A senior barrister had his brief to act for the Queensland Government taken away just days after he criticised the LNP administration's law and order policies.

The highly unusual move, made against the wishes of the state's Crown Solicitor, prompted a "crisis" within the Justice Department as bureaucrats scrambled to find an acceptable replacement.

Stephen Keim SC, best known for representing falsely accused terror suspect Mohamed Haneef, was in late November set to represent the Crown in an administrative law matter involving the Normanby pub in Brisbane.

He had received the files and begun work when bureaucrats told him he had not been approved for the job by the Justice Department's director-general, John Sosso.

"I was offered the brief. I accepted the brief. Then it was taken away after the crown solicitor consulted the director-general," Mr Keim said.

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-11/barrister-qld-govt-brief-stripped-days-after-policy-criticism/5253104

 

Don't kid yourselves, you, the denialist crappers out there. GLOBAL WARMING IS STILL ON despite a plateau-ing of heat observed in the ATMOSPHERE since 1998. The oceans are warming up deeper, as stronger winds are stirring the surface. Glaciers are melting faster than ever before and Australia had its warmest year on record in 2013. 

I don't have to remind you that there are always fluctuations between cause and effect in complex systems such as climate, but the core fact is the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the more energy is going to lurking around in there.

2014 and/or 2015 will be telling as the warming is likely to accelerate again, as we've passed more than 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

The increase of demand for energy has to be now fulfilled only by renewable energy. FULL STOP. As I have mentioned before, in a global warming situation, increase in global temperature shoots up then plateau then shoots up again all due to a few mitigating factors, though the major driver of increase in temperatures is CO2. The more CO2, the MORE heat, plus or minus the effects of minor mitigating factors... 

The record shows irregular increase, though the temperature increase is always in step with CO2 increase. Thus we have be prepared.

Unfortunately, the Abbott regime is totally deluded with its rejection of global warming action. 

 

This is a crisis completely of the government's making and was totally avoidable. The "no government handouts" line exists in complete isolation to all expert advice and is guided by a blind observance to neo-conservative ideology. 

An ideology that lacks any wiggle room for compromise or pragmatism. This government is of the far right and willingly accept the consequences of its misguided actions.

If they did listen to expert advice, they would realise the modest investment sought by the auto industry in Australia is nothing compared to what the governments of Germany, the Germany and the United States provide.

Read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/blind-ideology-ends-australian-car-industry,6158

 

In a comment above I say a senator was friendly with the junk food industry... But I stand corrected:

 

Pressure is building on Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash's chief of staff to resign after allegations he did not disclose financial ties to the junk food industry.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has not commented publicly about Alastair Furnival's involvement in high-level negotiations over a healthy food rating system. Neither Mr Furnival nor Senator Nash revealed Mr Furnival's shareholding in a company that lobbies for the Australian Beverages Council, Kraft peanut butter, Cadbury and Oreo, among others.

Public health and consumer groups were left stunned last week when the new health star rating website was published, only to be taken down hours later after intervention from Senator Nash and Mr Furnival.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/fiona-nash-chief-of-staff-alastair-furnival-under-pressure-to-resign-over-food-ratings-website-20140212-32i4n.html#ixzz2t5dQbsor

Meanwhile apparently, our weasel in chief did a remarkable weasel speech in Parliament today... Weasels words are cheap and come at two pence a dozen... Some commentators placed the value at $100 worth of porkied weasel words...

 

 

 

 

In the future they will call it the Hockey Recession, says Bob Ellis, and wonder at the sort of fanatical economic terrorists who were running Australia.

AFTER IT HAPPENS it will be called the Hockey Recession.

And it will be known that he swore Holden would get no money and challenged them to go and they went the next day. And it will be known that this resulted, logically, in Toyota going too and the loss of half a million livelihoods and, by knock-on effect, the ruin of Australia.

The Hockey Recession. The one we didn’t have to have.

