Liberal senator Cori Bernardi has roundly criticised his own Government's budget, saying concerns about it are "legitimate".

In a weekly newsletter, the South Australian senator from the Coalition's right-wing, has taken a swipe at the federal budget measures, particularly the decisions to bring in a debt tax and to spend the proceeds of the $7 GP co-payment on medical research.

"There are plenty of regular people who are disappointed with aspects of the budget and their concerns are entirely legitimate," Senator Bernardi said.

"It is now up to the Government to spell out the facts and convince Australians that the proposed changes are necessary and manageable."

The senator has spelt out the difficulty the Government faces in having Parliament pass the measures.

"Early indications are that the Government will have to make some concessions as the Senate is unlikely to pass all the budget measures," he said.

Senator Bernardi also says he does not believe the $7 fee on GP visits, X-rays and blood tests should go towards a medical research fund.

"Personally, I would prefer to see the co-payment directed to debt reduction, but the Government decided otherwise," he said.

In relation to the 2 per cent hike in income taxes for top earners, he says taxes should instead be reduced "across the board".

"But for better or worse, this is what the Government decided," he said.

"What Australians can do is make sure that this does in fact remain a temporary levy."

Top earners will pay an extra 2 per cent tax for three years, ending on June 30, 2017, in a measure worth $3.1 billion.

A regular critic of the ABC, Senator Bernardi also said the 1 per cent reduction in funding over four years for the public broadcaster was "measly".

"If it was up to me I'd limit the ABC's public funding to current radio stations and two television channels," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-05-21/cory-bernardi-criticises-his-own-governments-budget/5468496

 

Life has its ups and downs... as well as being insane... Please visit:  angels with snouts...

With a budget rejected by the public, backbenchers skittish about dismal poll numbers and uni students revolting, what does Tony Abbott do when an old-age pensioner tells him she needs to work on a phone sex line to survive? He smirks and winks. Bob Ellis comments.

Bad numbers add up to imminent end of Abbott experiment

The change in Abbott’s and Hockey’s fortunes (and it’s now likely they won’t both be in the same job in September) is a measure of how influential two sets of numbers – Newspoll and Nielsen – have lately been.

Talk of displacing one or both of them is on the rise and forty or fifty Liberal and National members are worried – frantically in some cases – about losing their seats, especially in Queensland.

These polls are very influential.

Many people, having read them, change their voting intention to keep up with the crowd, the fashion, the zeitgeist, the prevailing winds. They are, perhaps, the most potent weapon in the arsenal of politics.

And so it was last August when ReachTel’s and Lonergan’s machines, ringing on Thursday night eighty people for every one that took the robocall, found Rudd, Swan, Clare, Burke, Bowen, Murphy, Melham, Dreyfus and Bradbury would lose their seats and a younger generation of Labor leaders be swept out of history.

Murphy, Melham and Bradbury did lose their seats, but the others did not, and the confected panic about them consumed, in many headlines, the wave of confidence Rudd’s return had momentarily stirred, and made the idea of him losing − Rudd losing, Rudd the unbeatable − in the public mind a certitude.

ReachTel and Lonergan were thus propaganda bunker-busters and big lies – or premeditated inexactitudes – and their publication lost Labor four or five seats, one of them certainly Forde, which Beattie with better initial published polling might well have picked up.

ReachTel and Lonergan ring landlines when no young people are at home, and so were able to exaggerate the anti-Labor swing last year. This year, however, the old people are voting Labor too, and the news on the landlines is nearly as dire as it would have been on the mobile phones of the under-forties rung in the pub or the mall or the car driving home on Thursday night.

Nearly as dire. But not quite. Morgan, ringing mobiles, last weekend found Labor on 57.5 per cent, numbers that would lose Pyne, Hockey, Cormann, and, probably, Abbott their seats. And a momentum like the Rudd-Swan-Burke-Bowen-Dreyfus figures of last year gives, this year, the present Government no great hope of re-election.

Re-election this September, probably. Abbott’s cowardice (he now foresees assassination in Deakin University) in the Senate will not save him. Palmer will keep upping the ante till he calls an election.

Clive Palmer will even vote to uphold the carbon tax.

He has said he will do so if Abbott does not cancel a lot of things and he will keep his word. An election would give him three or four seats in the House, and 10 in the Senate, and there is no point, any more, in Palmer waiting two-and-a-half years to overthrow a gang he so detests, who misspent the millions he gave them and now deride him as a drongo.

The Newspoll-Nielsen Effect will put Abbott, next week, sixteen points behind Shorten as preferred Prime Minister. There is no precedent for this in countries that do not, usually, change government by army coup. Once the prime minister begins to refuse to go to public meetings (Abbott is famous for his feisty defiance of bellicose crowds in the past; no more, it seems), we will truly have a government ‘in the bunker’ as few Down Under have been before.

And all because Murdoch couldn’t control Nielsen, and had to supply, with gritted teeth, a plausible Newspoll, showing Abbott losing forty seats.

Tony Abbott is a winker

The wink Abbott gave when he heard a dying 67-year-old woman was a phone sex worker – though unremarkable as a reaction given he forgot the camera was on and he was talking to Jon Faine — was politically indefensible, and, like General Patton slapping a sick soldier, will bring him down.

No more than 41 per cent of women will vote for him after this – ever – and he will have to resign.

I give him thirty days.

see more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/bad-budget-and-bad-polls-make-tony-a-winker,6502

 

The wink, which dominated debate on social media on Wednesday, came on a torrid day for the Prime Minister, who was forced to defend his daughter Frances for receiving a $60,000 design degree scholarship from an institution linked to a Liberal donor.

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Mr Abbott said on Thursday morning that he was responding to the ABC radio host when he winked during the interview.

"Look, I was looking at Jon Faine, he was smiling at me and I winked back at him," Mr Abbott told Channel Nine.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbott-admits-wink-was-a-mistake-defends-daughter-over-scholarship-controversy-20140522-38ppk.html#ixzz32OZX2ZkC

As USUAL Tony the Turd blames something else for his otherwise very defined stupidity... It's an art form. Deflect your own bullshit and blame others for it... Tony got a degree for this skill on England with a Rhodes scholarship... His daughter is obviously super talented like wonder woman and my only beef is if she was worth the $60,000 grant in comparison to say my neighbour's granddaughter she must have been far too good to go and learn something... It's not what you know or don't know, it's who you know... We talk about nepotism corruption in Indonesia, but our own Tony is too good a fudging liar for us ...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFWXGvFLq70#t=83