Election
Well that’s it then, if the ALP form government, and I expect they will, Queensland is stuffed. With Greens and the unions at the table our costs are going to skyrocket along with the debt.
How did it come to this. Unquestionably Newman came across as a decisive and firm leader and this was portrayed as arrogant but when you have to make calls that hurt some, then this will be the result. He should have better explained what he was doing and why. As in; “We have to cut the public service because it is way to big, so big in fact, that Bligh had to borrow money to pay wages. We can’t afford it. If we do this in conjunction with cutting Green tape, then in due course, business will expand and employment overall will improve.”
The anti- bikie laws got a lot of flack. They should never have been referred to as Anti-bikie because as soon as you do that the criminal gangs will produce a video of some rough head bikie cuddling a toy bear on the way to giving it to a poor little kid. Warm and cuddly images that ignore the fact that said bikie, more than likely, had attended a meeting the previous evening where income from drugs, prostitution and extortion were allocated to other criminals.
The laws as they stand should just have been strengthened and sold as anti crime-gang laws. If consorting is no longer in vogue in today’s Everyone’s innocent climate then just change the laws and tell the human rights lawyers to look up human responsibilities
Media.
It doesn’t matter whether we are working on improving the country or state. It doesn’t matter that were are fixing the economy because the media will just ignore it and find something of no import and make it the catch of the day.
The voters themselves don’t understand or even consider economics. The young ones vote for handouts and the older ones respond to the media telling them to hate Abbott or Newman and actually vote accordingly.
They read things like Abbott gave Phillip a Knighthood and that’s terrible and take offence. It doesn’t matter that Hawke gave Phillip Australia’s highest honour years ago and that Abbott was simply upgrading it as the awards system itself had been upgraded. It doesn’t matter that the other significant Commonwealth countries had awarded Phillip similar honours and that is simply protocol at that level. The Conservative hating media made it the catch of the day and when voters should’ve been thinking and talking about economics and who best to fix up Queensland’s near bankrupt economy, they were led astray and were talking about insignificant stuff that simply didn’t matter.
The LNP lost control of the debate.
Wayne Swan on ABC literally said “debt and deficits don’t matter!” and he is right. The man who took over as national Treasurer with $50b in the bank and successfully turned that into a $300b debt should know. He continues to act as if he did well as Treasurer and voters, with the memory of a lightning bolt, nod their heads and agree.
The ABC have given up all pretense of being unbiased. They simply campaign for the ALP and we do nothing about it. We conservatives are being flogged by the media and we appear to just accept it.
Fight back you bastards and do something about it. There is no reason for the government of the day to accept that a media arm that they fund, openly campaigns to get them outed from office.
Don’t be weak and roll over. Attack. Don’t be afraid of upsetting ABC watchers. They already hate you because the ABC tell them to. If you do force the ABC to employ a centre-right commentator for every centre-left employed then who knows, their viewing audience might improve.
In Queensland we are in for a rough ride. The ALP, led by a woman who doesn’t even know what the GST rate is, who has a stated plan to pay back Anna Bligh’s debt in 63 years looks like falling over the line and forming government. She will be obliged to reemploy all the public servants that have lost their jobs, give the unions back their business destroying power and considering she will have won by Greens preferences, will have to dance to their tune as well.
Look forward to the slow down of development and the associated jobs and income and increased cost for services as the unions get their payback.
You voted for it.
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I’ll bet you Five cents that the ALP govt sells off Qld’s assets.
If the ABC was biased, it would be running the following verifiable facts about Campbell Newman and his family. All of this is reported fact from a variety of media, including News Limited. None of it is sourced from the ABC.
Seb Monsour (Newman’s brother-in-law) –
Investigated by the FBI for inappropriately obtaining technology developed by the US Department of Defence. The allegations related to claims Majella inappropriately gained technology, used in war zones and after natural disasters, from an employee of US company Global Relief Technologies. His sister, Mr Newman’s wife, Lisa, was briefly the secretary of the company. Insufficient evidence was found for a conviction, but somehow or other Seb ended up with the technology. This technology was to be used in winning a contract for managing the cleanup after the disastrous 2011 Brisbane floods, but more about that below.
His bid for preselection for the federal seat of Ryan fell in a heap when he was found to be falsely big-noting himself on his website by claiming to have played for the Queensland Reds.
This was after the member for Ryan, Michael Johnson, was expelled from the Liberal Party for bringing the party into disrepute. The question to be asked here, of course, is who blew the whistle on Johnson. (Refer Bruce McIver’s black folder). The Newmans have plenty of influence on the organisational wing.
Seb made the news over an incident on the night Newman was elected in Lord Mayor in 2004 when he entered the Brisbane Water offices apparently because he thought documents were being shredded by the outgoing Labor administration. He was caught on security cameras. No documents were shredded. Question is – who put him up to it?
An email obtained by The Australian in 2011 showed that Seb Monsour wrote on January 20 to John Bradley, then director-general of the Department of Environment and Resource Management, boasting that his company’s products had been used after Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti earthquake. “We are the Asia Pacific representatives of Global Relief Technologies . . . we simply belief (sic) our product can provide immediate benefit in the support of the recovery efforts in Queensland,” he wrote. An American company, GRT, threatened to take legal action against Seb Monsour for falsely representing himself as part of GRT. Mr Monsour was the chief executive of Majella Global Technologies, which first established as Invictus Solutions Pty Ltd and traded as GRT Asia Pacific in its correspondence with the state government. Global Relief Technologies chief executive Michael Gray and Mr Monsour were embroiled in a public spat about approaches made to the state government by Mr Monsour, purportedly on GRT’s behalf.
