McMillan extends through West Gippsland from Pakenham in Melbourne’s eastern outskirts to the western reaches of the Latrobe Valley, and along the coast from Wonthaggi through Wilsons Promontory to Welshpool. It covered broadly similar territory on its creation in 1949, the area having previously been covered by Gippsland and to a smaller extent by Flinders. The redistribution following the expansion of parliament in 1984 caused it to lose its coastal territory while extending further eastwards along the Princes Highway to Traralgon, which was eventually reversed by the redistribution of 2004. The transfer of Traralgon and neighbouring Latrobe Valley towns to Gippsland on the latter occasion substantially weakened Labor, and the seat has been held by the Liberals ever since.
Conservative strength in the rural areas kept McMillan in Liberal hands from 1949 until 1980, barring a National/Country Party interruption from 1972 to 1975 when it was won and then lost by Arthur Hewson. However, post-war growth in the Latrobe Valley strengthened Labor over time, leading to a close result in 1974, a relatively mild anti-Labor swing in 1975, and finally a win for Labor candidate Barry Cunningham in 1980. Cunningham was swept out a decade later with the statewide backlash that cost Labor nine Victorian seats at the 1990 election, but he recovered the seat by a 0.4% margin in 1993. This was not enough to save him from even the relatively modest swing Labor suffered in Victoria at the 1996 election, when Russell Broadbent gained the seat for the Liberals with a swing of 2.5%.
Broadbent first came to parliament in 1990 as member for Corinella, a seat to the immediate west of McMillan which existed from 1990 to 1996. He was defeated at the 1993 election by Labor’s Alan Griffin, who moved to his present home of Bruce with the abolition of Corinella. Broadbent returned as member for McMillan three years later, before again experiencing the sharp end of life in a marginal seat with his defeat 25-year-old Labor candidate Christian Zahra in 1998. Zahra added 2.3% to his margin against the trend of the 2001 election, before emerging a big loser when his electorate traded Morwell and Traralgon for conservative farming and coastal areas around Leongatha and Wonthaggi. Zahra was left needing a 2.9% to retain his seat in 2004, but a 2.1% swing the other way saw it change hands for the fifth time in six elections.
Thus began a remarkable third stint in parliament for Broadbent, who went on to perform very strongly in limiting the swings against him to 0.2% in 2007 and 0.4% in 2010, before securing his hold with a swing of 7.6% in 2013. He has been assisted by a trend against Labor in the Latrobe Valley and surrounding areas, which has been equally evident at state level. Broadbent has failed to win promotion, but has generated headlines on a number of occasions with his liberal positions on asylum seekers.
My adopted children came from Protestant homes, although I do know that the mothers were given a little time to decide whether to give the baby up or not. The babies were not snatched away at birth.
Thanks bemused and sorry psyclaw!
What was done to those mothers and their babies was appalling, cruel and wrong, by any century’s standards. It was what they did in those times, but it caused fore-see-able grief and harm. It was part of religious control of women and that institution’s total disregard for the health and well-being of women and girls.
himi@14
Many here have recognised the accuracy of your comments about vexatious and stupid contributions.
Some here use the comments to sharpen their responses, others (most) ignore the stupidities and see them for what they are.
What would PB be without a few countervailing views even if they are nothing more that Liberal party cheat-sheet comments?
In some cases the avatars probably describe the comments from several people actually working the site. Some comments range from the almost cogent to others having the intellectual content of somebody in Year 6.
The site you refer to often gets the dander up of some – even our host – but it is still there, still offering the same tired lines (for the most part) and largely ignored by most, most of the time.
MTBW@52
That’s what introduced the topic.
But I feel sure there have been other movies on that topic before although not with quite the same intensity.
Tricot@54
I have always seen a lot of responses to tisme as people letting off steam instead of, say, kicking the dog. 😛
Before I am jumped on I don’t advocate kicking dogs.
An adviser to the PM? What hope do we have!
[“The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling.”
Mr Newman wrote he believed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change resorted to “dishonesty and deceit” and were “intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money”.
