ACT, Neilsen and Rudd
The good news from the ACT elections is that the Greens have suffered a swing against them of 4.6% with some dissaffected Labor voters going back to the fold but most of this loss going to the Libs who enjoyed a 6.4% positive swing.
Labor will govern with the help of the Greens giving us another ALP/Greens coalition. All the better to remind people what a disaster ALP/Green governments are.
The more the Greens are in the news, the more people become aware of their attacks against our economy and their loopy policies. I look forward to a similar, or even better swing in next years federal poll.
The ABC are all over Gillard being the preferred PM over Abbott and this morning it took an entire news broadcast before they reluctantly mentioned, as an aside, that Neilsen still had the Oppostion in a winning lead. The prefferred PM poll is more a reflection of better ALP spin than substance so it is of little importance in the scheme of things and definitely doesn't win or lose government.
Up here in Brisbane The Australian reports Labor would win under Rudd. The Rudd cheer squad include Sid Maher, the journalist who wrote the puff piece, a Gallop Poll commissioned by a union, and, obviously a Rudd should be PM committee chaired by Rudd himself.
Mobbed by dozens of people wanting to have their photographs taken with him at the Chong Yeung festival, Mr Rudd refused to rule out interest in another tilt at the party leadership.He also received a rapturous welcome at a Chinese festival in Sydney, with dancers chanting "Kev-in, Kev-in"
The plot thickens, the body sickens. Interestingly, the piece wasn't carried by the Courier Mail and I'm surprised it made the news anywhere other than a union newsheet.
I don't care if Rudd gets back in the chair. I figure it would take about one to two months for the voters to remember why they didn't like him last time round. Either way, one of them will have to face the music at election day where, for once, their spin machine will not be able to present the anticipated flogging as 'good news'.
They will, of course, be able to blame it on Abbott and that would represent the first occassion where their blame sheet would be accurate.
Back to Gillard – Micheller Grattan at The Age reports;
Not surprisingly, Gillard's biggest gain on a range of attributes was in the area of foreign affairs, where the percentage saying she had a firm grasp on policy jumped from 39 per cent in August 2010 to 56 per cent – a perception that will be reinforced by Australia securing a seat on the United Nations Security Council.
Michelle may not be surprised but I am astounded. If you are a troubled rusted on ALP supporter go read the piece – it will give you heart but don't take it to the bank just yet.
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Kev
You forgot to mention the latest on Napoleon. He's backflipped on uranium, quoting federal Labor policy as an excuse. Shame he has't also followed Labor on the NDIS trials. There are two principles consistently followed by Newman.
1. Target the most vulnerable (people with disabilities and the elderly).
2. Completely ignore any promises made to get elected.
He's turned lying into an art form.
Conservatives are not hamstrung by the ideological hatred of uranium – a condition developed in the cold war days when the Left's useful idiots were doing all they could to unilaterally disarm the US. USSR and uranium/nuclear weapons good – US and uranium/nuclear weapons – bad. It's a commodity that from time to time earns good money for any country smart enough to treat it as such.
NDIS is a typical ALP heart strings policy. Select something that everyone will think is marvellous…say you are about to impliment said policy and get everyone in the debate on side and then drop the "but we don't have any money to do it – the states will have to cough up" bomb. NDIS is a good idea and will be welcomed when Canberra works out how to finance it. As this is not an ALP forte it will most probably have to wait quite a while as it will take years for Abbott to drag us out of debt.
I don't get the target the most vulnerable comment – you will have to explain that one.
Pre election promises. I would've thought people from your side of politics would stay well clear of that subjetc. I don't recall Newman saying there would be no uranium mine under a government I lead just that when he was asked if he had a plan at that time to mine uranium he said no.
Thankfully, now he does. Remember, he has to claw back the state economy from previously unplumbed depths of debt so any initiative that saves or earns money is desperately needed.
Gillard's backflip (now there's a backflip) on selling uranium to India will play well at the ALP conference as the Left try and maintain their cold war hatred of the evil commodity. Once again she was forced to fix up an ALP stuff-up when they had initially reneged on a Howard Govt contract to sell uranium to India. The Left held sway and the deal was cancelled. Another diplomatic coup that had enraged India and cost Australia money.
All Newman is doing is setting us up to earn and save money – I recall he had a fairly clear mandate to do just that.
Once again numerical misfit doesn’t understand the difference between “there will be no etc etc” and ” I don’t have a plan to etc etc”. The latter indicated that there may be a change. The Federal LABOR Government opened up an opportunity to market something that Qld can supply giving rise to the opportunity to create a plan that did not previously exist. Pretty simple really, unless you are a watermelon with a lack of simple year 7 comprehension.
