The BludgerTrack poll aggregate this week continues its steady drift back to the Coalition, with new figures from Newspoll, Morgan and Essential contributing to a 0.4% shift on two-party preferred. Labor now barely maintains overall majority status on the seat projection following a further loss of two seats, one in New South Wales and one in Victoria. Tony Abbott has also recovered the lead as preferred prime minister on the back of new figures from Newspoll and Essential Research. His net approval rating also continues to get less bad in the wake of MH17, although the rate of improvement has slowed and he is still well into the negative. Bill Shorten’s loss of the preferred prime minister mantle is not on account of his own rating, which has been steady since March outside of a brief spike in the wake of the budget. Full details as always on the sidebar.
The ABC’s Jemelle Wells seems to have gone missing from ICAC reporting.
About time. Thick as 2 bricks and then some.
https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/24717547/abbott-stops-over-in-singapore/ Ahh I am heading for the hills :devil:
CTar1
Nick Dole seems to doing a good job though.
Doesn’t mess around with either side of politics.
mari
Pretend to be an NZ’er time.
[Pretend to be an NZ’er time.]
Although their conservative government appears to be headed for re-election next month, if this paywalled article in Crikey is to be believed.
http://www.crikey.com.au/2014/08/14/poll-bludger-kiwi-election-campaign-ramps-up-with-pirates-lurking/
[ Say “Cheese” Tony. There are virtues to #Auspol PMs not latching on to every bandwagon going… Clever, those Swiss.
Yeah, they did pretty well out of the Nazis too.]
Switzerland only had 100 casualties in WW2. And no-one hates then.
If you look at WW2 as a game theory exercise, Switzerland won.
slothy
Just received a letter from our energy supplier advising of price rises. Peak electricity is up by 1.3 ¢/kWh, the supply charge by 3.75 ¢/day and the solar rebate is dropping by 2.2 ¢/kWh.
Electricity will always be cheaper under a Liberal Gov.. just like interest rates
Dont know if this has already been posted
[Russia has described as “unacceptable” the blame placed on it by Australia for Moscow’s perceived role in the crash of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July.
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it deemed ‘‘unacceptable the recent allegations made by Australia that place the blame in the tragic events in Ukraine, including the crash of the Malaysian airliner on Russia”, according to an English-language report on state-backed Ria Novosti.
A separate English-language report on the state-backed Itar-Tass service went further, slamming Australian politicians’ views and language surrounding the conflict in eastern Ukraine.]
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/mh17-russia-slams-australia-over-blame-for-downed-airliner-20140814-103u4c.html#ixzz3ALSooGpF
[Switzerland only had 100 casualties in WW2. And no-one hates then.]
Not so.
[Malkin is from the Philippines; Kos is from Bolivia or some fucking hole; Reynolds is from the state of Tennessee, which is basically a bunch of idiots living in a giant rhombus. Legally they are American, but culturally they are Swiss.
What’s wrong with being Swiss? Listen, and I’ll tell you.
The Swiss are the world’s most miserable creatures. Baffled and affronted by anyone who tries to make a joke, they fanatically disapprove of any humour that rises above the level of a clown being hit with a broom, though if you spill soup down your shirt they will laugh. Incapable of joy, they devote their dismal lives to banking and endless niggling referendums. From time to time an Italian visitor will have his car clamped, or be fined for smoking: this provides the only sour amusement a Swiss ever experiences.
After a few decades of this he dies, and the cuckoo clock croaks its mournful music over his lifeless body.
Go and fuck yourself, if you are a blogger or a Swiss. A very Merry Christmas to everyone else.]
[Yeah, the did pretty well out of the Nazis too.]
Just trying to imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth if Gillard, for instance, had single-handedly almost severed trade with Russia, plus had been diplomatically back-handed by their Foreign Office, as well as personally shirt-fronted their President.
Add to that being late for SBY’s birthday party (at which said Russian President was her next-door neighbour at the table), bragged to the Chinese about finding a plane that still isn’t found, and then travelled to Europe so she could offer a couple of Hercules aircraft to drop supplies onto a mountain top.
The Daily Tele would have been trumpeting the fuel bill, the hotel bill and the food bill. Abbott would have been up in Parliament calling her “an embarrassment”. Mesma would have been waxing lyrical about how useless it was being on the UN Security Council if this was all we could achieve.
And all that’s without a shoe malfunction to use as a Press Gallery metaphor for her government’s inept club-footedness. If there HAd been a shoe malfunction they’d have gone the whole hog: eyes, ear lobes, fat ankles, big bum, red glasses (why no comment about Abbott’s glasses, by the way?), inexperience and general unsuitability for office.
