A fairly pronounced narrowing in the Coalition’s lead may now be observed on the BludgerTrack poll aggregate charts, thanks mostly to an unusually soft result for the Turnbull government in this week’s Morgan result. This shows up as a 0.6% move to Labor on two-party preferred since last week, but it’s only made a slight difference on the seat projection, which credits the Coalition with a net gain of one seat since the 2013 election despite a 0.4% lower two-party vote. The aggregate also records a lift in support for the Greens, who had had some of the wind taken out of their sails when Malcolm Turnbull became Prime Minister. The addition of new figures from Essential Research to the leadership ratings results in essentially no change to an overall picture of Turnbull enjoying massive but nonetheless slightly reduced leads over Bill Shorten on both net approval and preferred prime minister.
Vic,
I said on Tuesday that Robert was an ex-parrot. The only reason he hasn’t gone yet is that Turnbull is trying to take the trash out at a time of his choosing. Probably 5:45 this afternoon.
He’s a fool. Outsourcing your leadership (to a cabinet committee for Briggs and now his head of Department for Robert) is just gutless and it will count against him. His backbench know he can be pushed around, and the voters will notice eventually. Labor are running that line hard. You can bet it’s getting some results in the focus groups.
Not sure if this has gotten much attention in the past few days (I hadn’t heard about it) – the Turnbull gov will allow purchasers of luxury cars avoid much of the luxury car tax by allowing “parallel importation” from 2018.
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/cars-are-about-to-get-a-whole-lot-cheaper-in-australia-2016-2
Of course these changes won’t affect the lower end of the market – they will only provide much needed tax relief for impoverished buyers of Porsches and other high-end cars.
Entirely consistent with Turnbull talking up “fairness” while introducing some new loopholes for the wealthy.
WWP
If I were to guess who you meant, I would say that poster is still highly valued for other posts.
I am sure William loves all his posters equally as we are all special in our own ways.
Except for Bemused. He is just a crankpot.
ratsak
Turnbull is a hollow man. Let’s hope the voters are waking up to it
How unsurprisement
[Shorten_Suite
Shorten_Suite – @Shorten_Suite
.@Barnaby_Joyce on Stuart Robert on @TheTodayShow: “I haven’t yet seen what is it that he has done wrong. What is his crime?” #auspol
1:15 PM – 11 Feb 2016
6 RETWEETS1 LIKE]
[“I haven’t yet seen what is it that he has done wrong. What is his crime?”]
If Barnaby sees nothing wrong in a government minister on private leave allowing himself to be presented in his official capacity, then this government is heading for a very big fall.
‘Crankpot’ – useful new word, although I won’t be applying it to fellow posters here. There are a few public figures that we can apply it to – maybe including our new Deputy PM.
A good comment about real resource constraints on national prosperity.
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=32938
steve777
it was a friendly nonesense jibe that I am sure the target would take the correct way. Besides, he knows how to defend himself and dish it out.
[Government announces election says the last day of Parliament is tomorrow, Labor can pass the appropriation bill or bring the country to a stand still … you chose.]
We should really wait and see what the political climate is like in May.
My bet is that it won’t be as rosy for Turnbull – pollwize and vibewize – as it is now.
He has a resource he can spend. Call it “political capital”. It’s useless unless you do something with it, the political equivalent of Scrooge McDuck and his swimming pools full of money, or Joe Hockey’s mystical Surplus, gained at the cost of half-impoverishing a nation.
Anyone can have a swimming pool full of money. Anyone can have political capital. It’s what you do with it that counts.
Turnbull preeening himself in front of his own mirror, asking it every day, “Who is the fairest of them all?”, and the mirror – the media, the ABC chatterers, the glitterati who whisper into his ear that he can be PM for as long as he likes (based on a few months’ friendly polls) – replying “You sir, Saint Malcolm. You are the prettiest of them all!” doesn’t actually get anything done.
Turnbull’s enemies are waiting for the inevitable decline in stellar numbers. So many here (surprising for a supposedly sophisticated poll-watching site) trot out the line that Malcolm Turnbull is immune from the crow’s feet and the sagging paunch of political old age. He’s not. His day will come.
