Monday 25th of November 2024
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all tip & no iceberg .....

all tip & no iceberg .....

It didn't have come to this, Julia.

Although a rusted on Labor voter, I will swallow my pride, confront an aversion to conservatism and vote Liberal, purely out of spite.

Australians don't all sleep with cricket bats next to their bed to thwart invading boat people; Paul Keating was Australia's greatest treasurer, prime minister, antique clock collector and deliverer of artful insults; and Labor is traditionally the party of substantial economic reform. But it's all gone so horribly wrong.

Sure, Labor has trashed Keating's economic legacy with its gratuitous spending but that was supposed to be former PM Kevin Rudd's fault. Rudd was an ideological social democrat committed to big government, which is convenient because he was the government. But with Julia Gillard deposing Rudd as PM, the Labor Party was poised to return to its former glory.

Unfortunately, Gillard spent her first month as Prime Minister doing her best not to sound like one. Although she wisely ditched her Stepford wife alter ego early in the campaign, Gillard has been more disappointing than the iPhone4. What does she stand for, besides maintaining power and being a safe but timid manager of the economy? Gillard has made Kevin Rudd look like a principled political titan - and that is no mean feat.

On the policy front, Labor should lose the election on the basis of its climate change citizens' forum.

You can imagine how this climate change policy was concocted. Labor strategists from the NSW right were huddled in their Sussex Street lair, scheming over the best way to neutralise climate change as an election issue. In a moment of brevity, the resident Labor joker suggested a citizens forum to examine the science behind climate change and Australia's policy response. No policy issue should be dumbed-down to a citizens forum, especially climate change and its inaccessible science. That's what made it so funny, he thought. But instead of laughter, there was silence. Two of Labor's arch-strategists locked eyes on each other and a shared a deliciously evil moment. Might this incredibly stupid idea actually work? Could Australians be fooled so easily? Yes, they agreed. Labor could hoodwink voters with the world's most ridiculous policy, and delay doing anything real, and therefore costly, on climate change.

It's not as though Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party have earned the right to government but they are the least-worst of a diabolical major party choice.

Abbott might have forfeited the right to be prime minister on the basis that boat people are a central pillar of his campaign. I support legal immigration in much the same way as one is pro-road rules and anti-tax evasion, and no one should risk their life coming to Australia on a leaky boat. But boat people are a peripheral issue and focusing on them demeans Abbott as a person and politician. Yet Gillard's sustainable Australia ruse almost plummets to Abbott's depressing depth, and, therefore. they cancel each other out.

On the economy, it's also nil-all draw. The measure of a government's success should be the willingness to pursue tough but necessary economic reform. Labor's only attempt at economic reform was to ambush the mining industry with a massive tax to fund spending commitments it otherwise couldn't afford. For its part, the Liberal Party can only live for so long with the GST in 1998 as their only example of real reform. Whoever wins on August 21 is unlikely to have the courage or imagination to do anything meaningful on tax, productivity and competition. If Keating was the batman of economic reform, then Gillard and Abbott don't even deserve to be Robin.

However, Abbott's maternity leave plan is a rare example of policy substance in the election campaign. The fact that it's absurdly generous - paying some mothers vastly more than others to do exactly the same thing - is almost beside the point. Ditto to raising corporate taxes to fund the policy, which offends common sense, economic responsibility and Liberal values. It's bold, and even a flawed bold policy is worth supporting in an uninspiring election campaign marked by policy smallness.

Labor's National Broadband Network (NBN) could have rivaled the Liberal's maternity leave plan but it smacks of government excess. If the NBN will transform Australia's economy and our lives - as the government hyperbolically claims - then why wasn't an even rudimentary cost-benefit analysis done? Labor might be convinced it has divine providence to gratuitously spend taxpayers money but surely the past three years of ill-conceived initiatives gives it pause for thought.

Labor deserves to lose this election and in the process it might just rediscover its political soul. It should be the natural party of government in Australia, with progressive social policies, liberal economic policies and a strong reform agenda. Instead, the Labor Party is a joke. Paul Keating was a political giant and the party has neglected his legacy to its detriment.

Brendan Brown is a freelance writer and former economic policy adviser in the Treasury Department.

Labor Trashes Keating's Legacy

 

a dung beetle...

"Although a rusted on Labor voter, I will swallow my pride, confront an aversion to conservatism and vote Liberal, purely out of spite."?

Gus: that's right! Swallow your dick at the same time! What an idiotic remark!... So this fellow prefers the worst of the lot so he can vent his spleen!!! Let me say now, Julia's work was not made easy by a shifty and near-sociopathic Tony! Give her the chance to emerge as a working bee compared to Tony who would be metamorphosing into a dung beetle...

apologies...

Let me apologise for some pretty harsh and rude words I used about Tony's flipflapflops... Yes I know, I should be more civilised and I am despite being annoyed. But I can't stay polite when seeing and knowing what Tony is doing...

Let me tell you a secret... It won't be anymore but it does not matter. When Tony was talking of "I'll stop the boats" in his "contract"... I made a bet with myself that he would come back to this hard-core policy and by end present himself as a more "reasonable" man — because everyone knows boats can't be stopped unless sunk... Now Tony is selling us the concept of three boats a year down from a NO-BOAT policy and we're at ten yellow laughs a minute. Pity, some people won't see through this as another con...

