Essential Research’s fortnight rolling average has Labor’s two-party lead unchanged at 54-46, the only change on the primary vote being a one point drop for Labor to 37%, with the Coalition on 37%, the Greens on 10% and One Nation on 6%. An occasional question on the attributes of the parties yields little change since it was last asked in May, the biggest movers being “have good policies”, “clear about what they stand for” and “too close to big corporate and financial interests” for Labor, all of which are down five points. Another question finds Labor more trusted to find Medicare, the NDIS, universities, the age pension and public schools, but the Coalition more trusted to fund independent and private schools (keeping in mind that not everyone would feel these things should be funded). Labor’s specific budget response proposals all get highly positive responses; more respondents oppose (39%) than favour (24%) removing the deficit levy on the top income tax rate; and an overwhelming majority (78% to 7%) expect the bank levy will be passed on to customers.
Of course, I wouldn’t need to be applying for Centrelink assistance if my husband wasn’t locked out of his workplace by an overseas employer.
Paying my husband (and his mates) more would keep more money in Australia AND reduce the welfare bill!
C@
You are, of course, welcome any time. No need to tap dance, unless you really want to.
adrian @ #200 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 5:22 pm
I had to choose my words carefully with that in mind.
BK
Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 4:54 pm
I often wonder what would be going through the minds of the half-decent government ministers when Barnaby is Acting PM.
**********************************************************************
The loss of any sense of credibility (not that they have much anyway)
Jackol @4:48PM . I just think Labor need to be careful not to waste opportunities by pushing too hard.
Agree. I am actually hoping that our little Green friends together with crossbenchers will help get thes over the line and take whatever blame. In any case it would not be below the Coalition to hold needs based school funding hostage.
Thanks, zoom. 🙂
Just saw Luke Foley on TV talking about the Lindt Cafe coroner’s report.
A reminder that Labor is going nowhere in gaining government in NSW.
The ABC is such a spineless organisation.
tom @ #159 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 4:28 pm
The VC used Kalashnikovs and an assortment of odds and ends. Kalashnikovs do not use 5.65mm, the use a .30cal (7.62×39 mm) of lesser power than the NATO 7.62mm but more than the 5.65mm.
I read an article in the last few days which reported the yanks as being dissatisfied with the power of the 5.65mm round and looking for something with more killing power and capable of penetrating modern body armour.
Understood Jackol,
I wasn’t trying to verbal your position, but point out that Turnbull has got more nasty stuff done than Abbott.
I’m not keen on throwing him any bones : )
trog sorrenson @ #199 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 5:21 pm
Typical RenewEconomy misrepresentation, and you seem to fall for it every time. From that article (my bold) …
I know most people here won’t know the difference, and most won’t care, but comparing the cost of solar to the cost of a gas peaking plant – possibly the most expensive type of electricity generation – is just nonsensical. All it really does is demonstrate just how far solar has yet to go to be competitive with other sources of baseload electricity.
Nick Cater, who is on the board of Quadrant, isn’t holding back in condemning that pig Franklin… “utterly despicable, disgraceful, beyond the pale”.
tom @ #163 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 4:29 pm
Neither have I, but that is not the point. The cops went in with M4 carbines which used 5.65mm ammunition. Not a good idea in a confined space with lots of hard surfaces to ricochet of.
I would have thought 9mm pistols adequate or maybe 9mm submachine guns set to fire single shots.
I too have owned firearms.
gippslander @ #173 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 4:41 pm
I am quoting from the Coroner that they didn’t feel they had authorisation to shoot and felt they could get into legal difficulty if they did.
Surely a major failing?
So why were they there? After-all, snipers are usually hidden so would not have impressed or intimidated Monis.
Good evening,
Labor should continue to oppose the education funding model proposed by Turnbull. I find it amusing that Emerson and others have called on labor to support the model and add to it when in government or wtte.
Firstly, labor is no certainty to be elected into government when Australians next vote so why support a inferior proposal that would inflict significant hardship on a large number of schools and students simply as a sign of bipartisanship and ” readiness for government ” or whatever that means without any certainty of being able to improve it any time soon.
Fight for what you believe in now and not what may happen in the future.
