The gloss has well and truly come off the toff from Point Piper.

After Malcolm Turnbull surgically removed Tony Abbott, media expectations were high. Now we supposedly had a “modern” prime minister who would put the dark Abbott days behind us. Australia would no longer be an embarrassment on the world stage.

The more liberal sections of the media and the middle class hoped that Turnbull would soften some of Abbott’s most reactionary social policies: at long last legalise same sex marriage, ease up on refugee and Muslim bashing and start to actually do something about climate change.

Big business was also very happy to see the back of Abbott. Abbott and Hockey had proved utterly incapable of delivering an agenda of sacrifice and austerity. Turnbull presented himself as the suave innovator who would push through economic “reforms” (i.e. savage cutbacks) and not be distracted by right wing ideological shibboleths on social issues.

The bosses hoped that he could deliver key items on their long wish list – an increase in the GST, a major reduction in company tax, more government subsidies for big business, savage cuts to Medicare, hospital expenditure, pensions and social welfare more generally, plus a further round of deregulation and privatisations.

https://redflag.org.au/node/5157

At this stage the Liberal-Greens deal enjoys the status of scuttlebutt, but the potential trade-off could be: massively influential Liberal cards in a handful of electorates around the country where Greens support is sufficiently high for them to be in with a chance, in exchange for modest assistance across all marginal electorates that should make the difference for the Liberals in one or two of them.

Labor is determined to publicise this latest alleged "dirty deal". And being seen to play footsie with the Liberals could damage the minor party among the left-leaning majority of its support base.

 

After Martin Ferguson's retirement from Batman in 2013, right wing factional Dalek David Feeney suffered a 10 per cent primary vote swing but still romped home against the Greens candidate - with the help of Liberal cards. He won the seat 60-40 after preferences, but subtracting that 10 per cent makes the result line-ball.

That is one reason Batman is again being talked about.

The other Victorian electorate being discussed is Wills, where the longstanding MP Kelvin Thomson is retiring. Seats without sitting members, and hence no personal vote, suddenly become more vulnerable.

In New South Wales, Grayndler and Sydney, where sitting members are Anthony Albanese and Tanya Plibersek, are being eyeballed. Either of them would be a massive scalp.

There are several ways to assess the Greens' chances of improving their tally of lower house seats this year. One is that despite what opinion polls now suggest - polls generally overstate Greens support - it is unlikely that in 2016 the minor party will match or better its 2010 record high of 11.8 per cent nationally in the House of Representatives. And six years ago they only managed one seat - Melbourne - and that was with friendly Liberal HTV cards. Why should they expect to do better in 2016?

But hope for the Greens can be taken from the last Victorian and NSW elections. In both, the party's statewide support barely moved from the previous election, but it congregated where it mattered, and they scooped up new seats.

Overlaying Greens state votes onto federal boundaries to produce on-paper Greens victories is an exercise in wishful thinking. In this case, Plibersek and Albanese, both high-profile, former cabinet ministers, now in shadow cabinet and in the left faction, would have substantial personal votes, and their profiles would extend to new voters brought in by the redistribution.

By contrast, there were no sitting Labor MPs in the corresponding state seats last year.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-11/brent-how-would-a-libs-greens-preference-deal-play-out/7236166

 

Imagine the Greens (the zucchinis) are about to do the dirtiest deal in politics and sleep with Malcolm and his anti-windmills coalition. UGLY. 

 

Senator Abetz has appealed to the Liberal Party's federal president Richard Alston, expressing his concerns in a letter that he also copied to the party's federal executive.

And taking his campaign to ABC radio, he said any arrangement to direct preferences to the Greens would be anathema to "the party of Menzies and Bolte and other great luminaries" in the Liberal tradition.

"They took on the extreme left head-on and would never countenance doing preference deals," Senator Abetz said. "The way that you allocate preferences says a lot about what you as a party stand for and what matters to you."

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/liberal-greats-would-never-deal-with-the-greens-says-eric-abetz-20160314-gni5l3.html#ixzz42qBzc6Ov
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook

At your next election, place the Liberals (CONservatives) and the Greens last on ALL your ballot papers.

 

The library has already shed many staff – skilled and dedicated people who were committed to the institution’s function as national memory. The funding cut will necessarily impact on Trove’s reach into new collections and the continued digitisation of material already in its orbit.

We invest governments with the confidence to make spending decisions. And they do – like increasing defence spending to 2% of GDP so that Australia might “invest” $50bn in 12 new submarines, while cutting $20m from national collecting institutions in the arts portfolio.

The latest cuts (from which the Australian War Memorial has been quarantined) do seem to be predicated on a false premise that the corner of the arts represented by the national institutions is somehow for the elite.

Nothing could be further from the truth. And nothing illustrates this better than the great digital democracy that is Trove.

The federal government is discovering this to its peril. Contributing users, the well known and lesser so, have taken to social media en masse to defend their treasure.

They are angry, their number is growing and they will not go away. Their message to Malcolm Turnbull and his government is simple: #fundTrove.

The campaign has only just begun.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/14/national-librarys-trove-a-great-digital-democracy-under-threat

 

Typical of Turdball's mob... Ignorance shall be cultivated like potatoes with guns....

Another day, another opinion poll; this time it's Fairfax's Ipsos poll confirming the slide in the Prime Minister's public approval ratings to a level described by one commentator as the "land of political mortals".

