Reasons not to vote LABOR.

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"Enough is enough. When I see sexism and misogyny I'm going to call them for what they are." J.Gillard

Unless it's Tim or Peter Slipper of any member of the prog left...

I'm... appears to be 2 or more standards in play here.

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If Stephen Conroy is labor senate Leader it just goes to show what I've been saying is true... Labor is talentless.

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Carbon-tax-starting-to-hit-jobs

ANU Professor Warwick McKibbin says industries most impacted by the carbon tax are starting to see job losses.

http://video.theaustralian.com.au/23336 ... o-hit-jobs" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

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A letter from Uncle Eric Abetz...

Dear Nephew,

Labor’s waste & mismanagement has already broken all Australian records, but check out some new examples of Labor incompetence and chaos uncovered by Coalition Senators this week:

Giving up on rip-off merchants
The Government has given up trying to recover more than $15 million fraudulently claimed by dodgy installers under Labor’s disastrous roof batts scheme.

High cost of office
The Department of Climate Change, which the Coalition has promised to abolish, has locked itself into a 15-year lease on new office accommodation at a cost of $158 million, plus another $21 million in fit-out costs.

$440,000 per month to maintain decommissioned detention centre
Last March, Labor decommissioned the Pontville Detention Centre, claiming it was no longer needed. Yet eight months later they announced it would be re-opened.

The reason: during that time, 232 more illegal boats and 14,391 more people had arrived in Australia. Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining Pontville while it was “decommissioned” and empty was more than $4 million – or $440,000 per month.

More on illegal boat arrivals
Taxpayers are forking out $120,000 per week to have the Antarctic Division’s A419 aircraft on standby waiting to ferry asylum seekers around Australia. More than $50 million has been spent on charter flights for asylum seekers since 1 July 2012.

Meanwhile, for the first time in a decade there have been no Customs vessels patrolling illegal fishing or whaling in the Southern Ocean during the last year.

Computers in schools program facing axe
Senate Estimates heard that the Government has refused to commit to continuing its computers in schools program, the centrepiece of its so-called Education Revolution, beyond 30 June this year. If funding is not renewed it will leave parents and schools to carry the can.

Yet more Carbon Tax advertising
$70 million has already been spent on advertising the Carbon Tax. Yet the Government directed the Department to undertake $1 million of research and creative work for phase 3 of the Carbon Tax compensation advertising campaign, even though there was no decision to proceed with the campaign.

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Unbelievable isn't it and these morons will get tossed out but still be paid huge salaries because why?

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yes it certainly makes you wonder.

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Rudd can't escape all mining tax dirt
* by: Laurie Oakes pro ALP commentator.
* From: The Daily Telegraph
* February 16, 2013 12:00AM

WAYNE Swan talked and talked in parliament this week. And the more he talked, the worse he looked. If that is indeed possible.

The disappearing mining tax - the tax that raises no revenue - has become a running joke. The butt of the joke is the Treasurer.

As Swan tried to explain why a tax forecast to raise $2 billion this financial year yielded only $126 million in its first six months, a deepening despondency among Labor MPs was palpable.

It was clear what many of them were thinking. That this might well be the final nail in the government's coffin. That it is very likely one bungle too many. Another day... another bungle. yet approx 30% of people want to vote bunglers back in.

Because, although Swan and Julia Gillard angrily deny that they have bungled, that is the way the mining tax is seen by Joe Public. That is because it is another incompetent idea incompetently handled by and incompetent government.

And it is a perception no amount of argument is likely to change now. Certainly not argument from someone with Swan's decidedly modest communication skills. Now now Laurie, let's not just blame it on Wayne's speaking skills, it's what he has to communicate too you know.

The minuscule revenue yield from the tax was always going to be an embarrassment for Swan but, in case it did not prove embarrassing enough, Kevin from Queensland was there to help.

Normally Kevin Rudd's actions are viewed through the prism of his well-known dislike for the woman who deposed him as prime minister. Oh the misogyny of it all. Or misandry if we are talking about the women

But he has an equal contempt for Swan and, in an interview with SKY News on Tuesday, set out to ensure that the Treasurer was squarely in the frame with Gillard in the mining tax blame game - and that he himself was distanced from it.

It has become accepted wisdom that, when Gillard took over as prime minister and set out to end the war with the mining industry over the original design of the tax, she and Swan were outsmarted in negotiations by BHP Billiton, Xstrata and Rio Tinto.

It is claimed that Gillard, Swan and Resources Minister Martin Ferguson conducted the negotiations themselves, and that officials from Treasury - "the ones who really understood the tax being discussed", said one newspaper report during the week - were shut out of the room.

According to this account, the big three mining companies effectively authored the new tax themselves, and were able to ensure they paid as little as possible. Not surprisingly, Tony Abbott and Co have had great fun with this version of events, at Swan's expense.

In fact, it is not true that Treasury officials were shut out of the process. It doesn't matter laurie, haven't I told you about making excuses? The crucial stage in negotiations occurred when government representatives and mining company executives found that Treasury's assumptions about the likely impact of the tax and the industry's own assumptions differed widely. In particular, Treasury's forecasts for commodity prices were considerably lower than the industry's. Also, there was uncertainty about the value of mining company assets, the starting base for the tax.

Eventually the government representatives proposed each side simply open their books to the other. The miners agreed.

Swan's chief advisers and the number-crunchers from the mining companies assembled in a ground floor room in the Treasury building with all the Treasury experts.

Spreadsheets were projected on the wall and discussed line by line. Information was compared and debated. Numbers were run. Assumptions were tested. The session went late into the night. "Exhaustive and exhausting," is the way one participant describes it.

