Category Archives: Politics – Australian

Joe Hockey – contemptible buffoon

Posted on by
Reply

Running true to form, the article exposing the treachery of Joe Hockey in betraying his Prime Minister is displayed by von Onselen as somehow Tony Abbott’s fault. The headline writer gets it sort of right, but there is more to the story than this: How Joe Hockey added an $80bn insult to Abbott’s injuries. Let him van Onselen tell the story:

[Hockey] insisted on the $80 billion of cuts to health and education funding beyond the forward estimates being included in the budget, in those terms. They didn’t need to be; in fact, standard practice would mean such long-term forward projections (well out beyond 2020) never would be ­included.

Abbott, showing political common sense, a commodity utterly absent in his Treasurer, was adamant that these projected cuts not be included. “The PMO insisted,” writes van Onselen, “the $80bn in cuts come out of the document”. Why invite trouble when dealing with the Senate was already likely to be difficult.

But team Hockey reinserted it without PMO approval or even awareness, [which] shows Abbott and his office were aware of the political challenge such sizeable cuts would represent, all the more so in the context of Abbott’s promise that there would be no cuts to health and education in the SBS interview — the areas targeted for an $80bn haircut.

Yes, they were aware of the political challenge, due to the likes of columnists like van Onselen who under no circumstances would have said a positive word on Abbott’s behalf when it might have been some use in getting a budget passed. Who knows where Joe took advice at that stage, from whichever treacherous scum there might also have been among Liberals in cabinet. But at least, if it could be said that Joe’s judgement was vindicated then at least there would be that. Back to van Onselen:

Hockey’s standing in the electorate sank after the first budget, ending his hopes of one day leading the Liberal Party. Talk of Hockey as a future leader was quickly replaced by calls for him to be sacked as treasurer. The mutual self-interest of survival helped Hockey and Abbott overcome the colossal mistake [!!!] in that first budget. But distrust between the off­ices never went away, and Credlin in particular never trusted Hockey or his staff again.

She never trusted Hockey again! What a terrible woman no longer to trust such a duplicitous lying deceiving rat ever again. You may be sure that no one ever trusted Hockey again. Meanwhile, van Onselen cannot bring himself to state that obvious, that Abbott had been dudded in such a way at such a time by someone he had put into a position of trust. It is one of the most disgusting stories I have ever come across, and the fact that Hockey allowed this story to reach the light of day shows what a political imbecile he is and obviously always had been.

Some friendly advice on tax reform

Posted on by
Reply

Tony Abbott offers advice to Malcolm Turnbull on tax reform.

“Changing the tax burden from income to spending makes sense but only if overall taxes become lower, simpler and fairer.”

“As a potential reformer, Malcolm Turnbull has the advantage of being relatively unbound by previous commitments but still faces the problem of how to deal with the “no one can be worse off’ mindset that makes serious reform so hard.”

“The real challenge, in Australia as in Britain, is how responsibly to spend less on short-term consumption and more on long-term investment in infrastructure and national security.”

There’s more than just tax at the link as well.

A few scraps

Posted on by
Reply

A few things I have come across I find worth noting, each of which puts a different complexion on things. First this, with the strangest imaginable headline from the SMH, What Martin Parkinson can offer Malcolm Turnbull wherein I read:

Parkinson is the treasury secretary Abbott unfairly sacked against the wishes of his treasurer.

Who knew there was such a debate at the time? Joe’s idea of a fresh start was to keep Wayne’s Secretary of the Treasury, the one who had previously run the Department of Climate Change.

And then this, from Andrew Bolt re the 12,000 Christian refugees we are bringing to Australia:

Of the four families in the first wave of approvals, two were Sunni Muslim and two were Christian: Assyrian Christians from Mosul in Iraq, and Chaldean Catholics from Baghdad.

The people most endangered ought to be the ones we offer refuge to. Why not continue the policy that had already been put in place?

And finally, as we head to Paris, this is the latest news:

In Asia alone this year power companies are building more than 500 coal-fired plants, with at least a thousand more on planning boards.

You could shut down the whole Australian economy and it wouldn’t make a jot of difference to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. I should become like my Canadian friends who are visiting and who I met up with yesterday. They both carefully read the press, Canada’s national daily even, The Globe and Mail, and conscientiously watch the news, specially the CBC. Therefore, they did not know that global temperatures had not risen for nineteen years, had never heard the phrase “hide the decline” and thought the most damning thing they could tell me about Stephen Harper was that he forbade public servants from speaking at conferences without prior approval of their Department Head.