Hello 17…
Do you have a twin by the name of Blobbsy? If not, there is a commenter doing a fine job of emulating your style and your thinking.
I wrote a while back that on RTA I would post a link to the Australian version of Nadu’al Islam (the Call of Islam), which is the now defunct magazine for which Keysar Trad of the Islamic Australian Friendship Society translated some articles. Here is the link:
http://web.archive.org/web/19970708170642/www.islam.org.au/articles/index.htm
As the articles do not suit your thinking, you may not wish to read them. Consequently, I have extracted a few quotes from the one titled Preserving the Islamic Identity in the West
“To be a good Australian means to obey the laws of the land even if they conflict with the laws of Allah (s.w.t). We see this from the earliest stages of the child’s education in the form of flag-raising ceremonies each morning in which the children sing the national anthem and stand in respect as the flag of the non-Muslims is raised over their heads”.
“It is a fact of life that we must, to some extent, keep close company with the Kuffar. This is almost unavoidable given that we work, study and, unfortunately, play with them”.
“The likeness of Islam and Kuffar is like that of fresh clear spring water and water brought up from the bottom of a suburban sewer. If even a drop of the filthy water enters the clear water, the clarity diminishes. Likewise it only takes a drop of the filth of disbelief to contaminate Islam in the West”.
This is the same Keysar Trad described by Justice C J McClellan of the NSW Supreme Court as a disgraceful person. Here is the link:
http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/scjudgments/2009nswsc.nsf/6ccf7431c546464bca2570e6001a45d2/016866bf2c705469ca2576030020218c?OpenDocument
Trad has form elsewhere, including in Queensland, and I will provide this on request. Keep on believing in what he, his mates and their absurd beliefs represent 17… , it will help maintain their morale but do the rest of us no good at all..
Your response to my last post included some bizarre claims, the first one being we had perhaps suffered trauma and PTSD from [our forbears] being dragged to the ends of the earth never to see family or friends again.
Transportation ended in 1868 after about 162,000 people had been transported over the preceding 80 years. However, by the end of transportation the population was over 1,500,000. Do you really believe that number of convicts has caused mass PTSD and mass trauma among Australia’s 23,000,000?
You then claimed the Chinese at Lambing Flat had been attacked because of fear and loathing. The National Museum of Australia disagrees. It advises “European diggers were incensed by the Chinese and their apparent wastage of water when extracting gold…. Six anti-Chinese riots occurred at the Lambing Flat camps over a period of 10 months. The most serious riot occurred on 14 July 1861… After this tragic event, Lambing Flat was renamed Young.” You will find other reasons for the riots but I have not come across fear and loathing as one of them.
You then appeared to claim Australia was largely built on the backs of “reffos” and “wogs”. Here is an extract from the website of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship: “By 1950, almost 200,000 people had arrived. One million more migrants arrived in each of the following four decades”.
Your claim is based on a myth – nearly half the early post war immigrants were from the UK while a large number were from Northern Europe. Similarly, I do not recall these people being referred to as wogs and reffos in Sydney in the 40s and 50s. The term wogs was used almost exclusively to describe swarthy Italians and Greeks. Similarly, reffo was usually used to describe Slavs.
You also claimed there was “….admiration for Hitler (he made the trains run on time)”. That organisational quality was ascribed to Mussolini – not Hitler.
However, your final claim is the strangest. You wrote: “A group of religious fanatics kill 3000 civilians in New York and Washington, and in the “get square” at least 120,000 civilians have died in Iraq, as well as over 4000 coalition soldiers. The (sic) fact that extensive reserves of light sweet crude are found in countries where Islam holds sway is scarcely irrelevant”.
The attack on the WTC took place in September 2001 and Operation Iraqi Freedom began in early 2003. Are you seriously suggesting the US took over a year to organise a “get square” campaign, and then attacked, apparently in error, a country that had not provided a single one of the 19 terrorists? Would it not have made more sense to attack Saudi which provided 15 of them, and which also had “extensive reserves of light sweet crude? “
Likewise, your allusion to a pretext to launch Iraqi Freedom is at odds with the facts.
If President Bush lied about WMDs, he was in the company of President Clinton and many other Democrats including Madeline Albright, Al Gore, Senator Ted Kennedy, Senator John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi and Senator Hillary Clinton. Each of these Bush opponents made it clear in statements between 1998 -2003 that Saddam possessed WMDs or, was in the process of obtaining them.
