Coalition MP Mal Washer, a GP, spotted the danger signs early. He checked on Thomson’s welfare and then issued a warning on ABC TV that continued pressure could be deadly. Tony Abbott backed off as a result, telling Parliament ‘’at a human level, I have a great deal of sympathy for the member for Dobell’, and shifting the complaint to Julia Gillard for keeping him in the hot seat. But the government’s narrative was set in stone, and trickled on into the weekend columns of amenable journalists, that brutal Abbott’s “blood lust” for power was hounding a sick man to self-harm. Chief Whip Joel Fitzgibbon fleshed it out, talking about colleague Greg Wilton’s suicide 12 years ago, a despicable tactic for so many reasons not worth canvassing. Anthony Albanese followed suit, looking like a cat expecting a saucer of milk. But Abbott had foiled them again. More nuanced and thoughtful a personality than his enemies ever allow, to their detriment alone, Abbott knew, as the public does, that Thomson has gone beyond censure.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “Government ministers jumped up, quick as a flash, in Question Time, staffers rushing around the corridors of parliament, feminists firing up on Twitter to create a furore about the “sexist goons” of Tony Abbott, whose alleged “woman problem” keeps eluding his enemies - probably because he doesn’t have one.
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“I think it would be folly to expect that women will ever dominate or even approach equal representation in a large number of areas simply because their aptitudes, abilities and interests are different for physiological reasons”
1979 radio interview with the then president of Sydney University’s SRC, one Tony Abbott
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpqHBzYVPqY
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9/5/12: “How do Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott justify their vote of confidence in Craig Thomson yesterday? For that is the message they sent by voting with the government against the Opposition motion to suspend Thomson for 14 days. Their assistance allowed Thomson to escape parliamentary censure in the wake of the damning Fair Work Australia report alleging financial mismanagement and rorting at the Health Services Union. The report alleges Thomson spent $500,000 of HSU members’ money on prostitutes, ATM cash withdrawals, fine dining and election expenses in his central coast seat of Dobell
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15/5/12: “CRAIG Thomson has been cleared of almost all allegations of dodgy election funding following an investigation by the Australian Electoral Commission. But there will still be demands for him to use his address to Parliament next week to explain why his old union, the Health Services Union, spent a significant sum on his political ambitions. The AEC today reported that just over $88,000 in money from the Health Services Union, where Mr Thomson had been national secretary, had been used to support his 2007 bid for the seat of Dobell on the NSW central coast as an ALP candidate. However, most of the amount - totalling about $71,300 - were either below the threshold for compulsory declaration, or had been declared by the HSU.”
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/news/national/craig-thomson-cleared-of-dodgy-election-funding/story-e6frea8c-1226357611368
“Who is Michael Lawler? For starters, according to reliable sources, Michael Lawler is friends with a man named Tony Abbott. Apparently, the two of them socialise regularly. Conveniently, Tony Abbott is also the leader of the political party making so much ground out of the claims Michael’s partner is making. Michael Lawler works for an organisation called Fair Work Australia, where he is a Vice-President on a salary of $400,000 a year. The only person higher than him at that organisation is Iain Ross, who just replaced Geoffrey Giudice – the one who Tony Abbott and Lawler’s partner Kathy Jackson were attacking daily – as President of Fair Work Australia. On the 11th of October 2002, according to the FWA annual report, Michael Lawler was appointed Vice President of Fair Work Australia — although back then it was called the Australian Industrial Relations Commission. Previously, Lawler was a barrister who made his mark representing employers in employment disputes. The man who appointed him to the AIRC was none other than Tony Abbott — who at the time was Employment and Workplace Relations Minister under John Howard’s Coalition Government.”
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2012/politics/how-the-hsu-tangled-jackson-lawler-and-thomson-with-abbott/
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“Abbott’s speech on Thursday night had electrified his supporters. He slapped down the Prime Minister’s class war rhetoric
”This schoolkids’ bonus doesn’t have to be spent on schools,” Mr Abbott told a group of mothers yesterday, adding that it could be spent at the club or on pokies.”
and asserted that governments should be “at least as interested in the creation of wealth as in its redistribution”.”
“Coalition stumbles over its $70 billion black hole”
“Hating Tories, redistributing wealth via postcode as Wayne Swan says, and dividing Australians by wealth was never going to inspire, and it takes a tin ear to try it.”
“Mining tax gets backing from most taxpayers.”
“The Opposition leader should “get off Sydney’s north shore and go talk to some real families”, Julia Gillard said last week, as part of a Labor strategy to re-animate its base.But the tactic only freed Abbott to highlight the previously unmentionable: the difference between his life as a family man with a hefty mortgage in suburban Sydney and the Prime Minister’s less typical experience as an unmarried, childless, career woman with tastes that run to $1800 Louis Vuitton briefcases.”
“Abbott’s love child turns into shaggy dog story”
“the bushfire brigade volunteer who lives in an average house on which he once took out an extra mortgage to pay school fees when his pay dropped in opposition.”
“The compassionate conservative philosophy he mapped out
promises social cohesion, rather than division.
“Abbott says gays ‘challenge the order of things’”
It melds aspiration with social justice
because “government should protect the vulnerable, not to create more clients of the state but to foster more self-reliant citizens”.”
“An implacable hatred for Tony Abbott drives Windsor, but the tide has turned and he’s on the wrong side of it.”