Labor has called on the Prime Minister to ask Mr Newman to withdraw his comments “which damage Australia’s relationships with its trading partners”.
“These extraordinary comments from one of Tony Abbott’s closest advisers prove the Coalition is not serious about taking action on climate change and does not accept the overwhelming evidence of a changing climate,” the Opposition’s acting environment spokesman Shayne Neumann said.
“The worst part about Mr Newman’s ignorant comments is that he’s only voicing what we know Tony Abbott thinks about climate change.”
Fairfax Media has contacted the Prime Minister’s office for a response to Mr Newman’s comments.]
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbotts-business-adviser-says-australia-taken-hostage-by-climate-change-madness-20131231-303qw.html#ixzz2p0PP4VZn
Puff
I think you are denying the real reasons for such practices it was called “shame”.
Fran and others
The “innate” point is that Brandis and his creature Wilson get to look into their hearts and say what human rights are, and aren’t, rather than human rights relevantly being defined by international agreements to which Australia has committed itself and which are recognised in Australian law.
Thus Tim Wilson has said on the record he is not sure there is a human right to freedom from discrimination … even though articles 2 and 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (contained in the definition of human rights in the Australian Human Rights Commission Act) indicate otherwise.
The man isn’t a lawyer but that’s no excuse. Clearly unfit for appointment but there we are.
Ironically (to put it nicely) Brandis has criticised the Human Rights Commission as being “arbiters” of human rights …
In the early 1960s a girl getting ‘into trouble’ was a serious crime against society. There was no sole parent pension back then and it was shameful to be a single mother. If a shotgun wedding was out of the question a pregnant girl was packed off somewhere out of sight to have her baby and these babies were always given up for adoption. Think of Tony Abbott and his girlfriend – he chickened out of marrying her so her baby had to be given away.
At my girls high school a girl would just not turn up one day. If anyone asked where she was the excuse was always the same – she had gone to stay with family in the country and would be studying by corresponcdence for a while. These girls never came back to school.
Even twenty years ago this sort of thing was still going on, as I learnt when former friends stopped sending Christmas newsletters – their daughter had become pregnant at age 17, had been sent away to have the baby and it had been given up for adoption. I could not believe how they could have so easily discarded their own grand-child.
http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2013/12/30/tough-year-yet-encouraging-ri-diplomacy-marty-says.html
A happy New year to all
[Fairfax Media has contacted the Prime Minister’s office for a response to Mr Newman’s comments.]
The PM’s Office noted that the snow was beautiful and questioned the sanity of anyone not loving the climate.
One woman I know recently traced her birth parents.
Her mother was sixteen (father not much older). They both wanted to get married and keep the baby, but were told they were too young.
Forty years later, they’re still very happily married.
My own family has a slightly different take. My great grandmother got pregnant at 18, was told she could return home but the baby couldn’t. So she ‘farmed’ the baby out locally, paying for its upkeep, and visited when possible.
One day my (supposed) great grandmother was visiting her sister in town. She had just realised she was never going to have a child of her own. Her sister said to her, “Oh, I know of a baby you can have.”
They walked into the farmhouse, scooped up the baby and (supposed) great grandmother took her home.
No formal adoption ever took place – and my grandmother had a vivid memory, from when she was about three, of ‘a madwoman trying to pull me off the train’.
Another depressing Tisme-ism:
[How many degrees cooler did Gillard’s Carbon Tax make the Earth again?]
It took just under two hundred years of industrial output, increasing exponentially year-by-year, for the planet to warm. It’s going to take a lot longer than that to restore atmospheric CO2 levels to “normal”.
Expecting instant results is intellectual wickedness and bastardry of the highest order.
But we have to start somewhere, because there is nothing surer than the planet is going to continue to warm, with catastrophic results for future – and even current – generations if we don’t.
If nations persist in waiting for all other nations to go first in CO2 abatement, then nothing will ever happen.
If idiots like Tisme insist that Australia must make a measurable contribution to that abatement for its efforts to count – or else do nothing at all – then they should also insist that we never enter into any international agreements, treaties or programs because our share is bound to be small, compared to other countries.
