Bill Shorten

[Rorschach]

[Rorschach]

[Rorschach]

Bill Shorten shoots himself and the Labor Party in the foot again

Bill Shorten can’t control his addiction to telling lies and deceiving the Australian public and has been caught out again with his campaign against the reduction in Sunday penalty rates announced by his crony and personal political appointment Fair Work Commission President Iain Ross.

It has been all over the media that Bill Shorten and the Labor Party wheeled out fake victim Trent Hunter, who is a Labor Party member and union delegate, at a press conference to attack the government for being responsible for the reduced penalty rates. Trent claimed he will lose $109 a week but his employer later pointed out he won’t lose a cent.

Trent Hunter in a campaign post for the Labor Party

The scams and lies being exposed could not have happened at a worse time with Bill Shorten’s crime gang due to face court again next month on criminal charges relating to their attempt to rig the 2016 election in the Federal seat of Melbourne Ports.

Fair Work Commission judgement
As reported on the ABC website:

Sunday and public holiday penalty rates will be reduced for full-time and part-time workers in the hospitality, retail and fast-food industries, the Fair Work Commission has ruled.

Key points:

Workers will continue to receive penalties but they will be reduced
Retailers say the decision means they can extend opening hours
Unions say low-paid workers will struggle to make ends meet

The Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) said nearly half a million people, including some of the country’s lowest-paid workers, would lose up to $6,000 a year.

The commission said the cuts would lead to increased services and trading hours on public holidays and Sundays.

FWC President Justice Iain Ross AO

The Fair Work Commission is Australia’s national workplace relations tribunal and is overseen by the Labor Party appointed Iain Ross. Labor leader Bill Shorten is in full attack mode blaming the government but has conveniently forgotten that he is the one who appointed Iain Ross. Mr Ross has had numerous critics since he was appointed accusing him of everything from bullying to ostracising dissenters.

It is almost guaranteed that Iain Ross is very much still a Labor and Union boy.

It says on Bill Shorten’s website (2012):

MEDIA RELEASE: NEW PRESIDENT LEADS FAIR WORK AUSTRALIA
Justice Iain Ross AO has been appointed the new President of Fair Work Australia (FWA), succeeding Justice Geoffrey Giudice who steps down on 29 February. Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Bill Shorten today said Justice Ross is eminently qualified to lead Australia’s independent industrial umpire.

“Justice Iain Ross is a highly respected Judicial Officer with extensive experience dealing with workplace relations matters, including during his time as Vice President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission”.

Since 2009 Justice Ross has been a Victorian Supreme Court judge and last year became President of the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal. He is also Chair of the Council of Australian Tribunals. He has held positions with the Australian Council of Trade Unions and worked with the law reform commissions in New South Wales and Victoria. From 1994-2006 he was Vice President of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission.

In 2012 Federal MP Jamie Briggs in effect accused Iain Ross of bullying and bastardisation. I published a story not long after titled: “Fair Work Commission President Justice Iain Ross accused of bullying and bastardisation of judicial officers“. To my knowledge Iain Ross has never challenged those allegations.

In September 2015, it was reported:

Fair Work Commission president Iain Ross has been accused of ostracising dissenters on the tribunal, resulting in decisions weighted in favour of unions.

Brendan McCarthy, who was a commission deputy president for 13 years until he retired last December, said Justice Ross ensured a “small core of favoured persons” were appointed to full benches determining important matters.

“It’s not an independent umpire,” Mr McCarthy told The Australian Financial Review on Wednesday. “There is a perception that it’s not, and there is a basis for that perception, given how full benches are selected.”

Mr McCarthy, a former employer representative appointed by the Howard government, said commission members, including tribunal vice-president Graeme Watson, were not selected to sit on full benches determining important cases. “because they are more independently minded”.”

Dissenters are ostracised and isolated,” he said.”

He [Justice Ross] doesn’t want anyone with a potentially different opinion. What he wants are people who have the same or similar opinions to him. If there are matters of importance, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will be on those matters.”

