Today’s Courier-Mail has a YouGov Galaxy poll of federal voting intention in Queensland which gives the Coalition one of its best poll results in some time, crediting them with a 52-48 lead. This represents a two-party swing to Labor of only 2.1% since the 2016 election, although it’s only one point better than in the previous Queensland poll by Galaxy in August last year. The poll also provides further evidence that One Nation has gone off the boil, their primary vote of 9% being three points down on August. The Coalition is up four to 41% (compared with 43.2% at the election), Labor is steady on 32% (30.9% at the election), and the Greens are up three to 10% (8.8% at the election).
A perfectly even split of opinion is recorded on the Adani coal mine, with support and opposition both at 41%. This breaks down to 43-38 against in south-east Queensland, and 45-37 in favour in the rest of the state. The poll was conducted Wednesday and Thursday from a sample of 860.
poroti @ #1390 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:02 am
Sounds like extortion to me. ‘Give me the tax cut, or the Workers’ pay and conditions will cop it in the neck! No pay rises for them, until a Corporate Tax Cut for me!’
Maybe this explains the actions of Barnaby Beetroot!
Burgey
Spot on!
Trog Sorrenson says:
Monday, February 12, 2018 at 10:02 am
The Armadills will need to get creative with Beetroot on the outer.
https://thewest.com.au/lifestyle/food/5-creative-ways-to-eat-pork-this-summer-ng-b88725445z
_________________________
Joyce has provided little pork though promising a lot.
The pollie who has provided slabs of it is Nationals’ Adam Marshall, member for northern tablelands
Desperate times for the LNP. The government needs to go to an election in the next year. The LNP, Turnbull’s government has been consistantly behind in the polls for yonks. Looking at the recent doorstop interviews you’d be excused for thinking that we’ve had the best government since Federation.
The Nats are living in fairy land if they think this melee is all over bar the drinks.
Simply, a government so desperate for a change of fortune can’t afford to proceed into an election year with this affair and the cad who’s responsible hanging about digging a bigger hole.
Just about everything Joyce fingers is characterised by misinformation, deceit and bloodymindedness.
Turnbull has few friends and certainly won’t entertain the possibility of Joyce hanging about. Gina will soon let everyone know what Gina thinks of this.
The National Party members and senators notoriously pigheaded, will have an awakening this week as the reality of their ex leader’s predicament goes beyond the embryonic stage. They’ll tire of the metaphoric haven of derision and contempt.
The MSM and the CPG can’t afford to mess up anymore. Their reputation and regard have been further depleted by their continued overestimated sense of self importance. Their management and responses to this affair has been atrocious.
C@tmomma @ #1401 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:22 am
Improving your company’s profitability by getting a corporate tax cut is a far easier way for a CEO to earn their bonus than actually working to achieve the same thing.
Turns out, the latter is actually a bit difficult – who knew?
Where do you set the boundaries again though. Who makes the moral judgements on reporting the story.
There shouldn’t be moral judgements. That’s the fucking point. The media’s question should only be ‘is there a particularly compelling reason not to disclose?’ That should be a very high bar to leap. As I’ve said previously where no political hypocrisy or corruption is involved then perhaps non exposure is appropriate, but even that is problematic. As I’ve explored, the risk is that potential grave misdeeds are left unexposed because proper investigation doesn’t occur due to the self serving arrangements within the political class.
Should an affair be uncovered early it will be unlikely to have great political import for a politician who has done little more than the dirty on his/her spouse. With so many marriages ending in divorce and even long term solid marriages having their ups and downs the vast majority of voters will not make too harsh a judgement. If it has the effect of giving them cause for second thoughts before bumping uglies and at least separating from their spouse in order to pursue a new relationship this is surely no bad thing either.
As I’ve noted, these people enjoy power and privilege denied to the vast majority of us. A mere inconvenience of having some uncomfortable truth about them exposed to the public is no argument against the far greater requirement for the public interest that they be held to account. They cannot be held to account properly if potential misdeeds can simply be swept under the carpet.
Had the fact of affairs been more commonly exposed then Joyce’s problems would very likely have never developed to the critical point they have. If (as it has been hinted) he’s a long term player then his political career would have factored this long ago. The need to try and cover it up with bogus jobs (which at this point seems to be the thing that will really do him in) would not have arisen. Also he would very likely have been far less hypocritical about some of his positions which would have saved a great many from the insults and repercussions of his political stances.
And lastly of course his family may have been saved at least some of the pain and insult that has been inflicted on them. His behaviour was always going to hurt them. Covering it up for so long has only made it worse. Yay media!
