Retired infantry officer. Conservative by nature and politics; Happily married and father and grandfather of eight. Loves V8 powered Range Rovers, Golden Retrievers, good books and technology and think there should be open season on Greenies.
Born in the mid forties and overdue for servicing but most parts still work.
SUPPORT for the Coalition has plunged to its lowest level in almost four years and voter dissatisfaction with Tony Abbott has jumped to the highest point since he became Prime Minister as the government prepares to deliver across-the-board pain in its first budget.
Amazing, isn’t it? The poor bastard has to fix a huge deficit left by the ALP and he is in trouble.
Mind you it’s totally expected. With the media, the ALP, every organization that lives off government handouts and the weird left wing screaming about mean Abbott and amongst all that, nobody, least of all Shorten, are calling it for what it is – a budget to try and get us out of the very deep hole the ALP have left us.
There is a fair chance the rich are going to pay for it. Bit unfair really because they didn’t cause it and are highly unlikely to have vote the spendthifts in. In a perfect world we would be able to isolate those who did vote them in, particularly the second ALP government, and give them the bill.
Wont happen of course.
What will happen, what has happened since Whitlam got booted, is that the Libs come in to fix the deficits. Over the first year hard decisions are made and their polls plummet with too many people thinking ME and not the country. LNP management starts to produce results and the polls climb to give them another run at government. The country stabilizes, surpluses appear and productivity lifts after union power is curtailed. Everythin’s rosy, people get complacent and with the memory span of a lightening bolt, forget how bad the ALP is at managing finances and everything else except looking after the unions and they fucking vote them back in.
The mysteries of the cycle of life.
A couple of quotes from Abbott.
“This budget is about shifting our focus from entitlement to enterprise; from welfare to work; from hand-out to hand-up; from our own short-term anxieties to our nation’s long-term opportunities,”
And;
“This will not be a budget for the rich or the poor; it will be a budget for the country.”
Yea, I know, he would say that, wouldn’t he, however I agree with his general thrust but would add that the country needs to pull in its spending to fix the abysmal waste of the Rudd/GIllard/Rudd governments.
The telling quote on this matter is from Grace Colliar;
[When we elected Rudd], after 13 years of Howard, our faith in politicians was higher than it is now. We had no commonwealth debt; $45 billion in public savings was burning a hole in our pocket. A nation of relaxed and comfortable gamblers took a punt. Carriage of our precious finances went to the Labor Party. We lost, they won.
Rudd turned out to be a vainglorious Trojan horse for Gillard and the unions. Now we have more than $350bn in commonwealth debt. ( From the RBA)
I would say everyone who thought about it were looking forward to savage cuts of ALP schemes and thought bubbles, but that, at present, seems to be stonewalled by the Senate. NDIS, Gonski and the NBN need tightening while every Green initiated programme such as the Carbon Tax and RET, along with the beaurocracies that have grown with them, need to disappear.
Green and red tape needs to be rationalized to kick-start the economy and the damage caused by the union dominated ALP will have to be sorted to encourage business to start employing people again. If penalty rates stop businesses opening on public holidays, and it does, then get rid of it.
When we are doing it tough at home we cut costs – mince based curries instead of Eye Fillet, or cheaper beers and wines and simplisically it is no different with the national economy.
Cut costs!
Stop spending!
I’m not happy with the talk of a tax levy but it could be a suck-it-and-see exercise. Run it up the flagpole and see who salutes or doesn’t. If the budget doesn’t slash ALP extravances and relies soley on a tax that we were promised wouldn’t happen, there will be hell to pay.
I can’t see how the ALP can criticise any proposal put up by Abbott and Hockey. Let’s face it, the ALP are responsible for the country’s current fiscal problems. If anything, they should be offering up their solutions to the problem and taking a bi-partisan approach to getting the country back on track.
I haven’t heard one positive suggestion from the party that caused the problem.
Not one!
A letter to the
The Australian’s editor
….There is no military threat to Australia, and as a fiscal conservative, I think it obscene to spend $12 billion on unnecessary fighter jets when the nation is broke.
Fabio Scalia, Windsor, Vic
Just a couple of points Fabio; the country isn’t broke, we just have to recover from the ALP spendathon, and
there is no military threat to Australia because we do things like spend billions on high level defence equipment.