Mr Philip Flood in his Report of the Inquiry into Australian Intelligence Agencies which was submitted to the Prime Minister on 20 July 2004, wrote on page 26 “ ……..it is noteworthy that prior to the coalition’s military action against Iraq on 19 March 2003, the only government in the world that claimed Iraq was not working on, and did not have biological and chemical weapons or prohibited missile systems was the government of Saddam Hussein.” I think that is a pretty significant point 17… What do you think?
Israel is a country that depends absolutely on accurate intelligence. Yet, it came close to defeat in 1973. At the end of that war the Agranat Commission was formed to determine what had gone wrong. Essentially, the Commission found Israel’s lack of preparedness was due to a failure of intelligence.
Curiously enough, this was the same conclusion reached by Mr Flood ie, there had been a straightforward failure of intelligence regarding WMDs in Iraq. You must surely have experienced similar failures during your tour in Vietnam – I know I did.
You ended your post by stating you are jack of bigotry. Good. However, you might display less of it in your thinking and your pronouncements if you opened your mind to new and reliable information. To help you along here is another insight into Islam.
During our time in Saudi, my wife and each of her friends experienced the bizarre behaviour that veiling and separation of the sexes induces.
All shop assistants in Saudi were males regardless of whether they were selling female underwear or power tools. Thus, seeing the face of a woman was more than a lot of the men could bear. (Western women had to wear a headscarf and an abeya but, the face could be uncovered). Accordingly, it was not uncommon for a shop assistant to begin masturbating in front of a Western female customer.
Lest you think that is the end of my experiences involving the home of Islam, be assured it is not.
Keep supporting this ideology 17… , and keep calling people who share my beliefs bigoted even though they are based on personal experience. But while doing so, keep in mind the trickle of arrivals you referred to will fill a vessel just as surely as will a flood.
As far as I am concerned the only thing Islam offers the world is proof that capital punishment does deter. The widespread failure to lampoon this ridiculous mish mash of woo woo cannot be explained any other way.
“the ideological hatred of uranium”
Uranium should be left in the ground, until a fail safe method of disposing of waste is developed. It has nothing to do with ideology. Bob Katter (hardly of the left) has had plenty to say on the topic – http://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22chamber%2Fhansardr%2F2005-11-01%2F0056%22
“I don’t get the target the most vulnerable comment – you will have to explain that one”.
The most vulnerable are people who rely on others for their quality of life. Most people with disabilities are in that situation, and eventually, all of us will be, if we survive to ripe old age.
It’s worth examining Napoleon’s actions in government in the area of disabilities in the short time he’s been in power. Here’s a brief summary –
Removed payments to families with a fully dependent individual. These payments were similar to a voucher system (popular with those on the Right) which entitled the family to buy taxi fares, vehicle alterations, respite care, etc, to enhance quality of life both for the individual concerned, as well as the whole family. The most disgraceful aspect of this is that in theory the funds have been given to each DOC office in the regions, but no funds have been allocated, so if a submission is made, clients are told there are no resources.
Capped taxi subsidies to people with disabilities. This has created so much angst that the decision is being reviewed. What this means, if it goes ahead, is that anyone with a disability in gainful employment who relies on daily taxis will lose their job. This will force them back on disability benefit, but I guess that’s OK, because the Feds pay that.
Closed Disability Services Support Unit in Dutton Park. This was an agency that provided a warehouse of resources which were available for loan to kids with disabilities in schools all over the state. This was particularly useful to kids in remote small schools which lacked the budgetary capacity to buy such equipment. Without it, some of these same kids simply won’t be able to attend their local school. Again, there has been a minor backflip in that the equipment is being allocated to various regions across the state, but no extra funds to store it, administer a working lending scheme, or transport it around the state has been allocated. All the staff in Dutton Park will either be made redundant or transferred, and no extra staff appointed in the regions, which means that people will be dragged of front line duties to manage the equipment.
Shut down support for students with disabilities in non-state schools. Again, the reasoning is that the feds will fill the gap. That’s unlikely.
Aside from this, there have been many sackings (although weasel words Newman calls them “voluntary redundancies”) in the agencies supporting people with disabilities across the state.
All of this might be acceptable, except that none of it was flagged before the election. To say he has a mandate is pure crap – none of this was part of the pre election manifesto. In fact, he made it very clear that “public servants have nothing to fear from an LNP government”. Remember?
