Tuesday, 9 December 2014

GP co-payment change brings a Hobson's choice that still undermines bulk-billing

The new policy isn’t as unfair as the original one, but the question
is whether Abbott has squandered so much trust that people have stopped
listening

0:00

Link to video: Tony Abbott ditches compulsory Medicare co-payment

Lenore Taylor, political editor

Tuesday 9 December 2014 18.48 AEST

Unable
to convince voters and the Senate to back its $7 GP co-payment for the
past seven months, the government has decided to try to sneak past them
with an amended version just as they start to relax into Christmas.

Children, pensioners and concession card holders will be exempt,
under the new plan, but doctors will be able to choose to raise their
fees to make up for the fact that the government rebate will decline by
$5 per consultation. That’s the kind of choice made famous by a man
called Hobson.

This policy isn’t as unfair as the original version, but it will
undermine bulk-billing for most patients – which was always its
political point.

And
despite requiring both legislation and regulation (which may be
disallowed by the Senate) it has been announced after the parliament has
risen, when the head of the Australian Medical Association is overseas
and David Warner had just scored a century in the first Test against
India.

Oh, and the prime minister said he was “certainly not ruling out”
advertising on this policy although that was “not being currently
contemplated”, just as the government is advertising the higher
education reforms that have also been rejected by the Senate.

At least this backdown had some policy detail, unlike the weekend’s
announcement about the paid parental leave scheme which was more a
foreshadowing of a backdown sometime in the future.

But it is still making fundamental and contentious changes to a
policy area which, according to the latest Essential poll, is ranked
highest by voters in terms of importance.

Tony Abbott
tried to make a virtue of necessity. He said the policy was better than
the one he presented in the budget – which he had kept arguing until
last week was in fact the best plan – because the government had been
listening to the concerns of its own backbench.

The question now is whether he has waited so long, and squandered so
much trust with broken promises and bickering, that the electorate has
stopped listening to the government, or its arguments, or its
advertising.

According to that same Essential poll, 65% of voters thought the past year has been a bad one for Australian politics. And 44% thought next year was unlikely to be any better.

Sunday, 7 December 2014

Ærchies Archive - Digital Detritus

I Have Sold My Conscience

Posted on December 7, 2014 by archiearchive FCD

4 Votes

I was once a proud Australian.

Then I took part in an electoral process which led to tony abbott becoming Prime Minister.

tony abbott, who began by lying about something his predecessor said
and who, after his election, continued to lie about everything he said
and ignore all facets of truth.

He lied about how he was going to tax us. He did say that there would be no changes to the GST.

He lied about no changes to Pensions even as he reduced the increases.

He lied about cuts to the ABC and SBS, calling them “efficiency dividends” before finally admitting they were cuts.

He lied about his education policy.

He, and his Ministers, lied about so many things.

Australia’s foreign aid was changed from being aid to help the needy to aid to help Australian Business people.

All of which made me sad
but not discouraged for these are the actions expected of a Tory
Government. Even if they did lie about them before the election.

What has destroyed my faith in Australia is what we have done to those refugees seeking our help.

We used to be the country of a “Fair Go”, of “Mateship”. Now we are a
Nation which has chosen to ignore our international obligations to help
others.

We have chosen to thumb our collective nose at the UNHCR. We have
chosen to incarcerate the innocent. We have chosen to lock up children.
All in the name of “saving lives at sea”. And we have accepted the
secrecy our Government has imposed so that we do not even question
whether lives have been saved.

Yes that has destroyed my faith in my Nation.

Yet even all that did not cause me to reach the depths I have reached in this past 48 hours.

I now must give up my conscience.

We have a Prime Minister who was once intending to become a Priest,
with an Immigration Minister who is a member of an Evangelical Church,
with most of the rest of the front bench and a large group of
back-benchers being avowed Christians of assorted persuasions. Yet those
Biblical strictures appear to have no relevance.

They
have, individually and collectively, broken almost all of the Old
Testament’s Ten Commandments and the New Testament’s New Commandment
which Jesus gave to all who follow Him. “A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.“

So we have a Government of Christians who, in other circumstances would be declared “Apostate”.

It is this Government which has destroyed my faith in my country.

Now my taxes, your taxes, will be going to schools set up to educate
new priests, parsons and ministers. The ones who hope to be a part of
Churches which have histories of Child Abuse.