BARRY O’Farrell has resigned as NSW Premier following his appearance at the Independent Commission against Corruption yesterday.
Mr O’Farrell denied receiving a $3000 bottle of wine from Australian Water Holdings boss Nick Di Girolamo yesterday but resigned today after it was revealed that he sent Mr Di Girolamo a card thanking him for the gift.
Something there for the ALP to think about. A Liberal political Premier resigns over a mistake he made, inadvertantly or not, while the ALP have had people like Thomson refusing to admit his crimes with Gillard backing him as a good local member. Hundreds of thousands stolen from his union members and through it all, he refused to resign and no one forced him to.
O’Farrell meets the high standards of the Liberal movement while the ALP sets low standards and fail to even meet them.
TWO Australian citizens have been killed in a US airstrike in Yemen in what is the first known example of Australian extremists dying as a result of Washington’s highly controversial use of predator drones.
Why
highly controversial The drone killed 5 terrorists – I would think that would make it
highly successful
I was concerned when I first read the headlines but it turned out the two guys were fighting for al-Qa’ida. If you fight for the enemy I think you should loses your citizenship so the only thing to take from the incident is that 5 terrorists were killed and that’s a good result.
A great video tour through Nuship Canberra which will dramatically increase Australia’s defence capabilities, and impact the Army as much as the RAN:
That is great news for Australia and the ADF but elsewhere, after 6 years of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle, the news is all bad.
Alan Dupont, in The Weekend Australian
underscores the problems Abbott faces repairing the damage the ALP did to our economy.
Perhaps the best way to understand the seriousness of defence’s budgetary problem is to benchmark against Force 2030, trumpeted by the Rudd government in the 2009 white paper as “capable of meeting every contingency the Australian Defence Force may be required to meet in the coming two decades”. Capable it may have been but funded it was not.
The subsequent savage cuts inflicted on Defence by Labor in pursuit of an illusory budget surplus effectively removed $18 billion from Force 2030 in the space of four short years, equivalent to nearly three-quarters of the annual defence budget.
I recall Rudd coming up with his 12 submarines as a blatant try at sounding like he and his party new what they were doing in matters military. Everyone who had any skin in the game just looked at each other, rolled their eyes and dug in waiting for the election to get rid of the idiot.
The logistics of our current submarine fleet have two on patrol, two on build-up or wind-down and two on maintenance and we can just manage the manpower and dollars to keep that moving and Rudd wanted to double the trouble.
Capable it may have been but funded it was not – like most of their ideas – NBN, NDIS and Gonski to name a few.
The public needs to be reminded every day that the reason Abbott and Hockey are about to drop hard times on the country through the 2014 budget is because of the huge, obscene debt ramped up by the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd debacle.
Well, Tony Abbott has got the Progresives traumatised with his reintroduction of Knights and Dames of the Order of Australia (AK/AD). Dame Quentin Bryce and, as of tomorrow, Sir Peter Cosgrove are the first two recipients.
I’m all for recognition of those who give much more than others and seriously impact on the life of Australia and Australians. Dame Quentin will have some difficulty with her progressive mates over accepting the award and any amount of others, like myself, will pause to wonder why she has accepted a title from a system she has railed against. Still, I doubt if she felt she had a choice and, anyway, don’t tell me she isn’t chuffed.
I doubt if many Australians would disagree with my old boss, Sir Peter Cosgrove, being so recognized.
Labour frontbencher Chris Bowen predicted Mr Abbott would next announce “that vinyl records are coming back or that his car plan is to reintroduce Cortinas and Toranas”. Greens leader Christine Milne said Mr Abbott was trying to create a “bunyip aristocracy” in Australia.
I’d take a Cortina if that happened. Had a rich girlfriend with a GT and as I recall I drove it from Melbourne to Perth and back in my 21st year(1967) and enjoyed every mile. The company was good as well.
Back to Knghthoods…..I actually don’t see it as an Imperial award because, simply put, it isn’t. Knights and Dames existed under the Order of Australia originally but were removed by Hawke because the ALP have this strange idea that everyone is equal. But as George Orwell pointed out in Animal Farm some are more equal than others.