And when it does, the knives will flash and the vengeful eyes will gleam… which will make it worse, of course. Think of a snake eating itself from the bum up. No matter that his rabid opponents from the Abbott Camp are mad as cut snakes. “Mad” seems to be de rigeur in politics lately, and not just here in Oz. There are enough maddies around to convince themselves they’re sane. And THERE’s yer problem! It’s wrong – theoretically and empirically – to believe Turnbull isn’t heading for a slump.
And when it comes, we’ll see who wants to have a July election and who doesn’t.
I think we can be pretty confident that the non-government party reps on the inquiry into ICAC are leaking heavily to Fairfax
Good Morning
My take on the DD leaks. I think Turnbull really really wants to go to an early election. He knows full well the more time votes have to see what is happening the worse off he will be.
However reality keeps getting in the way. First he has to have Morrison bring down a small spending budget. So no big bribes to the voters. That normally worked because the idea was you had previously had two tough budgets that caused the pain and now was the time for the sweetener.
Not this time. None of the tough medicine has got past the Senate. As a result there are hares running all over the place. We have a first year budget agenda in the last election year.
Thus the privatisation of the Medicare billing system before the election. Helpfully leaked by some in his own party.
We have the privatisation of funding for Gonski leaked today.
And so it goes on. Crazy desperate toxic to voters ideas to gain revenue to avoid addressing the popular lets tax the companies fairly so people can be left alone.
Labor is on a winner in all this and the truth is its all been handed to Labor on a plate by the incompetence and disfunction of the Liberals.
Labor have not had to come up with the normal first term election campaign to get into a position to challenge at the next election. Rather that is the default position with the very real possibility that Labor can win this first term election.
Thats the reality of what we are seeing. It is chaos and dysfunction worse than anything Labor did for the simple reason that no matter the divisions in the party in the Rudd Gillard years through out all that time Labor governed.
Impressively so when a minority government. Even the camp doing the leaking against the incumbent PM still helped Labor govern responsibly. Labor wanted to stay in government and were just arguing over who to run the show and who would be more popular with voters.
With the LNP its not being competent enough to negotiate with other parties in a meaningful way. As a result I have seen a tweet posted here earlier by a bludger where Senator Lambie who would be a natural ally to Turnbull in normal circumstances is cheering on Bill Shorten.
So the like the GST thought bubble the lets privatise if it moves will not get past the Senate. Let alone be accepted by voters.
This is why Turnbull is desperate for a DD. He needs to reset the game. Part of that is getting rid of the support base for the leakers by changing the numbers game in the party. Part of that is to have easy numbers in the Senate he can point to and blame the opposition or have it cave in to the LNP policies.
Its just as state above however there is no solution to go to a DD on that would be a vote winner. Instead there is a do nothing government that wants to rely on the personal popularity of the PM with voters as its major campaign planck and boo Labor.
Turnbull knows that is a fail so while he has settled on a date he has not settled on a policy he can take to win an election. Going we are Labor too won’t work like it did for Abbott last time
G’day
More economic BS being provided to the Press Gallery as backgrounding again today.
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/doing-nothing-is-not-an-option-on-tax-reform-says-morrison-20160211-gmrwpj.html
Treasury has apparently projected that a not particularly large amount of bracket creep in the next few years is allegedly going to “dampen growth”.
I’d love to see the full details of the modelling. The Government is currently running huge deficits, with no realistic hope of bringing them under control other than by:
(a) cutting like a chainsaw into Medicare and welfare (including age pensions) in a form of political harakiri; or
(b) collecting more taxes through bracket creep or other measures.
Both of these strategies will tend to dampen growth. Strategy (a) will always be the worst. The great thing about government spending is that most of the money – especially that given to low income households or gets spent on infrastructure, health or education services – is ultimately exchanged for goods and services within the Australian economy.
If you cut spending to reduce the size of the government deficit, this will always dampen growth. If you cut it in order to provide tax cuts, it will not dampen growth as much, but will never be as good as the government spending the money itself.
Why? Because a significant proportion of money given out in tax cuts, particularly to higher income earners, will get saved.
So, in a period of falling growth and rising government deficits, I cannot for the life of me see an argument for reducing taxes.