That’s correct.

Our taxes are going to support and educate child abusers.

That is the final straw.

That is the real cause of my anger and my tears.

I need to join the rest of my Nation and sell off my conscience!

Wednesday, 3 December 2014

The kooky Cult of Abbott's end days

Bob Ellis 3 December 2014, 10:30am 111

Politics

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It is hard to see the Abbott's Government's bizarre
cult-like denial of reality and meaningless, hairy-goat
expedition lasting another two years, writes Bob Ellis.

Bill Shorten is a million votes ahead of Abbott
as preferred Prime Minister, Labor 1.5 million votes ahead of the
Coalition as preferred Federal government and, in the Westminster
system, there would normally be resignations by now.

Christopher Pyne, for instance, failed to get his university revolution through and, last night, said he was "good friends" with Senator Glenn Lazarus — a man who thinks of him as a perverted stalker.

Scott Morrison was shown to have ordered a delay
for six hours of the disembarkation of heat-stressed asylum-seekers,
endangering some children’s lives, until Australia Day darkened into
night and their arrival could occur in secret. This is a crime and he
should stand down till it is investigated by a royal commission, or his
punishment determined by the Federal Police.

Defence Minister David Johnston committed treason by casting doubt on the ability of our Navy and should be stood down pending his trial for what, in other decades, was a capital crime.

Tony Abbott, also, threatened to fine
a new Premier, Daniel Andrews, $3 billion if he did not go back on a
promise which elected him on Saturday. This is a resignation matter.

Yet these kooks behave as if nothing out of the ordinary were
happening, that this "patient, disciplined government" were going about
their business in a "calm and orderly way".

It is, in fact, a strikingly aberrant government showing signs of being the worst in our history.

A thousand things they have done wrong could be listed by any attentive student. These include our shaming at APEC and the worst deficit in our history.

Some of the signs of Jonestown, or the Branch Davidian burning itself to death in Waco, Texas, are already apparent.

Finding their mutilation of the ABC opposed by eighty per cent of the people, they cut its money by half a billion dollars, after promising no change to it.

After killing car manufacture in this country, they then announced
they were killing submarine manufacture and awarding it, smashing a
whole state’s economy, to our former loathed war foe, Japan.

After opposing the invention of Medicare and abolishing it once, they
are now keen to make it unaffordable for old women who depend on it;
old women who have been, till now, their most reliable voters.

It is hard to see why they are behaving so madly. It may be that the
party of Menzies, Fraser, Peacock, Hamer, Hewson and Chaney is now
nursing and rearing a crazy, Catholic, fundamentalist cuckoo. It may be
that the autocratic rule of Credlin (or 'Meddlin’ Credlin, Queen of the
Kremlin', as she is sometimes known) is nearing its end, and Malcolm
Turnbull will soon be in charge again, and patient, calm civility
restored to an aghast, amazed and shattered nation.

It certainly cannot last.

This cult-like denial of reality and meaningless, hairy-goat
expedition (a billion will be spent on seeking MH370 and it is hard to
imagine why) may stir the Governor-General to initiate, off his own bat,
a Double Dissolution. The Senate, dismayed by our national ruin, may
refuse Supply. Abbott, beset by enemies and half mad anyway, may advise
an election and immolate his enemies along with himself.

It is hard to see it lasting another two years.

It has the smell of Bjelke Petersen and the Moonlight State, about
it. Masters, Fitzgerald and Dempster will be coming soon – or their
equivalent – and the story will soon, very soon, be over.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License

Tuesday, 2 December 2014

Tony Abbott can't win the battle of ideas with no ideas

Anthony Albanese

Tony Abbott’s negativity made him a formidable opposition leader, but
the cynical opportunism of that time has held him back as prime
minister

Wednesday 3 December 2014 10.00 AEST

Those
great philosophers, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, wrote and sang in
1965: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”. Australian voters might be
reminding themselves of this today, as they consider the disappointment
known as the Abbott government.

This is a government defined by disappointment, deceit and incompetence.

The opposition leader who promised so much has morphed into a
confused prime minister – a man rapidly sinking into the quicksand of
his own negativity. The source of this government’s dysfunction is the
cynical opportunism of its period in opposition.

