You have to give it to Tony Abbott – he thinks big.

Not satisfied with having put a wrecking ball through the relationship with Australia’s best friend in the neighbourhood, he has also set out to destroy Australia’s hard-won reputation as a concerned and responsible international citizen.

The stridency and contempt with which his government treated the Warsaw conference on climate change has seen the country relegated from being a constructive force to one at the very bottom of the heap, ahead of only Iran, Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia out of the 61 nations who took part.

Well, sort of took part. Australia did not send even a junior minister – they were all preoccupied with getting rid of the carbon tax, and Clean Energy Finance Corporation (“Bob Brown Bank”), the Climate Commission, the Climate Change Authority, and anyone else who takes the problem of global warming seriously. Instead, a bunch of officials arrived with instructions, it appeared, to treat it all as a bit of a joke; indeed, they turned up at some of the sessions wearing t-shirts, a gesture of disrespect that did not go unnoticed.

When they did intervene, it was to block everything: no question of raising goals, or joining negotiations for a binding treaty in Paris in 2015, or even of supporting the United Nations sponsored green climate fund, the organisation that seeks to raise $100 billion from the developed nations by 2020 to help those developing to take a cleaner path during their own industrialisation and to ameliorate the consequences of the changes which are already inevitable.

In fact Abbott had already joined Canada in dissenting from the final communiqué of the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Sri Lanka, which endorsed the fund. The irony is that under the previous government, Australia had already started contributing to the fund with $600 million; it is not clear whether Abbott intends to ask for a refund, but in view of his clearly antagonistic approach to the whole issue such pettiness would not be surprising.

read more: http://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/mungo-maccallum/2013/11/25/1385333215/everyone-out-step-except-our-tony

They promised before the election to be a “no-surprises” government.

But since winning power the Abbott government has lengthened its list of broken promises and policy surprises by more than one a week.

Just two days ago, the Federal Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne, performed a brazen policy back-flip on school funding, saying he would no longer accept Labor's funding and overall model despite Tony Abbott making this pre-election promise: “We will honour the agreements that Labor has entered into. We will match the offers that Labor has made. We will make sure that no school is worse off.”

A few weeks ago, the Coalition's pre-election commitment to "turn back the boats" was broken after Immigration Minister Scott Morrison ended a tense standoff with Jakarta - which was refusing to accept a boatload of asylum seekers - by ordering the boat to be taken to Christmas Island.

Last month, Treasurer Joe Hockey said he wanted to increase the debt ceiling from $300 billion to $500 billion. That was after the Coalition attacked the then Labor government's decision in May last year to raise Australia's debt ceiling from $250 billion to $300 billion, which Tony Abbott described at the time as "really extraordinary".

"What Joe Hockey is now doing on both the commission of cuts and on the issue of the debt ceiling is a million miles away from the expectations he gave the Australian people before the election," Labor finance spokesman Tony Burke said about the Coalition's recent decision to raise the debt limit.

Mr Abbott also promised before the election to have a government "which is transparent and open," saying "the last thing we want to do is to hide anything from the Australian people."

Since then, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has implemented a highly restrictive regime regarding information on border protection.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/abbotts-boulevard-of-broken-promises-20131127-2yac4.html#ixzz2lpz6cj7O

From Ben Pobjie....

Oh, the disappointment. Just when it seemed we had a prime minister willing to toughen Australia up again, Tony Abbott comes out with a namby-pamby recommendation for “gentle smacks” on children. 

The terrible irony is that in the same interview, Abbott even notes the danger of “political correctness taken to extremes”. And he’s right – that’s why we as a nation opted for a politically incorrect prime minister. And until now he’d lived up to his promise, being incorrect – politically – on all sorts of issues. We thought we could trust the prime minister to be politically incorrect almost to the point of political dementia. But apparently not, not now that he has decided that “gentle smacks” are the way for parents to go.

As a parent myself, I know very well that gentleness gets you nowhere with children. My mother used to have a saying – “I am going to kick you right in the neck” – and I think it’s as true today as it ever was. Kids will never learn the difference between right and wrong via gentleness: their brains are too small and malformed. The only way to get the message through to a child is to hit them so hard that the terrifying memory of your brutality rises like fire in their mind every time they even consider stepping out of line. You don’t have to take my word for it – all parenting experts agree that hurting your children is a bad idea, and we all know what idiots experts are.

But it’s not just Australian children Abbott is hurting by his reckless insistence on not hurting Australian children. No, this is all about the message he’s sending to the rest of society: the message that misbehaviour can be corrected “gently”. Think about the consequences of such an approach, for example, on border protection. Are we to assume that Abbott will be recommending only “gentle human rights abuses” being inflicted on refugees by our government? That’s not going to stop people getting on boats! We all know that you’ve got to be cruel to be kind – however will we save those poor souls from a watery grave if we don’t, figuratively, smack them as hard as possible? Do we really want our asylum seekers to end up as stroppy and disrespectful of authority as the mollycoddled Abbott daughters? Hopefully not.

It’s mixed messages, you see. This government has hitherto had a clear and unambiguous policy of punishing everyone it can as harshly as possible: refugees, child care workers, public schools. Yet now we see the prime minister himself prescribing “gentle” punishments. Where’s the consistency? And where will it end?

read more:  http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/12/smacking-children-tony-abbott-youre-just-too-gentle

As the demise of Holden is coming to roost in this fair country — with billions of economic points lost down the gurgler — the Prime Minister, the honourable Anthony Abbott has gently asked of us not to place the blame on anyone for the deed... Be gentle with General Motors was his implication and it was of course the lousy blameless work of the Labor Party that led to the closure... The high wages, the high dollar, the high chair used by the little brat were not to be blamed. No blame should be laid at his feet was the message... We should concentrate on digging holes.

No, it was not his trooper Joe Hockey who pushed the car company to the wall by demanding to put up or shut up (Holden thus shut up by shutting shop..)... Joe of course gave the company a golden opportunity to push a stick up his blameless arse in a delicate blameless manner. Joe took one for the team: we should not blame him... No, the Liberal Government had nothing to do with behaving like shits and refusing to understand a major complex problem which, of course, was simplified by Joe's statement that "Australians don't like driving Australian cars..."

Here you have it... We cannot even blame ourselves for not liking good Aussie cars...

Yes, we are blamelessly responsible... See image at top and rejoice at the PQ con-man awards of the year (2013) so far and destined to bleed into 2014... We're the one bleeding but hey, what's a little blameless sacrifice?

The number of people being diagnosed with dementia is going to soar to 7,500 a week, Health Minister Peter Dutton says.

Mr Dutton argues the Government's controversial Medicare reforms announced in the budget are necessary to ensure the health system can provide for genomic testing, new cancer drugs and the growing number of people being diagnosed with dementia.

He told ABC's Lateline on September 8, Australia needs to be able to pay for "the fact that 170 people per week today are being diagnosed with dementia, but in a number of years it'll be 7,500 a week".

It's well recognised that the number of people with dementia is growing, but could the number being diagnosed really increase fortyfold in a number of years?

ABC Fact Check takes a look at the numbers.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-13/peter-dutton-dementia-facts-flawed/5734256

At this rate the entire population of this country will be completely mad or suffering from memory loss — if it has not already from having to deal with a complete moron as a prime minister and simpleton dumdums as his acolytes — in about 56 years. I though you needed to know. One could be drafted for being bonkers on August 12, 2016 or earlier at an ever increasing rate. Unfortunately moronism from ministers tends to stain our own comprehension with mind numbing imbecility.