Gillards proposed New media laws and Oakshotts vote

[mellie]

I don't trust Oakshott as far as I can spit, and think despite his claims that he will not support the new media package as it is, I think he will do a back flip and vote in favor of it given half a chance.

THE federal government will drop its proposed media law changes rather than force them to a doomed vote next week, key Independent MP Rob Oakeshott predicts.

But the NSW MP says that doesn't mean Labor should give up on improving media standards in the medium-term if it retains government at the September election.

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy wants a package of six bills passed by both houses of parliament by next Thursday - the final sitting day before the May budget sessions.

However, independent MPs, the Greens and the coalition have complained the tight timetable means there's not enough to scrutinise the legislation, which was only released on Thursday.

Labor needs the support of crossbench MPs in the lower house and the Australian Greens in the Senate to pass the legislation, which includes a new public interest media advocate to oversee press standards and provide a check on big media mergers and acquisitions.

But Mr Oakeshott, who won't be voting for the package as it stands and is aware of the views of crossbench colleagues, says it's clear there's not enough support to get it through.

"Frankly, I would be very surprised if the government puts this to a vote and that's where it is looking," he told AAP on Friday.

"The process looks to be a dog's breakfast."

The Greens are believed to be split on the issue, with some wanting bills dealing with the ABC, SBS and a community broadcasting channel to be passed, while others want a Senate communications inquiry - due to produce a final reports in June - to run its full course.

Senator Conroy said the issues had been debated for many months following two independent reviews and it was "too early to make pronouncements about whether or not people are voting for the bill".

"The vote is next week, and there will obviously be a lot of discussions going on between now and then," Senator Conroy told ABC radio on Friday.

But Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said her party was concerned about the process and deadline, and accused Labor of bullying parliament into "either taking it or leaving it".

"We will come back to our position on the overall package after we've had a good look at our concerns ... and we've participated in that Senate inquiry process," she told reporters in Canberra.

Nationals Senate leader Barnaby Joyce told AAP the Greens would reveal themselves as "utter and unequivocal hypocrites" if they let the bills go through next week.

"The people of regional Australia need some input into what is going to happen," he said.

The Senate committee looking at the bills will take evidence from media companies, academics, peak industry bodies and the Australian Press Council in Canberra on Monday and Tuesday.

A separate joint select committee is looking at other possible media reforms, including the axing of the 75 per cent broadcasting audience reach rule, and will also take evidence in Canberra on Monday.

The reports of both inquires are due by June 17, but interim reports could be released on Wednesday.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/breaking-news/na ... z2Nbyz9E34" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/n ... 6596759316

[mellie]

Oakshott is a slimy little grub, who would have already squared this up with Gillard and Conroy.

Seriously, who's he kidding?

He knows that his career in politics will end in the likely event Gillard loses this coming election, (given he was one of 3 who helped her win the last) so he's holding onto her purple curtains for grim death.

The filthy little suckhole.



http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/i ... 6596787641

Tony Abbott attacked the changes as "a government official vetting media coverage".

Thats exactly what it is, and needless to say all in readiness for the up'n'coming election.

Thats one way of managing the sneers, smears and jibes coming from the Australian public, because the last thing Gillard needs/wants is for this contempt to be reinforced , echoed by our media in the lead up to a federal election.

If you have to change existing media laws to increase your odds of being re-elected, what does this say about Labor which is quite divided over this issue I believe?

Gillard, Conroy and their 3 flying monkeys take on the country.

The Greens and the Coalition are opposed to the proposed package.

Oakshott claims to be opposed to the new media package also, though he will vote in favor of what Gillard tells him to, without a doubt.

The grubby little stooge.

[mellie]

And just quietly, I think the Greens Ms Hanson-Young's opposition to the package in it's 'current' form and her sentiments re- the deadline is mere lip service, she just needs to be seen as scrutinising it in order to justify why the Greens will in fact vote in favor of it when the time comes.

This and don't want to be seen as brown-nosing the ALP, no questions asked too early in the piece.

Too bad Sarah.... we see where this is headed.

And we aren't impressed.



Remember this...

http://www.nationaltimes.com.au/opinion ... 2f7mn.html

[mellie]

Media unites against laws as furore engulfs Julia Gillard ....


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/nationa ... 6598629120


______________________________________________

Gillard is happily setting about implementing unpopular legislation and policy, given she knows her number is up.
It's half time, change sides, next cab off the rank.

She and Rudd will enjoy their PM pensions.

Lats take a trip down memory lane....

MATTERS OF PUBLIC INTEREST
The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT
(Senator Moore)
—
Order! It being 12.45
pm, I call on matters of public interest.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Senator SANTORO
(Queensland) (12.45

http://www.aph.gov.au/binaries/hansard/ ... 091105.pdf



Gillards and Conroys New Media Package is Newspeak for Soviet-Style Censorship.