Secondly, never let a opponent occupy your turf, turf that you have fought hard to own over a long period of time. Voters need a choice or otherwise why consider change. I have little time for the policies championed by Peta Crelin but she is very astute politically. She has stated many times that a political party needs to magnify differences with its opponent not embrace similarities. Shorten has done this in his budget reply.
Thirdly, the same as firstly. The liberal funding model is crap and is not Gonski so why support it ?
Cheers and a good evening to all
@Player One
If it was competing with a gas peaker (storage seems to suggest that ) is it not reasonable to compare it with a gas peaker?
TS
When Texans start building large scale solar in their oil fields without subsidies and backed by long term contracts then the jig is up.
The real tragedy of it is that Big Oil and Big Coal decided to gain a couple of decades on their stranded assets by thoroughly debasing political discourse in the West.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2017-05-24/wedge-tailed-eagle-takes-down-drone-over-wa-wheat-farm/8554120
CTaR1
I am seriously concerned at what is going to happen to raptors as they deal with drones. The speed at the tips of the propellors are regularly going to do damage to soft tissue.
Raptors simply cannot afford any damage or any reduction on their efficiency margins.
Raptors look superb but their energy balance is so tenuous that any damage could be fatal over time.
D
$22 billion is the answer to all questions on Gonski 2.
It is the figure that the Government spent all of QT dodging today.
The big issue for Labor going against the Government’s Gonski Lite in the next election will be identifying funding of $22 billion.
My take on Gonski funding.
There are agreements between the Commonwealth and school providers for funding into the future, giving them certainty and allowing them to plan ahead.
Due to the time frame of the agreements some of this funding fell outside the budgetary cycle.
In the current budgetary cycle the current Government has decided not to honour that agreement and has allocated less money than is required.
They wish to impose their own funding model without any consultation with the relevant parties.
This model contains $22 billion or so less than what the Commonwealth and the schools have agreed to.
The only possible conclusion is that this is a case of the Commonwealth, now, trashing an agreement and cutting funding.
Am I missing something?
Bw
Drones everywhere these days –
From Barbican Talk.
What do ISIS, Consertatives, Religion have in common?!?!
CTaR1
Yep. The little fuckers are omnipresent. Have been spied on while out in the bush.
zoidlord @ #223 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 6:25 pm
Using the weak.
@BK,
Yes one part of the answer…
BIGD
Yep.
You’re missing the fact that the local Greens Trots spent a good fortnight getting into a tizz about RC education systems and public v private schools.
They were suckered big time by Turnbull, Birmingham, Morrison, Di Natale and Sarah Hanson-Young.
Some of their PB duffers offered some fascinating insights into why the Greens are stranded on 10%.
zoidlord @ #226 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 6:29 pm
Pt 2 – for their own benefit.
CTaR1
The price for your wheat crop will look a bit better if the latest attempt at an OPEC reset to lift oil prices work…
… a slender reed, I agree, but the anti-hanrahan faction of the farming community have learned to hope against hope…
From the ABC report on Trump’s budget, which includes the double-counting, is this
‘States that voted for Clinton would collectively face a drop of 4.8 per cent, while those that backed Mr Trump would see assistance cut by 1.2 per cent.
‘ States that voted for Clinton would collectively face a drop of 4.8 per cent, while those that backed Mr Trump would see assistance cut by 1.2 per cent.’
One Nation party going down in flames, their qld media adviser is in police custody.
Bw – My last season of hands on.
Lots of high quality protein, more than enough hungry people and not a way of feeding them.
It gets a bit disheartening as years go on.
@John Reid
Sounds a lot like Tories, LNP party budgets.
@BK
1. They convert fools.
2. They know how to sell dodgy claims.
3. They are all fake organisations.
CTaR1
I sometimes think of myself as detritus on the high tide mark.
Cheery thoughts abound.
timothy reichle @ #216 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 6:00 pm
Not really. The price of peaking power varies according to the demand, not according to the cost to produce the electricity, which is largely irrelevant. So using such a comparison to make a point about the cost of solar is … well, misleading, to say the least.