It will be known too that keeping Holden here till 2025 would have cost each taxpayer ten dollars, or three café lattes, a year and Joe thought this an unacceptable price, and it was better that a half million lives be injured than we pay that sum for our national salvation.

It will be known too that he could have saved SPC Ardmona, and with it the Goulburn Valley and another hundred thousand livelihoods, by asking us to pay the price of two café lattes just once this decade and never again — or maybe never again.

These are the acts of a fool, that go far beyond fundamentalist fanaticism.

They are the acts of a suicide bomber, like Slim Pickens in Dr Strangelove riding the A-bomb down into Russia and whooping and whacking it with his hat as he ends human life on the planet, pleased he is doing so.

It is hard not to think him a damn fool and he must, in the shaving mirror, himself suspect that something is wrong.

Will Joyce, Macfarlane, Turnbull and Heffernan join Sharman Stone in wanting him gone? Will the Senate refuse him Supply? Will the GG summon him, and ask what he thinks he is doing?

It is an unusual moment of national clarity.

Something big must happen, and happen soon.

 

Australia's unemployment rate has jumped to 6 per cent for the first time in more than a decade.

The Bureau of Statistics estimates that 3,700 jobs were lost in January, pushing the unemployment rate from 5.8 up to 6 per cent - the first time it has reached that level since July 2003.

That jobless rate of 6 per cent tops the figure reached during the height of the global financial crisis, when unemployment peaked at 5.9 per cent in June 2009.

All of the jobs lost were full-time, with an estimated 7,100 positions going, while 3,400 part-time jobs were added.

Despite the loss of full-time positions, the ABS estimate of aggregate monthly hours worked last month rose 1.3 per cent to 1.64 billion.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-02-13/january-employment-figures-bureau-of-statistics/5257326

-------------------------------------------------------
I might be wrong but I am going to say it anyway... The perfidious Abbott regime has worked a way to make people work harder for less...
See, when the geezer I forgot the name of invented capitalism, he introduced a quotient of unemployment written in the growth equation. And if my memory serves me right, the quotient was a neat 6 per cent (not less).  This was deliberately included as to stop workers feeling "comfortable". In a conservative capitalist regime, should the worker become comfortable, according to the ruling mob the workers become demanding, slack off and start to have clout since "they" have money.
This is a deliberate adjustment of working conditions created by the Abbott regime: workers have got to be begging to get work and be paid less so they can get it, and those who don't get work see their social "benefits" or "allowance" cut to the bone... 
Get it?... Conspiracy against the "working class"?... With a simultaneous attack on unions, you bet there is...
I am not wrong, unfortunately... Am I?...
On the other side, most of the rich don't need "workers" per se... apart from a few dedicated brokers who are on commission (but never make it into the cabal of the rich though some of them might make the rich list at some stage before being busted for whatever)...
I know some conservatives who stated to me without shame that "they were going to get rid of those bastards who get money for doing an "unnecessary" job...". And of course this included all the scientists working on "global warming"... The most necessary job on earth at the moment is to understand the dynamics of climate change... But no. The bastards only care about... money.
So there...

 

 

Christopher Pyne – the MP who has been disciplined the most in 112 years of Australian parliamentary history – has criticised the opposition for “ungentlemanly” and “rude” conduct.

The leader of government business went on the attack after a torrid afternoon in the lower house on Wednesday, characterised by repeated Labor attempts to criticise the government over job losses, countered by multiple government motions to gag opposition speakers.

Pyne denied claims of hypocrisy given the Coalition’s behaviour in the previous parliament, arguing the lack of majority government was a “very unique beast” and asserting that Labor was “illegitimately elected”.

The house divided 14 times during the procedural tussle that began near the end of question time on Wednesday and continued during the speeches replying to the governor general’s opening speech to parliament last year.

Pyne said the Labor party “behaved in a very bad mannered and undergraduate way” by disrupting the address-in-reply speeches reflecting on Quentin Bryce’s speech last November.