Why does the supposed right always try to fix the revenue problems created by the left?

Posted on by
Reply

An absolute disgrace if this is how the Government is thinking: GST: ‘Higher taxes’ to flow from reform plan.

“We still seem to be in denial about the structural budget ­deficit,” said Tony Shepherd, the former Business Council of Australia president who chaired the audit commission for the federal government. “I’d return the GST increase to those who are ­seriously in need, such as the ­bottom quartile. The top three-quarters (of people by income) are going to pay more tax — that’s the bottom line.”

Another member of the commission, Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone, said a higher consumption tax would have to happen sooner or later. “The states need more money,” she said. “And if the states need more money but we don’t want extra federal expenditure, the GST is the way to do it.”

If Labor loves all this public spending, let them get elected on the promise of more taxes. In the meantime, Mr Eloquent and his Treasurer, Mr Fixanything, should be making the case for lower spending and why it is so important.

It’s the same thing now in the US with Paul Ryan, the Republican House Speaker, working to get the revenue to pay at least some of the bills.

Europe’s “catastrophic error”

Posted on by
Reply

The headline writer chose this, Europe must follow our lead on turnbacks: Tony Abbott but the first sentence says what he was really trying to say:

Europe is heading towards a “catastrophic error” that could change it forever and must instead study and adopt Australia’s policy to turn back the tide of asylum-seekers, Tony Abbott said today.

Delivering the second ­Thatcher Lecture at London’s Guildhall, the former prime minister also called for more to be done to strike Islamic State terrorism “at its source” and said it was a pity a recent summit by world leaders looked only at countering violent extremism and not the ­inspiration for it.

In his first significant speech since he was toppled by Malcolm Turnbull six weeks ago, Mr Abbott said his invitation to give the lecture “suggests there was at least a hint of Thatcherism about my government in Australia”.

For some, a hint of Thatcherism is the kiss of death. For others, who have some idea of the stakes involved, there cannot be enough of Mrs Thatcher and what she stood for. What he and she understood is the difference between right and wrong. Now it is the difference between good and evil, and even so the left is blind to it all. And here’s the advice:

Europe should study how Australia had stopped the boats and restored border security as “the only compassionate thing to do”.

“This means turning boats around, for people coming by sea. It means denying entry at the border, for people with no legal right to come; and it means establishing camps for people who currently have nowhere to go,” he said.

“It requires some force; it will ­require massive logistics and ­expense; it will gnaw at our consciences — yet it is the only way to prevent a tide of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly changing it forever.

“The Australian experience proves that the only way to dissuade people seeking to come from afar is not to let them in.”

In the meantime, it can only be hoped that Malcolm gets the message before we end up in the same boat as Europe. Abbott is world class, one of the deepest thinkers ever to rise to high office in this country. It’s only a shame that what he saw and understood was too difficult, not just for the media and the left in general, which is to be expected, but for the people who he had to deal with in cabinet and in his own party room.

AND CONTINUING: This has been cross-posted at Catallaxy and the comments thread is quite interesting. Hard for me to imagine people who would disagree with Abbott on these issues but, I guess, with much of the right self-identified as “libertarian”, and therefore open-borders, perhaps it’s not that surprising after all. I have added two comments of my own. First this:

Abbott was all Thatcher but where was his Keith Joseph? And Margaret didn’t have to put up with a creep like Turnbull who relentlessly stalked his own PM to the extent that nothing debated in cabinet was not the next day being aired on the news. But Margaret was famous for her foreign policy even more than the economics. She with Ronald Reagan and the Pope stared down the Evil Empire, not to mention Argentina and the Falklands. I only wish we had a Margaret Thatcher somewhere in one of the major countries of the West. Instead we have Obama, Merkel and Malcolm. There is some potential in Cameron but he, too, is no Margaret Thatcher.

And then this:

Dealing with migration and the Islamic State is the issue of our time in the same way that dealing with the Soviet Union was the issue of her time. Who besides Tony gets it? As for economics, this is from her first budget in 1979:
.

