The Coalition makes a miserable start to 2020
With January almost done and dusted the Coalition’s form over the past six and a bit years has shown no signs of improvement.
Sincerely, I would much rather be writing about the remarkable advancements the government has made since Scott Morrison came to power. I would gladly take it on the chin and congratulate his work.
About how when he took the reins of the leadership of our nation that he confronted the climate change deniers of his party in the best Whitlamesque “crash through or crash” style of leadership – won the day for the nation and now governs for the common good.
But alas, I cannot. The story is as sad as it is true. It is an ongoing seemingly never-ending narrative of poor leadership that has no vision, no goals that long for completion and no truth that the people can trust.
I would like to say that they have a blueprint, a narrative that inspires me to follow a leader I can have faith in, who has the nation in his heart.
Again, I cannot.
What they are good at is producing advertisements that falsely sing their own praises no matter the wickedness of what they have done.
I and others who write for The AIMN, over many years now have repeatedly explored the incompetence of the Coalition partners.
“Good government starts tomorrow,” said Tony Abbott in 2014. It never did. In fact, it has gotten progressively worse since to the point where the latest polls reflect the electorates current disdain for Scott Morrison’s leadership.
It has been and will be for the duration of its tenure a government lacking in confidence, without having their heart in it given they never expected to win the last election. Nor can it improve given the quality of its leadership, its outmoded economics and its untrustworthiness.
Never be burdened by the negativity of others. Wear positivity as if your life depended on it.
The worry is the time a new government, whenever it is elected, will take to restore any semblance of what we know of good governance, Our memories might have faded so much by then that its meaning might leave us altogether.
I can now confidently predict that spin of the political kind will start to emerge about the reasons why the government is now unable to produce a budget surplus. The fires burnt it all. Was it going to happen? Well, we will never will. Convenient, isn’t it?
The Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison governments, for many and differing reasons, have been a complete and utter failure. Why?
The main problem is that the team is full of highly-educated people who have been in the game for so long that they know nothing other than the negativity they have inherited from previous leaders.
They have a fear of doing the right thing, as is the case of Minister Bridget McKenzie’s pork barrelling distribution of funds to sporting clubs prior to the last election. That she was wrong to do so is beyond dispute but to admit it would be against the principle of fake news.
Sometimes I allow myself the indulgence of thinking I know a lot. Then I realise that in the totality of things, I know little. One thing I am certain of however is that there are known facts in the world because science proves them.
Seriously though, Labor is correct. This is exactly the sort of thing they suggest that should go before a National Integrity Commission.
Probably because they thought they would lose the election this effort at deception was particularly brazen. It was nothing less than using taxpayer money for campaign funding.
The Prime Minister, in this instance, isn’t immune to charges that he would have known. After all, he did the announcements on a daily basis.
Twenty-four years ago Labor’s Ros Kelly did a similar thing and resigned from the ministry. McKenzie should do the same.
Having the ability to admit that you are wrong is an absolute prerequisite to discernment and knowledge.
The only man I know who could possibly talk underwater was sadly out of form during the first month of the year. His leadership during the current bushfire crisis left a lot to be desired and this reflected itself in a large drop in the polls.
His woeful leadership doesn’t include a thought for the possibility of being wrong or the capacity to tell others of his own ilk they are.
It is in this inflexibility that we may see him lose his job during the course of a year that may have profound consequences for the citizens of this great land.
Speaking of leadership, the National Party itself demonstrates the dearth of talent we have in our country. The only candidate the party could come up with to replace Barnaby Joyce (a renegade politician with an obsession for the ownership of self-righteousness) was Michael McCormack who seems to suffer from foot in mouth disease an aversion to gay people and any socially progressive decisions made post his birth date.
During January the two most obnoxious politicians in the parliament; George (have you met my wife) Christiansen and Craig (if I cannot say it here I will fly to England to do so) Kelly continued to promote coal as opposed to common sense.
The Minister for Things including the NDIS, Stuart Robert (the man with the biggest NBN bills in the land) had the affront to claim that no one had died waiting for the scheme, despite the agency saying more than 1,200 people have died before they received a scheme plan and the prime minister describing those same figures as “unacceptable”. Go figure that one.
And while all this was happening Peter Dutton was nowhere to be found. “Let him stew in his own mess” probably preoccupied his thoughts as Morrison slugged it out in the heat of unwanted flames.
Or maybe he was privately talking about resilience and just how much the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience (AIDR) develops, maintains and shares knowledge and learning to support a disaster resilient Australia.
Or his absence might mean he is busy congratulating those asylum seekers who are this year entering their 8th year of forced incarceration for never having committed a crime.
