forget the Board, have a word with Kevin.
marky, ditto, Australia was pivotal in setting up the U.N. post WW2. I suspect that Rudd is trying to get the organisation to tackle some serious global concerns with some teeth. I’ve said it before, I don’t think this bloke goes into anything without some major and multiple goals in mind. He won the election with the OO and a lot of the MSM taking every shot they could at him, and not to put too fine a point on it, the current gov’t look like a heap of darlings vs. the Opposition who look like, well, Brendon, and not much else really.
Mayo @ 295
Conrad Black doesn’t exactly prove my point I concede! And there is so much not to like about Murdoch, especially on China and Iraq. There have been some other less intrusive foreign owners though: Tony O’Reilly (Irish, owned a lot of regional press), Austar’s owners (US mainly, they’ve changed hands a few times). I worry about Telstra moving into the old media in a big way which is one reason why I want the potential for new foreign entrants. Telstra is too big already, and the disgraceful way it has acted to keep its fixed line telephony monopoly intact really scares me were it to, for example, buy Fairfax.
So much for the Japanese PM being upset by Rudd not visiting Japan.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23459407-601,00.html
There was an article in SMH:
t’s time we got serious and used the D-word, given that most people seem blithely unaware just how close we came to a catastrophic financial event this month, an event brought about by reckless greed on a reckless scale. Given how close we came to a depression, not a mere recession, it is going to take years to recover from this financial near-catastrophe. Don’t expect your superannuation fund or home value to surge any time soon.
How we just avoided the big D
http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/how-we-just-avoided-the-big-d/2008/03/30/1206850700844.html
Too tedious, Frank, it really is.
The article begins with the Japanese being unconcerned, for reasons given, yet the author chooses to carry on about it being an issue.
It is an issue, for the maggots. Tomorrow’s ooze today. Nothing about Newspoll, by the way. More, though from the old mag, about Kev supposedly arranging a by way trip to Japan.
I hope like hell that he does not.
There is no point. The Japanese have their own problems.Kev, in case he is entertaining such an idea as the unpopular press should wish, must not allow himself to be dictated to.
I hope that somone in the Media points out the stupidity of Robb and Nelson over the Japan snub. They have apparently no idea of the cultural faux-pas they have committed that has forced a public statement from the Japanese Prime Minister. I don’t think that there’s any way that the Japanese would have addressed the issue unless they felt very strongly, or felt that they, in some way, caused the problem.
That they have had to become involved in what is, at most, a national political issue is disgraceful. I felt embarrassed by Howard, and I can now add Nelson, Robb and the sycophantic and culturally inept media to the same list.
It’s time to grow up in the world people and stop measuring your performance by the column inch.
Kev would do much better in totally ignoring the press as irrelevant and do whatever it is he plans. If he changes due to press rubbish then they will play him.
But I am sure he and the others are well aware of this.
And a “New” issue about Dental Reform.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23463903-5013871,00.html
Don’t even need to read the article, Kina.
Only had to listen today, to the reassurance that one’s earnings as regards super will recover, miraculously, over the course of time.
Despite the present plummet and gloomy forecast on super returns. This has happened to me. Negative positives. Or is it the reverse. Thanks so much. Despite the fact that the stock market, in which I have no faith, nor desire to be involved, is where I am forced, repeat, forced to invest my money. Worse, that the holders of my money get to reap a profit from me.
I, for one, am not much interested in holding off for 36 years, apparently the trajectory in which I should stake my faith.
Not, I suspect, I have that much time up my sleeve.
Fine point, well made.
“A FORMER One Nation member has been given an official role by the NSW Liberal Party and will direct the party’s campaign for coming local government elections in northwestern Sydney.
Gordon Reynolds, a former One Nation and Australians Against Further Immigration member, was last Thursday appointed president of the local government conference in Baulkham Hills.
The move has angered some party moderates who fear the hard right is doing untold damage.
“Everyone was just stunned,” a senior Liberal member said. “It is absolutely ridiculous in a election year to be taking the advice of a former One Nation official.”
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,23463889-5006009,00.html
Unfortunately the (gutless) senior Liberal member is in the powerless minority of his party. I’ll tip that the MSM won’t be interested in this issue.
The continual spin and negative stuff from the OO [I am beginning to prefer Liberal Party Gazette as it is more accurate or Liberal Orifice.] gets up my nose even though I almost never read it…just hearing you guys talk about it.
However I think for Rudd Labor what the are shown doing on TV/radio has the greater effect on public understanding.
I got out of the share market a few weeks before the 1987 crash, by pure luck, and haven’t been back since except for one renewable energy venture, Geodynamics. I was in banking back then so saw the consequences of all that up close.
They should ask him if he still has that view then ask him about the skills crisis and if he thinks immigrants might be useful.
And, thinking on that, onimod.
How bad are the Maggots going to look when Kev shows up in Japan? To an hero’s welcome. Why would it be otherwise?
Much to lose.
What are the Japanese likely to do, as our ‘most important trading partner’? As the commentators like to say.
What, tightly wrap their kimonos? I don’t know if the have a term for ’shove it’ but why would they?
I do know they have a term for self destruct, but again, why would they?
The Maggs have got this entirely wrong.
Peace and harmony still rules the NSW Libs.
Lib MP accused of spoiling for fight
A STATE Liberal MP has been accused of challenging a branch president in his 60s to a fight after a local meeting and of subjecting him to a tirade of expletives.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/mp-accused-of-spoiling-for-fight/2008/03/31/1206850812079.html
Good lord from Shamaham
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23464160-601,00.html
New post up on matters federal.
Crikey Whitey
You are not forced to invest your money anywhere, you have super choice. I am sure there is a fund that suits you need and if there isn’t set up your own.