Most
parties in opposition focus on holding governments to account and on
rebuilding their credibility by developing new ideas. Like Dan Andrews
did in Victoria, they make themselves participants in the battle of
ideas.

When the Abbott government was in opposition its only focus was on
attacking the former Labor government. As opposition leader, the prime
minister built his entire case for power on anti-Labor hatred and
three-word slogans.

Everything was about politics and nothing was about policy.

That is why the Tories have retreated to their comfort zone today.
Without positive ideas they have been forced to lean heavily on Tony
Abbott’s regressive and punitive personal ideology – one that values
individualism ahead of equity and opportunity.

Abbott’s negativity did make him a formidable opposition leader, but
it makes him a pretty bad prime minister. We now see that negativity is
all he ever had. It is his only weapon. He is a one-trick Tony.

You cannot win the battle of ideas if you have no ideas; you cannot
run an economy on three-word slogans; you do not create jobs by saying
“no” to everything; and you do not inspire people by misleading them.

Before the election, the prime minister promised no cuts to health,
education, pensions, the ABC or SBS. He promised no new taxes. In
government, he has cut $80bn from health and education, slashed funding
for the ABC and SBS and created new taxes whenever people visit a GP or
fill up their car at the petrol bowser.

Rubbing
salt into the wounds, he has since insulted the electorate’s
intelligence with Monty Pythonesque claims that he has not broken any
promises.

The prime minister is on the wrong side of history; his place defined
not by leadership and forward-thinking but by a sad yearning for a less
equal and less progressive past – a place where average Australians pay
a Medicare levy every week only to be told they have to pay again to
visit a doctor; where education is about entrenching privilege, not
spreading opportunity; where climate science is derided; and where a
visiting US president’s praise for the splendour of the Great Barrier
Reef is attacked by those opposite as an affront to our national
sovereignty.

It is a place where our renewable energy target has been so
successful that it has to be scrapped; where we have only one woman in
the cabinet; where radio shock jocks and partisan newspaper columnists
set the government’s political agenda; where bigotry is a right; where
people communicate over ageing copper wire rather than 21st century
fibre; and a place where the long-faded trappings of our colonial past
are revived through the reintroduction of the British honours system.

The Abbott government has misread the egalitarian nature of
Australian culture. Australians care about the fair go. Australians
support measures to improve the budget, but they are not stupid.

They know that when a single income family on $65,000 a year will be
$6,000 a year worse off every year, while corporate tax cheats are a
protected species, that budget repair is being used as a cover for an
ideological agenda. The 2014 budget was not a plan for the future but an
attack on the gains of the past. Australians know it is unfair and they
are demanding better.

In my own area of infrastructure, the prime minister has treated his election promises like plates at a Greek wedding.

The government said it would preserve the independence of
Infrastructure Australia. What they have done is try to remove that
independence through legislation – an attempt abandoned only after
pressure from Labor and business groups, including the Business Council
of Australia, Infrastructure Partnerships Australia and, indeed,
Infrastructure Australia itself.

The government said they would reappoint Sir Rod Eddington as the
chairman of Infrastructure Australia but they appointed a former Liberal
party minister instead. They said they would not invest in
infrastructure without cost-benefit analysis to ensure value for money.
Then they took money from Infrastructure Australia priority projects
that had had cost-benefit analysis done and reallocated it to the East
West Link, Westconnex and a Perth freight link.

The government said there would be cranes and bulldozers at work on
new projects within 12 months of their election. But there are no
bulldozers, just bull dust.

They said they would pay money to states for infrastructure projects
in stages, based on the achievement of milestones. Then they gave the
Victorian government a $1.5bn advance payment for the East West Link, a
project that has not commenced construction.

They pretend they are investing in new infrastructure, but they
continue to travel the nation on a magical infrastructure
re-announcement tour, seeking ownership of existing projects funded by
the previous Labor government.

Worst of all, the few new road projects in the budget are being
funded by cuts to all Commonwealth investment in public transport
projects not under construction.

The prime minister, in his manifesto Battlelines, wrote:

Mostly there just aren’t enough people wanting to go from a
particular place to a particular destination at a particular time to
justify any vehicle larger than a car and cars need roads.

That is an absurd proposition for any national leader to make in 2014.