“It’s a time when they can speak on any subject that they like for 20 minutes and the Labor party decided to disrupt that particular speech of several of my members, which is quite frankly just very, very rude,” Pyne told the ABC on Thursday.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/13/christopher-pyne-attacks-labor-ungentlemanly-behaviour

 

Hundreds of Aboriginal public servants drafted into Tony Abbott's department to help "close the gap" are being paid up to $19,000 less than their new white colleagues doing the same jobs.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has more than 260 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bureaucrats, brought in from the old FaHCSIA department in a plan to bring indigenous policy under the PM's control.

But while the Prime Minister spoke last week of "closing the gap" in indigenous disadvantage in Australia, hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bureaucrats were settling into their new jobs working for Mr Abbott's department on wages well below those of their new non-indigenous co-workers.

There was more bad news for the department's officials on Friday afternoon as Secretary Ian Watt told his staff that PM&C could not afford to maintain its present staffing levels and that job losses were inevitable.

In another blow to indigenous voices in the federal arena, representative body the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples says it is sacking two-thirds of its workforce, a loss of 23 jobs, after the federal government cut its funding.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/public-service/glaring-pay-gap-as-aboriginal-bureaucrats-brought-into-prime-ministers-department-20140214-32rpb.html#ixzz2tN9mKMK7

Cabinet documents from the previous Labor government have been handed over to the royal commission into the home insulation scheme on the orders of the prime minister, Tony Abbott.

The revelation that the documents had been transferred nearly a month ago came to light during Senate estimates committee hearings on Monday. The attorney general, George Brandis, said earlier in the day he was not aware any documents had been handed over.

Brandis attempted to deflect Labor complaints that the decision defied more than a century of tradition surrounding the confidentiality of cabinet discussions. He pointed to a previously undisclosed piece of correspondence, a 31 January letter from the Australian government solicitor asking the royal commission to proceed on the basis documents would be aired publicly “only in the rarest cases”.

In a separate committee hearing, the deputy secretary of the department of the prime minister and cabinet (DPMC), Elizabeth Kelly, confirmed that the cabinet documents were handed over after the department sought advice from the government solicitor.

The committee was told Abbott ordered the documents be given to the royal commission after the legal advice was relayed to him by the department.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/24/tony-abbott-cabinet-documents-royal-commission

 

 

• The Pulse: Politics live with Judith Ireland

I have many flaws, at least according to my children. But the biggest is my obsession with musicals. I can sing my way through South Pacific, take a detour past Rydell High and arrive, shrieking with pleasure, at Next to Normal. These songs are not actually recognisable when I sing them - or that's the view of the ingrates.

So my enthusiasm that Tim Minchin's (and Roald Dahl's) Matilda the Musical will soon arrive in Australia is unbridled.

 

Based on the Dahl book, it's the story of Matilda Wormwood, whose father bullies and hectors her on a regular basis. She is made to feel hopeless and helpless. One evening (or did I just imagine the time of day? I developed a personal relationship with the book after reading it endlessly to my ingrate children), well, one day, Matilda is speaking to her father. He turns on her.

In the movie, the words go:

''Listen, you little wiseacre: I'm smart, you're dumb; I'm big, you're little; I'm right, you're wrong; and there's nothing you can do about it.''

Absolutely heartbreaking. Here is this person who is meant to be protecting little Matilda, and all he does is demean her, belittle her.

She is the underdog, despite her many talents, yet she is not protected by the person who should be her foremost defender.

Which is how we should all be feeling right now.

We have a government which isn't standing up for us. It's standing with the overdog. It's using the excuse of red tape and overlegislation. It's removing protections of all kinds. And it's not as if we can individually stand up for ourselves. You can't fight big by yourself - you need governments to stand between innocent citizens and greed machines.

Case 1: Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, on Monday in a speech at ANU, said the federal Attorney-General wanted to make amendments to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. In other words, if you hate being called a boong or a yid or a spic on the streets, you better stop caring. Any changes to 18C will unleash a barrage of race hate.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/we-are-all-matilda-betrayed-by-tony-abbott-20140303-340mj.html#ixzz2uxZJjd47

See mischief at top and story below it...

