Labor says Prime Minister Tony Abbott has conceded the fuel excise is a "carbon tax on steroids" following remarks about the scheme the PM made in the US.

Mr Abbott told US president Barack Obama during wide-ranging private discussions in Washington the fuel excise, which the Government announced would increase in the budget, was acting like a carbon price signal.

Australia is resisting pressure to put climate change on the agenda for the G20 Leaders summit meeting in Brisbane in November, but the leaders agreed to discuss energy efficiency.

Labor's transport spokesman Anthony Albanese seized on the Prime Minister's comments, telling the ABC Mr Abbott's remarks had exposed the real truth.

"He's railed about a price on carbon wrecking the economy, now he's conceded that his big new petrol tax is just that – it's a carbon tax on steroids," Mr Albanese said.

He said the Prime Minister's message changed depending on whom he was speaking to.

"This is one message in the United States but a very different message to what he's giving to the Australian people.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-13/fuel-excise-a-carbon-tax-on-steroids-labor-says/5522216

Our travelling Turd-in-Chief is not afraid of telling different stories and he does not care if he is sprung... For example on the concept of global warming which he seems to now go along with in the US, he has sacked all the scientists doing the climate science in Australia and replaced them with UNSCIENTIFIC advisors that are complete denialists... If this is not turdy, what is?

I'm starting to believe that this turd is baiting Gus to do more and more outrageous cartoons!

Part Two of Alan Austin’s report on Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s bumbling visits to Indonesia, France, Canada and the USA you will not find in the mainstream media.

[Read Part one here.]

THE NICKNAME ‘Nigel No-friends’caused amusement this week when opposition MP Tanya Plibersek drew attention to Abbott’s isolation in Indonesia and France.

Abbott’s office hit back highlighting Abbott’s rapport with Canadian PM Stephen Harper who he visited on Tuesday.

Both have been climate science deniers and are opposed to carbon taxes. Both won office despite manifest lack of aptitude and suitability and both are embattled at home with mounting opposition to failing policies.

Abbott embarrassed Harper and himself this week with his public call for an alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain and India to oppose global moves towards emissions reduction led by Europe and the US.

Bizarrely, Abbott had not sounded out his potential partners in private. So, not surprisingly, the scheme was immediately slapped down by Britain and New Zealand. Absolute silence from India.

read more: http://www.independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/an-abbott-abroad-ii-tony-no-friends-wants-to-be-like-mike,6574

From Bob Brown

In February 2012, as leader of the Greens, I made a courtesy call on Tony Abbott. He had just pipped Malcolm Turnbull in a party room vote for the leadership of the opposition. He looked straight at me and said, "I am an environmentalist!"

I did not roll my eyes or argue. I had heard the like before. The CEO of Tasmania's Hydro-Electric Commission, after flooding Lake Pedder and at the height of the controversy over damming the Franklin River, maintained that he was an environmentalist. So have a string of other dam-builders, loggers and gougers of the Earth.

Quite a few embellish this absurdity by calling themselves the true or real environmentalists. Even the Japanese whale killers fire their grenade-tipped harpoons in the name of environmental science.

US president George Bush senior flew to the Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 claiming to be the environmental president. One US cartoonist had him being greeted there by three other male heads-of-state with "I'm Little Red Riding Hood", "I'm Miss Muffet" and "and "I'm Goldilocks!".

John Howard went no further than to claim that he was "greenish", but Tony Abbott is staking his claim to be the environmental prime minister. In Washington last week he repeated his self-assessment – "I am a conservationist" – to bewildered journalists.

He has been repeating this absurdity for some years, while convincing no one but himself. In 2012, Abbott told a community forum in Victoria that he was "as much a conservationist as Bob Brown". He would have left thinking the audience believed him. He has become the Green Emperor with no clothes.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jun/16/i-am-a-conservationist-is-tony-abbott-the-only-person-who-believes-that

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Tony Abbott is dishonest. End of story. Full stop... Finito. Kaput... One lie too many from the turd.

The Federal Government has lost a bid to delist more than 70,000 hectares of forest from Tasmania's World Heritage Area (WHA).

The United Nations' World Heritage Committee, meeting in Doha, took just 10 minutes to reject the Government's application to reverse protection for 74,000 hectares.

The area was part of 170,000 hectares added to the WHA last year under Tasmania's forest peace deal enacted by the former state and federal Labor governments.

News of the decision was quickly welcomed by conservation groups, including former Greens leader Bob Brown who described the decision as a "global diplomatic humiliation" for the Abbott Government.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-24/unesco-rejects-bid-to-delist-world-heritage-forest/5538946

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Knowing how the little "conservationist" Turd-in-Chief operates, he will go and send his axemen to destroy twice as many trees somewhere else... or during the night... or wait for a bushfire to blame the "greenies"...

Every time someone pops up and accuses Barbara Ramjan of lying over the infamous university incident when Tony Abbott flew his fists into a wall, there has been a handsome apology to her.

If only you'd been listening on Monday night you'd have heard the latest in a series of grovels, this one from Andrew Bolt on 2GB's Steve Price show.

