SMH posted:

Tony Abbott slaps down Joe Hockey after stoush over WA GST anger

Treasurer Joe Hockey has rounded on Liberal Premier Colin Barnett in a partyroom stoush on the amount of GST revenue Western Australia receives.

And in a worrying sign for the Treasurer, who has been under pressure for his performance selling the budget, he was cut off by Deputy Liberal Leader Julie Bishop and rebuked by Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Sources told Fairfax Media the showdown was sparked when former WA state treasurer turned federal MP Christian Porter stood up to argue for a greater GST share for the West. He was delegated to speak for his WA colleagues.

Mr Porter said that WA received an unfair and falling share of the GST and flagged that he would get every WA MP and Senator to author a submission to an upcoming review into the tax system.

But Mr Hockey was said to have taken a dim view of the complaint and chose to attack Mr Barnett instead, declaring that WA was the worst performing government in the Commonwealth when it came privatising infrastructure.

According to MPs, the party's most senior WA federal representative, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop, repeatedly interjected in an attempt to cool Mr Hockey down.

Sources said she repeatedly interjected to calm the situation. At that pointMr Abbott praised Premier Barnett and said he led a good government.

One MP in the room told Fairfax Media Mr Hockey's contribution was "extraordinary", another said he was clearly slapped down by Mr Abbott.

A third MP said: "Julie was trying to stop Joe . . . from a cabinet minister it was unusual and the PM tried to fix it up."

Towards the end of his contribution Mr Hockey attempted to smooth things over by pointing out that the WA Government could access funding from the federal government's asset recycling fund.

Freudian Slip posted:

Hehehe - party of unity, adults etc etc


I love how far Joe has fallen and that there are so many of his party that are rubbing it in

Also what interested me is the fact that the leakers were are pains to paint Bishop in a positive light

Haters Objector posted:

Large scale privatisation has led to massive wealth and prosperity in such historical examples as:

quote:

Amendments include:

Low income super contribution will stay until 2017.
Income support bonus will stay until 2016
School kids bonus, means-tested for families up to $100K, will stay until 2016.
Compulsory superannuation will be increased to 10% in 2021, instead of 2015-16 as it was under Labor.

Freudian Slip posted:

Also what interested me is the fact that the leakers were are pains to paint Bishop in a positive light

Urcher posted:

Highlights from last month's thread:

Murodese posted:

Bishop is the next Liberal leader. They've been setting her up for a couple months now.

e; wasn't super supposed to go to 12% by 2018?

Murodese posted:

e; wasn't super supposed to go to 12% by 2018?

Murodese posted:

You're forgetting the fact that she's female and would have to lead a group of people that showed pretty clearly last term that they're unable to deal with female leaders.

sidviscous posted:

And once again.. Palmer makes big noise about blocking government policy.. passes it anyway with token amendments.

Murodese posted:

Wasn't Stihlgerrian a goon? That was a lovely loving explanation of butt security in that ABC article, broman.

Lizard Combatant posted:

Yeah I can see this happening.

On one hand it'd be so sweet to see Hockey, Pyne and Abbott given the boot and demoted (dead wood, have to go), the prospect of The Bishop of Asbestos at the helm is particularly worrying considering that she's the most competent one the LNP have.

Tokamak posted:

The Guardian posted:

he mining tax is set to be abolished after a deal with the Palmer United party (PUP) in which the government agreed to delay the abolition of the schoolkids bonus and other savings, as well as legislated increases to superannuation.

The government paved the way for the deal with the three PUP senators and the Motoring Enthusiast senator, Ricky Muir, on Monday when it reintroduced the mining tax legislation but removed all the dates for the associated savings measures.

In a surprise move, the government then filled in the details of the secret negotiations when the bill reached the Senate on Tuesday, revealing a deal with the crossbench senators to retain three programs until after the next election, instead of abolishing them straight away.

In changes that will cost the budget bottom line $6.5bn, the government has agreed to:

• keep the schoolkids bonus until December 2017, with a slight toughening oF the means test

• keep the low income superannuation contribution until 30 June 2017

• keep the income support bonus until 31 December 2016.

But it will recoup many of the forgone savings by delaying the already-legislated increase in the employer-paid superannuation for all workers. It is now scheduled to increase to 10% in 2015-16 and then by 0.5% each year to reach 12% in 2019-20. It will now be frozen at 10% for seven years and won’t reach 10% until 2020-21.

Labor reacted with fury to the government’s plan to slam the deal through the senate with minimal debate, but with the support of PUP, Muir and Family First senator Bob Day, it does not have the numbers to block it.

Labor said delaying the superannuation increase was a clear breach of a promise by Tony Abbott – that he would not make “any adverse changes to superannuation in this term of parliament” – in order to keep his promise to abolish a tax for the big miners.

