State premiers have reacted angrily to an $80 billion federal budget cut to schools and hospitals funding, accusing the Commonwealth of trying to "wedge" them into pushing for a hike to the Goods and Services Tax (GST).

Commonwealth funding will be slashed from schools and hospitals over the next decade, as the Federal Government moves agreements with the states and territories to "more realistic" deals.

Labor's Gonski school funding plan will be dumped in 2017-18, saving about $30 billion from the federal budget.

Hospital funding agreements, agreed with the states and territories under former Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, will also be wound back from 2017, saving a massive $50 billion over eight years.

New South Wales Premier Mike Baird says the Federal Government is trying to fix the budget bottom line by shifting the burden to the states - and the states will not cop it.

"When we got our house in order, we didn't send the bill to Canberra," he said.

"We got our house in order, we took the actions required and got our budget back onto a sustainable path.

"What we had last night from the Federal Government is a fleet pass; it is cost shifting and it says to this state, 'we have a problem, you work it out'.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-14/budget-2014-states-react-to-health-and-education-cuts/5452234

Fat man with a cigar says 'tighten your belts, the age of entitlement is over'. What is wrong with this picture, asks Bob Ellis.

Fat man with cigar says:

‘Tighten your belts.’

What is wrong with this picture?

Fat man with cigar whispers:

‘Lunch with me, baby? Twenty thousand bucks.’

What is wrong with this message?

There is an old Labor saying: If you’ve never had holes in your shoes, you don’t know what it’s like.

I last had holes in my shoes in 2003 and a girl in the office, Viv Skinner, bought me new ones.

I wear sandals now; a conscious decision — they’re cheaper.

I had holes in my shoes because I had student-age kids and a half-million mortgage left over from misspending money on real estate in the eighties and losing it all. You get holes in your shoes that way. And you see things differently, with holes in your shoes.

Joe somehow thinks the occasional skint supporting mother with four sick children and a part-time job who has to pay, now, twenty-eight dollars a week to go to the doctor and twenty dollars more for medicine doesn’t matter.

He imagines she’s uncommon, statistically irrelevant, uninfluential when she whinges about it.
He imagines she doesn’t have a mother, an uncle, a schoolfriend, a neighbour, a fellow church member who’ll talk about her to others and write to their local member.

He imagines this kind of information, in the Facebook age, can be suppressed — as it was last century by editorial policy and a fearful ABC newsroom.

He imagines he can act as secretly as Howard and Costello did and get away with it.

He imagines no-one’s watching or listening.

He imagines no-one cares.

He also imagines Howard and Costello got away with it, when their 1996 ‘tough budget’ lost them seventeen seats. Seventeen seats would put his mob out of government — and more people are watching, and listening, and reading now than ever before.

One of the things they saw was a fat man with a cigar telling others to tighten their belts.

One of the things they heard was of him, Joe, charging twenty thousand dollars for lunch with him, at the ‘North Sydney Forum’. What they heard was how Liberals have been buying influence in this fashion since Askin’s day, and the Liberal Party is, basically, a racket. Almost sixty per cent of New South Walespeople believe this now — and he’s telling them to tighten their belts, and share the pain, the burden.

They’ve seen Rake. They know how big a fib this is. Cleaver Green says I’m on your side, trust me.

The bottom line − to use a tedious phrase − is eighty per cent of us have less money to spend now. And this is supposed to be good for the economy. And it’s really, really bad for the economy. Less money spent means less revenue, less profits, less jobs, less money spent, less revenue, and so on down to oblivion. It’s why all austerity programs fail.

A dimwit can work that out. Joe Hockey can’t.

Joe could have paid the interest on the deficit, $1.6 billion, by delaying for a year the money to be spent on the fool fighter-bomber that still can’t fly, and keeping all of Labor’s measures — broadband, Gonski, the NDIS, the schoolkids’ money, the ABC’s golden age — going.

He could have paid $3.2 billion next year by halving the pregnant millionairesses’ baby bonus, and waited for the economy to improve. Instead, he decided to wind up the Australian project — the fair go; the neighbourly society; the ladder of opportunity; the good village we all aspire to, altogether.

And he thereby lost his career, his reputation, his good name, his posterity. That’s how dumb he is. He will be despised now as Lehman Brothers. That’s how dumb he is.

He imagines he’s got years, not months, before ICAC snares him and he has to resign his seat. That’s how dumb he is. That’s how truly dumb.

Treasury revealed on Monday that the deficit for the first nine months of the fiscal year was $24 billion. Which meant for the whole year it was about $30 billion, not $47 billion. This brought down the problem by a third, and meant Swanny’s date of surplus, 2017, was correct. Joe will get his surplus too by that year — and in the meantime destroy Australia.

But it’s likely he won’t get that far.

The reason is the disabled and their relatives. This is three million people. On top of them are a million immediate friends and what we call the doctors’ wives. These add up to 22 per cent of the electorate. Joe is telling the disabled to get off their crippled butts and on their bike and find a job — in an era when half the young people’s jobs are done by machines. If he loses that 22 per cent, he loses fifty seats and sweeps the Liberal Party out of Australian history.

That’s how good he is at adding.

Fat man with cigar says get on your bike, you cripples, the age of entitlement is over. The healthy ones, come pay me $22,000 and we’ll talk.

That’s how dumb he is.

Oh boy.

http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/more-joe-hockey-stupidity-diamonds-on-the-soles-of-his-shoes,6476

 

...

We should encourage politicians to engage in some old-fashion policy reform.