The 8 and 12.5 per cent VAT rates were unified at 15 per cent, putting around 3.75 per cent on the RPI. There was also a 7p increase in petrol duty, adding 10p to a gallon when VAT was added in. (For RPI reasons, alcohol and tobacco duties were left untouched.) The oil companies were tapped: Petroleum Revenue Tax (PRT) was increased from 45 to 60p and BNOC lost its exemption from the tax.

Let us compare with Joe defending his first budget in 2013:
.

An emotional Mr Hockey described his first budget, which included the now-dumped GP co-payment, plans to uncap university fees and increased fuel and income taxes, as too courageous for the Parliament.

We will see as time goes by who will be as courageous as Joe and Tony were then. I suspect there is no one around who will take these issues on, least of all the current incumbent, who was probably leaking as furiously as he could to all his mates at the ABC.

This Abbott Derangement Syndrome truly is a form of insanity. People who think politics is no more difficult than agreeing with your friends while sitting around your dining room ought to get out once in a while. Abbott had a right to expect some slack from those who understand what the other side represents but political sophistication is as rare as a modern economist’s understanding of the operation of a market economy.

Living in a postmodern world

Posted on by
Reply

This is an article described as “reflections on the election of Justin Trudeau and the ‘idiotized’ culture” whose title is The Triumph of Drivel. It is specifically about Justin Trudeau, but having endured Barack Obama since 2008 and now Malcolm, I can only say I have got used to it as a phenomenon of our times. And what sort of phenomenon is that?

Perhaps I should explain what I mean by “drivel.” I could write “lies,” but these are only possible to those who have criteria for the truth. Drivel is what people talk who have no such criteria. The fact that what they’re saying may be true, or untrue, is of no significance to them. It is enough that it sounds plausible. The truthful man knows when he is lying; the postmodern man neither knows nor cares. He can believe himself “good,” as drivellers will do, because truth doesn’t come into it.

The old-style politician told knowing lies. The new-style politician doesn’t know what “lies” are. He uses the term rhetorically, against anything he doesn’t want to hear. The old-style politician would back down when confronted with the truth. The new-style politician doesn’t know what you are talking about. He assumes you are only trash-talking him.

So let us listen to how Malcolm describes events as they have transpired:

“This is the government of Australia, it’s not the Tony Abbott government, it’s not the Malcolm Turnbull government, we can be prime ministers but we are here to serve others,” he said. He also said he had learnt from his own downfall that it was vital for a leader to be collaborative and consultative.

“The one thing I have learnt and learnt this not just from my own experience but also from others (is) the absolutely critical importance of recognising that this is an exercise in collaboration. I’m not the president, I’m the Prime Minister. I am first among equals,” he said in a clear reference to the complaints about Mr Abbott not involving his colleagues enough in decision making.

Ridiculous. Just words with no sincerity. He can’t even fake it, he’s such a phoney, but those folks at The Australian just lap it up. So I return to the conclusion of the original article I quoted:

“The people” believe in drivel, too, as they have just proved. As I’ve mentioned before, a growing percentage of the general voting population has been morally and intellectually debilitated — “idiotized” is my preferred term — by postmodern media and education, and by spiritual neglect within (often broken) postmodern homes. Large vested interests can lead them by the nose, even while they imagine themselves victims of conspiracy.

Postmodern media! The folks of Europe have just discovered how the reality they live in has nothing much in common with what they read in the papers, see on the news or hear from their political leaders. Idiotized may do, but it is a form of political insanity for which no solution that I can think of now exists.

AND FURTHERMORE: That Barack Obama is delusional is truly the only explanation I can think of for his behaviour. He is leading America into a cesspit of social disorder, both nationally and across the world. His only friends are the deep left and the media. I would hardly be the first to describe him as a narcissist. Continuing this theme, the following was picked up via Andrew Bolt, an article by Paddy Manning in the SMH titled: Bad blood and bastardry: how Malcolm Turnbull became opposition leader. This is the passage I find so absorbing, but the lead-up in the article to Brendan Nelson’s comment quoted below is quite astonishing. I remember none of the events, but what I do remember is that Peter Costello gave away the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2007 because he could not bear having to deal with Malcolm. This might be why:

A doctor by profession, Nelson told journalist Peter Hartcher he genuinely believed Turnbull had a “narcissistic personality disorder … He says the most appalling things and can’t understand why people get upset. He has no empathy.”