I’d rather be on the wrong side than on a right side that has Tony Abbott on it.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “Therefore, non-compliant media are “unprofessional” or “shock jocks” acting as “volunteer sergeant majors in the people’s revolt summoned by Commander General Tony Abbott”, as one report put it. Any legitimate complaint is a “scare campaign”, intemperate phone calls become “death threats” and opposition by the Opposition is the equivalent of the US tea party.
The pattern here is partisan abuse, hyperbole and misrepresentation.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “But you can’t claim a mandate when it was popular opposition to carbon tax and resentment of soaring energy bills and green money-wasting schemes which destroyed Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership of the Opposition, and led to the downfall of Kevin “greatest moral challenge” Rudd.
Classic Miranda, 2011: “IF YOU are the Prime Minister you shouldn’t find yourself telling a radio talk show host, “you don’t need to patronise me”. Your dignity and authority should be so established that you are above such petty bickering. But Julia Gillard is a woman and her uncharacteristically angry comment to radio 3AW’s Neil Mitchell on Friday betrayed, just for a moment, the burden of her sex. When a woman says she is being patronised by a man, what she means is that he is treating her politely, but as if she is a lesser person. It is the most subtle form of sexism and the most difficult to combat, since it is usually done unconsciously and without malice. But when it occurs it is an unwelcome mirror of how the world perceives you, no matter what your status.
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I know how Neil Mitchell feels about the Prime Minister doesn’t reflect how I feel about her; and the polls often show that she’s preferred Prime Minister over Tony Abbott who the shock jocks treat like a son. As Bob Brown said the sexism directed at the Prime Minister comes from male “commentators” ie. the shock jocks; and their minuscule anti-carbon tax rallies show how fringe and unrepresentative of the majority of Australians they are.
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Classic Miranda, 2011: “Just how the money is spent was revealed by Simon Benson’s report in The Daily Telegraph this week: $2.5 million is spent each month to house extra asylum seekers in motels and other accommodation outside detention centres. For 13 days in November alone, the bill at the Darwin Airport Inn was $778,000 - that is $60,000 a day for a motel that has 136 rooms.
Even if the whole motel were booked out by the Department of Immigration, the price works out to be $440 per room, per night - or almost double the quoted rack rate of $235 for the motel’s most expensive room: a two-bedroom business suite. We should not be surprised at this laissez-faire attitude to taxpayers’ money - that is the hallmark of this Government and will be its lasting legacy.
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““At the heart of our plan for a stronger economy is getting government spending down…” said Mr Abbott.
Presumably down from Howard government levels. In those 11 years there was not one in which government spending was reduced. It grew by an average of 3.7 per cent in its final five years. Current projections for spending growth have an average of 1.5 per cent. And for fond memories you don’t put into the economic equation a global recession which took more than $140 billion from the tax revenue of the new Labor government, a plunge more severe that anything which hit the Howard Budgets. Memories have to be selective to be attractive, as there are bits of the golden age which can never be polished, even by Mr Abbott. For example, the Regional Partnerships Program which ran for eight years makes Labor’s Building an Education Revolution scheme look like a a well-oiled economic mechanism of integrity and efficiency. The BER never funded a Queensland coastal hotel which boasted gaming and strippers, but a 2005 Senate inquiry was told that’s just what the RPP did. As the Auditor General reported in 2007 on the $330 million spent by the RPP, “The manner in which the program had been administered over the three year period to 30 June 2006 examined by ANAO had fallen short of an acceptable standard of public administration, particularly in respect to the assessment of grant applications and the management of funding agreements.”The audit found “instances where no application for funding was received prior to funding being approved”. They were instances either of psychic accounting or pure electoral pork barrelling.”
http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/it-takes-selective-memory-to-call-Howard-era-a-golden-age/
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Usually Miranda has some posts posted on Saturday night ready for Sunday morning reading but today the post topping her blog is still the post posted on Tuesday about police taser use. I’m imagining Miranda poised over her laptop motionless because she is lost on how to respond to either or both of these issues:
““Oh no, look,” spluttered Oakeshott, “More than likely he would say no, he can’t command authority. But … the disappointing thing with the … Liberal party leadership is … it is more close to, you know, the BA Santamaria, the DLP view of the world, not true Liberal economics. It is closer to print-more-money economics.”
What’s he on about?
Abbott doesn’t advocate printing money. That’s Obama’s gig”
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Windsor is making a crack about Abbott being like a DLP member a protectionist rather than a free market Liberal. Member’s of his own party feel this crack might be apt:
Former Howard minister Peter Reith: “Tony Abbott’s recent decision to change the onus on dumping reminds me of John Howard on protectionism before our election win in 1996, although John offered the reassurance that came with his generally pro-market values. My worry is not immediately the dumping decision, but what it says about the policy of an incoming Abbott government. Of course, anti-dumping provisions are allowed under WTO rules, but they have been often misused for protectionist interests. So any free trader will look very closely at anything called “anti-dumping”.”
http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3665982.html
In Sophie Mirabella’s words: “effective anti-dumping systems perform a crucial function in world trade by providing recourse against the insidious practice of dumping. This occurs where foreign producers attempt to sell their goods in overseas markets at a price below the one they would charge at home.”
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/opinion/unenlightened-attacks-on-anti-dumping-policy/story-e6frgd0x-1226193960334
and the American President has no power over the Federal Reserve except appointing the Fed board members who has to be approved by the Senate; thus a President advocating the Fed print money should have no affect.
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