I can see a sort of an argument for trying to tax wealth a bit more and put it in the hands of people who will spend it and generate growth. Like the ALP, I personally still think that upping taxes on superannuation in the accumulation phase would be harsh, and actually rather ridiculous if – as Turnbull and Morrison seem to be considering – it is then paid out again in income tax cuts. The effective message to higher income earners looking to save for retirement would be: “the government doesn’t want to subsidise your equity savings any more, so you’d better go and borrow more money for negatively geared investments because we’re still happy to subsidise that.”
An effective package of tax reforms wouldn’t target real time savings, but large amounts of accumulated wealth, and also put some sort of moderate disincentive in place to dampen new investment in the housing sector. If we want to limit the total quantity of tax subsidies available to high income earners, it makes more economic sense to direct these towards superannuation rather than negatively-geared housing investments.
Sorry I forgot to say the obvious. The leaks are happening because there is an ideological war for the soul of the LNP party is on full bore and winning elections is short term compared to that.
[How will the Government continue to function after 1 July 2016 without the passage of appropriation bills]
Anthony Green has written a number of times on the possible DD and this is one of the difficulties he has mentioned. Basically they would need to have appropriation bills passed by 1 July to allow the government to continue function while the election period runs and the new government is appointed.
Remember him? He was the one who allegedly bribed Gillard’s ex boyfriend to tarnish her at the RC
[Harry Nowicki, a former union lawyer in Melbourne who investigated Julia Gillard’s connections to an AWU slush fund, leading to the Trade Union Royal Commission being set up, died on Wednesday after a brief illness. He was 67.
Early in his career, Nowicki was a young legal adviser to the Builders’ Labourers Federation and its boss, Norm Gallagher. Gallagher subsequently went to jail for corruption related offences.]
neighbour_s: Just for the record: “I’m going to keep reporting, it’s in my DNA” @FergusonNews #4Corners https://t.co/Xd0S80EOvj https://t.co/ycrRCICm6E
Does anyone know why Sally Neighbour felt the need to post this? I have looked on the timeline and it just appears in the middle of the upcoming dance party drug scene report.
[And when it comes, we’ll see who wants to have a July election and who doesn’t.]
I don’t think it has a lot at all to do with wanting a July election.
Hockey failed budget 2 made it clear to me that Hockey could not possibly deliver a 3rd budget.
The Turnbull ascension gave them a chance to reset, and made a budget possible again, but largely they have squandered that opportunity and IMHO cannot frame a budget that is acceptable.
Dwell on this a minute they have three years of public service work on GST increases, pension and service cuts, income tax cuts …
They need to win to roll these out …
Turnbull has got this all wrong, almost as badly as Gillard.
Simon Katich@753
And your evidence for that is?
My only sin seems to be to sometimes depart from the PB group think and to see through some of the charlatans who post here.
bemused
Yes I agree with you that you make substantial contributions no matter how annoying some of your personal idiosyncrasies are to others.
Two that spring immediately to my mind are your substantive and valuable contributions on public transport and mental health.
752
Parallel imports of luxury cars should be subject to luxury car tax, both for fairness and for revenue. Otherwise I have no objection to what they are allowing. There is however an argument that they should extend the allowable car age and distance travelled to allow Australia to get a share of the Japanese used cars that provide cheap source of cars for New Zealand.
BreakingNews: US Secretary of State John Kerry say diplomats have agreed to ‘cessation of hostalities’ in Syria and expanded aid https://t.co/JDHHWAxp3L
Bemused when I first read WWP’s #750 I thought he was referring to me until I got to the last sentence. I don’t call other posters stupid as I reserve that term for the politicians we talk about.
Anyway will be more than a few Libs thinking this morning about who is our new DPM is. It’s a bit of a worry 🙂
beneltham: The Margaret Cunneen case is a good example of the creep of the surveillance state. The ACC was surveilling the tow truck driver, caught her
[And your evidence for that is?]
There was hardly any bait on that hook.
I take it back.
[US Secretary of State John Kerry say diplomats have agreed to ‘cessation of hostalities’ in Syria ]
When will they tell all the warring parties to down weapons and have a group hug?
