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What a disaster it would have been to have had Kevin Rudd back as PM. Fortunately enough Labor MPs saw this and Rudd did not have the numbers. His exaggerated claims about being honest reflect only the sickening shallowness of this foolish little man. We want a PM not a disorganised, hyperactive clown with an [...] The relative failure of the mining tax reform was certainly due in part to its poor execution and particularly the inability of the then Rudd Government to explain the motivation for a decent tax reform that shifted the incidence of taxes away from output-destroying output-based royalties towards a tax that took most only when the [...] The pragmatic obvious strong case for dumping Tony Abbott from the leadership of the Liberal Party and replacing him with Malcolm Turnbull is the fact, that with 60% voter support, Turnbull enjoys twice the popular support of Abbott. Moreover while it is true that much of Turnbull’s support is among Labor voters a majority of [...] The repugnant remarks of Allan Jones on Julia Gillard’s alleged role in causing her father’s death reflect on Jones not on Julia Gillard. Jones should not be in the position of manipulating public opinion. 2GB should sack him and if they cannot because of his shareholding then advertisers should desert 2GB. I can only urge as [...] This piece in The Australian today is unfortunately behind a pay wall. If you insert the title of Henry Ergas’s piece in a Google search you will get the whole article. Henry Ergas is a professional economist who has some very sensible things to say on other issues but who evidently he doesn’t understand the [...] John Quiggin has a post on people who switch from one side of politics to the other – from “left” to “right” or visa versa. There are profound semantic issues here that, if taken seriously, can trivialise the analysis of such shifts – most of us are, in fact, social democrats. However despite this broad [...] The devastating defeat of the Labor Government in Queensland means that Federal Labor cannot win its forthcoming election. The Labor Party is in desperate straits having lost government in NSW, Victoria, Western Australia and now Queensland. But the scale of the Queensland massacre is unprecedented with nearly a 16% swing against Labor – about one [...] This fact sheet on the new Mineral Resources Rent Tax is worth reading if only because disinformation campaigns are currently being launched by right wing ideologues such as Alan Moran. Moran dismisses the notion of a tax that does not have disincentive effects. But most first-year economics students know of two such taxes – lump-sum [...] Julia Gillard has now publicly and explicitly identified the reasons Kevin Rudd could not continue as PM. His administrative incompetence was a primary difficulty. These reasons have long been recognised but Gillard’s public expression of them, and attacks on Rudd by senior ministers in the government, make Rudd an impossible choice as alternative PM. Gillard’s [...] Tony Abbott’s idiot populism can undo his apparently election-winning political ascendency. It is obvious from the opinion polls that the Julia Gillard Labor Government is ‘on the nose’ and faces the real likelihood of electoral defeat at the next election. But a surprising feature of the switch away from Labor is the continuing unpopularity of [...] Its fashionable to dismiss Julia Gillard’s Government as a failure – the opinion polls provide some (largely uninformed) backing for this view but I am more sympathetic than most to her. Gillard is an intelligent woman and that is a positive in the face of widespread misogyny in at least the Australian male electorate. She [...] Because of the appalling climate change policies of the Coalition I will probably vote Labor in the next Federal election. Unfortunately I might be backing a losing team but I won’t vote for the Liberals while people of Tony Abbott’s ilk are leading the party. It’s a difficult choice for me because I have long [...] I’ve known Bob since around 1966 or 1967. A great character of the left and a shrewd entrepreneur. Bob held strong Marxist views and sometimes said and did strange things. I remember him up in a tree outside the Soviet Embassy around 1968 when we were protesting the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. His bookstore itself was [...] The mining industry lies about the real neutrality of mining tax reforms, cigarette advertisers lie about the ineffectiveness of plain packaging of cigarettes (if this is ineffective why should the industry worry?) and the gambling industry are screaming like stuck pigs as they accumulate profits from the gambling of those whose lives are destroyed by it – 40% [...] The Coalition would enjoy a landslide electoral victory according to today’s polls in a shift against Labor that seems partly motivated by a fear campaign over the proposed carbon tax. The two-party preferred runs 56% to 44% in favour of the Coalition. Interestingly much of the negative views on Labor seem to stem from dissatisfaction with [...] The strange thing about our NSW neighbours is that they have put up with incompetent state government for such a long time – for a long-time the Liberals have obviously been a very unattractive alternative. However now Barry O’Farrell will be the new NSW Premier in the most dramatic and overwhelming rejection of Labor in history. It is [...] Quote from Julia Dullard “Labor has a long and proud track record of reforming the institutions and practices of political life I want to renovate that Labor tradition to bring lasting and durable improvements to our democracy”. With the exception of the Hawke-Keating years – a significant period – Labor has no ‘long and proud [...] The Australian’s Kate Legge rang me during the week and asked why I am now voting Green. My response is in this article of Kate – basically my revisionism stems from my concern with climate change and more general environmental issues. There are a few Liberal supporters in this article who had similar ideas to mine. This [...] My guess is that Tony Abbott’s Coalition will not win enough seats to form a government on its own bat but that it will fall just short of a majority of seats. With the support of the independents Abbott will be able to form a government in a hung parliament situation. Its a pretty good outcome in [...] It is now 5 days until the Federal elections and most people I talk to can’t wait for the campaign to be over. The obsession in the media with personal and electoral trivia and the blatant dishonesty and misrepresentation by each side in their public pronouncements and the use of ’sound bite’-style advertising leaves me feeling really [...] |
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