 

 

At an International Women’s Day event in March this year, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, in describing the progress women have made, noted, “It wasn’t so long ago as a Sydneysider that there was a female lord mayor, a female premier, a female prime minister, [and] a female head of state in our governor-general …”

It should hardly have been surprising that his remarks were ridiculed. No one had done more, after all, to see that three of the four had by that time been replaced by more traditional appointments – older, private school–educated, conservative white men.

The Abbott government is the first in Australian history not just to stifle but also to reverse the progress of Australian women.

It began within days of Abbott becoming prime minister at last September’s federal election, when he announced a 19-member cabinet with just one woman, the lowest level of female representation since 2001. It continued in January when a former chief of the Australian Defence Force, Peter Cosgrove, was chosen to replace Quentin Bryce, whose term as governor-general was about to expire.

In between times the tone was amplified with a slew of significant appointments weighted overwhelmingly towards older, business-oriented, climate change–denying, Sydney-based, conservative men.

Having mocked the then new prime minister Kevin Rudd for “hitting the ground reviewing” in 2007, Abbott has commenced his tenure in much the same way. “Independent reviews” have been commissioned across portfolios, and the choice of reviewers speaks volumes about the new government, its bedfellows and the advice it wants to hear.

Sydney businessman Tony Shepherd, 69, is chairing the National Commission of Audit. He is the immediate past president of the conservative Business Council of Australia. Sydney businessman Maurice Newman, 76, chairs the Business Advisory Council. A friend of John Howard’s, he is the former chair of the Australian Stock Exchange. Sydney businessman David Murray, 65, chairs the financial system inquiry. He is a former CEO of the Commonwealth Bank. Sydney businessman Dick Warburton, 72, chairs the review of the Renewable Energy Target. Like Murray and Newman, Warburton is an outspoken climate change sceptic, so his appointment to review one of the key planks of the government effort to combat climate change was unsurprisingly met with outrage and incredulity by environmentalists, climate scientists and renewable-energy advocates.

 Read more: http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/may/1398866400/rachel-nolan/men-certain-age

 

See image at top.

 

Parliament House officials have confirmed a marble table in the ministerial wing of the building was broken on the night Tony Abbott hosted a party after being ousted as prime minister.

Department of Parliamentary Services (DPS) staff were informed by cleaners the morning after the party that the furniture, in a room just outside the Cabinet Suite described as the 'Cabinet anteroom', was broken.

In Senate estimates, Labor senator Penny Wong pressed DPS official John Ryan on the incident.

John Ryan: We were told there were pieces of the table there.

Senator Wong: Pieces?

John Ryan: Pieces, yes.

Senator Wong: How do you ... what, pieces of the marble broke?

John Ryan: Some of the pieces of marble were found by the cleaners, yes.

Senator Wong: Quite a party.

Mr Ryan also told the committee that DPS staff were blocked from accessing the room and inspecting the damage for two days.

Liberal senator Cory Bernardi suggested the table could be better described as "broken" rather than "damaged".

More to come.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-19/marble-table-a-casualty-of-rowdy-abbott-party/6865510

 

See toon at top...

Tony Abbott is morphing from leadership aspirant into political assassin and the transition is deadly.

Because if Mr Abbott abandons hope of ever being prime minister again, he might settle for mortally wounding Malcolm Turnbull and letting someone else bury the corpse.

The speech he gave at the Making Australia Right book launch reeked of a man itching to pull the trigger on a Prime Minister he sees as spineless and lacking a moral core.

His hatred is profound, his anger is deepening and his impatience is growing. His disdain for Mr Turnbull leached through every word. It was a dress rehearsal for a showdown where he will define victory as both men walking away losers.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-02-24/tony-abbott-political-assassin-ana...

 

read from top... Nothing new...