You were beaten to it...but it's worth posting twice anyways!
www.seabreeze.com.au/forums/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=66189&whichpage=2&replies=37&PageSize=30&mxPages=2
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.
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 ?)
No cwamit, I don't think he should've killed off his deputy. That would've been suicide. But he should've known something was in the wind. Hell, even the media knew that weeks beforehand and therefore so did we. Knowing something was up, he should've moved to kick the heads of some of that backroom factional mob and nip the thing in the bud early on. He didn't (as far as we know).
But that's easy to say sitting here at home as an arm chair spectator so maybe I am being silly!
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!
Participatory democracy is a great idea, FS, and a wonderful dream. But somehow I can't see it working because:
1. 99% of the population don't give a rats - eg they don't even know how their vote works!
2. 0.9% have their own little barrow to push and that's all they really care about
3. 0.1% want to get involved even if it's boring stuff that doesn't affect them. Trouble is they're probably the same ones who go into politics
So in the end, most of the decisions would end up being made by politicians.
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 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”
@Trant: Well you would just need community leaders to propose the issues/solutions. Participatory!
Instead of leaving all the decisions in the hands of some squabbling buffoon in parliament.
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