In the modern world, with the media structured as it is with its far left perspective, this may be the only kind of personality type that can survive the never-ending negativity. The most personally decent man to ascend to become Prime Minister in a very long time, Tony Abbott was driven from office by the media left along with the left in general for whom personal values count for nothing against their own agenda. Malcolm, however, will do just fine.

Our very own Justin Trudeau

Posted on by
Reply

That Malcolm is an economic illiterate has always been evident, but if you are looking for more proof, there is this (picked up at Andrew Bolt):

He wants to trigger a big surge in Australian spending on infrastructure by changing the way the federal government has always operated.

He cheerfully admits that this is “an argument I lost in the Howard government” as minister responsible for water…

It’s now urgent with the economy slowing as the mining boom recedes. Infrastructure investment will partly take up “the slack”, he says…

“I think the Commonwealth should take a more active role,” he tells Fairfax Media. “We should be prepared to actually invest as opposed to simply making grants…”

Economics is supposed to be his long suit but he remains more clueless than the most clueless Keynesian. You might have hoped that the experience with the NBN would have tempered his enthusiasm for Commonwealth-directed expenditures, but apparently not. Losing billions is fine, since in this weird approach to economic prosperity, its the spending that gives you the growth. How stupid do you have to be not to see that spending represents the cost of the project. It is the revenue you get later that is the benefit. And having watched Malcolm for the last month or so, it is true that as short a suit as his economic credentials are, economics is his longest suit. Both Canada and Australia have traded in common sense for a fashion statement, and we are both going to regret this for a very long time to come.

A comprehensive list of Abbott’s achievements

Posted on by
Reply

I suppose political virtue is in the eye of the beholder, but this list of Abbott’s accomplishments is provided as a list of the things he got wrong. The website deals with Tracking Abbott’s Wreckage. Here are the first seven and the last seven. The hundreds in between are just the same:

478. Breaks a promise to provide a stable and unified Government – 14 September 2015

477. Laughs at Pacific countries who’s existence is being threatened by climate change – 10 September 2015

476. Rejects recommendations to make banks pay for tax payer funded insurance – 4 September 2015

475. Wastes $55 million, including $15 million on relocating four refugees to Cambodia before the deal to resettle refugees from Nauru collapses – 30 August 2015

474. Oversees botched Border Force announcement that they would stopping people for visa checks in the Melbourne CBD – 28 August 2015

473. Splurges $10 million to rename Border Force – 26 August 2015

472. Cuts $10 million from a grant to support sufferers of an incurable disease – 26 August 2015 . . .

7. Breaks a promise to make no cuts to health on 17 December 2013 when they cut $150 million from hospitals and health services.

6. Breaks a promise to make no cuts to health. He made this promise at the National Press Club on 2 September 2013 and in writing on 5 September 2013 as part of their policy commitments. This promise was first broken on 27 November 2013 when they cut funding to the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council

5. Breaks his election promise of no cuts to education by cutting funding for trade training centres in schools on 17 December 2013. He made this promise at the National Press Club on 2 September 2013 and in writing on 5 September 2013 as part of their policy commitments.

4. Breaks its NBN election promise of giving all Australians access to 25 megabits per second download speeds by 2016 – 12 December 2013 This was the Coalition’s policy they took to the election first announced 9 April 2013.

3. Breaks his promise to support Gonski – 25 November 2013 and 13 May 2014. Fails to commit to future funding or to require States to match the Commonwealth funding commitment. See paragraph two from Christopher Pyne on 29 August 2013

2. Fails to “stop the boats” – 23 September 2013. This promise was repeated so many times I can’t count. Here’s Abbott’s 2013 campaign launch speech.

1. Does not spend his first week as Prime Minister with an Aboriginal community – 14 September 2013. This promise was made in front of indigenous elders and participants at the Garma Festival on 10 August 2013, this is a live recording.

Read it all. Fascinating.

[Found by notafan]

Senator David Leyonhjelm comments at Catallaxy

Posted on by
Reply

The following is a comment by Senator David Leyonhjelm at Catallaxy as part of the thread on Time for Last Drinks at the Wake.

DavidLeyonhjelm
#1829310, posted on October 18, 2015 at 4:05 pm (Edit)

Good post Sinc. I share your view on this.