This works both ways, of course. Unless we co-operate with other nations, they won’t co-operate with us. The Seans of this world will be the loudest screamers for international help and pity if a disaster ever affects Australia so badly that we can’t handle the consequences all on our own.
It could be war. It could be a natural disaster. But rest assured that Sean Tisme and his arrogant pals, used to bragging about how Australia is “Godzone” or somehow “better” than other countries, will be wimpering about how we contributed to the UN, or famine relief or whatever, and why don’t other countries help us when our hour of need arrived? It will fall on deaf ears, and deservedly so. You get back what you give.
At the heart of Sean’s whole outlook on life is that we here are somehow “special”; that we deserve preferential treatment because we just DO deserve it.
It allows them to mock other nations and other peoples. It allows them to believe they can lecture other people on how to run their countries, while at the same time closing off our borders, and shunning the making of any contributions from us in the other direction.
Sean’s Australia is a nation of takers and arrogant finger pointers. It is primed for a giant comeuppance one day, and we will have no-one else to blame but ourselves if this attitude persists.
What shits me personally is that I will have to cop it, along with the braggarts and bullies who get us into whatever mess is yet to come.
The World does not owe us a living. We have to pay our way, and make efforts commensurate with our size and population. We are among the chief CO2 polluters on the planet. We supply many of the other chief polluters. We can’t lecture everyone else on how to get along in an international community if we ourselves refuse to make an effort.
Things like scare campaign concerning the Carbon Tax and (Sean’s other obsession) The Boats win election campaigns, but they are only convenient media vehicles, put in place to more easily distinguish the two sides of politics: ersatz, confected, proxy crises that, in the grand scheme of things, have no import.
Sean’s mistake is to cling to these issues as if they had the potentcy they enjoyed before the election. They don’t.
The public only “cares” about them if they are asked about them by an opinion pollster. Otherwise they couldn’t give a fig about them.
Even the polling is showing a softening of attitudes. A new government has been elected and the voters expect it to govern, not to continue to campaign for an election it has already won, to punish its opponents long after they have left politics, defeated, and to pursue political obsessions that were never genuinely important except in the frenzy of political combat, as easily discernible symbols of what each side stood for.
People like Sean, with his cretinous over-simplifications, and the guy I met at the barbecue the other day who seems to sincerely believe that the 1998-2008 drought, with it empty dams and its ravaged regional landscapes, was a one-off event, never to be repeated, will just have to get out of the way and let the real adults take charge. Saving Sean’s sorry arse from itself will be more akin to collateral damage than the main aim of the exercise.
The puerile, smug, arrogant Coalition government that seems to be permanently mired in the mindset of privileged GPS schooldays and male-only university colleges is already on the skids, and boasting about Boats or The Carbon Tax won’t save them.
Repealing laws doesn’t run countries.
Making laws does… but they have to be good laws, that benefit no-one unfairly over anyone else, simply because of their social or economic station.
Slogans are no substitute for government. Smartarsed quips about how much the Carbon Tax reduced world temperatures in 18 months are worse than useless. Every time they are uttered they set us back years, while we bury our heads in the sand and try to wish the consequences of our own actions away.
Opinion polls won’t solve wars, or abate climate catastrophes. There’s an argument to say they make them worse, because they give barracking oafs like Tisme, and my guy at the barbecue the other day, a chance to have their ignorant say and – horror of horrors – to influence governance.
To them the only issue is who won the Pub Test, who had the last laugh, calibrated in hours or days, not in the future years and decades ahead of us.
The idea that we can now – having reached the top of the ladder – just coast along and spout instructions to the rest of the world as to what they are to do – is dangerous and self-defeating.
We are a small nation, existing perilously on the margins of Asia. It’s our 20 million, against Asia’s billions. What have we done with our little plot? Dug holes in it and virtually given the dirt away to those who would add value to our resources, while we pollute away to our heart’s content, and then try to justify it on self-interested moral grounds that are mostly quicksand.