Not getting “troops” on the ground in the Ukraine would have been condemned as a national humiliation and “dishonouring the fallen” on a “foreign field”. using the phrase “call Australia home” would be dismissed out of hand as a crass reference to QANTAS which she allowed to practically go broke.
Then we have the “spare prick at a wedding” syndrome, where no-one of any importance met her caravan when she reached England, plus of course how she insulted the US Secretaries of both State and Defence by grandstanding overseas to the sound of two thumbnails clicked together, while they cooled their heels talking to underlings here.
Now it seems the only ones losing out are us. We don’t sell cheese. The Swiss do. I call that smart… by the Swiss.
@dave/53
And he looks like a little elf.
William
Keys may be a conservative and that’s bad enough but he’s also way less embarrassing when speaking on the International world stage.
William
[Reynolds is from the state of Tennessee, which is basically a bunch of idiots living in a giant rhombus.]
Excellent! 😆
[Switzerland only had 100 casualties in WW2]
Plus they got the Von Trapp family singers
[victoria
Posted Thursday, August 14, 2014 at 3:02 pm | Permalink
Bludgertrack is depressing. 🙁 ]
Vic
Don’t know if it helps, but I seem to recall reading that Kevin Bonham’s poll of polls has it at 52.3 to 47.7.
But it IS depressing to think that so many Australians appear to have such short memories and are so bloody gullible.
I see Tony is returning to Australia tonight, what a master stroke. He avoids polly pedal, misses the US Defence and State Secs, lobs in The Netherlands to be asked why are you here.
Flies to the UK to see Cameron who is on Holidays abroad, leave the night before the UK PM returns, wops into the UAE to see a couple of RAAF planes, then as all pollies do, stopover in Singapore to get the briefing notes correct.
I wonder if anyone will ask Tony WHY he flew around the world to avoid meeting world leaders?
@Darn/65
Well, they are the same type of people who fall for scams!
Gareth
[he looks like a little elf.]
He used to do a lot of Canberra local reporting. Known around the place as ‘Cub Reporter’.
Is this where the NSW Liberal Party is going.
http://chasemeladies.blogspot.com.au/2004/06/my-favourite-liberal.html
[ And he looks like a little elf.]
🙂
Name changes?
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/14/should-the-australian-greens-party-change-its-name?CMP=soc_568
Rua
[lobs in The Netherlands to be asked why are you here.]
I’ve had a look at the European Press and strangely I can’t find any articles saying ‘Tony, we’re already missing you. Come back soon.’
This is bewildering.
@William/55
Should be interesting to see if the Internet Party NZ gains seats and demands the anti-piracy/other policies to be removed.
If anything, the NZ are smarter than we are, they are rolling out FTTP at least.
guytaur@71
Wow! I bet Centre has a few suggestions. 😀
Actually, I can think of a few myself.
BK @ 42
[Did previous bills split out the carbon tax component/kWh?]
Yes, but the price rise is after adjusting for the carbon tax demise. It’s no surprise. I’d have been shocked if prices had really dropped as promised.
What I hadn’t counted on though was the drop in the solar rebate. Guess I should have expected the end of the CT tax to have an effect on it.
bemused
On the Liberal Party ones I would suggest they change their name to the Tea Party. More accurate
Re opinions on the history of Switzerland: From Graham Greene’s script for Carol Reed’s film noir classic, ‘The Third Man’, the following lines are spoken by Orson Welles’ character Harry Lime, a blackmarket villain in post WWII Vienna.
[Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.]
I think The Greens should change their name to the Progressive Labor Party. 😀
*ducks and runs away*
Abbott’s Law. Personal popularity is directly proportional to the square of his distance from Australia.
Bushfire Bill @ 60
[Just trying to imagine the weeping and gnashing of teeth if Gillard, for instance, had single-handedly almost severed trade with Russia,]
One of the puzzles is why Putin didn’t stop the importing of live cattle from here. There have been several shipments of up to 30,000 head in recent times and more are in the pipeline. That would have put the wind up the Nats.
Diogs,
The Gang of Greens would be more hip!
Of course the Swiss do have the substantial diplomatic advantage of being able to ring up senior government figures from any potential aggressor and saying WTTE “Touch us and we’ll burn your money”.
And what’s wrong with hitting clowns with brooms? Or any other blunt instrument for that matter.
Diogenes@78
Centre would probably opt for L O O N S Party.
I rather like Greentards myself.
Abbott has signed up to looking at how our air warfare destroyers can be reconfigured to carry anti-ballistic missile missiles.