It also explains wy the ALP don’t like the Army. We have officers.
Well done Tony Abbott and well done Dame Quentin and Sir Peter.
The agency in charge of the
national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) has been likened to “a plane that took off before it had been fully built and is being completed while it is in the air”, in an independent report that questions its ability to roll out the flagship project.
The report’s authors, led by former public service executive Jeff Whalan, point to woefully inadequate IT systems, staff confusion, lack of direction and vague terminology in the crucial assessments, such as the key “reasonable and necessary” supports.
The woes of the agency were made apparent as the Public Service Association in NSW stepped up a campaign to “ban work which requires their co-operation with the National Disability Insurance Agency” over its claims that the insurance scheme is being used as a cover to privatise disability services.
The ALP rushed this to get it out before the last election and it shows. They make mileage out of their “great ideas” but never got on top of actually making them work or financing them.
Those minor problems are left to the Libs to fix.
And then there is this.
LABOR’S most experienced frontbencher, Jenny Macklin, has signed a deal with Melbourne University Publishing to write the inside story on the social policy achievements of the Rudd/Gillard governments.
What should be a book of blank pages will wax philosophically about the ALP’s great programmes and NDIS, NBN and Gonski will rate highly in anything she produces.
The book should be restricted to programmes that were planned, financed and established in the system which would make Macklin’s job so much easier.
But it won’t be.
“My husband is a good man” according to the current Mrs Thomson which makes me wonder what the previous Mrs Thomson thinks. Christa Thomson was still married to him when he was on a spending spree booking whores, porn, booze and travel up to the HSU membership. He is claiming depression from the break-up of his marriage to Christa caused him to seek solace elsewhere however he also claims Christa was with him at times when is accused of consorting with the ladies.
Magistrate Charlie Rozencwajg doesn’t seem to be impressed with Thomsons depression plea.
“I’ve never met anyone who’s not depressed at the prospect of going to jail” he said, as Thomson’s QC passed up the magic report.
Thomson had agreed to repay the HSU the $24,538.42 he embezzled with union-issued credit cards and a Flight Centre account.
$24,538.42!
What about $389,000 of union money spent on getting himself elected to Parliament.
The thousand-page report by Fair Work Australia, made public this week, paints a fascinating picture of a man prepared to lie about the more than $250,000 of union funds he spent on trips, holidays with his ex-wife, an airfare for his brother’s girlfriend, wining and dining, and even prostitutes. Every cent of that spending – even the 14 airfares for his ex-wife – was legitimate, Thomson told FWA. Except for the prostitutes, of course.
Craig’s world is described
here
Michael Smith has
good coverage and well worth the time to read
The saga is nearly over and, I hope, it will end with Thomson’s incarceration.
I detect a breath of fresh air wafting across the Bass Straight as Tasmanians have at last seemingly recognized the damage the Greens have done to their state.
The Liberals recorded a 12 per cent swing to take 51 per cent of statewide vote to give them power in Tasmania but in South Australia the Liberals cant win with 53.5 % of the vote
Apparently, according to Shorten, the South Australia result is because the locals don’t trust Tony Abbott.
Let’s be really clear. Federal issues did play a role in the last couple of weeks of that state election and South Australians don’t trust Tony Abbott, and there’ll be a lot of South Australian Liberals who’ll be ruing his intervention.
But no such matter exists in Tasmania. There is no mention of the Taswegians not trusting Shorten or the Greens.
I would rather think that the Libs didn’t run a very good campaign and they are hard put to beat the gerrymander anyway.
Such & Brock, the two SA Indies, have stated that they will follow their electorate wishes and as both their electorates voted overwhelmingly for a change of government thats what they should do. Of course, it’s highly unlikely that they will, given the very nature of independants.
One of the two federal independents who propped up Julia Gillard’s minority government, Tony Windsor, warned the two South Australian independents that they should brace for a public backlash to the anticipated hung parliament. “They’ll be blamed for everything that goes wrong,” he said.
Only if they do what you did Tony and go against the wishes of their electorates.
The Libs are slightly bouyed today by the ongoing counting and a possible hint of an attitude adjustment in the case of the Independents but I still hold feint hope.
Time will tell as the postal vote count continues.
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