In many ways we are an international disgrace, and the way that other nations are starting to treat us serves us right. It will only get worse if the selfish Tismes of this country continue to have any political sway at all.
For the rest of us, it’s simply our bad luck that they do.
Tricot@54
This is true, but a big part of my frustration is the fact that the responses are almost always within the frame set by the conservatives – “Stop the boats!”. Sure, the whole discussion on this matter has been within that frame for the last six years, but that doesn’t change the fact that right now we (on the progressive side of the world) need to be getting outside those conservative frames and addressing the issues more completely.
It’s the same as the situation with budget surpluses – the Howard government managed to frame almost everything economic in terms of surpluses, tax cuts, and ever increasing profits. Labor never made any real effort to break out of that frame, and the end result was that they spent years struggling mightily to achieve those goals, rather than asking whether the goals were what we really wanted or needed to achieve.
Honing arguments against conservative talking points is a great idea (and it’s something that Zoomster has said she uses PB for), but we should at least try and put broader thought into the arguments before we start honing them to a fine edge.
All that said, abusing an idiot on the Internet can be a reasonably satisfying way to let off steam – certainly better than kicking dogs 😉
himi
Bushfire
Thank you for “cretinous over-simplifications”. 🙂
BB,
Sean writes simply to agitate and annoy. He’s not interested in what others have to say. And, the more peeved you become, the happier he is.
In the end conversing with Sean is like playing chess with a pigeon. No matter how carefully you prepare your next move all he’s interested in doing is pooping on the pieces and board and strutting around as if he’s won.
Ignore the cretin.
Of course, my last post /would/ end up sitting immediately after Bushfire Bill’s latest excellent dismantling of the conservative political and intellectual vacuum . . . Possibly an indication that what I’m railing against isn’t quite as serious a problem as I’d though 😉
himi
[Australia is following a scheme introduced in NZ to decide which wildlife should be allowed to die off
It’s conservation by numbers, or – as one headline writer put it – “survival of the cheapest”. In a country with one of the world’s highest extinction rates, scientists are using a mathematical equation to determine which species should be saved and which let go.]
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=11179373
[In the early 1960s a girl getting ‘into trouble’ was a serious crime against society. There was no sole parent pension back then and it was shameful to be a single mother. If a shotgun wedding was out of the question a pregnant girl was packed off somewhere out of sight to have her baby and these babies were always given up for adoption. Think of Tony Abbott and his girlfriend – he chickened out of marrying her so her baby had to be given away. ]
God you are a wanker.
It wasn’t even Tony Abbott’s baby. I know you are trying to do your desperate little anti-Abbott rant for the day but try and check your facts first before saying something so incredibly stupid and wrong.
Quite frankly the girl is to blame in this case because she was sleeping with more than one guy and didn’t know who knocked her up(or purposely lied)
If ST doesn’t fit the definition of a troll then my understanding must be incorrect. Why he is tolerated or even acknowledged is a mystery.
himi
Just keep doing what you are doing – we all have our own perspectives.
No Sean is just an idiot, who thinks he is an expert on every subject.
Maurice Newman who was once head of the ABC thinks Climate Change is nonesence as you would.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/tony-abbotts-business-adviser-says-australia-taken-hostage-by-climate-change-madness-20131231-303qw.html
“nonsence” may have been a better choice!
sean
Could I be so rude as to ask how old you are?
[It wasn’t even Tony Abbott’s baby.]
Ah yes, but Abbott thought it was.
He can’t even do “deserting an illegitimate baby and its mother” with any class.
Abbott is a bastard’s bastard.
MTBW,
or nonescience!
MTBW@74
This is the bloke who, as Chairman of the ASX, went absolutely bonkers over the Y2K non-event and cost Australian business $Billions by insisting they pursue a largely non-existent problem.
Perhaps he is over compensating for his folly then, but the differences are stark. AGW is a real problem.
Poor Maurice just can’t pick the difference.
GG
I will give you that one!
Sean Tisme@70
I can’t quite believe I’m responding to this, but . . .