There was one reason to take some joy from the first month of the New Year. It was that James and Kathryn Murdoch were quoted as saying:
“They are particularly disappointed with the ongoing denial of the role of climate change among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary.”
They, of course, were referring to the overwhelming evidence that all Murdoch news outlets in Australia were to a large degree biased against climate heating and heavily biased toward the right of the political spectrum.
My Thought for the Day
Everyone has a choice. You can either whinge about the issues or do something about them.
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29 comments
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corvusboreus
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Terence Mills
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corvusboreus
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Phil Pryor
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Josephus
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Kaye Lee
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Terence Mills
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whatever
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Kaye Lee
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corvusboreus
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Kaye Lee
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Harry Lime
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Kaye Lee
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Andrew Smith
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wam
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wam
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Geoff Andrewsg
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ajogrady
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corvusboreus
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JANO
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Kaye Lee
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Barry Thompson.
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Barry Thompson.
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Harry Lime
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Kaye Lee
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Gaele Maat
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corvusboreus
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New England Cocky
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Leon Bazso
Return to home pageLest we forget ‘robodebt’.
The term ‘pink batts’ has passed into a collective meme that people immediately associate with negativity’.
‘Pink batts? Yeah, that was Labor. People died.’
‘Robodebt’ has not yet achieved such notoriety, despite being far more deserving of rage and scorn.
Labor’ insulation scheme was part of a stimulus package to salvage the economy during a global financial crisis.
Flaws in levels of oversight of the suddenly expanded industry (mainly due to decades of deregulation) meant that a few unscrupulous operators broke the law and sent unqualified workers into unsafe situations resulting in a handful of extra deaths within the building industry.
A regrettable blight on an otherwise laudable programme.
The coalition’s ‘automated debt recover’ was purely a penny-pinching exercise implemented to gain consolidated revenue.
The programme was implemented in spite of numerous valid legal and technical objections expressed by welfare professionals.
It was the illegitimate in it’s parameters (inaccurate algorithm) and illegal in it’s execution (onus of disproof on the accused).
Although exact figures on the number of people driven to suicidal despair by ‘robodebt is hard to quantify, ACOSS cross-referencing of welfare and mortality statistics places the anomalous increase of deaths among affected welfare recipients in the thousands.
It certainly does not require a huge leap of empathic logic to see that receiving sudden threatening notification of large debt penalties completely out of the blue, with multiple delays, obstructions and frustrations in the appeals process, could push already vulnerable people completely over the edge.
So a programme designed solely to pinch pennies from poor people was illegitimately conceived and illegally executed, and caused, by a very conservative estimate, the deaths of hundreds of Australian citizens.
‘Pink batts? Try robodebt.’
Somehow, Morrison is going to have to get the AFP to report back on the forged documents issue that they are unable to find any wrong doing even though it’s staring them in the face.
Then Phil Gaitens has to be encouraged to report back and say that Bridget McKenzie did nothing wrong.
It might be easier for Morrison to take out the Australian Open in straight sets !
Ps, when I say that ‘robodebt’ was ‘illegitimate and illegal’, that is not an expression of personal opinion, it is a quotation of the legal findings of this nation’s highest court.
The coalition government implemented an illegitimate and illegal scheme that hounded and drove hundreds to thousands of Australian people to suicide.
The worse thing about comment is one’s drive to repeating the futility of commenting on filth, criminality, indecency, graft and corruption. We are part of a corporate, capitalist, advertising, media, money driven, insincere form of contrived social life only moving for the chosen, the blessed, the incrowd. So, if you submit the soul, the mind, the genitals, the entire career to gain, profiteering, cashing in and cornering up, accumulating, using, wasting, not caring, not sharing, you are one of the conservative greedy anuses doing well at the expense of all others, the planet, the environment, the reason for original living. The new huns and heathens are in, using religious superstition, synthesised lying, creative inner scripts of excuse, aim, justification, relentless wasteful materialism. This government reeks of the shit of it all, and could never be washed clean. Blessed are the meek for they provide the cheap workforce, the profits, the foundation. With huge size, momentum, fleshly drives, needs, positions, poses and shiny superficiality, the brainless, gutless, heartless, smiling hypocrites are in charge. And little nobodies with irritable ambitions know to get in on a good thing.
Totally agree. Communism was and is just as venial . Human nature being as vile as Dean Swift and Voltaire outlined, despair descends.
How many asylum seekers, permanently banished for asking for our help, have died? How many have self-harmed? How many are suffering illnesses due to their indefinite incarceration? What has happened to those who we forced to return?
Re the surplus that had supposedly already been delivered before the election, “The underlying cash balance for the 2019-20 financial year to 30 November 2019 was a deficit of $13,848 million.” The figures for December should come out some time in the coming week.
I heard on the radio yesterday that an asylum seeker on Nauru had twice been transferred to PNG for gall-stones treatment and then a chartered flight to Taiwan (cost $250,000) because Dutton would not allow him to come to Australia for treatment – he’s now back in detention on Nauru .
What on earth was Jacquie Lambie promised to get her vote to repeal Medevac ?
PS : on Bridget, The Shovel nailed it :
Red Cross Appoints Bridget McKenzie, To Ensure Bushfire Money Goes Where It’s Needed Most
Why were “Sports Grants” given to all these gun fanatics in the first place?
She served as sports minister from December 20, 2017 until the May 2019 election, signing off on $1,004,219 for shooting organisations, including a $100,000 grant to Shooting Australia to help older Australians take part in the sport.
Seven shooting clubs also received money – including $500,000 for the NT Field and Game Association – under two rounds of the controversial Community Sport Infrastructure program.
More than $160,000 was also spent commissioning a report into the economic and social impacts of recreational hunting and shooting.
One of the first obligations under the ministerial code is to “observe fairness in making official decisions” in a way that considers “the merits of the matter”, while also acting with “integrity”.
Bridget McKenzie’s office approved nine sport grants in key seats that it asked Sport Australia to assess after applications closed, despite a warning from the agency that it was “not appropriate” to accept or fund the projects.
According to the auditor general, seven of the nine projects that were approved outside of the normal process were located in a Coalition electorate, while two were in “targeted” electorates – one held by Labor and one held by an independent.
“While higher scored applications from the competitive process undertaken in August to September 2018 remained available for approval, each of these new or resubmitted applications were approved for funding as part of the third round,” the audit said.
But hey, she’s doing a great job says Elvis and Deputy PM impersonator, Whatsisname.
Terence and Kaye,
Good luck getting the broad electorate to care about the government blowing squillions on abusing asylum seekers.
Strayans don’t even seem to give much of a shit when the government shamelessly robs and kills it’s own citizenry.
We could also talk about how many people have died waiting for aged care, whether residential or home care packages. When they, and their families, need help the most, they are at the mercy of a for-profit industry, a bureaucratic paper shuffle, and a government whose only reaction to every crisis is to call for yet another inquiry. if we spent the money fixing the problem rather than paying for more inquiries whose recommendations are always ignored, we might get part way towards actually achieving something..
What will it take for this government to crash and burn?There is literally a mountain of evidence of corruption, incompetence,deceit and sheer stupidity.Are the trash media showing signs of having second thoughts?We probably can’t count on that as long as the wretched New York carcass still thieves oxygen.If the opposition can get their shit together,they should be unrelenting on pissant Morrison and his wall to wall lies,because sooner or later the dam wall will break.With a bit of luck, the rabble in the Gnats will precipitate the great unraveling.
The first sitting week next month will be instructive,the Liar has a two seat majority.
“I’m a prime minister for standards,” Morrison said.
Pity he was talking about that most pressing of issues, a dress code for Australia Day citizenship ceremonies.
Bring back gloves I say! And mantillas. And blue ties. Where’s the respect?
Ahhhhh the good old days.
Inaction and inertia of our govt. would be deemed to be a success by many in the LNP, IPA, NewsCorp, US govt. etc.
Our ageing Australian voters (whom are slight majority of the population) have become conditioned to accept a form of 19th century economics or capitalism e.g. master servant relationship and eugenics, through political media and PR techniques that changes how people think, or at least confused by white noise.
For example, while refugees and/or ‘immigrants’ (multiculturalism, environmentalism, secularism, democracy, govt. etc.) are dismissed due to real or imagined costs promoted by LNP and MSM, many Australians wealthy by global standards, are prepared to crawl across cut glass to receive direct or indirect benefit equivalent to a cup of coffee twice a month….
Meanwhile, it’s quite disturbing that many people outside of Australia seem better informed about bushfires and related environmental issues here. Further, we see a conservative Christian radical in Abbott and mining magnate masquerading as an environmental activist in Forrest on UK tv actively promoting the Trumpian ‘raking of leaves’ vs. any real science based climate action.
Then again, and similarly, how many Australians are really prepared to compromise significantly on their carbon footprint, with a price attached?
The fact that ros kelly resigned does not diminish the principle that politicians cannot be trusted without an independent public service and an icac..
The autocuist this morning took great pains and repeated over and over that this sports rorting ‘doesn’t matter LABOR or the coalition…’
That is true. Labor cannot run with this, outside of parliament, and only there with the aim of sinking the woman.ironically to give resurrection to the womaniser.
So what is labor to do on the autocue journalist front??
Corvus has the point of the human damage done by robodebt as a focus for labor but sadly, pinkbatts was the rabbott’s attack on gillard and rudd labor has no rabbott and no easy access to the media.
The banks might have some purchase but climate is worth a bash emphasise the 10 year hiatus of the rabbott and boobby sinking the rudd/howard initiative.
It is so hard to be positive and I may have to revert to my long term and well rehearsed negativity. Last night I attended a reception for the queen and as I sat the man in the next seat said that seat is reserved for tony abbott and then he said hello wam yes sit and I looked and it was john howard I awoke sweating and had a cold shower.
The cool pool showed me I was remiss not to wish you
kong yee fatt choy
for the new year. The year of the rat is auspicious and the start of everything anew.
So back to happiness and here is my red packet, lord, filled with a wealth of luck for your saturday words may they be full of honesty and hope.
ps 50 odd years ago I walked hong kong thinking fatt choy own almost all of the city.
wam
at last i’ve found you mate. come on, admit you’re archy i thought i recognised you’re writing style. i thought you must be dead. what are you now 104 years old. still using the same typewriter though, i see.
your old mate
mehitabel
ps don passed over a long time ago
There is growing corroborated evidence that the L/NP willfully and with prejudice ignored documented analysis as well as pleas from fire experts to make Australia ready and able to protect the people and country from the hell that was to come. This equates to a premeditated criminal act perpetrated by this government on the people and country that they are obligated to serve and protect. Dereliction of duty comes to mind although these have been criminal acts therefore charges of criminal negligence at the least or really treason would be more appropriate for the pain and misery of the deaths of many loved ones, homes and memories turned to ashes, businesses ruined beyond rehabilitation and a whole eco system annihilated. This government is far from any form of redemption that could appease their gross corrupt criminality.
Wam,
If I understand correctly, you suspect robodebt won’t resonate, so you reckon the ALP should ‘take a bash’ on climate change, but mainly in the form of trying to resurrect some rage against retired ex-politicians Tony Abbott and Bob Brown.
Astute strategy.
Scum mo debt . Welfare cards ..Work for the Mole .Dead start-payments ,
(Is this the Friday night Creature feature show ..)
Terrorize welfare receipients ..blame the un-employed . (.Criminalise- Marginalise – demonise ..!)
No rise in dead start payments- since 1994 …Hello !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!…………..
Why is there no solutions to poverty – Just mass Punitive , Nazism on the down trodden . A Cul de sac !…………………………….
This witch hunt on the poor .The dis advantage ,The un-employed , has to stop !…………………………..
A royal commission into these attack dogs- who are so relentless in their pursuit of making life hell for people on welfare ! – ( Suicide and homeless is the new normal ! … ) so this is a fair go ?
Quote – WHEN THE PEOPLE FEAR THE GOVERNMENT – THERE IS TYRANNY .
WHEN THE GOVERNMENT FEAR THE PEOPLE , THERE IS LIBERTY ! , Thomas Jefferson ..
Multiple Liberal politicians received honours this year: former Queensland premier Campbell Newman, former New South Wales premier Barry O’Farrell, former Victorian premier Ted Baillieu and former immigration minister Amanda Vanstone.
Jesus wept Kay Lee, when do they ever get their snouts out of the trough?
Sorry, Kaye.
Confirming, if we didn’t already know it,that our government is a black comedy, Kaye Lee.
Bettina Arndt also got an award for her stance that men are hardly done by in our society, that women make up rape allegations, that sexual harassment is overblown, that pedophile teachers are the victims of “sexually provocative” students – young women needed to “behave sensibly and not exploit their seductive power to ruin the lives of men”.
Gawd Strewth, Kaye Lee, I wish you hadn’t told me that! Luckily, I haven’t had brekkie yet, or it would have bounced. I was blissfully unaware that those 4 manure heaps had received any honours. Sob!
Kaye Lee,
Just part of the recent trend of coalition PM’s being more than comfortable hanging around with people who commit, cover up for, and positively rationalise crimes of pedophilia.
Such is the way of the new normal.
@Kaye Lee: And all undeserved; Campbell Newman for destroying the Queensland Public Service; Farry O’Barrell for forgetting about bribing politicians with very expensive Grange wine; Ted Bailleau for being a member of a leading social Melbourne family; Amanda Vandstone … did she do anything for Australian voters?
It seems we are run by crooks,wankers,rednecks who have nt a clue about law,people on the ground,welfare, climate change, duty of care,where do they find these people that suppose to run the country. The more you dig the more dirt you find,I call the professional CONPERSONS,whats going to become of this country with SO CALL LEADERS with bad form guide