It is not the media’s role to ‘look after’ a family being hurt by a politician’s misdeeds. If hurt is inflicted then the only one responsible for that is culprit. Obviously printing images of the pregnant staffer on the front page of the Tele was reprehensible. Barnaby is the story, not her. That was completely unnecessary. But the story had to be told and should have been told long ago because the public interest demanded it, and as I’ve said a media that doesn’t prioritise and even err on the side of the public interest is a media that is complicit in misleading the public.
Without the vital role of a media that exposes the failings of our leaders we are open to misrule. A media that perhaps goes a bit too far in exposing such failings is of far less danger to the public interest than one that privileges the privacy of the already privileged.
“Apply to all.
None of these privacy arguments were run when television cameras were being stuck in the bathroom window of Craig Thomson.”
Or , as others have noted to Gillard.
So it can look like it is payback I suppose.
It is complex, some organisations are ok with the employment of family members, husband and wife teams work well and kids want to follow their parents in their chosen fields.
Many labor lib kids following in parents footsteps and partners doing likewise. Staff jobs are an avenue for this and probs many well qualified for this.
The partner angle presents added complexities especially with the male/female power imbalance.
Private enterprise has seen that with one letting its CEO go and nother taking court actin against the junior staffer.
The quadbike affair may not have come to light except the allegation that another partner allegedly missed out on a promotion and so allegedly made the complaint that kicked it all off. Probs taking so long as they would have to examine the motives of and any influences on the selection panel who promoted the partner, never as straight forward as it looks.
How do you determine if Joyce’s partner’s jobs were on merits or not?
No, I am uncomfortable with the way in which it has been uncovered. Not that any potential corruption has been uncovered.
So like I said you are by default comfortable with the potential corruption not being uncovered.
The second simply wouldn’t have been exposed without the first.
It is an untenable position.
Ratsak
I have appreciated your spot on analysis in this Imbroglio!
I don’t think things like politicians having affairs should be outright ignored, I just don’t think they warrant front-page treatment with fevered, round the clock media coverage either – not when issues that actually effect people’s lives (often resulting from decisions by the very same politicians) are given considerably less prominence. Sure, if a journalist does find out about such things, I wouldn’t blame them for breaking the story, but- at least when it is genuinely just an affair, nothing more – it still strikes me as a distraction from the real issues. It’s not the fact that the story gets covered, rather the level of coverage.
With Barnaby, the real story isn’t the affair, it’s the cover-up of the affair. The former isn’t really relevant to anyone but his family (who, of course, have every right to be furious and devastated) and the woman having his baby. The latter is in the public interest. No, obviously you can’t find out about the cover-up without investigating the affair – but the Tele’s original story had nothing about the cover-up, just a trashy tabloid article featuring a giant paparazzi photograph of a pregnant woman who isn’t a public figure in any respect. If it had been a little article on page 20, with the big headline story not coming until the revelations about moving the woman to different departments, I would have considered it much more justified.
Because only people who pay tax have any say in how we are governed. National Party numpty no doubt.
adrian @ #1398 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:15 am
Don’t confuse Confessions with facts and logic.
Joyce can’t survive this. The longer it drags on, the bigger the disgrace for the government. Not in terms of the relationship, but the stories surrounding his partner’s employment and Joyce’s dealings with the bloke whose place he’s living at rent-free. If he doesn’t go, the PM’s and Canavan’s offices will inevitably be dragged into it given the ministerial code and the dodgy looking placement of Joyce’s partner.
It’s spiraling badly out of control as it is. The only political option is for the government to try to cauterize it and make Joyce leave.
Sure looks that way. And again had his behaviour been exposed a great deal earlier by the people to whom it was an open secret a great deal of problems would have been avoided. I bet Trumble isn’t sitting around thinking how wonderful it has turned out that his mate the Beetrooter has been allowed to accumulate a shit storm of scandal around himself thanks to the media’s cozy relationship.
It has all the hallmarks of a story that will just roll on taking many more down with Barney the longer the media is incentivized to follow the trail by not having his head handed up on a stake.
You’d think a lot of people who might be implicated the longer it goes on will be working overtime to have that head spiked asap.
That said, I do love the timing of this. The Coalition seemed to finally – finally – be making a recovery. The same-sex marriage issue had been dealt with, the citizenship saga was not only fading away but had caught up a Labor MP, the opposition had taken a bit of a beating, and the government generally seemed to have avoided any unforced errors for a little while. I was genuinely getting a bit worried that this might be the start of a genuine renaissance for Turnbull.
