Author: Kev

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.

Voldemort Tax

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The trouble with backing your reputation and government on a badly designed and unjustified tax is that after a while you start to sound ridiculous. Gillard, quoted in The Australian
“You can only spread opportunity if you keep the economy strong,” the Prime Minister said. This was only made possible by seizing reform challenges such as pricing carbon
A more fitting description of the Carbon Tax is the Voldemort Tax (from Harry Potter – he who will not be named) This definition comes from the series of ALP/Green TV commercials explaining how the compensation for the Carbon Tax works without actually mentioning the words “Carbon Tax” NIKI SAVVA draws a comparison between the implementation of the Carbon Tax and Howard’s GST. THERE IS NO COMPARISON! The GST replaced a whole host of inefficient taxes, some of them well over 20%, and made common goods cheaper. It also made Australian tax more efficient and simplified distribution of increased federal funds to the states more predictable. The Carbon Tax is new, replaces nothing, will not do what it is designed to do and will simply raise the cost of living. It will also raise the cost of doing business in Australia with a subsequent downturn in investment. But Gillard has committed her government to the tax so I can see how she has to keep trying but really, how can you trust someone who says keeping the economy strong is only made possible by seizing reform challenges such as pricing carbon. No, the world will not collapse on Carbon Tax Day, it will take a while for the flow-on effect to strike but it will – in almost everything we purchase. The flow-on effect will eat up compensation handouts within a year as the unknown and unplanned for consequences, common in all ALP/Green planning, comes into effect.
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Politics

Dingo guilty!

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Can’t see why. What is the evidence that a dingo did it? I can imagine NT coroner Elizabeth Morris finding the dingo guilty just to end the bloody case as we have been dealing with it for 32 years so far. There might be case to give the Chamberlains closure and peace of mind but guilty findings are supposed to be on hard evidence and beyond a reasonable doubt and I haven’t read any reports that can be taken as conclusive. Still, the good news is we shouldn’t have to read about it anymore.
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General Musings

Liberal leaders to busy for talkfest

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PRIME Minister Julia Gillard has urged Liberal premiers in Queensland and Western Australia to attend a major federal government economic forum, despite the mining boom state leaders saying they are too busy. It’s a standard ACTU/ALP talk fest where people say some things and promise to look into and never do. Why should liberal leaders bother? Let’s face it,Campbell is flat out repairing ACTU/ALP economic messes.
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Politics

Class war continues

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Gillard ramps up the class war targeting the 30% of the population who still think she’s relevant.
LOUDMOUTH mining magnates shouldn’t dominate public debate more than a nurse or a childcare worker, said Prime Minister Julia Gillard.
Nurses whose care and nursing is an inetegral and important part of our society are to be held in high esteem but they don’t employ tens of thousands of other Australians nor do they tip billions into the nation’s economy. For that reason the mining magnates do have a bigger part in the public debate and as much as Gillard and Swan hate the fact, generally, Australians listen to the likes of Reinhart and Palmer knowing and appreciating that they didn’t get where they are by being stupid and that they know how economies work. Unlike Gillard and her bank teller mate.
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Politics

Polls good for Abbott

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But not according to the Age. Prime Minister Julia Gillard will “absolutely” lead Labor to the next election, her fellow cabinet ministers say, despite Labor equalling its lowest-ever Fairfax/Nielsen poll result. Great. We need her to stay there so all and sundry can be reminded of the poor performance of herself and the government she leads.
The latest Nielsen poll brings bad news for Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and worse news for Labor.
Note they lead with so called ‘bad news for Tony Abbott’ hoping that is your lasting impression of the article. That sentence is a contradiction in terms and can only be written by someone who simply needs to find something positive for the ALP in a sea of rejection. This is what it’s all about.
Today’s poll puts Labor’s primary vote at 26 per cent, while, two party preferred, the Coalition comprehensively leads Labor by 57 per cent to 43 per cent. If there was a uniform swing, this would give the Coalition about 31 extra seats.
Still looking for the bad news for Tony Wait…here it is.
Mr Abbott’s personal approval also fell 5 points to 39 per cent, while his disapproval rose 5 points to 57 per cent.
As politics never was a popularity contest, personal approval doesn’t elect governments, the two party preferred does, then at this stage of the election cycle these figures are gold. When the election campaign proper begins then Coalition policies will be released and the popularity polls will most probably change.
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Politics

Campbell Newman cleaning out the stables

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ALMOST 70 staff within the state’s now-defunct Climate Change Office will be offered taxpayer-funded golden handshakes of $6500 or more to leave the public service. Two weeks after the Newman Government axed the office, headed by former premier Anna Bligh’s husband Greg Withers, its 67 staff members have been offered voluntary redundancy packages. A further 18 employees from the disbanded Sentencing Advisory Council and Queensland Workplace Rights Office have also been contacted. Staff will be offered their leave entitlements and a severance payment of two weeks’ pay per year of service, plus the added sweetener of an incentive payment worth $6500 or eight weeks’ pay, whichever is greater. Sounds like a positive step to me. Anything these people do can be covered by already existing departments. Now let’s look at Queensland Health, the third biggest employer in the country.
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Qld Politics

