Gillard Survived but Failed...

[Rorschach]

Gillard survived but she didn’t fix anything
Simon Benson
07 Dec 05:50am

Julia Gillard has survived another year as Prime Minister. A winner, not yet a grinner.

No-one should be surprised. The member for Lalor has proven to be a formidable and determined politician. It is unlikely that this hung parliament would have lasted as long as it has, had anyone else been at the helm.

Having so far weathered the AWU storm, the PM will now hope to emerge on the other side of the summer break with a fresh election year agenda ahead of her. We will hear much about equity for disability sufferers and their carers and rebuilding the education system; noble causes and necessary reforms. The pork-barreling will be on...

Gillard is right to pursue them even if Labor hasn’t worked out yet how to pay for them in a contracting economy and shrinking budget.

But pressure on Government finances to pay for this new agenda isn’t the only problem looming for Gillard.

The PM will not win the confidence of people to deliver any of this stuff, and keep the country from going broke, while the baggage of her failures to fix what she previously promised to still trail behind her like a fiscal and political anchor.

The three core issues Gillard promised to fix, and on which was based her entire leadership, her raison-d’être, her justification to Australia for rolling Kevin Rudd, remain spectacularly un-fixed.

The carbon tax speaks for itself. Gillard and Wayne Swan promised never to introduce one. And in two years time we will simply have a scheme that is almost identical to that proposed by Rudd – and originally argued against by Gillard.

Problem number two, which Gillard said Rudd had also buggered up has been fixed only by being reduced to an economic joke.

Far from the Treasurer’s dream of a great wealth distribution scheme, the mining tax is now under threat of becoming the first tax in the world that instead of raising revenue, actually costs taxpayers money to introduce because of the compensation deal on state royalties.

But by far the greatest failure has been the promise to fix the asylum seeker issue. Strike!!!!! 3!

Gillard has achieved the almost unachievable on this by turning a “problem” into a political and humanitarian disaster of epic proportions. And like the mining tax, it has also become a budgetary nightmare.

The human numbers tell the story.

Between December 3, 2007 when Rudd took the knife to John Howard’s Pacific Solution – and June 24, 2010 when Labor took the knife to Rudd - 6,220 people arrived on 140 boats crewed by 350 people smugglers.

At the time there were significant push factors involved, with people fleeing war ridden Afghanistan and Tamils escaping civil war in Sri-Lanka. Rudd’s policy, which Gillard claimed credit for, added a pull factor. Of that there is no doubt.

By June 2010 Labor strategists estimated that the boat “crisis” – if it could be called that – had shaved about two percentage points off Labor’s primary vote. Gillard was right to identify it as an issue that needed to be fixed.

But her success can be measured in raw statistics. Under Gillard’s watch, there have been a total of 24,024 people arrive on 391 boats manned by 674 crew.

That is three times the number of boats and four times the number of people arriving over the same period – two and half years – than under Rudd.

To achieve such a disaster requires an exceptional level of policy stupidity. And Immigration Minister Chris Bowen bears little responsibility, considering most of his ideas were knocked back.

There is a reasonable argument that says Rudd created the problem in the first place and that the hung parliament, and the High Court prevented Gillard from implementing a plan that she claimed would have worked – the Malaysian people swap deal.

But it should have become obvious to the Government that when boats started arriving en masse after Gillard’s premature East Timor announcement, and have kept coming ever since, that the third country or offshore processing deterrents were not necessarily going to work again, on their own.

It should never be underestimated just how significant Joe Ludwig’s handling of the Indonesian live cattle export has been to this issue.

Indonesia has always and will continue to be crucial to fixing this problem.

But instead of embracing our neighbour and offering incentives, the Government decided to offend an entire nation with a First World moral insult about how a few dodgy backyard abattoirs treat our animals before they are eaten.

Gillard could never have hoped to come close to solving this issue without some pretty messy political and intelligence work in Indonesia. The live cattle fiasco issue set that possibility back years.

There is course a fourth issue that Gillard promised to fix. It wasn’t one articulated publicly but one made to her caucus. She would fix the Polls. Steeee-rike 4!

How has Gillard gone on this score? When Rudd was rolled, the two party-preferred vote for Labor was 52/48, in Rudd’s favour.

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[Neferti]

Actually, Timmy gets more votes than Gillard. First Bloke indeed. What TWAT coined that?

