The Victorian people gave themselves an early Christmas present yesterday, relegating Napthine's corrupt Liberal  National Party Coalition to the ignominy of a first term government, sending an   explicit warning to Premier elect Daniel Andrews and his Labor colleagues they are on notice to keep their election promises. Or else.

Labor's victory and the emergence of the Greens as a viable political third force isstill in the counting as I write.

To the searing disdain of voters, the Abbott Coalition Federal Government has learned the hard way that blowback of interventionist politics is no longer automatically tolerated by voters, regardless of their political colours.

The people have an antidote for such Abbottulism.

The Abbott government should be afraid. Very afraid.

Moreover, Liberal-led State governments ought to be quaking in their Ferragamos.

States and territories should interpret Labor's victory as a sign that Code Red restitution politics by people power is a game-changer and here to stay.

The siren will be heard around the nation.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/victoria-decides-yes-we-dan,7141

See also: it sounds good when said with gravitas...

and: happy little vegemites...

and: comparing policies...

and: another desperate press conference with zero credibility...

From Victoria Rollison

As if a switch has been flicked, as if a group memo has gone out (perhaps from Rupert Murdoch), Australian political journalists have all very neatly and in a scarily synchronised fashion all decided there are problems with the Abbott government. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but this is the biggest case of too little too late that I have ever witnessed. It is now official that the mainstream political press is exactly one year and three months behind the independent media who, like me, have been pointing out to our readers since the day Tony Abbott became Prime Minister, that he is not fit for the job. Actually that’s not true. I and most others were saying it for six years before that. And now, after over a year of relentless, daily horrors from the Abbott camp, including internationally embarrassing gaffes, broken promises, horrible and unfair revenge policy, rorting of the public purse, corruption and mean spirited behaviour, it’s as if they’ve all suddenly had permission to point out that there might be a problem here. Low and behold, I think they might be right! Even a broken clock is right twice a day.

But if only it ended there. No. There’s another clause in the ‘you may now point out how bad the Abbott government is’ memo which they have all dutifully complied with to the letter. Not that I think it took any convincing. You guessed it. They only have permission to call the spade of the Abbott government a dysfunctional spade if they also maintain their completely misrepresentative and downright dishonest anti-factual narrative of Labor dysfunction at the same time. So the narrative goes like this: Abbott’s government is bad. We only just noticed. We also can’t help but notice it’s just as bad, if not possibly not quite as bad, as the previous Labor government.

Don’t believe me? I hear people like Bolt, Albrechtsen and Alan Jones have been piling on Abbott in their own synchronised act of ‘let’s give Julie Bishop a run’ narrative, while carefully laying the blame mostly at the feet of Abbott’s support team. Because criticising Abbott himself would be career suicide for these types I assume. I’m not, however, going to link to these bottom-feeders. But I will link to Murdoch-Liberal-lite commentator Peter van Onselen, who today contributed this piece: ‘Wheels are falling off as Abbott careers to year’s end’. 

read more: http://victoriarollison.com/2014/11/29/the-broken-clocks-are-right-twice-a-day/

"I'd be the first* to admit that last week was a bit of a ragged week for the Government," Mr Abbott said.

"I know that appearances do count and I concede that the appearance last week was a bit ragged but, in the end, nothing matters more than performance and this is a Government which has a very solid year of performance under its belt."

Mr Abbott's handling of the political debate over the Government's decision to cut the ABC and SBS budgets was also canvassed, with the Prime Minister conceding the decision contradicted his election-eve promise that there would be "no cuts".

"I accept what we are doing with the ABC is at odds with what I said immediately prior to the election but things have moved on, circumstances are different," he said.

This week is the last time Parliament will sit this year..

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-01/tony-abbott-concedes-government-had-ragged-week/5929996

-------------------------

*No Tony, you won't be the first. Please get in line. There has been at least 1,875,439.5 mentions of your ragged week before you did. Many people people think you are a liar and a con artist. And they are not wrong. Confession and "mea culpa" is not good enough especially when you are your own confessor... Go to the polls. Face the music if you have balls.

an oldie revisited

The Abbott administration has become the government that snookered itself.

The prime minister’s 45-minute media conference on Monday was a determined attempt to manoeuvre himself out of a dire political situation and reset the debate.

With even the conservative commentariat attacking his government, it was calculated to give the impression he was listening (sure, things have been a bit ragged) and making concessions (yes, ABC cuts are at odds with what I said before the election), while pointing out hand on heart that he had “guts” and “conviction” (one thing no one had ever really doubted).

But besides a minor concession on Australian Defence Force allowances and accepting the bleeding obvious about his broken promise on the ABC, there were no actual changes to give effect to the “reset”. That may be because every way the prime minister turns there’s an obstacle he put there himself.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/01/everywhere-tony-abbott-turns-theres-a-barrier-he-placed-there-himself

When most governments get into power there's an unspoken truce that occurs where the new leader says something like "OK, OK, I know almost half of you hate my guts and did everything in your power to see me humiliated and beaten, but now we gotta pull together. I will govern for all".