I do not remember a more cringeworthy moment than when he had an
opportunity to speak to the world’s leaders about a vision for the
future at the recent G20 meeting in Brisbane. Abbott’s contribution
involved whinging about Australians not supporting his GP tax and
proudly declaring he had removed a price on carbon.

There is no issue too big for Abbott to show how small he is. Serious
world leaders want to act on climate change and envy our system of
universal health care.

The problem is not that Abbott is stuck in the past. It is that he
wants the rest of Australia to go back there and keep him company.

Australians are sick of the negativity this government has brought to national political debate.

They want a government to focus on what really matters: them, jobs,
access to health care, equity of opportunity through access to
education; cities that are productive, sustainable and liveable; healthy
communities that value diversity; and an integrated transport system
that includes both public transport and roads.

Above all, Australians want a government that governs in accordance with Australian values, like that of the fair go.

Australian politics

Anthony Albanese

Tony Abbott

Sunday, 30 November 2014

Getting rid of dysfunctional Prime Ministers - The AIM Network

Getting rid of dysfunctional Prime Ministers

November 30, 2014
Written by:
Jennifer Wilson
19 Replies

Former Liberal Premier of Victoria, Jeff Kennett this morning dumped big time
on the federal LNP, claiming that dislike for Prime Minister Tony
Abbott is a major factor in the Victorian election result that yesterday
brought a resounding victory to the ALP, ousting the Liberal government
in its first term.

Kennett claims the Abbott government is a “shambles,” and Ministers
in the Napthine Government said there was “no question’’ that the
unpopularity of Tony Abbott in Victoria was a factor in their defeat.

The government is in a bind about Tony. If they get rid of him in his
first term they risk being seen as unstable and disloyal, allegations
they levelled unrelentingly while in opposition at the ALP for its
ongoing leadership woes with Kevin Rudd.

An aside on that matter. Now we have a good deal more information
about that debacle, wouldn’t it have been so much better if Gillard had
informed the electorate about the difficulties the government was having
with Rudd, rather than leaving us to wake up one morning and discover
we no longer had the extremely popular Prime Minister who’d led the
Labor party to victory? Pole-axing an electorate in such a fashion and
then going on to be excessively secretive as to the reasons for such
drastic action would seem to be a most unwise strategy, and indeed,
that’s what it proved to be.

The situation with Abbott is very different: while Rudd was still
popular but behind the scenes, dysfunctional, Abbott is openly
dysfunctional and unpopular to boot, so the electorate won’t go into
nearly as much shock and awe if he’s chucked out of the top job in his
first term.

Personally, I’d like to see Abbott stay on as leader as he’s the ALP’s best asset.

The federal government is like a dysfunctional family with a rogue
father at its head. Everyone closes ranks and publicly supports the
patriarch even though he’s bringing ruination down on their collective
heads, because that’s what families do. They stick together in the face
of adversity, and in so doing, enable the maintenance of the
dysfunction. This eventually damages every family member, and the price
for such misguided unity is death, of one kind or another.

There’s little more difficult than dealing with a dysfunctional
leader, be it in politics or the family, and we saw how the ALP crumbled
under the pressure of their Rudd woes.

The precedent for getting rid of first term Prime Ministers has been
set, and there are few among us who would find it shocking the second
time around. However, the LNP are likely far too spooked by the Rudd
saga to risk ousting their dysfunctional leader in his first term. This
could well be their downfall.

First published at Jennifer’s blog No Place for Sheep

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Friday, 28 November 2014

The death of due process, transparency and accountability - The AIM Network

The death of due process, transparency and accountability

November 28, 2014
Written by:
Kaye Lee
7 Replies

death_of_the_justice_by_quadraro-d6sapo4

Increasingly this government is seeking to subvert due process and impose their agenda in totalitarian fashion.

Regardless of whether you think the increase in fuel excise
is an appropriate measure, the move to introduce it through regulation
rather than legislation is specifically designed to bypass parliament.
The regulations will need to be backed up with proper legislation by the
Senate within 12 months or the money raised will have to be refunded.

As reported in the SMH

“The government believes the ploy will put Labor and Greens senators
in a bind at that time forcing them to choose between keeping the
escalating revenue stream, or voting it down forcing the government to
pay potentially hundreds of millions of dollars collected from motorists
back to oil companies.