Now have a think about this. Such missiles would be absolutely useless to Australia in the absence on US sensing devices. Specifically, Australia does not have the infastructure to detect, track and target enemy ballistic missiles.
And then have a think abou this: the Americans want the configuration to include the possibility of US commanders firing the missiles remotely.
Then have a think about this: the only plausible enemy with ballistic missile capability is China.
Then have a think about this: the recent forces posture agreement between the US has doubled the provision for marines to be based in Australia and has further opened Australian airports and harbours to US aircraft and navy ships.
Have a think about this: the length of the agreement has been extended to 25 years.
Finally, have a think about this: Shorten has supported it all.
This may turn out to be the worst ever decision in terms of foreign policy and war fighting. Our options for staying out of a general east asian war are being eroded to the vanishing point.
Level of public awareness of the implications and live debate about the issues?
Zero. Zip. De nada. Nothing.
What do we get instead?
Froth and furore about a seven year old holding up a severed head.
[William
Reynolds is from the state of Tennessee, which is basically a bunch of idiots living in a giant rhombus.
Excellent! ]
No, terrible. Tennessee is in the shape of a parallelogram, not a rhombus. A rhombus is a special type of parallelogram, one with 4 equal sides, like a diamond.
The Australian has an editorial which can be summed up that strategic mistakes were made in Iraq.
Specifically, the big mistake was that Obama withdrew US forces too soon.
Those warmongers!
As winter follows autumn! Start a war, fuck it up, and blame the left.
Atticus
[In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.]
Actually the Swiss didn’t even invent the cuckoo clock; the Germans did.
The Swiss managed velcro, the Swiss army knife and muesli which is a pretty poor return as Harry Lime pointed out.
Bw
[general east asian ]
Which military is he with?
Europe has a bit more to worry about than a couple of hundred dead and what Putin does in the Ukraine, serious thought that might be.
It’s the economy, stupid. The Putin pro- and anti- sanctions might just be enough to knock the whole stack of cards down.
Abbott may, or may not have noticed this. Who knows? He went of breathing fire and brimstone about increasing sanctions against Putin.
But he has gone a bit quiet about it while he was over there.
Maybe someone over there took him aside and said to him, ‘This is serious. F*** off and STF!’
Petrol expenditure as percentage of income
https://mobile.twitter.com/GeorgeBludger/status/499808257171402755/photo/1
mari: Don’t worry, Abbott has already left Singapore, in fact he’s already back in Australian airspace.
CTaR1
[Which military is he with?] Same as General Myrmidon of the ‘Numbers have a Quality All of Their Own Army’].
Talk about a nation of sleepwalkers.
I thought the Swiss had some hand in developing chocolate.
All jokes aside, I found Switzerland to be a fabulously friendly, clean and picturesque place when I visited in 1991. The toilet block in the caravan park just out of Berne was nicer than a number of hotel rooms Hubby and I rented in Italy and France.
BW
I’m always amused when warmongers like Bolt etc lecture the US on the war. They don’t seem to see a significant downside to 100,000 American troops having to live permanently in another country for no reason other than to pretend the war was a success.
CTAR1
Practicing my “sex” for “six” right now
Tweet from Jack The Insider
[You should see all the poor people driving home. They’re f@@king everywhere.]
bemused
[I rather like Greentards myself.]
there’s no requirement to respect our politics, but I find it regrettable that you use an aphetic of a word now deprecated as abusive to the cognitively disabled to take a cheap shot.
Affixing ‘tard to political names is one of the least pleasant Americanisms one sees around the web these days. I call upon you to apologise and to drop this practice.
All those stereotypes and resentments!
For many centuries, the Swiss have demonstrated a fundamental point about wars: it is far, far smarter to stay out of them than it is to get into them.
Instead of getting narked, I suggest we should spend a bit more time figuring out how they managed the trick.
Maybe, just maybe, Australia could learn something from having a very well-armed neutrality policy.
Instead, Australia is a sleeve-tugging, coat tail war regular and is sleepwalking towards what is potentially the Mother of all Wars without even a public policy debate about it.
I had a Swiss Auntie and Uncle and have four Swiss cousins. I have regular social contact with two of the latter and they are the funloving life of the party.
I am not sure they are representative of the other millions of Switsers.
It really doesn’t matter if the Swiss had developed nothing.
But, as it turns out, they have a high-end engineering industry that Australia could die for.
fran
[All jokes aside, I found Switzerland]
How can you ignore the fact, that in almost all contexts, the Swiss are well ‘out there’?