And that's what most governments do - or at least try really, really hard to seem like they do.

With the Abbott government, we're seeing a change in paradigm, where the PM and his office is clearly saying to the people who didn't vote for him: "You're not a part of our plans for three years, so you might as well avert your eyes, you're not gonna like this."

Comedian Chris Rock said recently of former US President George Bush: "He was the first president who only served the people who voted for him. He literally operated like a cable network. You know what I mean?

"He's the first cable-television president, and the thing liberals don't like about Obama is that he's a network guy ... He's trying to get everybody."

Abbott is our first Foxtel Prime Minister. If you're not a subscriber, too bad..

Say what you want about Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard but they tried to be free-to-air leaders. You could get service in all areas. It might not have been the best picture, but it wasn't a blank screen.

Of course, the Abbott government will deny this. The unfathomable sequence of broken promises and denials that they're actually broken promises is akin to them telling you to squint at the snow of static on your telly while insisting it's actually MasterChef.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/tony-abbott-our-foxtel-prime-minister-20141205-120mkq.html

We've know that Tony Abbott is not a man of the people. He is a servant of his masters, the high end of town, while being a master-liar himself. Without the help of Mr Murdoch who published Tony's lies as "truths", Turdy Tony would not be where he is now — lying his way to destroy your life in favour of a few elite rich from which you might get some crumbs if you're lucky... It's a sad case of crap being used to destroy the social structure of this country and the sanity of its future. While "accepting the blame for his lies" Tony Turdy pushes on with the zealot mad destruction. This what I call a turdy attitude and for a Prime Minister to subscribe to this shit is completely SSSSSSSScheiße...

This is what the merde-och press dished out:

Trust Tony?... You would not buy a brown paper bag from him...

With dire polls, budget doldrums and rumblings of leadership tension, Tony Abbott's 'year of achievement' has left the Coalition troops battered and bewildered, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Battered, bewildered and haggard, the Coalition troops staggered back to their electorates. After Tony Abbott's year of achievement, there was just one shred of comfort: the beloved leader had finally backflipped on his paid parental leave scheme.

Well, not quite backflipped: let's say downsized, recalibrated, or, as he himself might say, tweaked. At least that's what we think has happened. As always there was no real explanation or detail, and certainly no mea culpa.

But it appears that one barnacle has been scraped off, and that's a start. Of course, it was a no-brainer: the scheme was clearly unaffordable, widely derided and had no chance of passing though the Parliament. If the crossbenchers did not scuttle it, some of Abbott's own Government senators were willing and eager to do the job for them.

But this has been the case for months, years even; so why the procrastination? Well, just the Prime Minister's stubbornness: it was his baby and he was determined to protect it no matter what - or at least until it was dragged from his grasp. And when it was, it wasn't going to be when Parliament was sitting. There had been quite enough gloating already.

The dying days had finally produced what the commentators called a win. Scott Morrison, through a mixture of bribery and extortion, got through his temporary protection visas and, incidentally, was allowed to tear up the United Nations Convention on Refugees and the rule of international law in the process. But for the long-suffering backbenchers, it was too little and too late.

What they were on about was the economy, stupid: more specifically the budget. And on that front, there was still no discernible movement. The polls were dire and getting direr, and it appeared that for everyone but Abbott, Joe Hockey and the irrepressible Christopher Pyne, the Government was in much worse shape than it had been a year ago. Hence the rumblings: leadership tensions, suggestions of a rift between Abbott and his deputy Julie Bishop, and the suggestion that Hockey should be dumped, perhaps in favour of Malcolm Turnbull.

It should be said at once that the latter is just not going to happen. Hockey is frequently accident prone and regularly ridiculed by the public and even by some of his colleagues, but he is invulnerable: to bring him down would be an admission of total defeat for the whole Government strategy, and while that might increasingly be called into question, if it is to collapse it will do so with a prolonged and gradual whimper, not with a catastrophic bang.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-08/maccallum-abbotts-bruising-year-of-achievement/5951808

See toon at top...

See also:  spitting the dummy on stacks of bibles...

Labor has won the Adelaide seat of Fisher by just nine votes after a recount.

Electoral commissioner Kay Mousley said the recount, which finished about 9.30pm on Monday, delivered the narrow win to Labor’s Nat Cook.

The Liberal party requested the recount after Cook won the Saturday byelection by 23 votes.

After the distribution of preferences on Saturday, Cook won the seat with 10,299 votes to 10,276 for the Liberals’ Heidi Harris.

The Liberals had been expected to win back the seat, which had been held by former Liberal Bob Such, who became an independent in 2000 and died from a brain tumour in October.

http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2014/dec/15/south-australia-byelection-labors-nat-cook-wins-fisher-by-nine-votes

half plus four and a half voters did not swallow the Abbott-cure bitter pill. Regardless of the disease or political malaise from "both side of politics", it appears that Abbottulism is the worse kind of nasty, infantile, incompetent, idiotic and erratic political disastrous virus infecting local conditions.