The BludgerTrack poll aggregate records a slight move back to the Coalition this week, which is more to do with the reduced impact of last week’s Newspoll outlier than this week’s ReachTEL and Essential Research results, both of which landed right on trend. The Coalition is up 0.7% on the primary vote, 0.4% on two-party preferred and one on the seat projection, that being in Tasmania, where the Liberals scored strongly in the unpublished ReachTEL breakdown. No new figures for the leadership ratings this week.
Hi brains trust —
my phone got zapped by lighning a few days ago (which killed it). I’ve attached a different handset, an older one, and although I can ring out perfectly well and get dial tone, I’m not getting calls in.
The problem appears to be between here and the connection (so Telstra won’t touch it) as the phone in the shed works fine.
Ideas?
guytaur
[Why hide if all above board]
This involves some circular logic. No matter how many times someone repeats it, it’s circular. Who said he hid it? That he didn’t report it doesn’t prove active dissembling.
Start somewhere else. Such as
[ 2nd why is it only the PM’s daughter that got such a scholarship?
These are reasonable questions to ask.]
Yes, this is a reasonable question to ask.
z,
It’s the Carbon Tax.
zoomster
Use the shed as the base station for cordless even if you have to get range extenders for a cordless phone.
Either that or when paying to fix the line get the copper replaced with fibre. It does sound like the line damage is on your property.
Thats the best I can come up with. Hope others have another solution.
fredex
And how did you like the tiller in Pope’s cartoon?
@BBCBreaking: Experimental vaccine against #Ebola virus declared safe after human trials (via @bbckamal)
http://t.co/kRIUdmM8Ii
Re DN @47: my argument is that this ‘scholarship’ is a gift to an immediate family member of the then Opposition Leader and therefore prima facie shouild have been disclosed. I am not fully au fait with the rules for disclosure, but those who do know also seem to be uncertain. A precautionary principle would have strongly suggested disclosure as the wiser course. I believe Mr Abbott didn’t disclose the ‘scholarship’ (wheras he disclosed smaller items like tickets and designer clothing) because he knew how dodgy it looked. The college clearly did not want the gift disclosed – they went after the person who made it public, whereas they would have wanted to gain favourable publicity from a genuine scholarship.
So when is a scholarship genuine? Well, if it had been advertised, if there had been a process to apply for it, if there had been a process to assess applicants and choose awardees, if there was a case that the awardee was a person of outstanding merit who would be otherwise unable to afford the course, if there had been a prior history of awards…
But no, this looks and smells like a gift. Now it is not illegal to give or receive gifts, but special considerations apply to elected representatives.
Has Ms Abbott done anything illegal? No. Has the college? Not on what is known. Has Mr Abbott? Again, not on what is known. But is this good enough for the Prime Minister of Australia? No.
Heard Abetz say on the 3aw news this morning that the $7 co-payment is good policy and is not dead at all. So they can’t even put out a consistent message on that.
BK
Appreciated the whole thing – a clever mixture of subtle and direct.
Actually the best political comment by miles over the past year has been by the cartoonists, I’m amazed at how they have been allowed such freedom in contrast to the very short leash for the journos.
An omnibus of cartoons of 2014 would be very interesting.
The right hand doesn’t know what the extreme right hand is doing…
[Has Ms Abbott done anything illegal? No. ]
Agree 100%.
is it a threat to democracy that should be illegal – yes.
The last sentence of L. Tingle’s article sums up how absurd it is for Abbott to continually berate Labor for not having any better ideas.
[we are only just approaching the half-way mark in the term of the Parliament, and with the government in such dire trouble, there really isn’t any true political pressure on the Opposition to reveal anything.]
Maybe the copay is alive, just different.
[THE federal government will put a new price signal on visits to the doctor by using regulations to overcome a Senate veto of its $7 GP co-payment amid confusion yesterday over the fate of its controversial health reform.
Sticking to its goal of charging more for primary healthcare from next July, the government is drafting the new rules but abandoning its original budget proposal.
The government has decided on the new approach to rescue a key budget measure in the face of a splintering of alliances in the upper house that made it impossible to legislate the co-payment announced in the budget.]