Clive Palmer had said only hours earlier he had “hardened” his position against the mining tax abolition because of his opposition to the savings. However, minutes after the shock announcement by the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, Palmer’s Senate leader, Glenn Lazarus, said he was accepting the government’s new plan on behalf of the PUP senators and Muir.

“We support the amendments put forward by the government because we must remove the mining tax … as soon as possible. The tax is hurting investment in Australia and diminishing our competitiveness on the world stage,” Lazarus said.

The deal means the government can tick off another key promise ahead of the looming first anniversary of its election, but at the price of abandoning some of its savings.

It has also promised to back Palmer’s plan to have a joint parliamentary inquiry into an “Australia Fund” that would help support “rural and manufacturing industries in times of crisis” and another inquiry into boosting trade and investment.

The deal was secured in a letter from Cormann to Palmer on Tuesday morning.

Labor deputy leader Stephen Conroy described the arrangements as a “filthy deal” in which the “PUP senators have once again been mugged and conned by the government”.

quote:

• keep the low income superannuation contribution until 30 June 2017

Vladimir Poutine posted:

Meanwhile the body of a West Papuan independence leader has been floating in a sack in the ocean. Little to no coverage in the Australian media.

Anidav posted:

Mining Tax is gone.

Vladimir Poutine posted:

Meanwhile the body of a West Papuan independence leader has been floating in a sack in the ocean. Little to no coverage in the Australian media.

Vladimir Poutine posted:

Meanwhile the body of a West Papuan independence leader has been floating in a sack in the ocean. Little to no coverage in the Australian media.

You Am I posted:

It was sadly expected. As the Something Wonky guys have been hammering on about in their Podcast, Palmer is only there to make sure things that effect him are either stopped or don't happen. Just look at the death of the "Carbon Tax" as another example.

Cartoon posted:

Also West Papua? Who_Cares!.png

Doctor Spaceman posted:

Bishop outranks Hockey and Pyne currently though.

Being positioned as the next leader doesn't mean she'll be taking over soon, especially given she's deliberately avoided most of the leadership challenges thus far.

Anidav posted:

I fully expect the PUP senators to be loyal LNP subjects within a year.

Alex Mitchell, Crikey posted:

Shades of Rudd mark II in Dump Robbo campaign

A concerted attempt is being made to unseat New South Wales Labor Party leader John Robertson and replace him with upper house MP Luke Foley.

The plan is to install Foley before the NSW election on March 28 in order to boost Labor’s share of seats in the Legislative Assembly, making the party more viable for a return to office in 2019.

Labor currently holds a measly 21 seats in the 93-seat chamber following the 2011 election defeat, its worst in 100 years.

The putschists believe that “Robbo” can only succeed in increasing Labor’s numbers by 15, whereas a Foley-led campaign stands to deliver 20 extra seats or more (Crikey has also called for Robertson to go, but for different reasons).

This was the same reasoning behind the overthrow of prime minister Julia Gillard in June 2013 and her replacement by Kevin Rudd. His supporters continue to argue that his reincarnation turned the anti-Labor electoral tide in Queensland, Victoria and western Sydney.

Labor finished the Victorian election with 55 seats, which was 15 more than the party expected if Gillard had been in charge. According to polls, Labor was facing a worst-case scenario of a swing of up to 18% against it and a catastrophic primary vote of around 30%. (This analysis is expected to be challenged when Gillard’s long-anticipated memoir, My Story, is published by Random House on October 1).

Like the overthrow of Gillard, the move against Robertson is largely extra-parliamentary. It is supported by Labor’s “elder statesman” -- former prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, ex-premier Bob Carr, and other ALP luminaries like Graham “Richo” Richardson, Michael Egan and Bruce Hawker.

With hand on heart they will claim to be acting “in the interests of the great party we love”. The anti-Gillard brigade adopted the same moral tone when they knifed her.

And once again there is no talk of policy differentiation or ideological and philosophical differences between the incumbent and the challenger. Party members and voters aren’t taken into account at all; they are pawns to be manipulated in a Game of Thrones. And in both instances, the coup plotters have the unwavering editorial support of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp papers.

Last week a full-page article in The Daily Telegraph, describing Robertson as “unelectable”, rubbished the leader and called for a regime change. Creating mischief in Labor’s ranks with constant leadership speculation fills space, boosts circulation and turns politics into a cage-wrestling spectacle. It’s straight from the Murdoch playbook.

The major difference is that whereas Rudd was pathologically committed to destroying Gillard, Foley is a reluctant candidate to depose Robertson and shows no interest in moving to the lower house to mount a challenge.

