Not long after Labor’s 2013 defeat, Julia Gillard dissected its years in government and got to the bloody heart of the disaster.

“Purpose matters. Being able to answer the question what are you going to do for me, for my family, for our nation, matters,” she wrote.

“Believing in a purpose larger than yourself and your immediate political interests matters.

“Labor comes to opposition having sent the Australian community a very cynical and shallow message about its sense of purpose … [It] unambiguously sent a very clear message that it cared about nothing other than the prospects of survival of its members of parliament at the polls.”

Last weekend, a similar penny seemed to drop for the treasurer, Scott Morrison, as this government begins to contemplate political mortality.

He told the Liberal federal council that after 10 years of political brawling, Australians simply didn’t care about the “old political fights” and had “collectively reached for the remote and turned down the volume on Canberra’s noise”.

read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/01/its-a-downward-sp...

Not that Julia did not try to move away from the unpurposed bum-fight. She organised a carbon trading scheme, the NDIS, the Gonski scheme for education, the RC into sexual abuse and some health reforms that would have improved Medicare's ability to fight against greedy pharmaceuticals. But she was under the gun, from a rabid egotistical Rudd, a rabid Turdy Abbott and a rabid media that did not like a red-head atheist unmarried woman dictating to the political beasts in Kanbra. And the left and the right wing media indulged in her destruction -- mostly for vicarious pleasure.

Religion, misogyny and hypocrisy still rule in the corrosive corridors of this anachronistic city and any other capital cities in Australia for that matter. Scott Morrison says Australians have ‘collectively reached for the remote and turned down the volume on Canberra’s noise’. Not only we've turned the volume down, we've individually switched off. 

Turdy Abbott is still doing what he promised not to. It's in his genes of Head-Turd to massively lie, rewrite history and sow discord everywhere like a dog pissing on trees to mark his territory. But he is not alone. The KONservative movement in Australia ceased to be a broad church under the stewardship of lying Johnnee Howard. This of course undermines Malcolm's ability to be a mild progressive. And he is too nice to his fellow idiots in his party because he needs them. 

Purpose to make this country "great again" has turned into the survival of the pollies on a snake and ladder game in which the public is at the bottom of the pile and the rich indulge in pissy oneupmanship... 

It's crazy.

The Murdoch media have gone the full Abbott this week with multiple articles spruiking a comeback for the disgraced former PM. In the spirit of Tony, they are riddled with hypocrisies, distortions and lies.

In an extraordinary lament for her fallen hero, Miranda Devine wrote yesterday:

‘The Liberal Party should never have toppled Abbott … The coup was a breach of trust with the electorate, an admission of catastrophic failure where none existed … All of which I wrote at the time, although without anticipating just how profoundly Abbott would break his promise of “no wrecking, no undermining, and no sniping”.’

Abbott’s administration dudded the electorate from the outset. Of the myriad specific election promises, all but a few were trashed in the early weeks. The broken promises and backflips – whichtallied 85 well before he was ousted – were breaches of trust with the electorate. But so were many promises kept.

He fulfilled virtually all his promises to enrich the rapacious big corporations. He ended the carbon and mining taxes, let them pay only what they wanted in company tax, reduced wages, cut regulations and allowed the rates of worker deaths and corporate rorts to escalate.

Yes, he promised to stop the boats. Labor, however, had already accomplished this, as John Menadue has shown convincingly.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/news-corp-boo...

See toon at top...

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has urged his sympathisers in the New South Wales Liberals to wrestle back control of the party from powerbrokers.

• Abbott urges Liberal conservatives to "take our party back"
• Says great thing about Liberal Party is "we have always respected our leaders"
• Recent speeches seen by Turnbull camp as bid to undermine PM

The now backbencher is demanding an overhaul of the Liberal state branch, but many in the party have accused him of stoking a broader factional brawl between moderates and conservatives.

There is a heated debate bubbling away in the New South Wales division over whether to adopt a Victorian-style plebiscite model to empower branch members in preselecting candidates.

Mr Abbott made the comments at a gathering of conservative Liberals, billed as a "Call to Arms for the Forgotten People of our Party".

He warned his colleagues of the threat from the Labor Party, backed by the war chests of the union movement, come the next election.

"The only way we can be a real people's movement is if we respect the people, above all else if we respect the people who are in our party," he argued.

don't read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-01/tony-abbott-liberal-party-conserva...

Respect?... Tony Turdy has no understanding of the meaning of the word... He talks bullshit and has not respect for anyone not even the lies that he utters daily.

SYDNEY — Australia’s urbane prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is trying to revive the fortunes of his unpopular government by borrowing from an unexpected role model: President Trump.

When he ousted his conservative predecessor, Tony Abbott, from office in 2015, Turnbull had made his reputation supporting the legalization of same-sex marriage, the strengthening of ties with China and the replacement of Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state with an Australian.

Representing one of the most progressive districts in the country, Turnbull is one of the most left-wing members of the center-right Liberal Party. Before he became prime minister, his signature policy was support for an emissions-trading plan to fight climate change, a position that led to the end of his first term as party leader in 2009.