Talking of taxing wealth, the death duties idea is a superficially appealing one, but I would have thought that it would be almost impossible from preventing the very rich – towards whom proponents wish to target it – from getting around it through family trusts, offshore investments and the like. I can’t see how you could hope to close all the possible loopholes.
Also, like any other measure targeting the very rich, it’s not going to raise all that much money in the context of the massive cost of government in the 21st century.
Like it or lump it, the current paradigm in which the Australian Government taxes and spends involves gauging a growing proportion of revenue from working people in the middle to upper income categories (say, from AWE to five times AWE: currently around $80k to $400k per annum) and, after churning a small part of it back to them through government services and family payments, giving the rest of it to people of working age who don’t earn much through work and to retired people at all levels of income and wealth (you’d be very hard pressed to find a retired person aged over 60 in Australia at the moment who is paying more into the taxation system than they are getting out of it through benefits, costs of health care, etc.)
The problem that Australia, and a number of other OECD countries, is starting to face is that the working age proportion of the population earning between AWE and 5 times AWE is steadily falling as a proportion of the population, whereas the retired group – which consumes a lot more government spending per capita- is steadily growing.
This is the biggest economic challenge Australia and many other countries have faced since those of the 1930s depression and post-World War II reconstruction.
Taxing the accumulated wealth of older people – especially that which they are passively holding for no purpose other than to pass on to their heirs – is potentially a good strategy for addressing this problem. But it can never be the main solution.
The main solution, hard though it might be politically, is to get older people to pay a bit more for the costs of their health and aged care and/or take a bit less in benefits. And, for those who are receiving a high level of income from their accumulated assets, paying a bit more tax than they are currently required to pay (eg, more than 0% on superannuation pensions/withdrawals).
http://media.smh.com.au/video-news/video-world-news/watch-men-save-mother-and-child-from-sinking-car-7204096.html
There are plenty of good people in this world.
guytaur@770
You have identified two of my obsessions. 😛
There are others.
Your longer posts are usually your best as they have obviously had some thought put into them.
[774
guytaur
Posted Friday, February 12, 2016 at 11:02 am | PERMALINK
beneltham: The Margaret Cunneen case is a good example of the creep of the surveillance state. The ACC was surveilling the tow truck driver, caught her]
Serendipitous detection of conduct warranting investigation happens all the time.
dwh
Secretary Kerry hugging an IS member would be a sight to behold.
Even this cessation has the air of the surreal about it.
guytaur@772
That will be a blessing if it comes about.
Shell bell
That was the point Eltham was making.
His point is how often should this be happening?
davidwh@773
I try not to call posters stupid, but I will use that and other terms for some of their posts.
Simon Katich@775
Awwwww… and here was I looking forward to a good debate. 😉
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/bullshit-kevin-rudds-brutal-slapdown-of-australians-who-dont-think-we-have-a-racism-problem-20160211-gms4bn.html
[The main solution, hard though it might be politically, is to get older people to pay a bit more for the costs of their health and aged care and/or take a bit less in benefits. ]
We can do better than that.
In any event the baby boomers aren’t a generation to pay their dues, they are a pillage and plunder generation who didn’t have to pay for their education (although they made those that came after them pay) and they aren’t about to pay for their retirement, their healthcare or anything else.
Least they can do is pay a toll on their plunder as they pass to the great beyond.
Yes there are issues and challenges but the equity and revenue outcomes more than justify taking the challenge.
Not that any party has the courage needed.
GuardianAus: The AFP and me: how one of my asylum stories sparked a 200-page police investigation https://t.co/XpSTt2O6bv
[24.Bemused when I first read WWP’s #750 I thought he was referring to me until I got to the last sentence. I don’t call other posters stupid as I reserve that term for the politicians we talk about.]
You should be totally uninterested in my view of you, at your very worst you are like our very own PvO, looking smart and sounding good as you brush over some LNP type eating lightly roasted human flesh, to jump to the important bit about Labor being worse.
I have so much respect for you that I can’t determine whether you actually fell for Turnball’s cowardly due process con, or just thought it fun to torment us with the appearance!
