Friday 29th of March 2024

piece of cake...

banks shooting blanks...

Last Wednesday (2 May), Liberal MP Julia Banks – one of the nodding heads behind Malcolm Turnbull when Question Time is televised – claimed she could live on the Newstart allowance of $40 a day while looking for a job.

This $40 is the pittance a single unemployed person gets for the system's failure to create enough jobs.

Banks’ claim is, of course, nonsense. Jennifer Westacott, CEO of the Business Council of Australiaadmits she could not live on itDeloitte Access Economics Partner Chris Richardson – hardly a radical economist – called for the "unnecessarily cruel" payment level to be increased by $50 a week, saying doing so was more important than budget repair.

 

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/can-liberal-m...

less than three cups of coffee a week...

Low and middle-income earners will get tax cuts worth up to $10.50 a week in tomorrow's budget.

The ABC understands that while the measure will start on July 1, the tax break will come in the form of a bigger end-of-year tax rebate.

The tax relief will be delivered by an increase to the Low Income Tax Offset (LITO) which doesn't show up in weekly or fortnightly pay packets.

At the moment, the LITO is worth $445 a year for people earning below $37,000 annually.

It gradually reduces and cuts out completely when people earn $66,667 a year.

Treasurer Scott Morrison is expected to announce the value of the offset will more than double to $1,000.

It will be extended to people on incomes of about $90,000 a year, the ABC understands, and would still be phased out so that the more a person earns, the lower the rebate they would receive.

That would mean an extra $10.50 a week for those who receive the maximum benefit.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-07/10-dollar-tax-cut-in-federal-budge...

 

I'm sure you don't need these extra three cups a week since you're already caffeine maxed-out to block out your ineptitude, your pain and your average inability to cope. So you can spend the extra cash on soft drinks that, full of sugar, will onset your oncoming diabetes 2 earlier. But you can choose to be generous and give the cash away to one of the charities the government has cut funding to. You will thus do your bit to fight those Chinese who are invading the now deprived-of-Australian-government-cash island in the Pacific before they go under water due to global warming. Here's a thought: Give the cash back to the government so it can keep public education public. Hey don't push the barrow too hard...

stale bread + a newspaper-bed cover, crushed by the stars...

Annie McLoughlin had one thought when she heard Liberal MP Julia Banks’s claim she could live on Newstart’s $40 a day.

“I just thought, she’s not really on the same planet as people who are under the pump,” McLoughlin said. “If you’ve got children to look after, how are you actually expected to get out from under?”

“I thought she was a fool, basically.”

McLoughlin was so outraged by the comments that she joined a small protest outside Banks’s electorate office in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs on Friday. The protesters, organised by the Australian Unemployed Workers’ Union, wanted to give Banks the weekly budgets of Newstart recipients, to show her the kind of hardship they faced.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/may/25/not-on-the-same-p...

jumping out...

Liberal MP Julia Banks has announced she will not recontest her marginal seat of Chisholm in an incendiary letter blasting the “cultural and gender bias, bullying and intimidation” of women in politics.

In a blow to Scott Morrison’s attempts to heal the wounds of a party divided by the successful conservative push to remove Malcolm Turnbull, Banks revealed she had experienced intimidation and bullying both from within her own party and from the opposition Labor party.

Banks - who won Chisholm in the 2016 election with a wafer-thin margin of 1.24% after Labor held the seat for 18 years – noted in the letter she was elected “under the leadership of Malcolm Turnbull”.

She said she and her constituents had wanted Turnbull to remain prime minister and Julie Bishop to remain deputy Liberal leader.

Banks said she had always put Australia’s national interest “before internal political games, factional party figures, self-proclaimed power-brokers and certain media personalities who bear vindictive, mean-spirited grudges intent on settling their personal scores ... Last week’s events were the last straw”.

She described bullying and intimidation as a “scourge” in politics, the media and business, and warned those who would accuse her of “playing the gender card” that she will continue to fight for gender equality because women have been “silent for too long”.