Iain Ross is clearly a Labor Party man so for Bill Shorten and the Labor Party to criticise the government for the decision is very deceitful. What they could do if they want is criticise the government for supporting the decision because they do. But at the end of the day Shorten and the Labor Party have to take a large part of the ownership for the decision even if they don’t agree with it.

Bill Shorten’s crime gang

In January this year a ticking time bomb hit Bill Shorten’s PM hopes with the arrest of some of his closest allies in the Labor Party. It was in court for a mention this month and will be back in court in March. It will shine the light on how Shorten and some of his closest supporters operate in the shadows when they think nobody’s watching. I wrote in January:

Criminal charges have been laid against Bill Shorten’s crime gang for attempting to influence the outcome in Michael Danby’s seat of Melbourne Ports during the 2016 federal election. Danby just scraped over the line and was re-elected with preferences from The Greens.

This should not be a surprise given branch stacking is what allegedly allowed Bill Shorten to become a federal MP and there were allegations of vote rigging when Shorten defeated Anthony Albanese in 2013 for the leadership of the Labor Party.

The people charged include Andrew Landeryou who is the husband of Senator Kimberley Kitching, David Asmar who is married to HSU Victoria Number 1 Branch Secretary Diana Asmar and Dean Sherriff who has a long criminal association with Andrew Landeryou. Also involved was George Droutsas but at this point it is unknown if he has been charged.

The crimes relate to the early morning of the last federal election on the 2/7/16

Bill Shorten is way ahead in the polls and should be able to cruise to victory at the next election but Shorten can’t seem to change his Union ways of rigging elections and in this case rigging a press conference. Add that to the self-inflicted wound of his crime gang hitting court in a few weeks he only needs to look in the mirror if he loses the next election.

Sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you realise how bad things are and that would be the positive if Shorten does become PM. The Australian public would rise as one against him after a short time.

[Rorschach]

Bill Shorten’s Identity Politics

Australians once thought politics akin to sport -- lose the contest, revise tactics, do better next time. Today it is civil war, with blatant and irresponsible lies prominent in the Opposition leader's arsenal. His contemptible myths about poisoned waterholes demonstrate just how low he can stoop

One of the most disappointing spectacles in the aftermath of the death of Bill Leak—a lovely bloke of extraordinary genius whose premature passing is one of the tragedies of our time—was the vile invective hurled at him by the proponents of identity politics. As Quadrant Online found in a quick survey of the Twitter postings of gay activists, feminists, Muslim pundits, indigenous identifiers and the left-wing media, many used the opportunity to tell the world how glad they were he was dead. Here’s a sample:

Paul Kidd, gay and HIV activist: “Bill Leak was an enemy of my community; he made a living insulting and attacking queers. Of course I’m glad he’s dead.”

Stephanie McCarthy, transvestite performer: “Just a quick reminder of what a disgusting, vile, racist piece of shit Bill Leak was. This man deserves ZERO praise or respect.”

Shane Bazzi, refugee advocate and LGBTQ activist: “Bill Leak was a horrible person. Homo­phobic, transphobic, racist, Islamophobic. His death does not change that.”

Michael Lucy, Online Editor at the Monthly: “It’s one thing not to speak ill of the dead but another to praise publicly shitty dead people just because you were mates with them.”

Fatima Measham, consulting editor and columnist, Eureka Street: “Turns out death doesn’t write off the damage you did.”

Nakkia Lui, Aboriginal actress and playwright: “If only the victims of Bill Leak’s racism got as much news and attention as he has.”

K. Thor Jensen, American comic strip illustrator and novelist: “Bill Leak, one of the worst political cartoonists in the world, has died. He was a 61 year old piece of shit and should have died years ago.”

Although identity politics originated in the 1970s among radical feminists, gays and black power advocates, the movement has taken a very ugly turn ever since Julia Gillard and the Greens formed a minority government in 2010. It has changed democratic politics for the worse, and freed its followers from any reticence about the level of abuse they hurl at opponents.

Identity politics today has overturned the principle, once taken for granted in Australia, that politics is more like sport than warfare. We once thought that, although the other team are your rivals, if you lose to them the proper response is to revise your tactics, train harder and try again next time. You could even have drinks with them after the game.