While the incremental inflation adjustments will raise an expected
$167 million from motorists by November next year, little-appreciated
new compliance costs for service stations are calculated at $5.06
million according to Treasury estimates.”

So much for cutting red tape to help small businesses. They also
ignore the flowon costs to households as businesses pass on increased
delivery expenses, and the cumulative effect of twice yearly increases.

And it seems they may be trying to introduce the GP co-payment in the same way.

Initially, on Tuesday Peter Dutton said

“There is no capacity to introduce a $7 co-payment through
regulation, the advice from our legal people within the department as
well as with attorneys is the $7 co-payment needs substantive
legislation to support the co-payment.”

But yesterday he changed that message, refusing to rule out the
introduction of the $7 levy by regulation to bypass the need for
legislation.

“I am not going to rule things in or out. I am saying that there are
options that are available to the Government,” Mr Dutton said.

Finding ways around our parliament and our laws is becoming a habit.

After the High Court ruled in June that the federal government could not directly fund religious chaplains
in public schools, Christopher Pyne chose to give the money to the
states with the direction that it could not be used for secular welfare
workers.

So much for their claim that education decisions should not be dictated by Canberra.

In February, a Senate inquiry paved the way for the Parliament to
give Environment Minister Greg Hunt legal immunity against future legal
challenges to his decisions on mining projects. It will protect him
from being challenged over deliberate or negligent decisions that do not
comply with the law.

The Coalition government has now licensed Greg Hunt to avoid compliance with the EPBC Act.
The amendment retrospectively validates ministerial decisions – even if
they did not comply with the EPBC Act when they were made.

We are also losing our right to appeal development decisions.

The Abbott government’s move to establish a single approval process
by passing environmental approval responsibilities onto the states and
territories creates a conflict of interest as they raise revenue from
land sales and mining royalties.

In early 2014 the Queensland government proposed to confine the
objections and notifications process for a mining lease to people owning
land within the proposed lease.

The Coordinator-General is fast becoming an almost supremely powerful
czar for large projects in Queensland, subject only to the political
whims of the state government. He can also prevent any objections to
the environmental authority for a coordinated project from being heard
by the Land Court. When combined with the severe restrictions on
objections to mining leases, very few people can now challenge matters
such as impacts on groundwater of large mines that are declared a
coordinated project.

Under the federal Coalition’s one-stop shop the Coordinator-General
is also proposed to have power to approve projects impacting on matters
protected under federal environmental laws.

And that’s not the only avenue for appeal that is being shut down.

Australians could be left with no appeal rights against government secrecy by the end of this year.

The May budget cut $10.2 million funding for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) which handles Freedom of Information
appeals. The government wants appeals to be handled by the
Administrative Appeals Tribunal instead. This move is being blocked in
the Senate so we will be left with effectively no avenue for appeal.

But perhaps the most blatant disregard for the law is being shown by
Scott Morrison who, in a Napoleonic gesture, has conferred on himself
the power to revoke a person’s citizenship.
The new laws provide the Minister with the power to set aside decisions
of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) concerning character and
identity if it would be in the public interest to do so and confer on
the Minister the power to make legislative instruments.

Morrison has condemned innocent people to indefinite incarceration and washed his hands of any responsibility for their welfare. He has ignored warnings that his actions are in breach of human rights
and is actively outsourcing our responsibilities under the Refugee
Convention at enormous cost to this country. He is now even blocking
refugee applications from people coming through official UNHCR channels.

Journalists have been denied access to detention camps. Even the head of the Human Rights Commission, Gillian Triggs, was denied access to child asylum seekers
on Nauru on the grounds that the commission’s jurisdiction did not
extend beyond Australia’s borders. The cost of a single-entry media visa to Nauru rose from $200 to $8,000.

And if any of us report on the machinations of this government, our
fate is in the hands of Attorney-General George Brandis who has the
individual power to determine if we should face a possible ten year jail sentence.

So much for free speech, transparency and accountability.

“Trust me,” they say. Not friggin’ likely.

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Thursday, 27 November 2014

What Incompetent Amateurs. - The AIM Network

What Incompetent Amateurs.

November 28, 2014
Written by:
John Kelly
25 Replies

**Happy bedfellows. Picture courtesy of The Age. Photo: Alex Ellinhausen**

After a disastrous first budget, Joe Hockey looks
to be a man without ideas. So too his dear leader Tony Abbott who, in
what appears to be an act of desperation, has pleaded with the business
community to help him.