But unfortunately for Swan, with newspapers running headlines like "How Canberra Got Diddled" - the horse has bolted. The idea that he and Gillard let the big miners make chumps of them will stick.

With his SKY interview, Rudd helped to make the mining tax an issue in the growing speculation about Gillard's leadership.

It is also dividing the anti-Rudd forces, with some Gillard backers openly criticising Swan's shortcomings as a salesman and communicator.

When it comes to the question of whether Gillard gets the chop and Rudd returns to the prime ministership, however, the mining tax is a two-edged sword.

In his SKY News attempt to lump Swan and Gillard with all the blame, Rudd asserted that the idea for the tax "came from the Henry Review which was established by the Treasurer".

This conveniently overlooked the fact that the tax review headed by then treasury secretary Ken Henry resulted from Rudd's own 2020 summit in 2008 and was announced by Rudd, not Swan, on the ABC's 7.30 Report.

Rudd is rewriting history. And you are splitting hairs laurie.

Swan certainly pushed for the mining tax ahead of the 2010 budget. If you believe the mining companies, he also failed to consult with them properly. But Rudd, as prime minister at the time, cannot avoid responsibility.

Distracted by other matters, he did not focus on the tax until hostilities with the mining companies had got out of hand. And, as was his habit, he did not bother with the kind of cabinet discussion that might have helped to avoid the crisis.

A senior Labor figure who supported Gillard in the past but now despairs of her puts it this way: "Sure this hurts us. But how can we change leaders if the new leader is the one that caused the problem in the first place?"

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

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Labor looking at setting all the wrong records in 2013
Simon Benson
15 Feb 06:00am

The Gillard Government is facing an election wipeout in western Sydney that will rival the routing that was delivered to NSW Labor in 2011.

Voters know it, the Labor MPs who will lose their seats know it, and the Prime Minister herself surely knows it. But it’s unlikely that too many in the top levels of the Gillard Government have a firm grasp on the true horrors that await Labor on September 14.

Senior Labor MPs are now talking about secret union polling over the past month that reveals the seat of Lindsay could return a swing against Labor of more than 20 per cent - which would set a Federal election record.

Labor sources in NSW claim knowledge of a recent poll conducted by the Queensland branch of the Liquor, Hospitality & Miscellaneous Workers Union, taken in the key seat which takes in Penrith, the lower Blue Mountains, Emu Plains, Glenmore Park, St Marys and Oxley Park.

The figures are hard to believe: Labor on a primary vote of just 22 per cent.

There is some dispute, however, over the poll’s legitimacy. The “missos” claim they aren’t their numbers. They have done polling, conducted by a Queensland firm, in Lindsay but claim the results are consistent with national polling trends. But several top Labor sources insist that the polling is real and are putting the numbers around caucus.

If the poll is genuine, it would mean a 20 per cent plus swing against sitting member David Bradbury, a typical ALP no talent an outcome rivalled only by the Bass by-election in 1975 and coming close to the NSW State record of 23 per cent against Labor in the Ryde by-election of 2008.

It’s no wonder that the NSW Federal MPs are the ones now not just actively pushing for a change to Kevin Rudd but are frothing at the mouth about it. froth away... Rudd isn't the answer... a quick look at responses to his twitter account proves this

They are getting desperate, and understandably so. To the point that perhaps they are imagining poll numbers. 
But, while the caucus is now split between change and the status quo, the Rudd camp itself has split - between those who want to challenge Julia Gillard soon and those who want to wait.

This is an edited version of an unsolicited phone call to me yesterday from a fuming Rudd supporter who fears that the circus tent is about to collapse around the entire Labor Party.

“There are two things operating here. One is that Rudd is insane, and the second is that NSW will blow this show up,” the MP said.

“And you can print that!


“Rudd is going nowhere. He doesn’t have the numbers. And he can’t do anything because she (Gillard) is not going anywhere.

“We are collapsing in a sea of despondency and what Rudd should be doing is going around the country adding value to the government, not blowing it up.

“Shorten is not changing. And if he isn’t changing, nothing is changing. 
The other thing is that Rudd’s behaviour only alienates members of the caucus. You have got to remember that Australian people don’t have a vote in caucus - and Gillard still has the numbers.

“If change has to happen, it has to be orderly. What these guys are doing is starting a bushfire which will only burn down the entire Labor Party. Good then you can start again and this time enlist some talent

“If we want Rudd back as leader we must let natural forces move as they may.”

The point about Bill Shorten is key to what will happen from here. Overtures to Shorten have been made from the NSW right - containing a veiled threat the powerful NSW right would block Shorten’s ambitions to ever become Labor’s leader if he sticks with Gillard.

Shorten isn’t shifting. But that is not to say, like so many others who were involved in Rudd’s knifing, he won’t play a dead hand and let it happen without any involvement.

In other words, Rudd’s return only requires Shorten to NOT stand in the way. 
The NSW right know that its power will shift to the Victorians, under Shorten’s control, if they cannot hold on to their MPs in western Sydney - they stand to lose serious numbers in caucus.

It’s a twisted irony that the faction that installed Rudd in 2006 and later tore him down is now looking to Rudd as a lifeboat. Any port in a storm.

But for Rudd, and indeed for Gillard, the election and what it may reap for the party is not the only contest. 
They are now engaged in a future war. It is now as much a battle for whose legacy prevails when the revisionists get to work on this sad chapter of Labor Party history as it is about the leadership itself. This pathetic chapter in labor history...

If the Lindsay numbers are right, who wins the election appears to have already been well and truly decided.