[Rorschach]

Piers Akerman: ABC goes bananas to help Julia sell her dodgy record
* by: Piers Akerman
* From: The Sunday Telegraph
* December 16, 2012 12:00AM

ABC's AM program gave Prime Minister Julia Gillard an early Christmas present on Friday when host Tony Eastley made the specious claim the government had been able to "bring in changes to education and deliver a antional disability insurance scheme".

Sure, that education change would be the $16 billion Building the Education Revolution that saw the spread of unusable halls and lunch rooms; this, in a week when it was revealed Australian primary school students scored the lowest of any English-speaking nation in an international test of reading, ranking 27th out of 48 countries.

We're down there with Bulgaria, Slovenia and Lithuania. Is this the sort of change the ABC welcomes? Apparently it is.

As for delivering a NDIS, all that has been delivered is a draft that will cover a trial period and the Gillard government is pushing the real delivery of anything substantial five years down the track when its dysfunctional existence will be just a bad memory.

The prime minister's spin doctors are hoping they can piggyback an election on this pie-in-the-sky promise using the optimism of people with disabilities to cover their failures.

That's why Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin was shrieking at the opposition across the house in the last sitting week: "Labor. We own the NDIS!"

Except for the funding the states are agreeing to find because the Gillard government can't count.

They key to the ABC's loyal attempt to help the government is that there is a widespread perception that Labor is the party of social justice. This illusion must be maintained because Labor doesn't have any successful policies to boast about and the distractions provided by Trade Minister Craig Emerson and Infrastructure Minister Anthony Albanese are now only remarkable for their grotesque hypocrisy. Otherwise known as the bile brothers or tweedledumb and tweedledumber

The conservative side of politics actually has an astonishingly sound record in the field Labor is trying to co-opt.

When Bob Menzies was forming the Liberal Party in 1944, he said: "What we must look for, and it is a matter of desperate importance to our society, is a true revival of liberal thought which will work for social justice and security, for national power and national progress, and for the full development of the individual citizen, though not through the dull and deadening process of socialism."

After winning government in 1949 he proceeded to deliver policies which took the ratio of home ownership from about 50 per cent to about 75 per cent, made Australia one of the top-10 trading nations, delivered a sound immigration program with the arrival of 1.25 million immigrants in a decade and created social security measures, including the pensioner medical and free medicines service; free milk to school children and a national health scheme based on self-help, providing cover for all citizens.

It was the Menzies government that established the Australian Universities Commission and introduced commonwealth scholarships for secondary schools.

It was the Menzies government that engaged with Asia and negotiated the remarkable Australia-Japan trade agreement in 1957, establishing the most important trade relationship the nation has had over the past 50 years.

Gillard, with her hollow White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century is only half a century too late. When she recently captivated the luvvie "mummy bloggers" with drinks at Kirribilli House, she probably omitted to mention family allowances and family assistance supplements were introduced in the period of Liberal prime ministers Harold Holt, John Gorton, Billy McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. It's a cert that the Balmain basket-weavers don't know that the Australia Council for the Arts, the Australian Film and Television Corporation and the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA), were also Liberal creations.

SBS TV and radio, and the Institute of Multicultural Affairs _ more from the Libs. Not something I'd be bragging about.

Sport wasn't neglected either, with the establishment of the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), along with the Sport Development Program, National Athlete Reward Scheme, National Committee on Sport and Recreation for the Disabled.

For the gender-obsessed, there was the National Women's Advisory Council. For the environmentally fixated, the declaration of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the World Heritage listing of the Great Barrier Reef, Kakadu, Wilandra Lakes, Lord Howe Island and Southwest Tasmania.

The heavy lifting continued under the Howard government with real wages rising _ they had fallen under the previous Labor governments _ and policies which delivered an extra $2.4 billion in family benefits and childcare assistance and Work for the Dole, while tighter welfare controls targeting cheats saved taxpayers more than $2 million a day.

Record amounts were spent on health and education _ and after paying off Labor's $96 billon government debt _ Australia was saving $8.8 billion a year in interest payments by 2007.

That is some record and it doesn't tell the whole story.

But Gillard and Labor have an army of spin doctors and the ABC and much of Fairfax working for them.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is undergoing an image transformation _ his blue tie matches those worn by world leaders Barack Obama and David Cameron _ but as the election year approaches there must be more than a change of uniform.

The message must be one of contrast.