In what could be interpreted as a cry for help, Abbott has called on
business leaders and state governments to be the drivers of a new wave
of economic reform. Speaking at a Business Council of Australia dinner, this week, the Prime Minister signalled out taxation as the most urgent of the nation’s woes. Really?

One can rightfully ask if this is analogous to waving the white flag.
As well as the business community, Abbott has included the Labor party
in this invitation and all state governments, “to join Team Australia and to think of our country and not just the next election.” Could it be the Prime Minister is telling us he doesn’t know how to govern the country?

What? These magicians of spin, these production wonder boys, these
wealth creation gurus, these self-proclaimed ‘budget emergency’ busters
who conned so many of the electorate into thinking they were our
economic saviours, are they now giving up?

These
lying, deceitful cretins who supposedly had the answers to all our
problems are now asking members of the former government who saved us
from the GFC to come on board as partners in ‘Team Australia’?

What a pathetic way for a national leader to acknowledge that he and
his treasurer are no longer up to the task. And if that is true, they
should hide their heads in shame and go back to the people.

Abbott’s plaintive call to 400 of the country’s leading executives
came after another week of management failures that covered a range of
areas involving his own stupidity, his Defence Minister’s stupidity, and
the Communication Minister’s stupidity.

It came after a week that included other ministers sending mixed
signals about dumping the $7 GP co-payment, which itself came right on
the heels of some disastrous fiscal projections from the Parliamentary
Budget Office concerning the ever ballooning deficit.

Laura Tingle of the Australian Financial Review notes that “Prime
Minister Tony Abbott finds himself defending the indefensible, or the
already mortally-wounded, on three different fronts”. She is
referring to a now dead budget strategy, the ABC broken promises parody
and Defence Minister, David Johnson’s ‘rhetorical flourish’.

With the government’s Senate option’s now even harder to negotiate,
little wonder Abbott is showing signs of desperation. How humiliating it
must be for him to ask for Labor’s help. Particularly, as Laura Tingle
explains, the markets and the business community now see the budget
impasse as “a disaster of the Coalition’s own making.”

In a quite feeble defence, the government has also called on Labor to say what it would do to ‘fix the budget’. Once again, they seem to forget that they are no longer in Opposition.

And,
seen through their narrow-minded neo-liberal eyes, what a fix it needs.
Just last May, Hockey projected a budget deficit of $29 billion for
2014-15. The report just released by the Canberra-based consultancy
Macroeconomics suggests that on current trends
the deficit will more likely be $47 billion. Worse still, they are
projecting a deficit of $24 billion in 2016-17 against Hockey’s
projected $2.8 billion.

How vindicated must Wayne Swan be feeling right now as he witnesses
these incompetent amateurs stumbling around in the dark desperately
trying to spin their way out of their own ineptness.

Meanwhile the Parliamentary Budget Office has released an analysis
emphasising the “sensitivity” of the economy to the areas of
productivity growth, the labour force participation rate, and the terms
of trade and the likely outcome on revenues if the present targets are
not met. Take a look. It isn’t pretty.

There
are some dark days ahead for Hockey, right up to the next election. But
Abbott’s position is worse. He has all but lost credibility within his
own party. As Laura Tingle puts it, “As
Abbott’s credibility is under deadly assault, and the authority of his
senior ministers is missing in action, the resolve of both Labor and
cross benches to stand their ground only increases.”

They say what goes around, comes around. Surely that Sydney Daily Telegraph front page headline of the 5^th August
2013, urging the electorate to “kick this mob out” must certainly be
resonating around the country right now. If asking Labor to help get it
out of its fiscal mess is any guide, perhaps it is also resonating from
within the Coalition.

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Wednesday, 26 November 2014

Suicidal hubris or a trick up the sleeve? - The AIM Network

Suicidal hubris or a trick up the sleeve?

November 27, 2014
Written by:
The AIM Network
1 Reply

**Tony Abbott - oozing arrogance (image from canberratimes.com.au)**

Has this federal government lost its grip on reality, fooled by
its own rhetoric, destined for a grisly political death or do they have a
grand game changer ready to be unleashed?

