Birb Katter posted:

I would have 15 min ago but for obvious reasons won't now.

Zetsubou-san posted:

That bastion of :wrods:, The Grauniad

Zetsubou-san posted:

That bastion of , The Guardian

Zetsubou-san posted:

That bastion of , The Guardian

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

Speaking of Abbott and his potential misunderstanding of the Indonesian President, hasn't Abbott done that before? I'm still waking up but I'm getting weird deja vu - something about a politician being super incompetent and not understanding the finer parts of diplospeak where there is a common tongue of pleasant ambiguities that disguise the veiled threats or refusals beneath, and then an overeager and inexperienced politician takes the words at face value and pulls an excited press conference to announce that the US is sympathetic to our cause and will do whatever they can to help!!! Which then triggers a massive facepalm and later retraction. I swear it was a LNP member but I could also be conflating it with a movie or something

Zetsubou-san posted:

That bastion of , The Guardian

PaletteSwappedNinja posted:

I'm pretty sure he announced Indonesia's cooperation in towing back refugee boats or something, only for the Indonesian government to say "lol no" and leak the transcript of the meeting where they told Bishop that they weren't gonna tow, buy or sink any boats and that Abbott was wasting his time.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

Oh yeah, I think that's it. Isn't it wonderful when you misremember a PM's fuckups as pure incompetence and then it turns out they were just lying... Incompetently

quote:

Australia is in the midst of an “unprecedented level of industrial action” within the public service, as workers refuse to accept pay offers put forward by the government, according to a trade union.

The departments of defence, employment, agriculture, human services and veterans’ affairs, as well as the CSIRO and tax office, have all moved to take industrial action over pay and conditions.

The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) said industrial action is now on the cards for agencies that represent half of the commonwealth’s nearly 160,000 public service workers.

“In over 20 years of enterprise bargaining, it is unheard of that not a single agency can make an offer that staff can accept,” the CPSU national secretary Nadine Flood told Guardian Australia. “It’s an unprecedented level of industrial action.”

Flood said public servants have been asked to trade away working conditions for a pay rise of 1% or less.

Employment minister Eric Abetz has rejected that.

“The CPSU consistently misrepresents and exaggerates matters to do with wage bargaining,” Abetz told Guardian Australia.

He said protected action to date has not been widespread.

“Most public servants appreciate the need to work with the government under the current budget conditions and would prefer a minimal wage rise with job security, rather than engage in the CPSU’s outlandish pay claims and its industrial actions,” he said.

“The CPSU should stop standing between public servants and wage outcomes which are affordable. The sooner the CPSU adopts a reasonable approach to bargaining, the sooner public servants will benefit from affordable deals which don’t endanger their own jobs.”

Shadow employment minister Brendan O’Connor said the offers made to public servants is not good enough.

“The Abbott government has shown its contempt for the public service by offering employees from several departments an unreasonable cut to their hard-won conditions on top of a pay cut in real terms,” he told Guardian Australia.

“The government cannot expect the Australian Public Service to function effectively when large numbers of staff are being sacked and those left behind are forced to fight for the most basic workplace entitlements.”

Flood said she “struggles to identify” a time when an employment minister has been so reluctant to negotiate.

The last time they had a face-to-face meeting was January 2014.

“Senator Abetz refuses to meet the CPSU and discuss bargaining. That is very unusual,” Flood said. “I think it’s bizarre. It’s bizarre to have a minister who won’t even discuss the problem.

“We are happy at any point to sit down and have a sensible discussion,” she said.

A spokeswoman for Abetz said the CPSU had been misguided in repeatedly writing to the minister as the bargaining agent for most of the various agencies and departments.

“The minister has said he will not discuss bargaining as he is not the agent. The minister is agreeable to discuss other matters,” she said.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

I can see why he wouldn't bother meeting the union representatives after Jan 2014, he needs to wait for mandatory data retention to pass and be implemented, then his buddies at the AFP et al. can do a bit of snooping and scrape together some blackmail material. No point wasting time on 'negotiations' when you're in the game to destroy unions utterly

quote:

tax office, have all moved to take industrial action over pay and conditions.

Mad Katter posted:

So excited for the goon meet tomorrow, I've given my favourite dragon shirt its yearly wash.

Breetai posted:

A rookie mistake. How do you expect any of the plethora of curvy goonettes who will no doubt be in attendance to swoon over your manly musk if you don't let it accumulate?

Ten Becquerels posted:

At least they post it at a readable size? Being able to read it does make it easier to see how painfully unfunny it is, though.