While gathering signatures to force a party-room vote on Turnbull’s leadership, conservatives were accused of intimidating several women MPs and senators to support the push.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/aug/29/liberal-mp-julia-...

 

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unless exposed, the bullies win...

Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi has threatened to use parliamentary privilege to name those inside the Liberal Party she says have bullied and intimidated her.

Key points:
  • Lucy Gichuhi says she will detail her experience during the leadership spill
  • She says she was asked about Malcolm Turnbull's leadership as far back as June
  • Kelly O'Dwyer also says there has been unacceptable behaviour

 

In an exclusive interview with RN Drive, Senator Gichuhi also said the political execution of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull was a factor in her pre-selection battle.

She revealed one Liberal Party figure in South Australia asked her during her pre-selection battle as far back as June whether she wanted Mr Turnbull to lead the Liberal Party to the election.

"I was asked that question [about Malcolm Turnbull] by one of the pre-selectors. So for that question to arise, then something was already happening," she said in relation to the move against Mr Turnbull.

She said the question was asked by someone who wanted to get rid of Mr Turnbull.

Senator Gichuhi was relegated to an unwinnable spot in the South Australian Liberal pre-selection process, and has decided to speak out against bullying and intimidation.

"I will detail my experience not only with the PM's spill, because this is a culture, this is a systematic kind of issue. I will say from when I joined the Liberal Party, from when I joined politics … and how, what, where, I think, would be construed or would fit the definition of bullying," she said.

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-03/lucy-gichuhi-threatens-to-name-lib...

julia banks quits the libs...

Julia Banks has delivered a scathing critique of Australian politics after abandoning the governing Liberal Party and moving to the crossbench.

Key points:
  • Julia Banks leaves the Liberal Party after complaining about behaviour of colleagues
  • The first-term MP says major parties are "years behind" business in treatment of women
  • Her defection make the Government's hold on Parliament even more precarious

 

The decision by the first-term MP leaves the Government struggling to keep control of the House of Representatives.

Ms Banks, a former lawyer and company director, described the treatment of women in Parliament as "years behind" the business world.

"Equal representation of men and women in this Parliament is an urgent imperative that will create a culture change," she said.

"There's the blinkered rejection of quotas and support of the merit myth, but this is more than a numbers game."

Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi said the party could not "hide our face in the sand".

"As a Liberal Party, we just need to accept that we have some areas that we are not doing great, and one of those areas is just about women in leadership.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-27/julia-banks-bombshell-quits-liberal-party-treatment-women/

 

Brave move... but welcome (except from the male chauvinists of the libs)... All we need now is a vote of "no confidence in the government"... then Scummo could be cooked like a greasy snag...

 

political "advances"...

 

Former Liberal MP Julia Banks has alleged she was subjected to an unwanted sexual advance at work from a cabinet minister in the Turnbull government, and warned that similar inappropriate touching by other men is probably happening "every single day in Parliament House".

Key points:
  • Julia Banks says a male colleague ran his hand up her leg in a room full of other MPs
  • Ms Banks says entering politics had felt like "stepping back in time" to the 1980s
  • She says Scott Morrison tried to portray her as a "weak petal" when she decided not to recontest the next election

Ms Banks has shed new light on her experiences of a "Mad Men"-esque culture at the heart of federal politics in an exclusive TV interview with 7.30's Laura Tingle.

Ms Banks was the only Liberal MP to win a seat from Labor at the 2016 election, but ended up quitting the party after the Morrison leadership spill, sitting briefly as an independent until the subsequent election in 2019. 

Her startling portrait of the political culture comes just as the Parliament is undergoing a major workplace review, sparked by former staffer Brittany Higgins's allegations that she was raped by a colleague on a couch in the ministerial wing.

Ms Banks describes an incident one evening at Parliament House when all the Coalition MPs were "corralled" into then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's wing.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-07-05/former-liberal-mp-julia-banks-on-her-time-in-parliament/100263928

 

 

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