The Abbott Government seems to be on a mission to systematically
annoy, exploit or degrade as many pockets of the Australian electorate
as they can in one term of government. But for a party that regards the
power of office as an end in itself, they appear to be running a flawed
strategic agenda.

Let’s not kid ourselves, this bunch really do want to get themselves
re-elected. They’re not a squadron of kamikaze neo-con pilots, biting
off the last piece of ideological territory before their poisonous
political movement crashes to its inevitable death. They are not that
stoic.

Who can forget the embarrassing three year tantrum Abbott threw when
Julia Gillard beat him to the punch, negotiating her way to minority
government?

The madness we are witnessing are the actions of a government that thinks it belongs in power.
The men in blue ties hold every hope of being re-elected. They may even
be under the impression that the things they are doing are contributing
to their chances of re-election.

Since coming to office this government has waged vicious attacks on
our most vulnerable, acted as an unabashed lobbyist for our most harmful
and moribund industries, ignored, denied and chastised science, killed
off promising new industries, skipped their way excitedly into a
religious war, ignored a global health emergency, defamed global
leaders, pursued nasty political vendettas, punished its detractors and
nobbled our national broadcaster.

And they’ve done it all without whiff of charisma. The people
inflicting these horrible wounds are not classy, well-spoken, smart
practitioners of the dark arts. No! Our tormentors are a ramshackle
group of misfits: a punch drunk Luddite who struggles from word to word
in every sentence he delivers as he gaffs his way across the domestic
and international stage; a hateful, angry, glutinous, cigar-smoking
leaner; an eighteenth century dandy with a nasty streak wider than the
gap between rich and poor; an extreme Christian zealot who thinks crimes
against humanity are not quite harsh enough; an asbestos defending,
globe-trotting lawyer who rates a mean stare amongst her greatest
attributes; and a smooth talking could-have-been hero of the Australian
centre who lately has taken the strange step of selling his soul on
national television in defence of the man whose job he coverts.

Ramshackle? This mob are an outright circus of evil clowns and it
makes the pain, torment and burden just that much more difficult to
bear.

But bear it we must. And we also must, apparently, tolerate the fact
that all of these crimes against Australia and what we stand for are
committed within an atmosphere of dishonesty and hypocrisy that has
never before plagued our land of sweeping plains. We are served
undergraduate linguistic gymnastics, developed by the Abbott Ministry of
Truth, for which we pay millions, designed to convince us that black is
white, up is down and herpes is good for us.

And yet, be assured, this mob expect to be re-elected next time around.

Can the support they receive from Rupert and his anti-democratic,
anti-truth attack dogs be that reassuring? Is Abbott and his gang of
shifty fiddlers betting the farm on the power of Bolt and friends to
spin their lunar right, IPA-inspired agenda?

Murdoch certainly has been putting his best foot forward when it
comes to his little game of telling people what to think and who to
hate. To give some perspective, Bill Hayden, Whitlam’s last Treasurer, recently told Wayne Swan that Murdoch’s current behaviour was ‘three to four times worse’ than at the time of the dismissal.

That’s heady stuff. But it’s still hard to imagine that our
government of power-hungry, ideological vandals could be so trusting.
Would they really put all their eggs in one basket? Murdoch may have
cranked up the mendacious absurdity, but his readership is declining
rapidly at the same time as the Fifth Estate is gaining competence,
credibility and readers.

Either this government is drunk on hubris, fooled by the ease of
their 2013 election win with misplaced confidence in the support of the
world’s most evil media ‘empire’, hurtling their way towards what the
polls have long suggested will be a landslide loss in 2016. Or they have
one last, grand nasty trick up their sleeve; a devilish plot to
frighten, threaten and corner an under-informed public into voting for
them again.

Let’s hope it’s the former and that the damage done in the meantime
can be reversed, because trying to imagine what that devilish plot might
be is enough to send shivers down your spine.

A guest post by AIMN reader David Frizzell.

Tuesday, 9 December 2014

Sunday, 7 December 2014

I was once a proud Australian.

Wednesday, 3 December 2014

Tuesday, 2 December 2014

Tony Abbott can't win the battle of ideas with no ideas

Sunday, 30 November 2014

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Friday, 28 November 2014

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Thursday, 27 November 2014

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Wednesday, 26 November 2014

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