Missing the point that regulations can be disallowed by either House.
ru@63
Isn’t that what they tried on with FOFA.
But they gain a 1 vote advantage in using regulation, which given the state of the Senate is potentially a big deal.
guytaur
the base is what got fried!
I’m now using an old Telstra handset.
I picked it up before to check dialtone and found myself talking to someone….so it appears the phone just isn’t ringing.
zoomster
If the Telstra handset is ringing its buy a new cordless phone time. 🙂
z
if the phone in the shed is ringing then the problem is more likely to be the ringer in this new (old) phone (some models have a volume control check that isn’t turned down).
Swap it with the phone in the shed and test to see if it rings there. If not it’s the phone, if so then it will be a problem in the line between the shed and house (assuming the shed is closer to the exchange). But that’s much less likely if you can actually speak to someone over it. The ring pulse should transmit much more easily than speech.
I wouldn’t put it past Abbott and Dutton to manipulate the Mediacare scheduled fees to force doctors to find ways of maintaining their income. Gap payments perhaps?
[Heard Abetz say on the 3aw news this morning that the $7 co-payment is good policy and is not dead at all.]
If they are so convinced that this is good policy I hope they take this to the 2016 election.
[ Missing the point that regulations can be disallowed by either House. ]
And digging a deeper hole. tory standard procedure it seems.
Lets hope abbott digs his feet in as well on PPL and a ministerial reshuffle.
Wadda bunch of dopes.
Re your phones if you go with the cordless setups.
Always keep an old style phone just incase of power failures … I have had to temporarily revert back to the old plan A recently when the powerpoles were upgraded in our area.
The phonelines stayed on but house power off = equates to no cordless phone system operating.
It is a trap for old players.
Hey old friend BK, I think we might be in for some fun with Brommie in the Chair today. Being Thursday and all.
I thought yesterday that Albo was just about on the brink of losing it with her.
Hope there are some fireworks today.
BCassidy spoke with JFaine just now. Cassidy is not going to predict winner of vic state election save to say that the result will be known on saturday night. What sort of a political commentator is he?!
The whole $7 threat has obviously hit home. Months ago, a notice went up in my doctor’s waiting room assuring patients that there was no co-payment. It’s not a “rich” area and she has a lot of elderly patients, so I suspect they were all panicking.
jeffemu
Yes, let’s hope there is a conflagration.
victoria
Not a good one. Commentary I have seen is of a lot of pre poll voting so outcome may well not be known on Saturday night.
[Months ago, a notice went up in my doctor’s waiting room assuring patients that there was no co-payment.]
QML Pathology have “no copayment” signs on all their advertising, even on their courier cars.
Z
Oh joy. Tones doubling down on the stoopid.
The reason the ABC/SBS thing has really hit the nerve is that it’s the first of his broken promises that is actually now seen real live and in the wild. All the other stuff has been either hidden or blocked.
So they get the message out that the co-payment is going to be dropped. Plenty of people would be pleased because it’s poison. Who knows they might have even picked up a point or two for ‘listening to what the public wanted’.
But now after saying ‘no changes to Medicare’ and declaring that Labor was ‘running a scare campaign’ on a co-payment before the Griffith by election and WA Senate re-run, and then proving all that was all a bunch of lies, they now look in 24hrs to go back on going back on the lie? FMD. Lying about Lying about Lying, or something?
These imbeciles just don’t have a connection to reality do they? So Dutton is woken from his slumber to regulate a co-payment. Being a genius he might leave it until next Friday so that there is no chance of the Senate knocking it off before Christmas (but he needs as much notice as possible to allow the systems to be put in place to accept the payment on 1 July.
Now normally the Government gets a bit of a breather over Christmas as people focus on other things. But do these dopes seriously think that a broken promise that’s been lied about so much and enforced by a sneaky tactic because the Senate was blocking it will just be forgotten over Christmas? From this government? Which will also be announcing how badly they have screwed the economy and blown out the deficit in December?
I reckon we’re seeing still a good number of voters who are sticking by the Libs happy that the Senate is stopping them from going full rightard. They regulate a medicare co-payment and that cohort will shrink dramatically.
