Gillard Vs Abbott...

There are certainly some talented people out there...

Abbott's sounding like he's got a lot on his mind. Alterior motives maybe. You can tell too easily when he is thinking for safe words to use. He's playing within the same rules obviously not willing to change anything (going by what he was saying today on ABC).

And Gillard.. who the hell would want Labor for the next 4 years...

I say stuff em both vote below the line for neither

Petermac, no just a two faced back stabbing lesbian atheist who can't talk or string together an intelligent idea. Did I go too far?
If she can do what she did to Kevin, imagine what she'll do to Australia.

I really think Australia and Australians deserve better.

Think fly was just trying to get across that it angers him.

I think you're missing the Point man. I also forgot to mention wranger and a pom, she was too sick to live in Whales!... OMG now I know I've gone too far.

To be honest the only thing I got against her is:
1.- Her back stabbing of Kevin.
2.- Her voice.
3.- The content of her dialog.

Fly i think you need to move forward.

What's with the idea Kev got back stabbed and is the innocent party in all this ?

As the leader he must have had the upper hand at some point.

Was he too dumb to see things afoot ? many journo's were making vague predictions for several weeks.

Opinion polls weren't good for a fair while.

His recent actions caused significant bad publicity

Could Kev not sense the mood of his own party ?

Quite franky I would suggest if a person could not see it coming when in the position he was in and deal with it early and swiftly then maybe he was not of the ability to be Prime Minister ?

Prior to Kev being PM most commentators were saying what a great diplomat he was, possibly one of the most skilled diplomats of the 21st centaury. Given how he spoke about the Chinese after the Rio employees arrests and how he so sensationally failed to fall from grace in a respectable manner I would suggest he is not one of the greatest diplomats of the 21st centaury


(arrgh hang on - we all believe he was back stabbed in a most disgusting manner - maybe he ain't such a bad diplomat ?)

K Rudd is one of those lads, who struggles to see why the majority are not following his thought process at the rate he is developing policies. He thinks everybody is on the same page with him.
Typical was the CTS, he realised that taking this on would smash Australia's ability to compete internationally, unless the rest of the developed and developing went with Australia. Nobody else was geared so he stalled out. And rightly so. But he didn’t think he needed to explain it in point by point form. He just though everybody would understand why.
I am not complaining about him mind you, just an observation.

Give us more of this:

And this:



And this:

Julia was telling him and the media everything was fare dinkum. I heard her say "something stupid" before I become PM.

Kevin thought he was safe, so where was the challenge gona come from... well he learnt the hard way not to trust



Come folks do we really need a dog and pony show coming up with policies for our country, do we really need a political party... can't we just run the show ourselves... who's in favor of Participatory Democracy? It's not a big leap, all the services stay, we just avoid the bludgers.

Vote for policies, not politicians I mean bludgers!

But isn't being able to assess the future and make judgements on the most likely scenario an important skill to have as PM ?

What else does a PM do but take advice from 1000 places (civil servants, your party, the public, the electorate, the international community, pressure groups, the illuminati) and then make the decision that is most correct to the majority of people.

If you can't do that are you likely to be a good PM ??


If you can't deal with your own party, judge its moods, predicts its movements, guide it in the direction you want it to go then you aren't going to be able to deal with the G20 in Copenhagen are you ?

(oh that's right he couldn't do that either)

If you need everybody to be nice to you then maybe politics or diplomacy are the wrong career choices ?

I'm with pointman and frankly find it enormously refreshing to not have a head of state pretending to be Gawd's right hand man/rib and assuming/shoving religious mumbo down my throat at every opening/speech/opportunity to be in the spotty.

The fact that she is not married makes diddly diff to me, as although the crazy monk is married with squids, sumpin tells me that is where any similarities between he and I end.

Honestly how much do you reckon most pollies understand about real people's life/work?? I can't recall the last time my driver took me to a free lunch.

Julia's voice grates but then once again she breaks the affluent schooled schtick that most front benchers (on both sides) seem to need as a pre-requisite.



So it's the Ranga Fishwife or the Mad-Monk Wing-nut...

Hmmm - can I phone a friend.



The Master (de)bate should be very interesting. Let's see if wing nut needs to don the togs to rescue some female voters.

So who here is actually going to be voting for or against Gillard or Abbott and who is going to be voting to elect their local parliamentiary representative???

Be your vote formal or informal, the latter will be the case for all of us!!!

Unfortunately, for all of us, the pissant two party system with the "also rans" others will determine the former.

Just the way it is folks but I do believe it needs to be changed!!

I would think the point is that the popular decision isn't always the right decision. (can you imagine a poll "should we raise taxes?")
The current system gives minority groups a voice and it also allows better decisions to be made in areas with some confidentiality about them.

For a simple example, let's take a small town where 20% of the population own dogs.
The right decision would be to allow some public land to be used as dog walking areas. But in a popular vote, 80% of the town would see no need to give up some of the community area to other people, so they would probably vote against it if they were forced to vote or it took no effort to vote.
Expand this idea, think about how it might apply to religion, race, environment, ideology etc.

Secondly, if everything is voted on, then the power shifts to the people conducting the poll and the people holding the information about the decisions. I can write two versions of the same poll and get different outcomes.

e.g.

1. Should we rebuild the local school hall, as the old one is falling apart and is quite dangerous? Yes/No

or

2. Should we spend $1million on rebuilding a school hall so 30 kids can do a stage production, or spend $1million on fixing the pot holes in the local road to prevent road accidents?