You do remember, when this came up in the first place, that Abbott actually thought it was his baby? He obviously thought so at the time, otherwise there would have been no sheepish mea culpas with all the associated damage to his public persona. It’s also entirely possible that his girlfriend genuinely thought it was his baby at the time. Assuming no deliberate misinformation was being distributed (which is surely the most charitable starting point?), Abbott’s girlfriend found herself pregnant, asked him to “do the right thing by her”, and found that he was unwilling to do so – an understandable reaction from many normal 19 year old males, but one that reflects on /him/, not on anyone else.
Trying to shift blame for Abbott’s decision not to support his girlfriend and what he believed was his unborn child is a pretty pond-scum thing to do. In fact, even pond scum would probably balk at it.
himi
And now I’ve managed to screw up the HTML . . . Hopefully it won’t spread to the rest of the page
himi
Not to do with anything but Kogan has a Scanner for all the old photo slides we have in boxes – if you are as old us me – it scans them to digital.
http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/combo-scanner-5-1/
Apparently, the world is just sunshine, lollypops and rainbows…….
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-live-in-the-best-of-times-so-dont-buy-the-media-gloom-20131230-302wn.html
[If ST doesn’t fit the definition of a troll then my understanding must be incorrect. Why he is tolerated or even acknowledged is a mystery.]
There must be a category below troll that ST aspires to reach when he grows up?
Bowen Presser good.
Takeout lines
Tax and red tape increase for small business.
On $5 Fee. Its a Sick Tax
[Apparently, the world is just sunshine, lollypops and rainbows…….
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/we-live-in-the-best-of-times-so-dont-buy-the-media-gloom-20131230-302wn.html%5D
Abbott’s problem is that nothing has changed (or it has got worse) and he convinced the foolish that everything was wrong before and that he could fix it easily just by taking office. I personally can’t see how anyone was stupid enough to believe anything he said at all but more than 50% of Australians were indeed that dumb.
MTBW@83
You write that just as I am pulling my scanner apart to attempt a repair. 😛
Not only has Tisme insulted Leone, who is far above him in knowledge and (forgive me, Leone) in age, he has proved his lack of class by his language on preganancy. I doubt he’d be welcome in the higher circles of the Libs.
bemused
I have boxes of them downstairs – are they worth doing?
Kogan also has this:
http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/tp-link-tp-link-24-port-unmanaged-switch-tl-sg1024d/?utm_source=kogan&utm_medium=chrome-extension&utm_campaign=new-product
Also for those not aware tomorrow marks more money for the School Kids Bonus.
What happens when a new government does not have a mini budget legacy policies play out.
PeeBee
re ‘finding’ on ipad – install Chrome (free), use its find feature
Bushfire Bill loved post 64 and agreed with it wholeheartedly, just wish I could be so eloquent.
On the subject of Sean I find his arguments and comments annoying but someone always responds which has given me access to thoughts and arguments that I can now use to refute some of the misconceptions my brother in law spouts as fact. Then again, I might never get invited to my sisters again. Quietly responding to arguments while the other party shouts louder and louder put things into context for some young family members.
MTBW@90
Boxes of scanners?
It would depend what was in the boxes.
Go look at Cnet browser comparison for expert advice. Every year at around CES time in January White Hat hackers put browsers through security paces and rate most and least secure.
Fran, just come back from a walk and saw your suggestion it works a treat so thanks. I am finding the iPad a little frustrating, and me thinks it has been designed to ensure an income stream to Apple. My son explained that I can’t just plug it into my computer to download files, I need to download iTunes to the computer first. Very limiting. I am also annoyed with having to use my (fat) finger to move the cursor and the screen is a smear of finger prints.
It is convenient to reading stuff but the type size is quiet small and the stuff on the screen sometimes starts jumping around.
peebee
ICloud, Dropbox etc for files from your Ipad.
The real meaning of the current polls.
https://twitter.com/davidbewart/status/417809678936973312/photo/1
Otis’s, thanks for the suggestion. Will give it a try as well.
Peebee
Also there are apparently USB sticks available by 3rd party that fit into Ipads.