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
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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
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