I cant believe the general public are pinning hopes on a scripted bullcrap staged popularity debate with no substance.
Surely everyone isn’t that blind that they cant see this pizzweak attempt by the media to promote this as a legitimate debate when its just a load of noise point scoring crap with no substance.
I agree completely with cisco on this, I vote for my local, not some puffed up poonce from Canberra.
In Paul Keating’s words, “Political live television debates are foolish media hype, with no clear winners and muddy’s the water for the not so clever debater”

The New Order Of Oz

By John Pilger

July 22, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- The Order of Mates celebrated beside Sydney Harbour the other day. This is a venerable masonry in Australian political life that unites the Labor Party with the rich elite known as the big end of town. They shake hands, not hug, though the Silver Bodgie now hugs. In his prime, the Silver Bodgie, aka Bob Hawke or Hawkie, wore suits that shone, wide-bottomed trousers and shirts with the buttons undone. A bodgie was a Australian version of the 1950s English Teddy Boy and Hawke’s thick grey-black coiffure added inches to his abbreviated stature.

Hawke also talked out of the corner of his mouth in an accent that was said to be “ocker”, or working class, although he himself was of the middle class and Oxford educated. As president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, his popularity rested on his reputation as a hard-drinking larrikin, an Australian sobriquet once prized almost as much as an imperial honour. For Hawke, it was the disguise of one whose heart belonged to the big end of town, who cooled the struggles of working Australians, during the rise to power of the new property sharks, minerals barons and tax avoiders.

Indeed, as Labor prime minister in the 1980s, Hawke and his treasurer Paul Keating eliminated the most equitable spread of personal income on earth: a model for the Blairites. And the great Mate across the Pacific loved Hawkie. Victor Marchetti, the CIA strategist who helped draft the treaty that gave America control over its most important spy base in the southern hemisphere, told me, “When Hawke came along... he immediately sent signals that he knew how the game was played and who was buttering his bread. He became very co-operative, and even obsequious.”

The party overlooking Sydney Harbour on 12 July was to launch a book by Hawke’s wife, Blanche d’Alpuget, whose effusions about the Silver Bodgie include his single-handed rescue of Nelson Mandela from apartheid’s clutches. A highlight of the occasion was the arrival of the brand new prime minister, Julia Gillard, who proclaimed Hawke her “role model” and the “gold standard” for running Australia.

This may help explain the extraordinary and brutal rise of Gillard. In 48 hours in June, she and Mates in Labor’s parliamnetary caucus got rid of the elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd. Her weapons were Rudd’s slide in the opinion polls and the power and prize of Australia’s vast trove of minerals. To pay off the national debt, Rudd had decreed a modest special tax on the profits of giants like BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto. The response was a vicious advertising campaign against the government and a threat to shut down mines.

Within days of her coup, Gillard, who was Rudd’s deputy, had reduced the new tax; and the companies’ campaign was called off. It was a repeat of Hawke’s capitulation to the mining companies in the 1980s when they threatened to bring down a state Labor government in Western Australia. Like her predecessors, Gillard is pursuing a landgrab of the one region of Australia, the Northern Territory, where Aboriginal Australians have land and mineral rights. The deceit is spectacular and historical. The government claims it is “protecting” black Australian children from “abuse” and “neglect” within their communities. Official statistics show that the incidence of child abuse is no different from that of white Australia and the true cause of Aboriginal suffering is a systemic colonial racism that denies housing, water, roads, adequate health care and schools to indigenous people and harasses and imprisons them at a rate greater than in South Africa under apartheid.

Since her coup, Gillard has reaffirmed this racism at the heart of policy-making. Australia takes fewer refugees than almost any country, yet Gillard is using their “threat” to outdo the hysterics of an especially primitive parliamentary opposition led by Tony Abbot, known as the “mad monk”. Gillard’s “hardline” on refugees has been welcomed by the openly racist former MP Pauline Hanson as “sweep[ing] political correctness from the debate”. Hanson’s One Nation Party is the equivalent of the white supremacist British National Party. Gillard, an immigrant from Wales, demanded that refugees heading for Australia be “processed” (dumped) in East Timor, an impoverished country whose genocidal occupation by Indonesia was backed by Australian governments. Now liberated, the East Timorese have read their massive, under-populated neighbour a moral lesson by saying no.

Many of the refugees come from Afghanistan which Australia invaded at Washington’s insistence. “Our national security is at stake in Afghanistan”, said Gillard on 5 July, linking a faraway tribal war and resistance to foreign invaders with three terrorist attacks in Indonesia in which Australians were killed. There is not a shred of evidence to support her statement. Australia’s security is probably unique; since 1915, an estimated 22 people have died as a result of politically motivated violence.

The new prime minister’s partner is a former hair products salesman called Tim Mathieson. This would be of no interest had he not been given the job of “Australia’s men’s health ambassador” by one of Gillard’s cabinet colleagues, the health minister, even though he had no experience in healthcare. Mathieson is now a “rising star” in real estate, thanks to one Albert Dadon, whose company is seeking planning permission for a contentious high rise development in Melbourne. Dadon can claim membership of the Order of Mates. As head of the Australia Israel Cultural Exchange, he arranges admiring tours of Israel for politicians and journalists. Gillard went on such a junket last year in the wake of Israel’s massacre of 1400 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. She who would be the first female prime minister of Australia drooled her uncritical support for their killers.

www.johnpilger.com