Geoff Clark’s bankruptcy extended

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GEOFF Clark, once the most influential Aboriginal leader in Australia, has had his bankruptcy extended for five years amid allegations of undeclared income and assets. Mr Clark was due to be released from bankruptcy but at the 11th hour on Friday, lawyers for Carol Stingel, who was found by a civil jury to have been raped by Mr Clark, petitioned the trustee to file an application for objection to discharge. Good Questions have been raised about his assets being hidden to avoid having to pay out to Carol Stingel.
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Indigenous Affairs

The Great Barrier Reef

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An interesting article by Walter Stark. It would be reasonable to say that no one knows more about marine biology, and certainly the Great Barrier Reef, than Starck
MPAs (marine protected areas) are an ill-considered and expensive idea that address no demonstrated problem. Bypassing full parliamentary scrutiny while permitting a single minister to exercise personal discretion in implementing a vast, costly, unneeded network of them is gross misgovernance.
How dangerous is that while we have the party of Joe Ludwig in power. The Greens, Getup, Greenpeace and the ALP are forever harping about the damage fishing and the passage of ships does to the reef but Stark comments;
And all this debate about the danger posed to the reef by shipping is nonsense. One cyclone causes more reef destruction than if all of the ships that ever traversed the reef since the beginning of time crashed into it. During World War II thousands of ships were sunk on or around reefs, bombed and smashed, some of them oil tankers. And where is the evidence of that today? To the extent that they went down on a reef they are now part of that reef. The Chinese bulk coal carrier Shen Neng 1 ran aground on the reef east of Rockhampton in 2010 amid cries of outrage and demands to cease bulk shipping through the reef. But in reality it was a minor blip on the vastness of the reef, one that will quickly rectify itself.
I’m prepared to accept that comment as being closer to reality that the Greens industry breaking out in an attack of the vapours every time someone mentions ‘coal ships’ and ‘Gladestone’ in the same sentence. A succession of baseless decisions have been made regarding limits on fishing the reef and Stark question the value of these. MPAs do nothing to address pollution or climate change. Their sole effect is to further restrict fishing when we already have the world’s most highly restricted marine fisheries.
MPAs, closed seasons, size limits, bag limits, quotas, gear restrictions, limited licenses and access restrictions have been imposed willy-nilly on fishing with little or no evidence of any problem and no consideration of socio-economic impacts. It seems that current management has never seen an additional restriction they find unnecessary or superfluous to those already in place. Australia has the largest per capita fishing zone and lowest harvest rate in the world at about 1/30 of the global average. We also have the most restrictive and costly marine resource management in the world. Two-thirds of our seafood consumption is imported. All of these imports come from much more heavily exploited resources elsewhere. This is unconscionable.
So we limit our catch of tuna, for example, while PNG licensed asians catches the tuna we don’t and then sell it back to us to the tune of AU$165 million. Now that sounds like a plan…an ALP/Greens plan, that is. It’s a good read and if you want to debate the Great Barrier Reef and fishing, mining, Gladestone, sinking ships and other ecological disasters then maybe, just maybe, it might add some balance. At the very least it indicates that the further away from any Greens solution we can get, the better off all players will be
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Politics

Shop Steward rolls Immigration Minister

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A committee of federal Labor MPs likely to include former union leader Doug Cameron will scrutinise applications from resource companies for foreign workers, but the government has stopped short of giving it a veto. The whole point of the exercise by caucus is they are afraid unions will lose power if foreign workers are employed in the mining industry.
The 12-point resolution creating the committee, which was moved by Left faction figure Doug Cameron and seconded by Victorian Right faction MP Kelvin Thomson, gives the committee the power to monitor and improve EMAs.
That’s it then. It’s now official. We have the unions running our nation with Shop Steward Cameron in the chair. Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie said Labor wanted to replace Australian labour with cheap Asian workers.
“I am worried that this is a move by stealth, ultimately by the mining industry, to reduce the cost of production by bringing in foreign workers, paying them half what they pay Australian workers while we have people sitting there looking for work,” Mr Wilkie said.
Except they get paid standard Aussie award rates, you idiot. This man has a vote in the House and he can’t even get his facts right.
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Politics

Qld Health Dept bigger than ADF

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A snippet from the local Bayside and Norther Suburbs Star Australia’s largest employers; Woolworths first with 94, 408 employees, Coles Myer second with 94,00 and third is the Queensland Health Department with 47,520 The Queensland Department of Health has more employees than Telstra, the Australian Department of Defence, all the mining companies and all of the other state Health Departments and two of those states have a much larger population. Good one, Anna Bligh. No wonder your ALP had to borrow money to pay the wages and even then they couldn’t manage it properly. The figures gives us an idea of the magnitude of the ALP’s incompetence and CanDo’s herculean task of bringing Queensland public service back into manageable proportions. Keep at it, CanDo.
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Politics
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