From the Guardian story I linked at 788
[The public interest in the report about the Ocean Protector was significant. It disclosed more details about Australia’s unlawful entry into Indonesian waters. This took place to turn back an asylum seeker vessel under one of Australia’s most controversial asylum policies. We also published the first images of the Ocean Protector, which was the vessel later used to detain asylum seekers held at sea who became the subject of a high court challenge.
A short time after our report, the government backed down on a key point. It acknowledged that a customs officer in charge of the Ocean Protector did not respond to a crew member’s concerns that the vessel was charting a course into Indonesian waters.
None of that appears to have been taken into account from a policy perspective by the AFP. A short time later, it took a referral from the immigration department chief, Michael Pezzullo, to investigate who had leaked information to me, and prosecute them. On the files in front of me, there’s no evidence the AFP even paused to consider they were prying into the affairs of a journalist working on a public interest investigation.]
“US Secretary of State John Kerry say diplomats have agreed to ‘cessation of hostalities’ in Syria”
Perhaps the Americans finally put pressure on their allies, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to rein in ISIS.
[There are plenty of good people in this world.]
I once had a painful tutorial discussion (I always seemed to be on my own against the tutor and her favourites) where I argued against altruism being ultimately a selfish act.
I stated altruism was mostly an involuntary response and either built into our DNA (anthro/evolutionary) or imbedded in our values through cultural means. I extended the argument that changes in culture caused by the political and economic changes over time – individualism, capitalism etc – could alter such traits that have not only endured through the ages but likely partly the cause of the success of the species.
meher baba@777
I have not done the calculations, but there do seem to be some blindingly obvious solutions.
If the problem is a reduced percentage on the population in the workforce, then make it possible for people who want to continue working to do so.
Of course we do have high unemployment, despite the official lies aka unemployment statistics. We need strategies to get these people working like most of them want to do. A mix of Keynesian stimulus to boost the level of economic activity and re-skilling would be a start.
Make it clear that economic activity that occurs in Australia will be taxed in Australia and anyone conspiring to subvert this will face criminal charges and possibly a lengthy gaol sentence. Amend the relevant legislation that obliges directors to act in the shareholders interests to only do so after meeting all taxation and other legal obligations.
So the fact no alcohol was recorded was immaterial. Its the intent of Cuneen thinking she may have had.
[“My only reservation, just between you and me, is that, that naughty girl, had alcohol had, had oh no that’s all right I can cover that,” Ms Cunneen said, according to an excerpt from the recording transcript relayed to Fairfax Media.]
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/the-icac-tapes-margaret-cunneen-said-she-had-sent-a-message-to-sophia-tilley-about-chest-pains-20160211-gms5dj.html#ixzz3zuOiJaOj
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook
MTBW@786
Good to see Kev is still remaining active in public life.
Nicholas @758
It seems Alan Greenspan (of all people) agrees!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU
In fact with the exception of a few total crackpots all economists agree that it’s real resources that are they thing that counts. To put it another way: real resources are like real, man!
And it’s almost all politicians, not just Paul Ryan (and WeWantPaul, apparently) who are living in a fantasy land.
bemused
Absolutely agree!
bemused
So many forget what he did for the Aboriginal people.
MTBW@797
Bob Ellis makes an interesting comment in his latest post.
[Most successful governments have muscular teams of two. Hawke and Keating. Blair and Brown. Howard and Costello. Rudd and Swan. Carr and Egan. Bracks and Brumby. Rann and Foley. They all scrubbed up well in the good years — as did, for a whike, Abbott and Hockey..]
Interesting who is omitted.
http://www.ellistabletalk.com/2016/02/12/the-biggest-mistake-thus-far/
Dogwhistle or megaphone? What is it we are supposed to be ‘debating’? The following is the lead story on the Daily Telecrap site:
[‘Birthrate fears
Western society is a dying breed
IT’S the biggest story of our times, but political correctness has stifled debate. According to a visiting author and free-speech advocate, low birth rates have put Western societies into a “demographic death spiral”.]
The story is behind the paywall. The front page lead in features a picture of a Muslim family.
It is not on the front page of the paoer edition, which features a beatup about the ‘crushing burden’ of income tax on ordinary workers.
I won’t add a link.