And so true to Gillards socialist forum past.

When to think, some of you have wondered why the ABC have closed many of their opinion forums/blogs?

Wakey wakey.

Former press council head David Flint compared the government's appointed advocate to Soviet regimes which he said "chose names which were completely contrary to what was the truth".

"It is dangerous ... it will give the government a power it should never have, the power to determine the content of the press. The press is there as a check and balance against the government," he said.

News Limited, publisher of The Daily Telegraph, and Fairfax lashed out at the proposals.

"This government will go down in history as the first Australian government outside of wartime to attack freedom of speech by seeking to introduce a regime which effectively institutes government sanctioned journalism," News Limited chief executive Kim Williams said.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/j ... 6595971160

[mellie]

Tomorrow will be interesting.

[mellie]

Our press will regress to a leftist fifth column.

Gillard's idea of payback for our already compromised media being critical of her tenure.

[Rorschach]

More on Dopeshott...

One political whopper and various lies on the side
* by: Piers Akerman
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* March 29, 2013 12:00AM

ROB Oakeshott needs a new diary - April Fool's Day is not until Monday. Yet, there he was on Wednesday telling such a whopper he must have thought everyone was already on their Easter break.

"I will not support bad law," he wrote in the Financial Review. nor a bad government eh Rob?

While the Fairfax tabloid doesn't have a lot of readers and those it has may still have been trying to guess the identity of Eddie Obeid's right testicle, given former NSW mining minister Ian Macdonald has been outed as the left one, Oakeshott's bald claim caused a choking fit among its cashed-up subscribers. or anyone with a brain...

Sometimes you just have to admire someone with Oakeshott's ostentatious effrontery or chutzpah.

Chutzpah is not exactly translatable from the Yiddish.

The best and most quoted description concerns the man who murdered his parents and asked for clemency on the grounds that he was an orphan.

In claiming not to back bad law, Oakeshott owes the nation - not least his own constituents - an explanation for his chutzpah.

He has voted with the minority Gillard government, for which he and his fellow independent Tony Windsor must take a huge degree of personal responsibility, on almost every piece of legislation of any importance - roughly 80 per cent of the time.

Critically, Oakeshott supported the carbon tax, which is probably the worst single piece of legislation this mockery of a parliament has passed, and the mining tax, which is possibly the most ineffectual tax bill any parliament has passed, and has backed the government on all its broken promises, including its treacherous backtracking on the health insurance rebate.

But as Oakeshott and Windsor betrayed their conservative electorates to install this radical left government, broken promises, somersaults and backflips all seem part of their clownish repertoires.

A trek through the parliamentary record shows Oakeshott voted with Labor against opposition motions which called on Prime Minister Julia Gillard to apologise for her comments on the carbon tax before the last election.

He did not even support a motion to suspend standing orders to permit discussion of the question of the carbon tax, or another motion to discuss the impact of the carbon tax on the cost of living.

Nor did he support an opposition motion which would have required the Prime Minister to explain why she would not hold a plebiscite on the carbon tax.

Similarly, he wouldn't vote to permit the opposition to question Gillard about her migration policy or asylum seekers (the people whose entry to Australia is not legally authorised but whom the Press Council advises should not be called illegal immigrants).

He obviously thought there was nothing wrong with the government's carbon tax or its disgraceful and lethal policy toward "unlawful non-citizens" and "unauthorised boat arrivals" (the government's description for those who keep the people smuggling businesses in operation).

Oakeshott wouldn't even support an opposition motion seeking an explanation from Gillard on why she had said the federal government had "lost its way" at that was why she and her band of faceless union officials acted ruthlessly to remove Kevin Rudd from his position as Australia's elected prime minister.

So protective has this so-called independent been of the Gillard Labor-Green-independent minority government that he would not permit questions about the support Craig Thomson had received from the NSW Labor Party - before he was asked to quit.

Nor would he support calls on Gillard to make a statement to the house about discussions her office had with Thomson's office about his actions while national secretary of the Health Services Union.

Not only does he support bad law, he supports a ban on inquiries into bad law. He voted against condemning the government for fraud perpetrated under its deadly home insulation scheme and he did not support a request for the government to release the results of an investigation into the disastrous program.

He voted against acknowledging the government's failure to deliver computers to all school students in Years 9 to 12.

Far from rejecting bad law, he has tried to block every inquiry into the government's failures and he has rejected the proposition that it is incompetent and untrustworthy - a view which seems widely held by a majority of Australians.

His extraordinary contempt for his own electors and the conservatives he betrayed may be explained by his own antagonism toward the democratic process.