Seagull posted:

please everyone who ever considers posting a first dog stop and think "does this contribute meaningfully to discussion? is this comic really relevant to current events? is it funny?"

if you answered yes to all three questions, don't post it anyway because you're wrong idiot

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

I don't know how super worried they'd be about treading on ATO's toes given their overall approach to government so far. So long as they keep the businesses happy, the reality of the economy and the budget doesn't seem to matter to them. They haven't gotten rid of Hockey and they're not backing down where ideology conflicts with economic management - they're still just looking for a different way to sell the same old poo poo. Howard gutted Australia like a squealing pig and we'd put him on the $100 note if we could.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

WTB dinner for 1 curvy g(.)(.)n3tte meet me at org gates

e: Please consider me spiritually in attendance at the adelaide goonmeet. Every half an hour everybody trail off into an awkward silence as though a fat guy wearing a breaking bad t-shirt and smelling of slightly spoiled milk had made some weird joke that nobody understands and then giggled at it for far longer than any normal person would

ewe2 posted:

Its not like they want it, more that they're sleepwalking into it from cowardice and incompetence.

quote:

They have to get rid of Abbott and Hockey, and their best option if not Turnbull and Bishop, is Bishop and Morrison. That's not a stable combination. Unless you have a cunning plan, we'd all like to hear it?

Birb Katter posted:

I would have 15 min ago but for obvious reasons won't now.

Lizard Combatant posted:

any takers?

Cartoon posted:

Agreed, but the sheer volume of sqwark coming from the Treasury building would be hard to ignore and it would get the attention of all sorts of inconvenient outsiders like the reserve bank board.

Breetai posted:

"as though"?

Trapezium Dave posted:

The alternative they might latch onto would be someone like Morrison with full-on nationalistic headstomping, which scares me in part because I'm afraid it could feasibly work.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

First dog is one of those funny things where people used to post it heaps and unironically like it because it was hugely dense and it made them feel clever for reading it, and then it gained popularity and the mainstream political enthusiasts got a hold of it so now it's apparently long-winded and inept when in reality it was always terrible, much like my posting

Cartoon posted:

Over reach is when you get the ATO to contemplate industrial action. ASIO and the AFP may be the King and Ace of Spades but the ATO is the whole loving suit of diamonds. A week long strike at the ATO amounts to ~ 1/100th of the annual revenue not collected. Yes it might get collected later but that page on the balance sheet will remain blank forever.

Cartoon posted:

Over reach is when you get the ATO to contemplate industrial action. ASIO and the AFP may be the King and Ace of Spades but the ATO is the whole loving suit of diamonds. A week long strike at the ATO amounts to ~ 1/100th of the annual revenue not collected. Yes it might get collected later but that page on the balance sheet will remain blank forever.

Raged posted:

Sometimes it's good and sometimes it's bad. Just like the posting in this thread.

This thread will never be comparable to Pope though.

Seagull posted:

actually it's all bad, though your metaphor still stands

Zetsubou-san posted:

Zetsubou-san posted:

top result for "penny wong's greatest hits"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuIbEJz23uY

same with brandis

quote:

Fear not fellow citizens. The US is now collecting so much data that they have not the people to read & listen through it all As a result they are actually missing important plots like 911,Oklahhoma bombing and boston bombing.

If your local library has only 3 or 4 books books, the chances are that they will be read many times over.

Sulla-Marius 88 posted:

Accidentally scrolled down to the comments

Comstar posted:

QANDA first question: 1% of the world owns 48% of the wealth. How can fix that?
Random person who is on the show for some reason: I don't believe that figure, who said that?
QANDA first question: Credit Swisse.
Random person who is on the show for some reason who clearly didn't want to hear the answer: I don't believe that number means anything...

I stopped watching TV at that point.



In other news, I hope the ABC keeps showing Mad As Hell in their actual news segments.

quote:

Trisha Jha

Trisha Jha joined the Centre for Independent Studies as a policy analyst in the Social Foundations program in August 2013. Her research has been in social policy, with a particular focus on the family payments system and childcare policy. Her latest reports on those topics were Complex Family Payments: What it Costs the Village to Raise a Child and Regulating for Quality in Childcare: The Evidence Base. Forthcoming research will be primarily on education and schools policy.

Trisha holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations from the Australian National University. She has a strong interest in classical liberal ideas, particularly in free speech and freedom of expression, and other civil liberties issues.

Besides her areas of policy expertise Trisha engages in discussions on the issues of the day across a variety of publications and media. She is actively involved in Australia’s small but growing libertarian community.