Today's Ipsos poll disagrees with findings from other recent polls that the Opposition has drawn level with the Government on a two-party preferred basis, claiming instead the Coalition is comfortably ahead at 53 to 47 per cent.

However, there is no dissent when it comes to Malcolm Turnbull's popularity having come off the boil, with Ipsos charting a 14 percentage point drop in the PM's approval rating to 55 per cent from a high of 69 per cent in November last year.

Another columnist ascribes half the plunge to disappointed progressives abandoning the PM for failure to deliver on totemic left-of-centre issues like same-sex marriage. The other half is apparently due to right-wingers having lost hope that Turnbull has the fortitude to deliver the tough measures needed for adequate economic reform.

However, Turnbull has more to worry about than being seen as heartless or without a spine; the PM's seeming prevarication over the timing of this year's federal election is also starting to make him look dodgy.

No one explains why better than the man himself, who as opposition leader in 2009 said of the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd:

His threat of a double dissolution and an early election proves to all of us what this budget is really about. It isn't about protecting the jobs of Australians ... It is about the job security of one man and one man only, a PM frightened of the consequences of his mismanagement, [who] now wants to cut and run before he is found out.

It wouldn't take much of a stretch for the current Opposition leader, Bill Shorten, to level the same accusation at Turnbull.

read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-14/matthewson-turnbull-looks-more-dodgy-than-decisive-these-days/7243804

Live: Senate erupts over moves to delay voting reform debate

Debate in the Senate is getting "messy and ugly" as the Government tries to force through voting reforms and crossbenchers line up to debate industrial relations, gay marriage and fracking.

 

Did Malcolm expect respect? He's is as bad as Turdy Tony...

Labor and the Greens have shot down suggestions the budget will be brought forward in order to facilitate a double dissolution election, saying they will overturn any motion by the Senate to bring the chamber back early.

The latest date the government can call a double dissolution election is 11 May, which is one day after the budget. That gives the Parliament little time to pass crucial supply bills before an election campaign gets underway.

Bringing the budget forward by a week - when neither house is due to sit - would give the government more time. But neither Labor nor the Greens are having a bar of it.

When asked if Labor would support moves to bring the budget forward, the opposition leader, Bill Shorten said simply: no.

“I think the government owes Australian people an explanation of what’s going on,” he said.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/mar/15/double-dissolution-early-budget-return-for-senate-ruled-out-by-labor-and-greens

 

After having had more prime ministers in five years than italy, Australia has become the joke-end of the world.

 

 

 

Filibuster creates farcical scenes in Australia senate

Monty Python references, a colonoscopy analogy and a pyjama-clad senator featured during an all-night sitting of Australia's upper house.

The Senate is considering controversial changes to voting laws that will disadvantage so-called "micro parties".

The ruling Coalition, the Greens and independent senator Nick Xenophon support the changes.

But the opposition Labor party and micro party senators oppose them.

The debate, which is continuing this morning, is at this stage the ninth-longest in the history of the Senate.

Australia's complex system of voter preference distribution presently allows micro parties to secure Senate seats, even if they receive a very small percentage of the primary vote.

At the last election a clutch of micro party and independent senators, including Ricky Muir of the Motoring Enthusiasts Party and former rugby league footballer Glenn Lazarus, won seats in the senate.

These senators have frustrated the government by blocking legislation. Their presence in the Senate also affects the Greens, depriving them of the balance-of-power position they have often held in the upper house.

'Animal food trough wiper'

During the all-night debate, Labor senators consistently spoke off-topic to delay votes to nine amendments to legislation that would give voters greater control over where their preferences were allocated.

The marathon session produced some unusual behaviour among the senators.

Independent senator Nick Xenophon, who supports the reforms, showed up to one vote wearing pyjamas covered with pictures of monkeys and bananas. He was asked to change.

Labor senator Doug Cameron began quoting Monty Python during one exchange: "You empty-headed animal food trough wiper … I fart in your general direction."

And Glenn Sterle, also from Labor, compared the marathon debate to a colonoscopy.

Labor has vowed to fight the voting amendments, saying they will allow the government to more easily gain the balance of power in the Senate.

But the government says the move will give voters more power and prevent backroom deals.

"The only people who get advantaged by this reform are voters," Finance Minister Mathias Cormann said.

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Mathias, please don't bullshit us ANY more... If people vote for small parties and the parties make a "back room" deal to have a representative, it means that some people who would get no one to represent them, get at least someone who may not be their first choice, but it's better than NOTHING.

Malcolm is a little Hitler on a molehill... and that's a shame... He could have done so much better...

The amazing caper here is that one has to get to the BBC to get the full colours of the debate... Aussie news are a bit to slow or do "live updates" in which the rigmarole becomes like a wilted flower bucket (I mean bouquet) on the forgotten tomb of democracy.

 

 

Live: Sleepless senators sound death knell for micro parties

 

RELATED STORY: Bleary-eyed senators debate through the night as standoff continues

After more than 28 hours of deliberations, the Upper House has passed the Government's Senate voting reforms to stop minor parties swapping preferences.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-18/marathon-senate-sitting-continues-live-blog/7256720

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The rape of democracy is upon us. Malcolm and the sold-out Greens "can be proud"... you cannot vote for them any more, without being complicit in this gang rape of your democratic rights. 

What the micro parties have to do is join forces call themselves various names on the senate ballot paper but present the SAME list of PERSONNEL for each of the parties with the person having the most chance to be elected at the top ON ALL THE LISTS. They have to make some sacrifice, but please THEY HAVE TO do it.