Such shifts of enphasis on subjects, to accommodate an illusion of "being reasonable" and on top of things is typical of sociopaths. I am not saying that Tony is a sociopath, but to me, he has shown more than a lot of the characteristics.

Small lies to vicious attacks on one's opponents, using BIG lies cleverly disguised, turning mouseholes into gigantic caverns, being highly manipulative and by saying major untruths in the manner of positive beliefs are much of the sociopathic patterns...

But sociopaths are hard to beat. They even cannot be pointed at...

Let's beat Tony, though, the hard way if we need too... at the ballot box...

the con shifts

The latest con shift of "three Boats" from Tony, "at this late stage", is designed (what am I saying  — precision crafted, planned well IN ADVANCE) to CON anti-boat people and the people who have a heart, towards Tony's duplicity... See should there be five boats coming to the shore, while Tony "would be PM", the people who have a heart would not be too upset and those who don't want the boats would believe Tony would be "doing his best" and they would blame the "boat smugglers"...

Lie-lie, win-win...

Despicable tactics.

The Power of the unregulated media Gus.

Having a reasonable memory for my age, I have been absolutely disgusted by the so-called media of - dare I say it - Australia.

Lie, lie, despicable tactics. But, with the risk of repeating an unwise-political statement by Mark Latham so long ago - "How do they get away with it"?

Those of us who have long ago learned that the most powerful non-voter in Australia is Rupert Murdoch and the empire that he has built on lies deception and ruthless take overs.  But look at the result.

I had previously opined that he would bring down the English Labor government and, given the scary financial meltdown, he had an easy target.

With the National Broadband intended by the Rudd Labor government to bring Australia into the 21st century, Murdoch's love of Rudd disintegrated by the statement that Labor intended it to be, at least first, an Australian public asset. Not surprisingly after his dining with Tony Abbott.

Even the unaligned media, and there is not many of them, were shocked at the sudden 180 degree turn by Murdoch about his recent admiration of Kevin Rudd.  When no one asked why, Murdoch took Government enterprises which were 90% successful and turned them into a 10% disgrace.

Surely, the reasons for the truth not getting to the Australian people is self evident?  NE OUBLIE.

 

look deeper .....

Hi Ernst,

I also decry the state of the media, though not just in Orstrayla, but around the world.

But I think it's too easy just to blame Murdoch. The devil he may be but his 'works' could not have flourished so successfully if it wasn't for the duplicity of both successive Labour & Coalition governments over the years, bent on pandering to the media moguls like him, Packer & Stokes, in the forlorn belief that it would somehow secure favourable coverage from their fish & chip wrappers for their political causes.

You will recall the saying about lying down with dogs .... & that's why I occasionally curse both political houses .... they've both betrayed us all.

In my view, Murdoch is just a symbol of that beytrayal. 

The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword.

I agree with the thread of your post John, but not in the way you tend to accept or even condone it.

I am aware that there seems to be many various types of media in most parts of the communicative world but, it is my major concern how my country is treated and by whom and why. I do not necessarily believe that this oh so obvious problem is caused by the major parties per se. It is who Murdoch favors.

So who came first, the chicken or the egg?

IMHO the born to rule dictated the original methods of telling their servants and peasants what they considered they should know?  Some lesser peoples learned to read and write and decided to pass on their interpretation of the unexplained wars etc. (Like Your Democracy?)

I also believe that, as is so often the defense of biased reporting, that the upsurge of Freedom of the Press in the Wild Wild West actually did happen but in a much less than “shoot everybody” way. Finally it would appear to me that like so many worthwhile objectives, this one was also exploited by the “powers that be” sometimes for Statehood.  Eventually the influence that this gave to unelected crazed wealthy opportunists was used to “buy the politicians” – or else politically destroy them.  Euphemistically called “Lobbying” in the US.

That is still as I see it today in Australia and, with the wealth of Murdoch, he has slowly but surely bought himself into a position of extreme power and has demonstrated that by helping to elect or destroy governments in England the US and Australia.  He just donated $1 billion to the Republican Party of America to remove some of Obama’s power in the half yearly elections.

Whitlam wanted to “buy back our farm” and its resources – so he went and violently" [Packer]

Keating passed the Cross Media Ownership Bill – he had to go and so he did.

Kevin Rudd had decided to keep the National Broadband in the public’s hands – ditto ditto ditto.

What Murdoch calls HIS “heart of the nation – the Australian” then turned on Julia  Gillard, even after lauding her credentials well above those of Kevin Rudd - which aided in the latter’s removal.

These obscenely rich parasites can only exist in democracies which aren’t really democracies at all – like the US UK and Australia.  The cold clear truth is that either Murdoch puts us out of our misery, by denying us a vote through his corrupt politicians, or we introduce massive regulations for truth and nothing but the truth. 

I try to think of these matters with a K.I.S.S. principle.  When and if you read any newspapers on the net or otherwise, and sources are not quoted, be informed that those articles would NOT BE ACCEPTED IN A COURT OF LAW.

So why do we allow the media to illegally condemn our citizens, especially politicians, solely on the basis of "the many who are saying that"? Or the real or imaginary leaks, especially those from the incomprehensible Laurie Oakes.  What gives him the right to cirumvent the law?

Malcolm Turnbull is noted for his penchant for taking people to court who malign his name in any way - and I for one don't blame him.  NE OUBLIE.