Eighteen months ago, on September 14, 2011, he exposed his condescending derision for democracy in the house in a series of interjections during an address by Liberal Greg Hunt. Hansard records the following:

Mr HUNT: The nature of democracy is that parties take to the people a platform on which they seek election. Their fundamental duty is to outline that platform, to seek a mandate and to implement that platform.

Mr OAKESHOTT: Rubbish.

Mr HUNT: There will be moments when it may have to change, but not the fundamental nature ...

Mr OAKESHOTT: Rubbish.

Hunt then said: "I have had enough of you, mate. I have had enough of you, with your performance, coming into this chamber and lecturing people on democracy, when you did not seek information about the mining tax, you did not seek information about water trading, you turned a blind eye to your constituents.

So no more cant or hypocrisy."

Such as claiming not to support bad law, a claim the record so easily destroys.

No wonder he's called Dopeshott.

[Rorschach]

Labor seeking new friends on Facebook
* by: Laurie Oakes
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* March 30, 2013 12:00AM

COMMUNICATIONS Minister Stephen Conroy brought the wrath of most media organisations down on the Gillard government with his ill-judged attempt at press regulation.

The fallout revived questions about the Prime Minister's political judgment and helped to provoke the botched leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd's supporters.

But Labor is involved in another, subtle strategy to deal with what it sees as problems with the mainstream media and in the way political information is conveyed to the public.

The ALP has embarked on a long-term plan to reduce its dependence on, and where possible to bypass, the traditional media. The Liberals are doing it too.

Increasingly the major parties are competing with newspapers, TV and radio in pushing material out to voters themselves. New technology in the internet age has made it possible and affordable.

It is early days yet, but this past week saw what Labor strategists regard as a significant development.

Reflecting what will be a crucial part of the economic debate in the run-up to the September 14 election, this newspaper ran a prominent report about government debt levels under the headline "Julia's gift to Australia is massive and growing debt".

Knowing it was coming, and with the coalition pushing the issue hard as well, Treasurer Wayne Swan's office prepared a counterattack - a graph showing Australia's current government debt compared with that of 22 other countries as a percentage of GDP.

We were the third lowest, our debt small compared with that of Austria, Germany, Belgium, Britain, France, the US, Japan, and - of course - Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Greece.

A red line on the graph arrowing south, with the message "This is Australia ... down here", emphasised in a slightly quirky way that Australia was right near the bottom. The graph was put on the ALP's Facebook page and took off. In the first 2 1/2 days there were 10,482 "shares". yep 10,000 votes Australia wide will really keep them in office.

By tracking "likes", the ALP's Digital Team was able to determine it had been seen by 815,360 people in that time, a long way ahead of anything the party had posted previously.

Since readership of The Telegraph is just over 780,000, Labor is claiming its own version of the debt story reached more people than the newspaper's. That would certainly be a milestone. If only people believed them or didn't know better than the propaganda they put out

It is interesting that Swan, frequently accused of lacking communication skills, is taking the lead here. Before the debt graph, two economic charts on the Treasurer's own Facebook page attracted attention because they appealed to patriotism by using national flags instead of bars. One chart dealing with employment reached nearly 107,000 people, the other on economic growth reached more than 206,000. In both, the Aussie flag towered over those of other industrialised countries.

A year ago one person handled Labor's digital campaign. Now it has five paid staff plus interns. An ALP source says: "Our goal was to have the capability to reach more people than some of the larger media outlets - for example, Alan Jones' radio show - and we can now do that."

Describing Facebook as "our fastest-growing platform", he adds: "We've been producing more compelling and relevant content that our supporters want to share with their non-political friends."

The Liberal Party's social media staff is slightly smaller than Labor's but just as active. It uses YouTube, central to its digital strategy, very effectively.

The Liberals give Facebook high priority, too, but put less emphasis on numbers than on "engagement rates". A party official says: "The engagement rates measure what action people take on your Facebook page - whether it's 'liking' a post, sharing with their friends or making a comment."

The Liberals put their Facebook engagement rate at around 50 per cent higher than Labor's. I doubt that people really interested in politics go to facebook or propaganda sites for real information.

For years, politicians and political parties have searched for ways to avoid the so-called "gatekeepers" in the media and present their messages directly to voters in the form they want. Labor's success with the debt graph shows how the digital revolution is now making it possible. I'm sorry.... since when do large numbers of viewers mean large numbers of people who agree with what they've seen?

Halfway through Barack Obama's first term his communications director taunted members of the Washington Press Corps that eventually they could be rendered obsolete through the president's use of social media. He was only half joking.

A few months ago I suggested that, because communications technology is becoming so cheap and easy, political operatives and parties would increasingly engage in do-it-yourself political journalism. "They'll be our competitors as well as our subject matter," I said.