Today, interest group politics is more like a civil war in which the contenders want to destroy their opponents utterly, so they can never compete again. They prefer the other side dead.

Yet if opinion polls keep going the way they are, in two years time Australia will have a prime minister totally committed to identity politics. Capturing the larger identity groups by taking their side and talking their language has emerged as one of Bill Shorten’s major strategies to defeat the Turnbull government. Shorten rarely misses an opportunity to display his credentials to members of these groups.
This essay appears in the April edition of Quadrant.

In February, in a parliamentary speech about the Closing the Gap Program which measures the outcomes from the $30 billion a year now spent on Aboriginal people, Shorten said, with a straight face, “It’s time for truth-telling.” He then went on to enshrine in Hansard two of the most notorious myths about the treatment of Aboriginal people in early colonial times: “We poisoned the waterholes; we distributed blankets infected with diseases we knew would kill.”

Both tales are historical fictions. Local legend from mid-nineteenth-century Narrandera, New South Wales, offers two different accounts of the origin of the name Poisoned Waterhole Creek. It was originally thought to derive from poisoned pellets spread around the site by pastoralists to kill wild dogs that were molesting sheep. The other account is that a drover once lost cattle there when they ate a local toxic weed. However, poet Mary Gilmore, whose father once worked on a station in Narrandera, later decided the name came from waterholes deliberately poisoned by a local pastoralist to kill Aborigines. She wrote in a newspaper article that her father was commissioned by a magistrate to fill up the holes to well above the old waterline. However, in an examination of the name’s origins in the Narrandera Argus in February 1951 (now checkable on Trove), a local historian, George Gow, said Gilmore’s claims were “utter rubbish”. The waterholes had never been filled in. Her version of events was unknown to either local pastoralists or local Aborigines and had been invented for political purposes. At the time Gilmore was a member of the Communist Party.

Shorten’s claims about disease-infected blankets are even less credible. This story originated not in the early history of Australia but in North America during the Indian Wars of the mid-eighteenth century. In 1763, at Fort Pitt (now Pittsburgh) the Indian chief Pontiac had laid siege to the fort where all the British settlers had congregated. Smallpox had broken out inside the fort. When two Indian emissaries visited the site to urge the British to abandon their stronghold, the Swiss commander Simeon Ecuyer refused to leave but, as an apparent gesture of submission, gave the Indians presents of two blankets and a handkerchief, which he had taken from the fort hospital’s infected patients. A month later in New York, Ecuyer’s commanding officer General Jeffrey Amherst learnt there was a smallpox outbreak among the Indians and, unaware then of Ecuyer’s actions, wrote that it would be a good idea to “Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians” as well as “to try Every other method that can serve to Extirpate this Execrable Race”.

Left-wing historians today milk Amherst’s message for all it is worth. In Australia, in an attempt to lend credence to claims that the British deliberately gave smallpox to the Aborigines, the historian Henry Reynolds in An Indelible Stain (2001) uses Fort Pitt as a precursor. He writes: “In an infamous incident, two visiting Indian chiefs on a diplomatic mission were given blankets from the smallpox hospital. The evidence indicates that the action was deliberate and calculated.” In fact, the evidence indicates nothing of the kind. It is most unlikely Ecuyer’s gifts started this epidemic. Reports from settlers who escaped the Indians said it was already prevalent among the tribes months before Pontiac’s siege.

In any case, smallpox is almost always transmitted by close contact with infected persons. It is possible for the disease to be transmitted from the scabs and pustules that might have brushed onto blankets but it is these same scabs that provided the early material for smallpox vaccines. Before the eighteenth century, physicians in China and Turkey developed techniques for immunising people against smallpox. Blowing powdered pustule scabs up the noses of patients was a commonly-used preventive measure. But, in any case, it would have been difficult for the early British settlers in Australia to spread the disease this way to the Aborigines since there was no outbreak of that kind among the colonists, thus no infected blankets to give.

There are several other recent examples of Shorten using the myths of identity politics to cement the loyalty of constituents. Last September, during the debate over a proposed plebiscite on same-sex marriage, he accused the Turnbull government of undermining the legitimacy of the identity of young homosexuals by debating their status on the national stage. “Let me be as blunt as possible,” he said. “A No campaign would be an emotional torment for gay teenagers and if one child commits suicide over the plebiscite, then that is one too many.”

