Tony Abbott might be our global coal ambassador but it appears he is increasingly out of step with the rest of the world, writes Mungo MacCallum.

Joe Hockey has tried to find another angle to sell his bosses’ Budget. Now he is trying to win the sympathy of tax paying workers by arguing that we workers work for a month to pay the taxes that provide support for the poor, the sick, the disabled, the old, the young.

Australian Labor Party federal parliamentarians Melissa Parke and Anna Burke moved in caucus on Tuesday to end the Party’s support for offshore processing of refugees. The motion said that the party “shall no longer support the transfer of asylum seekers by Australia to Manus Island or Nauru and shall call for the detention centres in those places to be closed down forthwith”. It didn’t go to a formal vote. It was lost on the voices. This means it wasn’t even close.

Tick a box every few years …..

from Mike Carlton ….

'WMD doubts are ludicrous'. Headline, The Australian, July 10, 2003.

Secret Trade in Services Agreement (TISA) - Financial Services Annex (from wikileaks)2014-06-19

Inside Snowden's Germany File

 

By SPIEGEL Staff

An analysis of secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden demonstrates that the NSA is more active in Germany than anywhere else in Europe -- and that data collected here may have helped kill suspected terrorists.

 

Reacting to antagonized Palestinian snowballing protests to her government’s decision on June 5 to reverse a 47-year old bipartisan consensus on describing eastern Jerusalem as “occupied,” Foreign Minister Julie Bishop on June 13 denied any “change in the Australian government’s position.”

 

A report into the police handling of former treasurer Troy Buswell's series of crashes in his ministerial car has found "systemic failure at a number of levels".

 

Australia’s high court has upheld a legal challenge against federal government funding arrangements for the national school chaplaincy program.

After the warmongers who were dead wrong about Iraq in the first place and now have the gall to go on TV and blame the entire mess on Barack Obama. People who really should have crawled under a rock in shame and stayed there, Paul Wolfowitz, Lindsey Graham, and most notably, the wrongest of them all, John McCain, are making the rounds so much, "you'd have thought they won 'Dancing With the Stars,' " Stewart quips.

From the less and less reliable Media Watch... Image above is an extract from the Telegraph

The story has allegations of...
Fraud.
Corruption.
Political slush funds.
And lying to a Royal Commission.

And tangled up in the middle of it is former Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, who in the 1990s was lover and lawyer to this man, Bruce Wilson.

He’s a former boss of the Australian Workers Union in Victoria and a man who could be charged with fraud, according to counsel assisting the royal commission.

On Friday, Wilson’s evidence to the commission was front page news in The Australian and the Telegraph.