That's still some years away. Traditional media will still dominate the 2013 election in Australia, as it dominated the 2013 US presidential election despite Obama's mastery of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest and the rest.

But the change, while embryonic, is certainly under way. Who can doubt it when Labor's digital boffins tip that the debt graph will eventually reach more than a million people before all the sharing and liking on Facebook is over.

Laurie Oakes is political editor for the Nine Network. His column appears every Saturday in The Daily Telegraph

[Rorschach]

Ah yes.... the truth and nothing but the truth.... how the media is populated by LW Progs and media bias...

Bank on the wails when Abbott wins the election
* by: Tim Blair
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* April 01, 2013 12:00AM

A COUPLE of weeks ago, following the official apology to Australia's victims of forced adoption, we were given a preview of how the left-leaning media might deal with a potential Tony Abbott government.

During that apology, Abbott joined Prime Minister Julia Gillard in expressing his deep regret over forced adoptions. His words didn't seem particularly inflammatory: "We honour the birth parents, including fathers, who have always loved their children. We honour those adoptive parents who have tried to do the right thing by their children. And we honour all the children, who have tried ... "

By that point, however, Abbott was compelled to halt his speech due to angry shouts from the audience offended by the terms "birth parents" and "adoptive parents". Given the emotion-charged nature of the event, their response was understandable. Grief can lead to furious overreactions and a hunt for scapegoats. Abbott became a target.

The yelling and the screaming, and the apology itself, were largely overshadowed because Labor decided to spend the rest of that day again attempting to destroy itself. But the tabloid Age newspaper, physically and influentially a shrinking Melbourne institution, took a swing at Abbott anyway in the next day's editorial. His use of the term "birth parents" was, wrote The Age, "unfortunately controversial". Abbott had caused "grievous offence". It was a "discourtesy" and "inexcusable".

It quickly emerged that The Age itself had repeatedly referred over the previous couple of years to "birth mothers". Apparently the prefix "birth" is only offensive to the Left when Tony Abbott uses it.

Look for this type of thing to occur throughout Abbott's prime ministership, should he be elected in September. Let's work through a few possible examples:

Scenario: Tony Abbott misidentifies Tanzania as Tasmania during an important speech.

Leftist reaction: Having given Julia Gillard a free pass for her own frequent verbal blunders - including references to "high dungeon", a place called the "hyperbowl", and the "Taliband", a formerly unknown Middle Eastern musical combo - Abbott's Tanzania/Tasmania confusion will be held as evidence of the Liberal prime minister's ignorance and stupidity. Video of the error becomes a Twitter meme.

(Incidentally, a prime minister has already committed exactly the error described. In her closing speech to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in October 2011, Gillard thanked "the President of Tasmania". This appears never to have been reported by either Fairfax or the ABC.)

Scenario: In records of a 1995 interview with Tony Abbott, he off-handedly describes a construction worker and union official as a "big Greek bullshit artist".

Leftist reaction: Outraged response is sought from both the overweight and Greek communities, who both call for apologies. The arts lobby also demands justice.

A planned Q&A program on the incident is abandoned when the studio floor collapses beneath the mass of several obese Athenian poets. An attempted march on parliament by the so-called "Grecian 2000" (in fact just 20 people each weighing 100kg) ends at a souvlaki joint near Belconnen.

(It emerged last year that Gillard, in an interview with former employer Peter Gordon, described former AWU figure and house renovator Bill Telikostoglou as a "big Greek bullshit artist". Not much complaint emerged from the Left, but Bill later had this to say: "I changed my bloody political party to support her. I'm a capitalist and I changed, I joined the Labor Party. She never replies to my emails. I don't think she is a nice person now. I was amazed when I saw what she said.")

Scenario: Tony Abbott imports a senior media adviser on a 457 visa, typically granted in circumstances where Australian applicants are unable to meet required skill levels.

Leftist reaction: Journalists, from whose ranks media advisers often are drawn, boycott press releases from the prime minister's office. Angry speeches at the Walkley Awards denounce a PM who doesn't value Australian media jobs. (Gillard's Scottish-born communications director John McTernan is on a 457 visa. Marvel at the fact that the Prime Minister doesn't believe anyone in Australia could do a better job.)

Scenario: Tony Abbott and treasurer Joe Hockey promise on hundreds of different occasions to deliver a budget surplus, then abruptly cancel that promise, citing global economic factors. Oh, and they also design a mining tax that costs more to implement than it generates in revenue.

Leftist reaction: Suddenly a surplus becomes an extremely desirable outcome, and failure to achieve it is a clear sign of Liberal economic incompetence. As for the mining tax, this is obviously an indication the Coalition is involved in a conspiracy with Big Coal.

Scenario: Tony Abbott invites Kyle Sandilands to Kirribilli House.

Leftist reaction: Thermonuclear meltdown.