Indeed, he told ABC host Quentin Dempster that the Tele report was “dead wrong”, adding: “John Robertson has the full and unqualified support of everyone in NSW Labor. He will go to the next election as our party’s candidate for premier with the support of everyone in NSW Labor.”

Monday’s Newspoll gave the NSW Coalition a commanding 54 to 46 lead over Labor in the two-party preferred rating. This is despite the political carnage inflicted on the Liberals by the Independent Commission Against Corruption, which has claimed 10 scalps, including ex-premier Barry O’Farrell, two senior ministers, Chris Hartcher and Mike Gallacher, and seven backbenchers.

But while Premier Mike Baird is the preferred premier with a 45% rating, Robertson polls only 21%, 12% below the party’s primary vote.

Those figures are enough to keep the “Dump Robbo” camp in destabilisation mode for another few months.

William Bowes, Crikey posted:

Poll Bludger: Labor's party reform a gift to Newman

With Labor's recently acquired enthusiasm for democratising its leadership elections, Australia has emerged as a late arrival to a trend that has been playing out in Western democracies over several decades.

Selection of parliamentary leaders and presidential election candidates has long been a matter for the top echelon of party hierarchies, which in different national contexts gave rise to metaphors invoking smoke-filled rooms and faceless men. That began to change from the 1970s, as parties throughout the Western world confronted electorates that were losing enthusiasm for engagement in party affairs through the traditional avenues of membership and activism during election campaigns.

The reform bug has usually struck when a party faced circumstances very much like those of the ALP at present, with poor electoral performance prompting a determination to signal a clear break from the past. In Britain, the Conservative Party's present method of choosing its leader, in which the parliamentary party whittles the field down to two and then leaves the matter in the hands of the membership, was the fruit of the Major government's devastating defeat in 1997. Labour similarly enhanced the power of party members after its demoralising fourth successive defeat in 1992. Now back in opposition, it has recently extended the favour from party members to registered supporters.

Elsewhere among the dominions, Canada's Conservative and Liberal parties opened up their leadership elections after their respective catastrophes of 1993 and 2011, while two heavy defeats inspired New Zealand's Labour Party to hold its first direct leadership election last year.

Novel though last year's contest between Bill Shorten and Anthony Albanese may have seemed from an Australian perspective, the real surprise is that nothing like it had happened sooner. The concerns of certain internal critics of the process having proved unfounded, a majority of state branches have since followed suit.

The Queensland branch, however, has decided to go about things a little differently. As elsewhere, parliamentarians and the party membership are to be given an equal say, but a third wheel has been attached in the shape of a direct vote for affiliated unions, so that each of the three components will contribute a third of the overall result. A resolution to junk the model in favour of the conventional 50-50 approach was voted down by a divided state conference last Saturday, with a newly ascendant Left winning the day over the main unions of the Right.

No doubt the advocates of the proposal do not imagine they are doing anything too radical, given that Britain's Labour Party reserved a specific share of the vote for the union movement until the reforms passed earlier this year, and the New Zealand party continues to do so.

However, the Queensland model is more conducive than either to the influence of union heavyweights. Whereas the British party grants equal voting rights to party members, registered supporters and union members who opt to pay a political levy as part of their dues, the Queensland model leaves the union movement's share of the vote in the hands of union delegates to state conference. In this it reflects the New Zealand model, except that the union component of the vote amounts to a full third, compared with the New Zealand party's 20%.

Given that much of the merit in reforming the process lies in signalling to voters that the faceless heavies who brought down Kevin Rudd have had their wings clipped, this may not have been the smartest move. Certainly it has handed a rhetorical weapon to the Newman government, and indeed to the scarcely less hostile Courier-Mail. State political reporter Steven Wardill wrote on Saturday that the system would ensure the demise of any leaders or aspirants other than "trade union toadies", while columnist Des Houghton rated the empowerment of a union movement burdened by corruption claims as "political poison".

Furthermore, the circumstances of the next election are such that the manner in which the leader is selected will have an unusually strong claim on the attention voters. While current Queensland Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk is performing respectably in opinion polls, the fact remains that she was rarely rated among the contenders to succeed Anna Bligh when defeat loomed at the March 2012 election. Those who were, notably Cameron Dick and Andrew Fraser, did not feature among the seven members who were able to retain their seats in the calamity that followed.

With the pendulum sure to swing forcefully back to Labor, and Cameron Dick in particular assuredly on his way back to Parliament, the infusion of new members leaves short odds on the leadership question being revisited not long afterwards. In this context, there is little doubt that the manner in which the party has chosen to handle the matter will play in the government's favour during the campaign, even if its impact doesn't reach the apocalyptic dimensions claimed for it by elements of the media.

quote:

Mike Carlton’s malevolent agenda

Philip Dalidakis, commentator for Sky News and ABC News writes: Israel is a small and isolated western democracy surrounded by undemocratic states and terrorist-controlled territories. Israel is not beyond criticism, nor do I lightly accuse people of anti-Semitism. It is not anti-Semitic to criticise Israel, but it is if you don’t hold other regimes and conflicts to the same standard.