There used to be an unwritten but widely acknowledged convention in the news media not to beat up stories about suicide, since there was plausible evidence from public health authorities that highly publicised stories about the topic produce copycat suicides, especially among young men. Shorten’s speech indicates he knows this but is still prepared to go public on the issue in order to shore up his stocks in the gay constituency.

Identity politics needs to be seen as the antithesis of democratic politics. Each identity group is taught that its members are victims of the wider society’s intolerance, and so separate rights and expensive special treatments are their cures. Identity politics is the most divisive version of relationship a nation can have with its people. Each group pursues its own aims, irrespective of their influence on the national interest. Each group has its own values, its own set of moral principles, its own version of its rights. There are no universal rights. This is a set of views deriving from multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Its logical conclusion is that child brides, pederasty, the subjugation of women, genital mutilation, and the killing of infidels are culturally, and thus morally, sanctioned. Each culture is entitled to its own “narratives” too, and so generates its own set of historical facts that sanction its sense of victimhood.

If Bill Shorten becomes prime minister, he is committed to entrenching this movement and these values even more securely than the previous Labor-Greens coalition. Poor fella my country.

[The Mechanic]

I dont know why the Labor party went down the Shorten path... or continue to do so..

im not complaining mind you...

he lost the last election and then went on an Australian Victory Lap Tour,..

and the lab rats all fell for it...

no matter what the polls say... come time to vote, I think Labor are on a loser with Bullshitten...

mind you...

if the Liberal Party keep shooting themselves in the foot then who knows.. maybe we'll have a rapist as our Prime Minister..

[Rorschach]

Originally published as BS doesn’t just stand for Bill Shorten

Citizenship saga has revealed Shorten’s brazen duplicity
Miranda Devine
September 3, 2017 12:00am

HOWEVER the citizenship fiasco in the federal parliament is resolved, it has brilliantly revealed the brazen duplicity at the core of one man, Bill Shorten.

Politicians from almost every other party have fallen like flies, honestly admitting to dual citizenship problems that may rule them constitutionally ineligible to remain in parliament.

When asked, they fold. But not Bill Shorten, or any of at least seven other Labor MPs he insists have no case to answer, when clearly they do.

Shorten received British citizenship by descent through his English father, and claims to have renounced it.

But he refuses to produce the evidence, and he is getting away with it.

Just like he got away with stabbing two prime ministers in the back, while pretending he was innocent.

Just like he got away with selling out workers for lower wages in exchange for direct payments to his Australian Workers’ Union.

Just like he got away with evading questions at the unions Royal Commission (even though commissioner Dyson Heydon kept telling him he was concerned about his “credibility as a witness”.)

And just like he gets away with arguing against his previous positions on everything from same sex marriage to a carbon tax.
Bill Shorten’s appearance on Q&A was a study in evasion.

The Q&A program two weeks ago was a fascinating masterclass in Shorten’s shamelessness. It is important because it provides a window into the character of the man who may be PM.

“So, Bill, is there a cloud over your own citizenship status?” asked host Tony Jones.

Shorten turned it into a joke: “If they can’t put me in jail, then they’re saying that I’m an agent of New Zealand.”

Jones tried again: “So, do you have the documents? Can you release them if necessary?”

Shorten went into sincere mode: “Well, first of all, this is an important issue. I know I renounced my British citizenship. I was born here. Dad was from the northeast of England. But I did the research, and you find out you get citizenship through paternity. So, you go and renounce it if you want to run for Parliament. It’s the basic rule. So, I’ve done all of that.”

JONES: “So, you’ve got the documents?”

SHORTEN: “We’ve done all of that, yes.

JONES: “You’ve got the documents?”

SHORTEN: “But let’s go to this…”

JONES: “Well, hang on... “

And back and forth it went until Jones finally said: “So, let’s just confirm this. You’re not going to release the documents — is that right?

SHORTEN: Well, I know what I am, and the point is we have a screening process.

