Newspoll: 51 to 49 per cent, Essential Research: 54-46 to Coalition The first Newspoll survey for the new year, conducted exclusively for The Australian at the weekend, shows Labor’s primary vote rose six percentage points to 38 per cent compared to the last poll in early December.  The Coalition’s primary vote fell 2 points. 6 points – wow! The shift comes as Ms Gillard vows to press ahead with school funding and disability insurance reforms, both costing billions of dollars, after Wayne Swan dropped Labor’s promise to deliver a budget surplus this year. I wonder whether the fact that these reforms plus others are unfunded will eventually seep through into the voters minds.  Gillard’s greatest diversionary tactic at the moment is to announce a wonderful progressive reform and then tell the states that they have to fund it. Even if it does seem to be working at the moment, empty promises only go so far before people start asking for results.  

WAYNE Swan’s maths may have been questioned when he predicted a Budget surplus – but when it comes to the carbon tax, things are adding up. Well, that’s what the Courier Mail reckons and we all know they will print whatever Wayne tells them to. Wayne chooses a few grocery items and notes the prices have actually gone down a few cents over the period June December 2012. Apparently, the price of ten grocery items that are subject to Woolworth’s marketing strategy are the final assessment for how much the Carbon Tax is costing us poor voters.

Mr Swan was on leave yesterday but acting Treasurer David Bradbury told The Courier-Mail it was “further evidence Tony Abbott’s shameless scare campaign on pricing pollution was complete and utter nonsense”.

What is shameless is the ALP’s insistence that the Carbon Tax isn’t going to hurt us.  The very basis of its purpose is to hurt us and force us to use less electricity.  The rising costs of power are not only reflected in our power bill but will eventually impact on everything that we use that is manufactured by electricity. Electricity isn’t the only evil being taxed.  A Publican reports his refrigerant gas bill is increasing from $20,000 pa to $170,000 pa and if your local council landfill projects generate more than 25,ooo tonnes of greenhouse gasses (and many do) then if you think that $23 times 25,000 plus  isn’t going to be divided amongst the ratepayers then you are not thinking it through. Still, its OK as Wayne says ‘Weetbix still costs the same as it did in June’ In another Wayne amazing revelation he claims the vitriol in parliament is all Tony Abbott’s work. This is a follow-on from Mc Ternan telling Gillard that as she can’t campaign on her government’s achievements, there being none of note, she needs to demonise Abbott and try and make him unelectable in the eyes of the voters. Her first attempt was to tell one of her staffers to phone up an ALP supporter and tell her to phone up Aborigines in Canberra at the time and inform them that Abbott was going to tear down the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra. It was an out and out lie but that was OK, it’s the current ALP way. It caused a riot and threatened the security of the PM and Abbott. The staffer was duly elected as the scapegoat and sent of the Britain to a good job to keep him out of the media’s way. Another major ALP vitriolic attack was the infamous Misogyny Speech when Gillard spoke in defence of Slipper who must be the most misogynist person ever to hold a position of responsibility and in doing so spent 30 odd minutes accusing Abbott of being a misogynist! Abbot of course would be the least misogynist person in Canberra but McTernan, who supposedly wrote the speech, is quiet happy to lie to achieve his aim of having the ALP re elected later this year. It was after this attack that the Libs started asking questions of the PM about her involvement in the AWU scandal where substantial sums were stolen by her then boyfriend and an accomplice ably aided and abetted by the PM. The Libs didn’t even start this debate – it was disenchanted ALP members that raised the issue. These questions cant be termed as vitriolic as they are based on facts whereas the Canberra riots and the misogyny speech were based on outright lies. The ALP campaign is working as Abbott is currently unpopular but when lack of popularity is based on a lie it wont last.    

ANDREW MCINTYRE in this morning’s The Australian

It also would explain why so many educated, generally mildly apolitical, well thinking middle class people with a regular diet of the ABC and Fairfax, simply are not aware that, for instance, the world has stopped warming for the past 16 years, that hurricanes and extreme weather events have declined and are not related to global warming, that Doha was a dismal failure, that the NBN has never had a cost benefit analysis, that Green jobs cost money … and jobs, that growing the economic pie is not the same as redistributing tax revenue or that the Great Barrier Reef is not being destroyed.

Explains the strange attitudes of some of my family and friends.