Mike Carlton's article on the Gaza ceasefire fails this test. It drips with hatred towards Israel, and towards those who support Israel -- which includes the overwhelming majority of Australian Jews, as well as both major political parties. It is also typically nasty. It was not Carlton's views that got him in to trouble with the Sydney Morning Herald, but his response to people who challenged him, including myself who he labelled an "abusive fuckwit" (he may be a sound judge of character but in this case the evidence did not support his claim).

More importantly, his article is full of false assertions and dishonest arguments. He says that Israel’s "stated aim" was to achieve "crushing military and economic dominance of the Palestinian people." Israel never stated any such aim. Israel’s stated aim was to stop Hamas firing rockets at Israel’s cities. That aim has now been achieved, and with Hamas stopping its rocket fire Israel has ceased responding.

Carlton cites the number of deaths in Gaza as evidence for the assertion (made openly in his July column) that Israel is waging a "war of terror on the entire Gaza population ... Call it genocide, call it ethnic cleansing: the aim is to kill Arabs." The facts refute this claim. Israel conducted well over 5000 air strikes against targets in Gaza. The official death toll is about 2000. Does anyone seriously suppose that if Israel's sole aim was to "kill Arabs", it would have been so incompetent at doing so? Israel could have bombed Gaza to rubble and killed tens of thousands of Arabs if that had been its aim.

But it wasn't. Israel’s aim was to destroy Hamas' rocket sites and tunnels. Israel attempted to minimise casualties, Hamas attempted to maximise them. It deliberately placed its launch sites in built-up areas, next to schools, hospitals and mosques, so that more people would be killed. As the Hamas Charter says: "death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of [our] wishes." Captured Hamas documents prove that this was a deliberate strategy, designed to persuade the gullible and the malevolent (Mike Carlton is both) that Hamas is somehow an injured innocent in this conflict.

This conflict was entirely of Hamas' making. Hamas seized power in Gaza in 2007, murdered its political opponents, imposed a fascistic regime on the people, then turned Gaza into a base for waging war on Israel. This year alone Hamas has fired more than 3000 missiles into Israel, every one of them intended to kill Israeli civilians.

It’s true that few Israelis were killed by Hamas' rockets. That’s because Israel, unlike Hamas, cares about the lives of its citizens and has spent fortunes on shelters, sirens and anti-missile systems. That does not in any way deny Israel the right to take action to stop these attacks.

Carlton draws an elaborate analogy between this conflict and the Vietnam War. The analogy is a false one. The US was not fighting a war of self-defence in Vietnam. North Vietnam was not firing rockets at American cities. The US could afford to abandon Vietnam to its fate when public support for the war collapsed. Israel has no such luxury, and the Israeli public knows that. Polls showed over 90% of Jewish Israelis supported the campaign against Gaza.

Carlton’s trump card is the letter to the New York Times condemning Israel and signed by 40 Holocaust survivors. He obviously doesn’t know much about Jewish demographics. There are about 120,000 Holocaust survivors still alive in the US, and probably twice that number in Israel. The vast majority of them support Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. Even here in Melbourne, I could get more than 40 Holocaust survivors to sign a statement of support for Israel in a morning. They would tell Carlton, if he had the nerve to ask them, "Never again will Jews be denied the right to defend themselves."

It suits Mike Carlton's malevolent agenda to suggest that anyone who supports Israel’s actions belongs to a "powerful and sophisticated Likud lobby." This is nonsense. I am a Labor party member and a Labor candidate for the coming Victorian state election. If I was an Israeli, I would not vote for Likud. I would vote for the Israeli Labor Party -- a progressive party which fully supported the campaign in Gaza.

I support a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and I oppose the expansion of settlements in the West Bank as counter-productive. But I also oppose people hiding behind the cloak of "proportionality" to deny Israel the right to defend itself while giving a free pass to proscribed terrorist organisations such as Hamas.

That is anti-Semitism.

ewe2 posted:

Meanwhile in darkest NSW...


Welp. Staying in the provinces...


Hmm, I like Poll Bludger but it is a long Bowe to assume the voting public are going to be interested in that line of attack when the Newman government has got a lot of explaining to do if it wants to come back not as a rump.

Finally I want to share this extraordinary email to Crikey, an all-out attack on Mike Carlton from a Sky News someone-or-other:


Yup, no self-interest in that little tirade, no sirree