Then this happens.
adrian , P1:
If we had a proper functioning press gallery doing its job the many magnitude failures, stuff-ups, cover-ups and incompetencies would’ve and should’ve seen Barnaby booted from the ministry long ago. But no, he’s still there under fire essentially because of an affair with a staff member. There would’ve been no affair worth reporting on if the media had focused its efforts on his work performance.
And that Turnbull is under pressure today, not from the billions of dollars in lost future-proofing opportunities offered our nation through the NBN, but from one of his ministers moving a staffer into a colleague’s office just emphasises how broken our political media is.
Ashua Leu
I felt the original trashy story was more a kite flying exercise. See what the public response as well as Labor response would be
PVO provides a historical context, which I’m sure his Nat colleagues are well aware of
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/peter-van-onselen/barnaby-joyce-has-become-the-nationals-loaded-dog/news-story/2ae5809093570fe2240f84e916505fc3
The Barnaby Joyce saga now has a life of its own — he’s become like the loaded dog of Henry Lawson fame.
In the 1901 short story a retriever dog described as “an overgrown pup … a big foolish, four-footed mate” picks up a stick of dynamite and accidentally runs it through a camp fire igniting it. His owners run for cover but the dog thinks it’s a game and playfully chases them up hill and down dale with the dynamite in his mouth.
The difference, perhaps, between the Lawson story and the Joyce saga is that the dog named Tommy eventually offloads the dynamite to other dogs who go on to blow themselves up. Tommy and his owners safely wander off into the sunset unharmed.
Joyce’s problem, in contrast, is causing him and his colleagues harm. The problem for the deputy Prime Minister is that the issue is no longer just about whether politicians’ private lives are public business. It’s no longer a debate about the editorial judgment of publishing something harmful to the families of the political class. It’s not even just about the hypocrisy of a family values conservative being caught out as
ratsak:
Are you sure? I can’t see how it not being public knowledge would have stopped some enterprising journalist from fully investigating the situation, and then revealing the whole thing once they had all the evidence.
Vic:
What do you make of this on the leaks about John Kelly and how he’s a liar?
The Guardian has dug into National Party whip allocations. Normally they dont get senior advisors (Campion’s job with former Nat whip Damian Drum)
Confessions:
Agreed.
Ides of March not.logged in @ #1421 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 7:51 am
And again, this could’ve been uncovered without even knowing the woman was sleeping with Barnaby if the press gallery had done this at the time she was moved there!
don
I guess the irrigator water thieves aren’t Armadills, and the APVMA move was a side of pork that turned rancid.
politicians marriages dont work out just like the rest of us. difference here is that BJoyce attempted to cover it all up before and during his by election a couple of months ago. it was obvious by his conduct during the campaign that he together with the complicity of the media, was laying low to avoid any scrutiny. he could have simply said at the outset of campaign that he is in a relationship and expecting their first child together. but no. he did not do that. why?
he deliberately deceived his electorate. he is not an unknown backbencher, but the Deputy Prime Minister of the country. if he deliberately deceived his electorate and the country about this, what else is he hiding?
fess
i saw that from counterchekist. i take what this twitterhandle says very seriously. has been on the money about this whole imbroglio from the get go.
Trump and his cronies are doing their level best to get away with their crimes. they can try, but it will ultimately fail. Mueller and his team have got this. Trump will eventually find his way to a padded cell, cos that is what he is going to do rather than see the inside of a prison cell.
I really want to see Joyce resign as DPM, because “I want to spend more time with my families”.
From The Guardian;
“There has been a focus on taxpayer-funded travel and on Campion’s movements in government staff positions once she left Joyce’s office. Labor has signalled over the weekend that it intends to investigate Joyce’s expenditure of taxpayer funds.
Campion was first moved to the office of then resources minister Matt Canavan, but once he moved to the backbench after becoming embroiled in the dual citizenship controversy, she was employed in the office of Nationals whip, Damian Drum.
As the Daily Telegraph first reported over the weekend, Drum’s staffing allocation was increased from six to seven to accommodate Campion.
Campion was understood to have moved to Drum’s office on her six-figure salary as a senior advisor. Campion’s contract ended in December last year.
An assessment of staffing allocations, tabled for Senate estimates over the last three years, shows the Nationals whip does not usually receive an allocation for a senior advisor. Of the four electorate officers, plus one or two personal staff allocations, the maximum level has traditionally been that of advisor.
The highest position allocated to the chief government whip, a more senior position than that of the Nationals whip, is also advisor.”