A failed government running up a huge debt to pay for failed policies or an opposition with a bloodline of economically responsible pragmatism and a proven record of standing for self-determination and providing support to the most vulnerable.

The conservatives won't be given any soft Christmas interviews by the ABC or any other media _ but then their record doesn't need manure to shine.

[Grendel]

I have noticed because I notice shit that you get up every bastard for quoting fruitcake "rusted on" wankers. And Wankerman is whose rusted on?

Dogupya!

[mellie]

Gillard has managed to nurse a mangled broken plane back to the hanger on auto-pilot, that's all.

But...

The plane is still broken, and Labors faceless men who are being dictated to by international socialists are really what's at the controls.

I think it's clear, Labor still hasn't found it's way, this and aren't likely too any time soon.

[Rorschach]

But apparently Grendel you fail to notice that I post wankers that write facts in their articles...

Hell I even bold them so morons can see them more easily.

I'm quite aware of Akerman's political bias thanks I even had him call me once to swear at me over the phone...in the end he agreed to disagree... after I put him straight.

[boxy]

Fuck off, roach, you're as rusted on as every other cun.t you accuse of it.

[Rorschach]

Truth hurt does it poxy

If I was a rusted-on I'd only ever vote for one party.... you were wrong again...

[Outlaw Yogi]

If something is rusted on, just deal with it like merchant sailors. Chip it off with a hammer and repaint it.

[Rorschach]

Julia Gillard breaks third promise as $1 billion Budget surplus axed
* by: Phillip Hudson
* From: Herald Sun
* December 21, 2012 12:00AM

On April 14, 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard said: "You can't run this country if you can't manage its Budget".

THE Gillard Government has dumped its sacred election promise to deliver a Budget surplus, saying it would have put jobs and the economy at risk to try and keep it.

The broken vow comes after Julia Gillard abandoned the "no carbon tax" pledge and scrapped her opposition to Pacific Island detention centres for asylum seekers.

Announcing the embarrassing backdown, Treasurer Wayne Swan blamed a $3.9 billion "sledgehammer hit" to revenue between July and October caused by weak company profits.

He won praise from economists, business leaders and the Greens, with top Budget watcher Chris Richardson saying it would have been "dumb to chase the surplus and damage the economy".

Credit rating agency Standard & Poor's said it would not change Australia's AAA credit rating.

But Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said the announcement in the shadow of Christmas was another failure by Labor that showed it could not be trusted to manage the economy or tell the truth.

Ms Gillard and Mr Swan had repeatedly said the surplus was a "guarantee" and would be delivered "come hell or high water" because it was vital to taking pressure off the cost of living. Last year the PM said "you can't run this country if you can't manage its Budget".

Mr Swan revealed he had a long discussion with Ms Gillard, who is on holidays, and other ministers before revealing the surplus was now "unlikely".

"I don't think it would be responsible to cut harder or further in 2012-13 to fill a hole in the tax system if that puts job or growth at risk," he said. "If the worst thing that people say is we got the economics right again but fell short on the politics, well I just say, so be it."

Mr Swan, who has already slashed welfare for single parents, made cuts to the baby bonus and curbed the private health insurance rebate to protect the surplus said it was not in line with Labor values to pursue more cuts.

The Treasurer, who has not delivered a surplus in his five Budgets, said the "aftershocks" from the global financial crisis that had wiped $160 billion from revenue over five years were still being felt.

The most recent update of the Budget just two months ago had predicted a $1.1 billion surplus, down from the $1.5 billion announced in the May Budget.

Economists now believe that it could be a deficit of $10 billion.

Mr Swan refused to say what the projected deficit was likely to be, saying Treasury officials would have a look with "a fresh set of eyes in the new year".

He rejected Opposition claims it was due to wasteful spending, saying spending was down by $1.3 billion and every dollar spent since mid-2009 had been matched by a cut.

Mr Swan said the Government was still committed to revealing how it would pay for increased education funding and the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme in next year's Budget.

Mr Abbott said after boasting for three years about the surplus, it was another failure by Labor.

"You just can't trust this Government to manage the economy and you just can't trust this Government to tell the truth," he said. "For three years they've been saying that this surplus was the badge of their economic credibility. Well, they don't have it any more."

Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey said Labor was trying to cover up its wasteful spending by "taking out the garbage five minutes before Christmas".

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/money/money-matt ... z2FeoJuRce" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;