“He came across as a very socially progressive and cosmopolitan politician before he became PM,” said Zareh Ghazarian, a political scientist at Monash University, in an interview. “Since becoming prime minister he has to modify his approach because of very conservative elements in his party.”

Voters haven’t warmed to Turnbull as prime minister, and he almost lost an election last year. Now facing what appears to be a guerrilla campaign by a bitter Abbott to undermine his leadership, Turnbull is not only copying elements of Trump’s conservative populist approach, he is awkwardly buddying up to the president in person.

At a recent ceremony at the Intrepid aircraft carrier museum in New York to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of the Coral Sea, Turnbull congratulated Trump after the House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

“I got to say, it’s always satisfying to win a vote when people predict you’re not going to win it,” Turnbull told Trump from a podium. “So keep at it. It’s great.”

Many Australians cringed at the praise. Australia has universal health care, a system that not even some far-right political parties want to dismantle.

read more:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/australias-leader-mock...

Tax cuts for the wealthy, wage cuts for the poor: Happy New (Financial) Year!

This financial year's inequality is epitomised by tax cuts and pay increases for the few alongside penalty rate cuts and more austerity for the many, writes John Passant.

JULY 1 MARKS new beginnings for most Australian taxpayers.

It is also often when government and corporate goodies (fewer and fewer of them for you and me) and baddies (more and more of them for you and me) start. 

In other words, there is usually nothing very happy about the new financial year, unless you are rich. Speaking of which, those on $180,000 a year got a tax cut from, you guessed it, 1 July. This is because the Turnbull Government allowed the "temporary" 2% budget repair levy on high-income earners to lapse. The "debt and deficit" and "budget emergency" must be over, eh?

Shane Wright, the economics editor for The West Australian, calculated back in February that this would mean a tax cut of $6,740 a year, or $129 a week, for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. It gets worse. That calculation was done on Turnbull’s then base salary of $517,504.

You guessed it. The prime minister’s base salary went up, on 1 July, by 2%, to $527, 852. That is a $10,348 pay increase. Turnbull and all the other Federal politicians have reason to be happy — they’ve "won" a pay increase and a tax cut.

To put this in perspective, the PM’s take-home pay, if we add together the wage increase of $10,348 and the tax cut of $6957, went up $17,305. I can think of many more people deserving of an extra $17,305 a year than multimillionaires like Malcolm Turnbull. Such as pensioners, the unemployed, the sick, the poor, teachers, nurses, older people ripped off by avaricious retirement’ homes — the list is almost endless.

read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/tax-cuts-for-...

...

We are on borrowed time and living beyond our means: growth is sluggish and our debt-to-GDP ratio is escalating. We are now in a phase very much different from 1983 to 2007 – the golden era of economic reform – one where the pace of the news cycle is faster, and the media beast has to be constantly fed.

Selling sound free-market reform in such a volatile political environment is more difficult than ever. It is destabilising for a prime minister to be all too often looking over his shoulder for the flash of daggers. This undermines his authority and makes governing even more fraught. At the turn of the decade, Labor learned the hard way that fratricidal governments do not win elections. How quickly today's Liberals have forgotten.

I don't know how to resolve this crisis, but I suspect leadership changes – however justified they may seem in the short term – will only prolong the problems bedevilling Australia's political system. For the MPs who sack Turnbull, the moment will feel cathartic, the relief of having defenestrated a traitor to their cause and ended a rush of bad polls and bad-news stories.

But there is every likelihood his successor will face the same problems that every leader since John Howard has faced. The present troubles will start all over again. And our political crisis endures.

Tom Switzer is a presenter on ABC's Radio National.

Read more:

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/federal-liberal-party-infighting-threatens-to-destroy-it-20170630-gx1z08.html

Tom laments that he has "no solution". Crap. Simple. Malcolm has to go back to his "progressive" agenda: marriage equality, a stronger climate change policy, a republican agenda, a more equitable social construct (hit the rich, help the poor) and a better energy policy with no coal. Most of the small (l) liberals would go with it and the "progressivista" would be voted in by Labor, Xenophon and the Greens, though opposed by the ningnongs of PHON and the silly party joined by Latham...

Meanwhile at the self-assessment zone:

Malcolm Turnbull has declared he is going to be prime minister for a very long time, delivering a warning to his critics that he will not be forced out of his job.

He has faced a week of internal tensions after a series of interviews and speeches from former prime minister Tony Abbott.

But Mr Turnbull said this morning he would be running in the 2019 election and would win.

"I can assure you I will be prime minister for many, many years to come," he said.

"So that's my commitment."

In a weekend interview, Mr Turnbull said he would quit parliament when he lost the prime ministership.

That was interpreted by some as a threat to create a by-election if he was ousted from the leadership and also a suggestion that Mr Abbott should retire from Parliament.

But today Mr Turnbull has repeatedly stressed he intends to be prime minister for years.

"I know you may think that at 62 I am too old. I can assure you, I will be prime minister for a very long time," he told reporters.

read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-07-03/turnbull-confident-he-will-be-pm-f...

http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/30824

smelling like the previous tenant...