And now of course, one of the more notorious members of the Calabrian cabal that holds him hostage have already been caught lying to parliament. As I said, this mob have turned it into an art form.
As the articles do not suit your thinking, you may not wish to read them.
A cursory google will find hundreds of hate sites which advocate killing Muslims. Diggers in Townsville have been fingered for advocating the same on Facebook. Hate, unfortunately, is universal, and your rantings contribute.
Lest you think that is the end of my experiences
I’ve also had experiences of being on the receiving end of hostility, a result of the same kind of stereotyping that you embrace so wholeheartedly when it comes to Muslims.
On RTA, on quite a few occasions, I was called a “child killer” (once by a colleague). I was called a “loser” as a Vietnam veteran by a Liberal booth worker in 1975.
That, old mate, is exactly the same behaviour you’re demonstrating in your rantings about Islam. You’re obviously too thick to notice, just as my use of metaphor in reference to PTSD and the Australian psyche has gone right over your head.
Don’t worry about it – stick to comics.
“I’ve also had experiences of being on the receiving end of hostility, a result of the same kind of stereotyping that you embrace so wholeheartedly, On RTA, on quite a few occasions, I was called a “child killer” (once by a colleague). I was called a “loser” as a Vietnam veteran by a Liberal booth worker in 1975”
Here we go again, break out the violins and peel a couple of onions.
Hello 17…
Although your marks have not improved, I note you have now signed up for Advanced Verbaling, Obfuscation and Missing the Point.
I wondered if you were serious in writing this:
“A glance at Australian history reveals that there has always been a pathological need to fear something. There’s a permanent bogey man hiding under the bed occupied by our national psyche. Perhaps it has something to do with our convict origins. Perhaps being dragged to the ends of the earth, never to see your home and family again, is deeply traumatising – and a kind of collective historical PTSD has emerged, the primary symptom being this irrational fear.
Whatever its origin, from time to time, pollies use this fear to frighten the voters. It works a treat.
The fact that more often than not, the objects of this chronic fear and loathing have turned out to be historical chimeras, has been conveniently overlooked”.
Your response was to claim it was a metaphor. It can’t be a metaphor, as that is a figure of speech ie, a word or a phrase. It is actually a hypothesis plus a conclusion spread over three paragraphs and seven sentences. But if we stretch the definition, what is your piece a metaphor for?
I was not advocating killing Muslims (they do that to each other often enough without outside help) but I would rejoice at the death of their ideology. Likewise, I laughed over your accusation I was stereotyping Muslims. There’s no need to stereotype them 17… They reveal their similarities day after day in many parts of the world.
It’s unfortunate you were abused on RTA but if it helps, I was spat on. That was carried out by a disciple of the Australian Vietnam Veterans true friend – JF Cairns.
It took just a few years to create this animosity among some of our people, while Islam starts when a child is about six and continues on 5 times each day for the rest of their lives. Are you incapable of understanding how deeply ingrained are the teachings of that wretched ideology?
There was no penalty for leaving Cairns’ preachings behind. But that is not the case with Islam. Apostasy gets you a good dose of death. It happened in Dharhan while I was in Saudi – the individual stated publicly Mohammed’s preachings were rubbish and was executed. The judges stated that so heinous was the insult, the only penalty applicable was death.
Keep on defending Islam 17… It’s a great religion – and it was surely a misunderstanding that caused the several hundred expats I worked with in Saudi to detest it. Nothing to do with first hand experience of course.
I can’t resist closing without a few more “rants”. The Arab News was, and still is, the leading English language newspaper in Saudi. It also carried an American sourced crossword each day. Here is the clue for 15 across from the issue of 10 Jun 94: ” service”. Here is the solution from the following day’s paper: “mass”. Here is the clue for 11 across from the issue of 14 Jun 94: “Japanese “. Here is the solution: “Shinto”.
Even the crosswords are censored to reflect Islam’s burning hatred for other religions and beliefs. Is the picture any clearer now 17…?
Last “rant” – for the time being. Switzerland’s flag (a white cross on a red background) was shown in Swissair’s brochures. But, that was not acceptable – the brochures in every travel agent had the flag blacked out. Not because it was Swiss, but because it featured that hated Christian symbol.
With luck Kev will host a get together of his readers. I will bring the file of newspaper clippings I kept from the last part of my time in Saudi – its contents won’t please you, but you will be able to see I am not the author of the hate you dislike so much. That originated elsewhere some 1400 years ago.
Keep on supporting that religion 17… it’s just too bad that given its way, it will destroy your’s.