It is what Labor did with the National Disability Insurance Scheme - pointing out the problems, getting a report on the options for solutions, then discussing it with the sector and through them the public.

It took an electorate, fearful of increases in cost of living, to the point where it happily accepted an extra tax through an increase in the Medicare levy.

Treasurer Joe Hockey too has engaged, singlehandedly, in some old-fashioned policy reform.

He began by describing the problem with what he called the "age of entitlement".

He spoke in broad terms about people doing things for themselves that they could afford without the need of government support.

For anyone who has listened to Mr Hockey in the past two years, the thrust of changes in the budget - although not their extent - would not have come as a surprise.

Unfortunately for him, his leader made many, many very specific promises and pledged to keep them all. (Gus bold)

So yes, take politicians to task for not keeping their promises. They should, especially when they have pledged to.

But maybe we should also ask them to make fewer promises and judge them on results.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-15/politicians-need-to-be-judged-on-results/5453388

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

Yes. OK. SURE. But under these conditions of making proper promises, Tony Abbott would not have been elected. He would never have been be allowed to use this country as a demolition derby to entertain the rich. The point here is that the Carbon Pricing was NOT constructed as a tax... and that despite the horror Armageddon that Tony the Dancing Turd told us would happen, it has not happened and the carbon pricing is working reasonably well to reduce Australia's carbon emissions. A wad of good environmental policies — INCLUDING  the "insulation" programme, I may add — worked well at reducing this country's carbon foot-print. This by itself is far more significant than all the painful crap contained in Joe Hockey's budget of hell, that also includes the financing of proselytising in PUBLIC SCHOOLS, while destroying the fairness of the education system. 

THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE. LABOR SHOULD REJECT ALL OF TONY'S BUDGIES... ER... I MEAN BUDGETS... Same crappy smell. These people have a hide!

REJECT, REJECT REJECT!!! Tell Tony to stick it in his own butt and light it,  as if it was one of Joe's cigars.

 

Senior Coalition ministers are taking a tough line on whether the Government will cede any ground in a bid to get billions of dollars of budget measures through Parliament.

Federal MPs have begun two weeks of sittings which will be dominated by the changes announced in the Abbott Government's first budget.

Many of the changes will face an uphill battle getting through the Senate, including the $7 fee for GP visits, cuts to family payments, hikes in the fuel excise and a radical reshaping of the higher education sector.

Labor has said it will oppose those measures as well as moves to increase the pension age to 70, cuts to pension rises, and moves to stop Newstart payments for young people without a job.

The Government will be forced to win over votes from the crossbench, but Finance Minister Mathias Cormann has taken a hard line on potential talks.

"We delivered the budget Australia had to have after six years of Labor waste and mismanagement," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-26/mps-take-tough-line-on-changes-to-budget/5478184

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

Yes Cormann, three bags full, Cormann. Going huff and puff with more tough lies, stiff porkies and hard core fibs... You mean this budget, full of lies to the gunnels, is your own way to mismanage the Aussie way of life... Go away... your budget stinks... F off...

The prime minister is likely to include a message in Centrelink’s “News for Seniors” publication to explain the unpopular budget and the “current financial situation” to 2.4 million pensioners and concession card holders.

The chief executive of the Council on the Ageing, Ian Yates, said he hoped the prime minister would not use the opportunity to repeat his claim that “pensions are not being cut” without “explaining the very narrow interpretation of cut that he uses to back up that position”.

The PM says the pension will not be cut because it will continue to be increased twice annually. But from 2017 the increase will be based on inflation rather than average weekly earnings, meaning it will be lower.

“The raw fact is that the new rate of pension indexation will mean that pensioners receive over time much less than they otherwise would have … the real value of the pension will fall dramatically over time,” Yates said.

And Yates suggested the prime minister might be better to wait before he sent any message since it seemed highly unlikely that the pension changes would pass either this Senate or the new one that sits from July.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/tony-abbott-message-likely-to-be-in-centrelink-publication-for-seniors

 

I hope most of the oldies, not affected by that terrible memory loss disease would tell Tony to go and piss on himself...

 

The cost of living rebate for seniors has been halved by the West Australian government after the Commonwealth cut funding for concessions.

The state government recently said it would not cover the $107 million over four years that was trimmed from the federal budget.

On Tuesday, WA Premier Colin Barnett said the annual cost of living rebate (COLR) for single seniors had been reduced to $82 and to $123 for couples, saving the state $21 million.

The cut will affect 306,000 West Australian seniors.

The premier said it was a regrettable decision to have to make but the federal government had left the state "holding the baby".

Mr Barnett said cutting the rebate was the simplest change to make administratively and would have the least affect on seniors and pensioners, who were more concerned with concessions for utilities and rates.

Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/wa-news/state-government-cuts-relief-to-seniors-20140624-zsk9v.html#ixzz35X5m0wQD

What a bunch of turds...

 

The Prime Minister has dumped the plan to raise the pension age to 70.

Scott Morrison has announced the decision on breakfast television this morning even before Cabinet has formally agreed to it.

It was one of the issues on which Labor had repeatedly attacked the Government, especially highlighting the impact for people with physically difficult jobs.

Former treasurer Joe Hockey announced the plan to lift the pension age from 67 to 70 in his controversial 2014 budget in a bid to help fund the cost of the ageing population.

The Senate has refused to ever agree to legislation to formalise the change, but until today the Government had stuck to the policy.

Mr Morrison told Channel Nine he did not think the measure was needed anymore.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-05/scott-morrison-scraps-plans-to-raise-pension-age-to-70/

 

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