The contest is now Turnbull versus Shorten. Most commenters here prefer Shorten, but that’s not what I hear elsewhere.

This was the tradeoff that had to be gauged, would more votes be won than lost by switching from Tony as PM to Malcolm. So far there is hardly anything in it, a switch of maybe one or two percentage points with the ABC and The Australian running as hard a pro-Turnbull campaign as it is possible to imagine. Come the election, or even before that, come an actual Turnbull decision that offends the left and we shall see what happens then. In the meantime, Malcolm is running to the left of Tony. This, therefore, is the program Malcolm has to achieve to improve on Abbott’s record, given Sinclair’s list:

– Repeal 18C
– Reduce marginal income tax rates
– Repeal the Renewable Energy Target and unwind Direct Action
– Dismantle the “opposition within”, the professional activists of the Human Rights Commission.
– Call a vote in the Parliament on SSM
– Make sound and sensible decisions on national defence and especially on procurement.

None are on the agenda. I will consider it a win if we merely just continue to stop the boats, but even there my hopes are not all that high.

But here is my question for you. At the last Presidential election in 2012, who did you support, Obama or Romney? If it was Obama, then I don’t care about a single thing you think about, not a single thing.

Spare me your ignorant lessons in political calculation

Posted on by
Reply

Do we really need such sanctimonious lessons in political calculation from the very leaders of the anti-Abbott Australian? To start we have Chris Kenny with Tony Abbott loyalists need to accept Malcolm Turnbull. But really, how do you beat this for destroying your own argument:

In Abbott’s favour were strong policy settings (border protection, climate change and attempted budget repair), the escalating issue of union power and corruption being teased out in the royal commission he established, and how all this had rendered Bill Shorten nigh-on unelectable.

So what’s Turnbull got that beats all of that, specially since Turnbull would not have achieved a single one of these, not one. As for “time to move on”, I will move on when Turnbull shows me he’s not everything I now assume he is. Then there’s this from Paul Kelly across the front page of the Inquirer section: The dilemma of conservatism. Other than wanting stability, honesty, personal responsibility, a free market economy and the government out of our lives – you know, those conservative values – what exactly do others add to the mix that I am missing. Here’s Kelly:

Turnbull does not say this but his mission is to modernise the Liberal Party. He is a social progressive who champions same-sex marriage, serious action on climate change, a multicultural ­society, a repudiation of monarchical trappings and an economy, entrepreneurial and innovative, geared to aspiration.

What an empty set of junk-filled cliched nonsense. If this is what Kelly and Turnbull think of as the issues of our time, they are so out of their tree that it is hard to fathom exactly how their rose-tinted glasses may be removed. These are people living in a bubble while just over the hill the entire Western world is under siege.

And then The Oz goes after David Flint because they think of him as part of the elites of our society. From Cut & Paste:

If words have meaning, Professor David Flint AM would be regarded as the member of an “elite”. Educated in Sydney, London and Paris, he became a tenured professor in law. In 1997, the Howard government appointed Flint chairman of the Australian Broadcasting Authority, one of the most influential positions in Australian public life. According to Who’s Who in Australia 2003, he is a member of Sydney’s Union Club. Yet Flint reckons he is not part of any elite, and he has just written a book, The Twilight of the Elites (Freedom Publishing), to prove his point. Following the American commentator Christopher Lasch, Flint maintains that “elite opinion is the opinion typical of the upper-middle-class liberal — that is, liberal in the American sense”. In short, elite opinion “tends to be left-wing on social and cultural issues”. How convenient, especially for a commentator who claims to disapprove of labelling.

Not even close. The elites of any society are a swarm of types like Malcolm who are the insiders, the kinds of people I think of as the Progressive Internationalists. People like David Flint often rise but they are never accepted. Richard Nixon would be your prime example, always an outsider to your Malcolm Turnbull types, in just the same way that Tony Abbott was. It is people like Turnbull, Kenny and Kelly who find, eventually, that they have to bring in some outsider to do their work for them. But as tone deaf to modern reality it is hard to imagine these people being more so than they are. In the meantime, we shall see if Turnbull and Morrison can do any better than Abbott and Hockey. Maybe they can, but they haven’t yet. And to say that whatever else, Malcolm will be better than Bill Shorten is only to admit that there was no argument at all in favour of the switch, since this argument works even better on behalf of Tony.