From the wiki on the Sydney Siege:
“Monis was shot in the head. An officer reported that “I watched the (gun’s) laser … from the centre of his chest go to his head and his head exploded and he fell”. One officer then fired a total of 17 rounds, and another officer fired 5 additional rounds. (Some fragments of those rounds killed Dawson.)”
I suppose my major question is this. Why did they shoot 22 times after ‘his head exploded and he fell’ needlessly resulting in the death of an innocent woman? Over-eagerness, lack of proper training, unprofessionalism, immaturity and a desire to be the one who took him down. That’s the only possible explanation I can see.
@Player One
from the article
“and well below the cost of a gas-fired peaking plant.”
This implies to me to be the cost to generate the power and not the price that they get for producing the power.
BC
It would be extremely not to fire a weapon in those circumstances.
ffs
Extremely difficult.
I don’t know if it’s dodgy equipment or dodgy planning for a growing area, but six suburbs in the Gungahlin area of Canberra have lost power since 6.21pm ,with restoration estimated at 8.30pm. Our daughter with a young baby is affected. There have been several blackouts recently and they seem to occur at the p.m. peak. It’s no fun having being without power in the dark as temperatures head towards a little above zero. ActewAGL cannot blame weather or other natural phenonema.
Maybe extremely difficult, but shouldn’t we expect a level of training and expertise beyond the normal, that makes the ‘extremely difficult’ less difficult and less extreme?
Maybe I am expecting too much, I don’t know.
boerwar @ #227 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 6:30 pm
But we are not the Government or the Opposition and we do not drive the political debate outside our PB sphere.
From my perspective the debate here was not so much about Gonski but the principle of public funding for private schools.
This is clearly nothing to do with Gonski as private schools get public funding under his proposal.
Gonski may have prompted this debate but it was nothing to do with the current political one outside PB.
Boerwar
Is that not what they are supposed to be trained in ? Keeping your head cool in such situations rather than going ‘Rambo’.
It is really stupid to call religious belief a mental illness or a delusion. In reality all of us, religious and non-religious alike, are creating our own meaning and imposing a sense of coherence and order and narrative structure on experiences and phenomena that are largely random and not intrinsically meaningful. We are meaning-seeking creatures. Religion is just one of the many ways in which people fashion a sense of coherence from an incoherent world.
timothy reichle @ #238 Wednesday, May 24, 2017 at 7:03 pm
Perhaps, but the point is that the cost to generate peaking power is generally very high, and this is mainly because a peaking power plant sits idle for hours of each day, days of each week, or even months of each year, depending on demand – and this determines the overall cost more than the cost of generating the power itself. So just being cheaper than the cost of peaking power in a particular situation tells you almost nothing … except that it is (by implication) more expensive than the cost of baseload power in the same situation (or the article would use that comparison instead).
In other words, claiming that solar compares well with the cost of peaking power is an indirect admission that it is still much more expensive than baseload power.
BIDG
‘From my perspective the debate here was not so much about Gonski but the principle of public funding for private schools.’
The Turnbull Government framed the Gonski funding cut in terms of public v private schools.
‘This is clearly nothing to do with Gonski as private schools get public funding under his proposal.’
The Gonski proposal will hit poor government and poor private schools. The issue with Gonski and Gonski Lite is that the latter pulls $22 billion.
So Turnbull is deliberately and calculatedly pulling $22 billion out of education under a smokescreen of public v rich private.
‘Gonski may have prompted this debate but it was nothing to do with the current political one’
The two are inextricably intertwined.
It is why Turnbull, Pyne and Birmingham have gone out of their way to call the RCs ‘liars’.
Trust Nicholas to stand by his fellow Delusionistas.
At least he is consistent.
Actually, I agree. But I don’t recall saying it was a good idea. I just stated one of the reasons why the Yanks and NATO have adopted the .223 round (since about 1962 iirc). Carbines were originally designed for cavalry and later, jungle warfare, where distance may still have been needed, but the ability to maneuver through jungle was also needed. Nothing to do w CQB work. And what have kalashnikovs got to do with it? I am aware of 7.62 x 39mm rifles. I owned one and have shot a fully auto one. That’s another story and in another life though 🙂 As to the inefficiencies of the .223 against body body armour, you may find this article interesting. http://www.olyarms.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14.
Tony Rambo Abbott today: