The latest Essential Research survey has the Coalition’s two-party lead unchanged at 51-49, with their primary vote down a point to 45 per cent, Labor steady on 39 per cent and the Greens up one to 10 per cent. Supplementary questions find respondents overwhelmingly of the belief that more competition is needed in the banking sector, trusting Joe Hockey and the Liberals slightly more on the issue than Wayne Swan and Labor; attaching high importance to our relationships with the United States and perfidious New Zealand, but indifferent about Germany and South Africa; rating the influence of the United States as weakening (60 per cent) rather than strengthening (20 per cent); and supporting same-sex marriage.
OzPol,
My condolences. I feel for you.
Am currently watching the Rural Affairs and Transport Senate Standing committee. They are hearing evidence about equine influenza. Members include Bill Heffernan and Julian McGauran. The former is exceptionally well informed on the matter, while the latter is doing everything he can to convince the committee he’s a complete waste of space.
During McGauran’s questioning of a bloke from Equestrian Australia, in which McGauran completely lost the point of his question, the EA bloke laughed at him. Heffernan laughed at him before having to finish McGauran’s question while he sat there wondering what the joke was. The Senate will not miss this goose come July!
Beautiful poem OzPol………and thank you for the link…….kindest regards, markjs
OPT
my heartfelt and sincere condolences
Diogs,
This is how you should learn to apologise.
http://www.news.com.au/technology/were-sorry-for-claiming-captain-kirk-was-in-command-of-captain-picards-starship/story-e6frfro0-1225947119042
Ozpol,
my thoughts and condolences as well.
GG
I missed the whole Star Trek thing. I’m pretty nerdy but not that bad.
*ducks and runs for cover*
Diogs,
Not a good start, comrade.
confessions – I’m in an area where we lost a lot of money through cancellation of horse events during the equine flu thing.
The talk among the horse people was that McGauran’s brother (an ex Howard Govt. Minister who conveniently resigned not long before the epidemic) allowed a diseased horse to be brought in by personally approving it for mates in the racing industry. Now who knows whether that is true or not but some of these equestrian people know exactly what goes on and they were red hot about the Howard Govt. not recompensing them enough. The group I’m involved with lost $thousands by having to cancel – no compensation for it tho. Another Howard got away with.
On question of 7.30 Report–
A program such as what I think it used to be, although maybe not viewed by many, can have a really important role in that it can set the agenda for the next days news. A little bit like the role that the Parrot has–his audience may not be huge or spread over a big demographic but it can set the discussion points for other journalists for that day.
On Roxon and interviews–
Maybe take a leaf out of Peter Reiths method. wtte–
“Mr Reith, what is the weather like outside?
Answer: Yes thats right. We need to stop these thugs on the wharf”.
The Coalition is trying to get Oakeshott for some supposed misdemeanour but read this article and see how they get away with things themselves. O’Farrell doing his best to get elected when really he doesn’t need to promise anything cos he’ll win in a landslide.
[So after attempting to get James Hardie to clean up its own mine mess near Tamworth for years now, the company dragged out the issue for decades in the courts (a tactic which worked re Bernie and those afflicted by asbestosis as they are now dead), and now the NSW Liberals have decided to do the work of James Hardie for them with funds from the public purse. Yes this needs to be done. But we can forget ever reclaiming the funds from James Hardie. This is GREAT news for mining companies! Apparently now all you have to do after you extracted all the goodies you want and make all the money you want while paying minimal taxes, you can dump the clean up job to the public purse. I think this is what they call in the courts, ‘a precedent’. The other key-note in this song of crap this policy was announced by Barry one day after the ombudsman released his report. To me that is some great manoeuvring! I now expect Barry, if his party to be successful, to follow this through in government and announce policy the day after ombudsman reports from now on. But wait! There is more to the cacophony of noise in this song. Turns out the Woodsreef mine just happens to be in a electorate that the Coalition need a 4.8% swing to win]
http://ashghebranious.wordpress.com/
BH:
Peter McGauran fronted the committee before the bloke from EA. He didn’t have a great deal to say – not surprising really.
GG
Howie did that to Rudd at some stage in Parliament when he was going down the tubes.
[BK – did you watch Agenda with Hewson and Richardson. Hewson definitely not going to give Julia any credit for anything at all.]
BH
Only the first 5 mins, BH, and decided it was going to be useless. So I went and spent a couple of hours slashing grass and belatedly washing my car.
And OzPolTragic, I hope all goes well for you.
I wrote a long email to the ABC regarding keeping The 7.30 Report as a serious current affairs program.
But this is how it’s always been!
There is an old pyrites mine near me that is costing the state $1 mill. a year to treat the sulphuric acid leaching from it and contaminating a nearby stream which feeds into the Lower Lakes. It is estimated that they’ll have to do this for at least another 1,000 years unless a permanent solution can be found. So far no one has been able to come up with one.
The mine only operated for 17 years (1955-72). I doubt the royalties totalled anywhere near $1 million, let alone billions.
This is not the only mine costing taxpayers small fortunes to keep safe. There are literally thousands across Australia.
OPT, my condolences on your loss. Cancer is a real bugger of a disease 🙁
[Peter McGauran fronted the committee before the bloke from EA. He didn’t have a great deal to say – not surprising really.]
I bet he didn’t, confessions. The people up here in the know will be watching so I’ll hear their reaction next week. I’ve had a lot of typing to do this morning so couldn’t watch it.
BK – your time was better spent I can tell you. Hewson has gone back to sticking up for his side. Must be looking for a job later on. Richardson wants Labor to go hard on the Greens and Hewson agrees.
OPT, condolences on your loss.
Richo says same sex marriage will get up. I don’t know how he comes up with the “several million” voters though. He must be including people not directly involved. About 2-4% of the population consider themselves gay/bisexual etc.
[Mr Richardson believes the number of Labor MPs in favour of gay marriage is growing and the policy will likely get over the line with the backing of Ms Gillard.
“And I have no doubt that privately she (Julia Gillard) would support it.”
It is an important issue because it affects “several million” voters, he said.
“There are a lot of gays in the world.”]
Dio,
I personally would vote for same sex marriages, but having said that I doubt that this one would be voted for if you took it too a referendum. I suspect that it will take another generation for this to be universally accepted.
[Finns – I know you are from the “The more books you read, the more stupid you become school” but this might have helped last night.]
Diog, I always had an ambivalent feeling towards Hitchens. I did have time for him pre 911. Post 911? – None. As i tried to tell Bilbo last night. But i cant do it for you, you have to decide.
[Review | ‘Hitch-22′: The two faces of Christopher Hitchens – Contradictions do not bother Christopher Hitchens, whose memoir examines the events that shaped him. BY ARIEL GONZALEZ
The title of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir is an obvious allusion to Joseph Heller’s great antiwar novel. Heller knew Hitchens; a generous blurb from him is given pride of place at the back of the book jacket. But one wonders what Heller, who died in 1999, would have thought of Hitchens’ post-9/11 warmongering, especially his defiant defense of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, a tragic morass engendered by the sort of bureaucratic arrogance and stupidity Catch-22 condemns……………… Hitchens has always cultivated contradictions, consequences be damned. Take friendship, for example. He holds it in esteem, but his almost pathological hatred of Bill Clinton drove him to betray White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, a longstanding friend, during the president’s impeachment trial. Blumenthal is omitted here; instead individual chapters are devoted to Hitchens’ relationship with the novelists Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis. To his credit, he never wavered in his support of Rushdie after the fatwa was issued against him. As for Amis, their bromance has lasted 35 years. Hitchens squelches rumors of any slapping and tickling between them, although he has engaged in homosexual acts, a phase that ended, he assures us, when he started losing his looks.
As it happens, women play a negligible role in this memoir. Girlfriends flit by unnamed. (Fashionistas will wish Hitchens had spilled the beans about his heated affair with the icy Anna Wintour.) Perhaps understandably, there is no mention of Hitchens’ first wife, a Greek lawyer who was pregnant when he ditched her for his current spouse, an American journalist who, less understandably, is hardly referred to. The same goes for his daughter. (He also has two sons.) However, we do learn a good deal about his mother. A lively and ambitious lady whose dreams were repeatedly dashed, she left her husband, a stiff-upper-lipped former Royal Navy officer, for another man after her boys had reached maturity. There was no happy ending. She and her lover committed suicide in an Athens apartment. Later Hitchens would learn of her hidden Jewish identity.
Hitchens is in many ways an impressive figure. He can be physically brave; recently, he was beaten for openly defacing the swastika logo of an Islamic fascist group. His work ethic is astonishing. In addition to four collections of reviews and essays, he has published books on Orwell, Jefferson, Clinton, Kissinger, Tom Paine, Mother Theresa and the toxicity of religion in the bestseller god Is Not Great. A high-functioning alcoholic, he produces 1,000 words a day. Breathtakingly well-read and articulate, he can, when the mood strikes him, be the funniest, most charming person in the room.
There is a dark side to him, too. His low point as a public intellectual occurred at the start of the Iraq war, when he threw in his lot with the neoconservative crowd. He lashed out at antiwar activists. As things got worse, friends worried. Incredibly, he still clings to the belief that Saddam Hussein had WMDs. Just you wait, he tells us. One day they will be found. He sets aside a single paragraph for self-criticism but concedes that the Bush-Cheney co-presidency was guilty of “impeachable incompetence.”
On this subject his credibility is nil. On other topics, such as the pedophile scandal engulfing the Roman Catholic Church, he remains an important advocate against corruption and hypocrisy. After reading Hitch-22, the only thing you can be sure of is that this flawed knight will not breathe contentedly unless he has a dragon to slay.]
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/30/1653164/books-memoir-the-two-faces-of.html
SK
The polls always have more than 50% in favor although there could be a wedging on the civil union vs marriage issue. I heard that a poll said all states were for it except Qld although that was on radio so I’m not sure where the state breakdown came from.
Finns
Agree with most of that. He got Iraq very wrong. At least he submitted to waterboarding and agreed it was torture.
Diogs,
I read one of his books and that was torture.
[Richardson wants Labor to]
[Richo says]
I am fed up with what Richo wants or says, and can’t for the life of me think why anyone in the media would take anything he says seriously! Richo says whatever is in Richo’s interests. Not Labor’s. Not gay people’s. He’s just an older version of Paul Howes but with far less relevence.
/rant
OPT
Condolences on the loss of your OH.
[I am fed up with what Richo wants or says, and can’t for the life of me think why anyone in the media would take anything he says seriously! Richo says whatever is in Richo’s interests. Not Labor’s. Not gay people’s. He’s just an older version of Paul Howes but with far less relevence.]
Spot on.
OPT,
My sincere condolences on the loss of your OH, I know words are little at such a time but please know our thoughts and caring are with you.
(hugs)
Puff.
Diog, he was not impressed with Mother Teresa either. This is another case of “i cant do it for you, you have to decide”:
[Mommie Dearest – The pope beatifies Mother Teresa, a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.
By Christopher Hitchens – This returns us to the medieval corruption of the church, which sold indulgences to the rich while preaching hellfire and continence to the poor. MT was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, which is the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction. And she was a friend to the worst of the rich, taking misappropriated money from the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti (whose rule she praised in return) and from Charles Keating of the Lincoln Savings and Loan. Where did that money, and all the other donations, go? The primitive hospice in Calcutta was as run down when she died as it always had been—she preferred California clinics when she got sick herself—and her order always refused to publish any audit. But we have her own claim that she opened 500 convents in more than a hundred countries, all bearing the name of her own order. Excuse me, but this is modesty and humility?]
http://www.slate.com/id/2090083/
Finns
I read “The Missionary Position” a while back. I was almost thrown out of a dinner party for discussing it!
Something that may or may not interest you the 6PR radio joke doing the 8 30am to 12 got the axe yesterday,low ratings were cited,poor old Simon he tried.
They say they want a more opinionated Jock joke?
So I think Bartlett or Paul Murray may be back,neither are worth 2 bob as far as I,m concerned,so I will continue to avoid it.
Dio,
Winning friends and influencing people again, huh? 😉
Finns
She also had this thing about not giving pain relief to people in her hospice. They died in agony.
Diog, is that a sequel to “The Perfume Garden”?
Next ALP conference dates have been set
[
RT @karlbitar: The next Australian Labor National Conference will be on 2, 3 & 4 December 2011 @ the Sydney Convention Centre #auspol
]
http://twitter.com/latikambourke
madcyril,
So does that mean the same sex marriage thing won’t get a look in until December next year?
SK
From everything I have read, that would seem the case
[RT @karlbitar: The next Australian Labor National Conference will be on 2, 3 & 4 December 2011 @ the Sydney Convention Centre #auspol ]
So, it’s in Sydneee after all … 🙂
The attempt by the “Mexicans” to move it to Melbourne didn’t work out, after all.
[The attempt by the “Mexicans” to move it to Melbourne didn’t work out, after all.]
The SMH story from a week back, discussing this ..
http://www.theage.com.au/national/labor-revolt-on-sydney-influence-20101113-17rxl.html
Evidently suppression orders aren’t enforceable on Facebook.
[VENGEFUL Facebook users wanting to name and shame the teenager accused of the Kapunda triple murders have hijacked the site to expose the alleged killer.
Yesterday, Facebook users armed with the accused’s details and images continued to publicly name the man who is charged with the murders of Andrew, Rose and 16-year-old Chantelle Rowe.
This is despite Magistrate Bob Harrap suppressing the name, image and address of the 18-year-old. While he declined to comment specifically on the Kapunda case, Attorney-General John Rau said the release of suppressed information on social networking sites could “compromise an investigation”.
But he admitted the state was powerless to stop Facebook hijackers.
“For a start, telecommunications is a matter that is regulated at a federal level,” Mr Rau said.
“Secondly, some of these platforms are offshore and that makes it even more difficult. The question is quite a complicated one and it involves whether the state has jurisdiction to deal with some of these matters and if it does how it goes about enforcing the rules.”]
[Richo says same sex marriage will get up. I don’t know how he comes up with the “several million” voters though. He must be including people not directly involved. ]
He’s including progressive voters who’ve become disillusioned with Labor & shifted their votes to the Greens.
Labor doesn’t have to copy the entire Greens platform word-for-word, but it does have to take steps to show these voters that it is still a progressive party.
Same-sex marriage, which has overwhelming support in the community is one such step.
I sent this email to Nicola Roxan parliamentary office. (is that the best place?)
I will let pb’ers know of the reply.
[Firstly, I wish to say that I am impressed with your performance in your portfolio and your performance in Parliament and in media interviews. I have always rated you well in your portfolio.
With regard, however, to the recent behaviour of the Opposition in blocking the pharmaceuticals legislation, I am surprised that you have not been more forceful, in parliament and in the media, in highlighting the effect this will have on people, in their millions, who have to use such drugs, particularly when they will be using for the term of their lives. The lifetime costs to a person on even one of these maintenance drugs would be easy for you to compute and use as an example.
I, for instance, am less interested in hearing about the effect opposition’s actions on the economy than its effect on the bank balance of my diabetic mother who has a pacemaker and takes half a dozen different drugs a day and will do so for the rest of her life.
Please advocate conspicuously in the media and the House for patients as individual, as well as for the economy]
Puff,
Excellent letter. Did you send this via email or snailmail?
@madcyril/3985,
I wonder if it’ll include any NBN details at the conference…? (unless pressured before then).
Now where have we heard this before?
brisoz,
The conference is next year, so the NBN bunfight should be well and truly over! (That is if Phoney grows a brain)
Fiz,
When did wanting to earn a living, feed, clothe and shelter your family become a luxury?
There’s a bit of sunshine being let into UK government. I wonder how long that will last…
Yes, that £170,000 water bill is for 5 months. The Camerons didn’t like the gib of the kitchen in Number 10 so they refurbished it out of their own pocket – the £55,000 was separate restoration. And it’s nice to see David Cameron is so supportive of his wife’s career.
It’s all very unseemly considering the cuts they have just undertaken. Here, you 500,000 people can lose your jobs… but I’m OK because I can afford to pop in a new kitchen because the old one was so dowdy.
[
Tory peer says majority have ‘never had it so good’
]
I’m sure the majority of Torie peer’s have never had it so good. As to the rest of the population, I gather that’s another matter
Oops, sorry – that should have been:
It’s nice to see Nick Clegg is so supportive of his wife’s career.