And they won’t get them back when the Senate disallows the regulation first sitting week back in 2015. For god’s sake Dutton do it.
It will be interesting to see from next month’s MYEFO the timing of when the copayment will start to enter revenue.
jeffemu
I did! But alas, the old phone isn’t working either.
However, the wonderful people at my local Post Office are loaning me an alternative until I get the othery fixed.
I may be stating the bleeding obvious here Zoomster but are you sure the volume on your old handset isn’t too low to hear/switched off?
lizzie
[The whole $7 threat has obviously hit home. Months ago, a notice went up in my doctor’s waiting room assuring patients that there was no co-payment. It’s not a “rich” area and she has a lot of elderly patients, so I suspect they were all panicking.]
Some of my colleagues mistakenly think that the $7 fee is already in effect.
The clinic I usually go to sent me 2 SMS texts a few months back that they ARE NOT charging the $7 fee.
BK
It will be interesting to see from next month’s MYEFO the timing of when the copayment will start to enter revenue.
Knowing this mob they have probably been banking it since last July..
The Advertiser and SA Liberal leader both calling for Johnston to be sacked.
Is there a date on which MYEFO must be released? Will we see it issued late on the 24th?
“@ABCNews24: Watch NOW: Opposition Leader @billshortenmp and @CatherineKingMP speaking on GP co-payment http://t.co/FlRWJB07J0 #medicare #auspol”
Steve777
It’s clear Abbott has no qualms about using/involving/hiding behind his family.
MYEFO release date is 15 December.
Positively interesting to see how Fairfax is going to town on Abbott.
That’s what happens when you do a dirty deal with Rupert to give his rags the bulk of the “EXCLUSIVES”, advance warnings, other favourable drops and “informed” leaks.
The other papers get shitty.
And, of course, the so-called $7 GP co-payment” is, in reality, “A GREAT BIG NEW TAX !!!!!”
As is the fuel tax.
Both these euphemistically described GBNTes are at least as much in the realm of “taxes” as the price on carbon was.
They just don’t get called as such.
@bencubby: Govt’s budget deficit could blow out by billions more than expected, the parliamentary budget office says. #auspol http://t.co/doyQbKWsF4
A hotter, drier than average Summer is predicted by that nest of left wing conspirators, the Bureau of Meteorology, for most of Australia, apart from the West of WA and Tasmania, where conditions are expected to be close to average:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/outlooks/#/overview/summary
Well, if the “copayment” gets turned into a cut to the rebate via regulation, as seems likely, it won’t be a GBNT it will just be a straight cut to health funding.
jackol
[Morrison as Treasurer? Seriously? I can’t wait for him to hide behind some military figure and refuse to discuss “on budget operational matters”.]
Very clever!
@89 Ta
“@BBCBreaking: Experimental #Ebola vaccine “very encouraging” http://t.co/9mrGF7Y1Kq [not “declared safe” as in earlier tweet]. Apologies”
[ Jackol
Posted Thursday, November 27, 2014 at 10:47 am | Permalink
Well, if the “copayment” gets turned into a cut to the rebate via regulation, as seems likely, it won’t be a GBNT it will just be a straight cut to health funding. ]
Plus it will amount to going to war against Doctors as well as the sick and voters in general.
Yet another broken promise to boot.
Still they keep digging.
Good morning all.
What is it with the saturation coverage of the Phil Hughes incident in lots of media outlets (the ABC and Fairfax especially: for once, News Limited is being slightly more restrained)? Reams of speculative commentary on the severity of the injury when nothing has been announced?
Yes, it’s a horrific situation for Hughes and his family, and my heart goes out to them. But are there really no other stories with which to fill the airwaves and pages of the newspapers : particularly when there really isn’t any more news available about the event than there was 24 hours ago?
There is an election in Victoria in 2 days time and yet the first two stories on The Age website are about Hughes, as are the first four on the Herald website!
I guess it’s all based on how many clicks each page gets, but gee…
zoomster
If you’ve swapped in another working phone on that same line that get zapped by lightning and it’s still not ringing, you might have to call in a sparky.