GRT said it was prepared to take legal action against Mr Monsour for falsely representing himself as part of the company and for using former GRT employee Art Cleaves to set up a similar company to GRT called Majella Global Technologies.
Mr Gray said he sent Mr Cleaves, an employee of GRT at the time, to Australia during the Queensland floods to see if the company’s technology could be used here. While here, Mr Cleaves met Mr Monsour and returned to America telling his boss they should go into business with him.
Mr Gray said he spoke to Mr Monsour once on the phone and immediately decided he was not someone he wanted to partner with in Australia. “He kept making remarks about how they have this presence and he was very involved with the government and knew everyone in government,” said Mr Gray. “He said he had a lot of contacts in high places and was very well connected.”I immediately terminated [any business interaction with him].”
We know who Seb’s major “contact” was……
So this American executive immediately detected the stench of corruption. It’s a shame more locals weren’t so prescient.
Heidi Monsour (Newman’s sister-in-law) –
Heidi Monsour is the Director of Marketing and Fundraising for the Brisbane Anglican Archdiocese. The Anglican Church worked closely with Mr Newman when he was Brisbane’s lord mayor during the floods. Majella, set up initially with Mr Newman’s wife, has courted controversy since the floods. The company, sought up to $30 million from the Queensland Reconstruction Authority to provide disaster recovery expertise. Majella was the only company asked to make a pitch to develop the Spiritus disaster management plan.
Campbell Newman –
Paid a retainer of $12000 per month to tide him over between resigning as Lord Major, and being elected Member for Ashgrove and subsequently Premier. There is nothing illegal about this of course, but it reinforces an understanding of the connection between the organisational wing of the party and Newman. This practice completely subverted the Westminster notion of democratic representation.
This material ended up before the CJC (before it was disbanded by Newman). There was enough evidence to investigate, but not enough to for a finding of misuse of public office. It doesn’t take an Einstein to make a connection between this and the LNP’s treatment of the CJC.
So for all your blathering and BS Newman has been found to have no case to answer in relation to the allegations you bring up…..merely being part of a family with what you claim to be skeletons in the closet.
Amazing. When I post a series of facts about Newman’s dodgy behaviour and his byzantine family connections, it’s “blathering”.
When Michael Smith spends years unsuccessfully trying to discredit Julia Gillard, he’s the ratbag Right’s pin-up boy. Read what I posted on this thread about bias.
Your tribalism is showing…………
He did discredit her. You would have to be a rusted on true believer and one eighth of the left spectrum to believe otherwise.
The only people who paid any attention to Smith’s spiteful ramblings were the Rancid Right. He will now quietly fade into oblivion. His stuff has never been relevant since Gillard was exonerated – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-10-31/news-in-90-seconds/5859202
His site also attracts some seriously deranged people, some of whom have made phoned death threats to me because I dared disagree with his bile.
When you start a comment intimating that the ABC isn’t biased your following words are lost in a maze of disbelief. If there was a definite case to answer the ABC would have been cycling the fact through ABC24 every 15 minutes.
To get the real problem…do you think Palaszczuk will be able to double Anna’s debt…maybe $160b within 3 years. What’s your best guess?
Irrespective of how they’re introduced, my words are statements of recorded fact. Do some research – check them out. You can deny them if you want, but that won’t make the history of fact disappear.
Bias is in the eye of the beholder. If you’re far enough to the Right, pretty much everything looks biased because you’re using one eighth of the spectrum. It’s a bit like trying to gain a view of a landscape through a telescope.
The count isn’t finished and Palaszczuk is not yet Premier. Even if the LNP pull off some kind of miracle and form government with the cross benchers, they won’t be able to flog public utilities to solve the debt problems, so it’s a moot point.
The voters of Queensland have twice delivered a verdict on that.
If you think I’m far right then you don’t even understand the political spectrum – I’m mostly centrist.
Governments simply should not own utilities as the very real threat exists that one day the ALP will get into power giving unions control of the utility. Wages and other costs climb while the government rip out dividends to help pay for their abysmal financial management.
The Australian has a good article on that exact subject today;
The people of Qld voted twice on the subject after union funds paid for a massive misinformation campaign to protect their jobs.
And why wouldn’t they – feather bedding is their forte.
Governments simply should not own utilities as the very real threat exists that one day the ALP will get into power giving unions control of the utility.
So it’s preferable for our major utilities to be sold off to multinationals? At least with government ownership – which until recently has been the historical practice in this country – the revenue stays onshore. A utility is by definition a public service. Ownership is also a national security issue. It’s amazing how greed trumps security in peacetime. The progressive shutting down of Australian oil refineries in the interests of “efficiency” is bizarre. They’re owned by multinationals, of course.
This meme that private ownership is by definition more efficient and cheaper is absolute bullshit. This is spouted ad nauseum by those who are bound to make a quick quid out of asset sales, but it simply does not happen in practice. All privatization does is increase the opportunities for noses in the trough. It’s obvious to even economic illiterates that if you have to make a return to shareholders, the only way to go is to sack employees, and run the organization into the ground. This is an example of the result – http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-23/judge-approves-black-saturday-class-action-settlement/5984374
Along with this goes the opportunity for those in positions of power (read the Newman/Monsour partnership) to reward their cronies when sale time comes round.
The principle that drives efficiency is subsidiarity – not privatization.