JONES: “No, but just...”

SHORTEN: “I’ve been clear four times.

JONES: “So, that’s a no, you’re not going to release the documents?”

SHORTEN: “Well, what is the case to release it?”

Shorten never looked perturbed, or defensive, as he dissembled, prevaricated, and blustered, always smiling. In the end, it was Jones, the veteran interviewer, who looked sheepish. That is quite a skill.

Despite the outward calm, Shorten’s staff have been extraordinarily aggressive over Labor’s citizenship woes, as Sharri Markson revealed, when she wrote about threats and foul-mouthed texts she has received from the “young, cocky blokes” in Shorten’s office.

No wonder Shorten’s nickname in the AWU was “Showbag”, Australian slang for someone who lies or boasts, not to be confused with “Showboat”.

The crowdsourced online “Urban Dictionary” defines Showbag as someone who is “full of sh*t”.

Journalist-turned-Senator Derryn Hinch long ago dubbed Shorten “Bull Shittin”.

Readers refer to him as “BeeEss”.

In response to my column last week, reader Michael asked: “How do you know when Shorten is lying? The answers from other readers came thick and fast: “He’s talking!”; “Whenever he opens his mouth; “As soon as his lips move!”

Most people feel ashamed to hide the truth, and it shows in their body language, touching their nose, smacking their lips, flicking their eyes or holding the interviewers’ gaze too long.

But not Shorten. He has little of what psychologists call “non-verbal leakage”. The only clue is that he slightly dials up his “aw, shucks” sincerity act.

But the public can smell the inauthenticity.

That is why, for all the government’s errors, though Newspoll shows Labor consistently 6-8 points ahead of the Coalition, Shorten trails Malcolm Turnbull by 10-15 points as preferred PM

It’s not that Turnbull is so great. It is that Shorten is perceived as untrustworthy, insincere, and not quite right.

Of 15 character attributes cited in an Essential poll, trustworthiness came in at 11th place for Shorten, ticked by just 31 per cent of all voters. Just 26 per cent agreed he was “more honest than most politicians”.

It’s also the attribute which has propelled this man of many faces to the top of a corrupted political class and may see him as Prime Minister.

Shorten takes “Whatever it takes” to a new level. If you thought Rudd/Gillard/Rudd was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

[LEFTWINGER supreme]

Kirribilly will be your PM for a very very very long time

[Neferti]

[Rorschach]

Remember the big lie that was Medicsare?

Well, with lying Billy there is always more....

Saturday, 12 November 2016
Shorten caught out lying - again

Reports today that Labor Leader Bill Shorten intends to take a tougher approach to 457 visas for foreign workers are laughable.

Mr Shorten is lying when he says Labor wants to remain the friend of blue collar workers. The truth is Labor has long abandoned blue collar workers for green voters in an effort to defend inner city seats from the Greens party.

The Opposition Leader and his party presided over a huge growth in 457 visa numbers when last in government and did little to protect Australian workers from being displaced by temporary visa holders.

Under Labor the number of 457 visa holders climbed from 68,000 in 2010 to more than 110,000 when they left office in 2013 and misuse of the 457 programme was rampant.

In one instance a company had 400 Chinese workers and just one Australian worker on a construction site. In another the workforce was almost exclusively South Korean with around 200 workers on 457 visas.

Under the Coalition Government the number of 457 visa holders has declined significantly by around 15,000 while at the same time hundreds of thousands of new jobs have been created for Australians.

The Coalition has strengthened integrity in the 457 programme through increasing resources for monitoring 457 sponsors, new obligations on those sponsors and additional penalties for those who attempt to game the system.

Whereas Labor cut staffing of the Fair Work Ombudsman when Bill Shorten was the responsible Minister, the Coalition has provided additional resources for the FWO to investigate and prosecute breaches of visa obligations.

These reforms ensure the 457 programme is a supplement to, not a substitute for, Australian workers.

Labor failed Australian workers when in government and Mr Shorten’s claims now to want to protect them are hypocritical.

Go CFMEU.... keep living in denial...

[Gordon]

I might actually vote Labor if they flick this prick.