Ramjan was the young woman who in 1977 enraged Tony Abbott and his band of university bovver boys, when she beat him in the election for the post of president of the University of Sydney's student representative council. She now works as guardian appearing for children in the NSW court system.

The interesting thing is: where does this series of apologies to Ramjan leave Tony Abbott's denial of the incident? The story was reported in David Marr's 2012 Quarterly Essay, Political Animal: The Making of Tony Abbott.

Ramjan told Marr that following the election Abbott approached her. "He came up to within an inch of my nose and punched the wall on either side of my head. It was done to intimidate," she said. Another witness said that Abbott's gang was screaming "commie" and "poofter" as they barged in to make their threatening protest to Ramjan.

Since then, Abbott has variously said that “it would be profoundly out of character had it occurred" and "it never happened". In the first he leaves open the possibility it did happen and in the second he rules it out.

The publication of the Quarterly Essay provoked indignation and denials from hardcore right-wing warriors. Melbourne's conservative pin-up boy Michael Kroger was laying into Ramjan, so was Alan Jones, so too The Australian and more recently Bolt on 2GB.

Apparently it was inconceivable that Abbott would lie in denying such a thing. Ramjan had to be making it up.

Careless with the facts, Bolt on 19 May told 2GB's listeners that: "Tony Abbott was falsely accused of punching a wall next to the head of the student official when he was at university..."

He was talking in the context of student demonstrations that greeted foreign minister Julie Bishop and how sad it was that there had not been the same amount of condemnation that greeted the story about Abbott and his wall punching. Bolt went on:

How many interviews did David Marr give about his book about Tony Abbott hitting a wall? I mean, on the ABC it was wall-to-wall. You couldn't turn on the ABC without it. If that is such a terrible thing - and he [Abbott] denied it and there are no eye witness accounts of him actually doing it that are credible. If that is such a germane thing, something that happened 30 something years ago, why is there zero, zero condemnation [of Bishop being jostled], it seems to me, from the usual mouthpieces of the left? What’s happening to Liberal politicians today?

That woe-begotten spray contained a crucial error. There were two credible eye witnesses, one of whom had made a sworn statement about what happened in 1977.

Patrick George, Ramjan's lawyer, quickly dispatched a letter of demand to Bolt, pointing out that his remarks gave rise to the imputation that his client had lied and there was a witness to say she had not lied. Bolt had nowhere to go, except to broadcast this grovel on Monday night:

On 19 May, I made some statements on air concerning an incident involving the prime minister which took place at the University of Sydney approximately 30 years ago. I have been told by Barbara Ramjan that my statements might have been understood to suggest that her evidence of the incident was not truthful. I have never accused Ms Ramjan of lying in giving her evidence of that incident. In referring to the incident I did not intend to suggest that she was a liar or that she had acted dishonestly and if anyone understood my statements to suggest that, then I apologise to her unreservedly.

In late 2012, Ramjan sued over vehement remarks made by Kroger on The Bolt Report on 23 September 2012, an interview he gave to Alan Jones on 2GB, and two articles in The Australian.

Among Kroger's claims was the allegation that she is a "serial fabricator of false complaints". Ramjan pleaded four imputations: she is a left wing lunatic, she is a disgraceful nobody, she fabricated the Abbott allegation, and she told a vicious lie about Abbott as part of a campaign to damage him.

Justice Henric Nicholas ordered a jury of 12 for the Kroger trial saying: "The first's defendant's prominence and conduct, the prominence and conduct of Mr Abbott, and of the plaintiff herself, are all matters capable of exciting prejudice and antagonism."

By August 2013 The Australian and Kroger had settled and the newspaper published an apology for saying she had lied. Channel 10 had also apologised.

The day after the broadcast with Kroger, Jones went on air with a long explanation and apology, which concluded: "So if anything I have done had led to discomfort and concern for Barbara Ramjan then I do apologise and I want to assure her, I don't know whether she listens to the program or not, as others know that's not the way I conduct this program."

Now it's been Bolt's turn this week to set the record straight. If other players have apologised for imputing that Barbara Ramjan lied about the punches and intimidation, Tony Abbott does seem out in the cold and alone with his "It never happened".

read all about it: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/10/andrew-bolt-the-latest-to-apologise-for-doubting-tony-abbotts-wall-punch

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These days, Tonicchio, if I remember, now claims total memory loss about this episode of his life... "Can't recall"... But I believe he has told so many lies about anything and everything, there is no way he can remember his own story line... I guess he's a bit like that fellow on the recent episode of "New Tricks" (repeat) who CONvinced women he was an out-of-luck ex-MI6 agent being on the run from the Russian mafia... Poor women... But Tonicchio only tricks voters... Big lies, small lies, heat of battle sort of thing porkies — anything to get in bed with you...

And yes, Kroger often appears on the Bolt Report... I would suggest that they are good friends, though I don't know, but I've seen them often book-ending a poor middle-of-the-road leftie or a scientist that with little time to make a case, is dragged over hot coals by Andrew Bolt.

comparing policies...