Tag Archives: Tony Abbott

Never apologise, never explain

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As a fan anyway of our Prime Minister I am still astonished at his sure footed ability to handle our latest controversy with Indonesia. Everybody “spies” on everybody else because in foreign relations it’s important to keep surprises to a minimum. You do want to know what they’re up to and you also are not averse to ensuring they know what you are up to, unless you are up to no good.

There’s politics here and in Indonesia. The Indonesians have to be “outraged”. Their politics demands at least some sense of having been officially offended by the routine use of listening and other devices that they no doubt use themselves. So the politics will play out but should be an absolute nothing one year from today. There are and will be many other things to worry about.

The apology demanded by some, even of the weakest kind, admits fault, and there is nothing some people like better than to exploit weakness and to play the injured party. We would be making a massive mistake to end up with anything resembling an apology. We would never hear the end of it. Toughing it out now means that this should peter out with no permanent harm done.

We are not alone

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From The Guardian, of all places. This is the headline:

Warsaw climate talks: nearly 3 in 10 countries not sending ministers

Australia is not alone in its failure to send a minister to the UN climate negotiations in Poland, reports RTCC

And while the previous government made a fetish about leading the way, it is actually Tony Abbott who is doing the leading. Again from this same story:

Australia recently attracted attention by its refusal to send either its environment minister Greg Hunt or foreign minister Julie Bishop to the negotiations.

Instead, Australia will send along its climate ambassador Justin Lee as its lead negotiator.

As the world’s top climate officials gather to discuss how to stem emissions and mobilise finance, Hunt will instead be based in the Australian parliament, attempting to fulfill Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s election promise to repeal the country’s carbon tax.

We are setting a precedent and others are taking notice.

And they’re off

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Question time of the first Parliament of the new government. From The Australian:

TONY Abbott and his ministers used their first question time in government to bludgeon the opposition over its carbon tax, its management of the economy and its record on asylum-boat arrivals.

The opposition sought to highlight the government’s moves to hike the debt limit, lift the deficit, and “hinder” Australia’s relationship with Indonesia.

But, with a solid majority behind him and his chosen speaker in the chair, the Prime Minister said he was doing exactly as he’d promised at the September 7 election.

For myself, I wish they would do more bludgeoning outside Parliament as well. Our locals here in Victoria never made enough of Labor’s massive spending disasters, the MYKI card which they had mates put together for something like more than a million billion and the desalination plant which may never be used for a single day, and may eventually cost three to four billion forged in unbreakable contracts. And now Labor is ahead and it is possibly too late.

I hope the Feds learn from our locals.

Being in government is hard

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Whatever else Tony Abbott may or may not do over the next three years, I doubt that he will go back on any of the promises he made. Politics is politics and running an economy is something else. So where Maurice Newman has written in today’s AFR how the Prime Minister must attend to various economic issues, I fear they will fall on deaf ears. They will fall on deaf ears in part because of what the PM said before the election, and they will fall on deaf ears because aside from paid maternity leave, every one of the policies he took up from the ALP would arrive back in spades if the Labor Party should happen to be returned.

Nevertheless, Newman does have a point:

The federal government’s top business adviser has criticised the cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the school funding reforms, slammed wages as too high and industrial relations as being too rigid, and urged the government to push the envelope in order to ‘repair’ the economy.

In a fiery speech on Monday night, Maurice Newman, the head of the Prime Minister’s Business Advisory Council, lamented as ‘hasty’ Tony Abbott’s pre-election promises to quarantine such areas as health and defence from budget cuts and suggested the Prime Minister ‘disturb the comfort zones of many’ to pay down debt and cut the deficit as soon as possible.

Vowing to furnish Mr Abbott with ‘dependable and fearless advice’, Mr Newman said the economy was ‘running on empty’ and, without reforms and fiscal discipline, it was ‘facing the prospect of growth with a zero in front of it’.

‘That will feel like hitting a brick wall,’ he said.

That GDP growth will decline for around a year is just how it is if there is to be a redeployment of resources to where they might actually be used productively. And I wish there was more explicit recognition that the only way for a recovery ever to occur will be if it is driven by the private sector.

But almost everyone only likes market outcomes when it suits them. I can only hope that the politics doesn’t overwhelm economic reform.

It is bizarre

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In the Salem Witch trials as I recall – my memory is a little rusty here – there were a bunch of fanatics burning climate change deniers at the stake. To think there is anything needed at all to “fix” our carbon emissions is a kind of loopyness that I just see as part of the world today, something along the lines of wanting to spend your way out of recession. Which brings me to this:

FORMER Treasury secretary Ken Henry has described Tony Abbott’s direct action scheme for tackling climate change as ‘bizarre’ and predicted the Coalition will wind up implementing an emissions trading scheme.

Direct action, as I understand it, says that we will wait for the rest of the world to come up with some kind of carbon-limitation scheme but in the meantime we will try to lower carbon emissions in ways that actually do some good of some other kind even if there isn’t a carbon emissions problem in the first place, and we will spend far less money on it as well. Carbon taxes and carbon-emissions schemes are both 100% wasteful if there is no carbon problem to solve. Direct action actually takes some positive actions. It is bizarre that people who believe carbon taxes or an ETS will actually do some good can rise to such high places of authority over our lives.

The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism

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Wow! Did Tony Abbott really say that? This is from The Daily Caller and relayed on Drudge:

Australia’s newly elected prime minister pulled no punches when giving his thoughts on the country’s carbon tax, which he says must be abolished as quickly as possible.

‘The carbon tax is bad for the economy and it doesn’t do any good for the environment,’ Abbott told The Washington Post. ‘Despite a carbon tax of $37 a ton by 2020, Australia’s domestic emissions were going up, not down. The carbon tax was basically socialism masquerading as environmentalism, and that’s why it’s going to get abolished.’

‘If the Labor Party wants to give the people of Australia a Christmas present, they will vote to abolish the carbon tax. It was damaging the economy without helping the environment. It was a stupid tax. A misconceived tax,’ Abbott added.

Using the s-word to describe socialists. We really are in a new world.