So Ms Campion appears to be have been given a job in the whip’s office at a level not usually found there.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
sprocket
Peter Van Onselen nails it perfectly
Asha Leu @ #1411 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:42 am
That’s a nice Utopian line to take but it doesn’t fully explore the messy nature of these things. Sure, you might think it better to have the story hidden away on Page 8 so it doesn’t affect the delicate sensibilities of that part of the population who think that sex and politics aren’t intimately mixed, or shouldn’t be. However, let me tell you, from my own experiences down in Canberra, behind the front line, you wouldn’t believe what the heady mix of powerful people, confined spaces and crushing work schedules produces! Plus sooo many Alphas! I can still remember the way that Costello used to lead the Coalition into Question Time every day along the ‘corridors of power’. They came along in a phalanx and literally strutted past everyone else as the sea of humans parted before them! You almost choked on the testosterone as they passed you by.
So, as is the nature of life, sex and power go hand in hand. Thus, as I posited to Confessions the other day, I think that, in this newly-minted #MeToo era, it is only right and proper that a story involving a VERY powerful man and his sexual peccadilloes is absolutely a story which needs to be exposed so that the rest of the country can learn to tell the difference between the manufactured hypocrisy of their public persona and their private standards, which betray that.
Victoria @ #1410 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:40 am
Me too!
I don’t want or think I have the right to know if any public official is having an affair but I do think I have the right to know if they are fiddling the public purse to do it. I don’t think that’s too hard a line for media organisations to draw.
Asha Leu @ #1419 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:51 am
Because they hadn’t lifted a finger to do it until The Daily Telegraph blew the whistle. Even though they all admitted knowing about it for months, and, as Jacqueline Maley tried to make the excuse for that inaction, they only have so much resources in the straightened circumstances of the current stripped-down newsroom. Which excuse falls to bits whenever it’s a Labor MP that they want to pursue as well.
“Asha Leu says:
Monday, February 12, 2018 at 10:48 am
That said, I do love the timing of this. The Coalition seemed to finally – finally – be making a recovery. The same-sex marriage issue had been dealt with, the citizenship saga was not only fading away but had caught up a Labor MP, the opposition had taken a bit of a beating, and the government generally seemed to have avoided any unforced errors for a little while. I was genuinely getting a bit worried that this might be the start of a genuine renaissance for Turnbull.”
Asha,
The government gave the impression of making some sort of recovery because over the holidays it wasn’t around. Now it’s back and it’s Charlie Fox after Charlie Fox as usual again.
No one is listening to what the government says any more. They are gone. They’re like Labor between 2010-2013.
Barring a completely unforeseen event (like, heaven forbid a terrorist attack here which scares the horses) they are as dead as Dodos. The only question is how many seats they’ll lose. If they stick with Turnbull they lose by 10-15 seats. If they panic and go back to Abbott or to some other hard right winger, they’ll lose 25 seats.
Turnbull is seen mostly as a major disappointment. Abbott et al are reviled.
I think the Joyce/Campion story has been ventilated because the internal enemies of Joyce and Turnbull have decided it is in their interest to have it published. The journalists are almost certainly mere pawns in this episode. Notably, Joyce’s family and Campion have mostly been left out of the reporting. This is about power, pure and simple. The target is Joyce and, through him, Turnbull. I guess the immediate question is whether or not there are more revelations to come. There have been hints of this. If there are, then the further questions will be whether Turnbull knew of them…and what he did or did not do with his knowledge.
Turnbull and Joyce will have to face the Parliament, alongside each other. It will be fascinating to see both how Labor approach this and how the Nationals react.
Vic
“politicians marriages dont work out just like the rest of us. difference here is that BJoyce attempted to cover it all up before and during his by election a couple of months ago. it was obvious by his conduct during the campaign that he together with the complicity of the media, was laying low to avoid any scrutiny. he could have simply said at the outset of campaign that he is in a relationship and expecting their first child together. but no. he did not do that. why?”
The problem I can see for the MSM is when do you start reporting it as they have noted. Can dig around and find that Joyce has left his family home and may be involved with a staffer, but as they have noted at the time there was not much hard evidence. and politicians do deserve some privacy especially if they are having problems in their private lives. Evidence is there now with the staffer undeniably pregnant and more details coming out.
But when do you start reporting? When a polly has dinner with their staffer and run a story of a possible affair, hetro/homosexual so can be male pollie having dinner with male staffer or whatever.? Pollie goes on a short holiday/ break without their family, temporarily moves out of the home for unrelated reasons, to help out a sick rellie, pollie gives hug to staffer going through a crisis? Staffer moves jobs due to minister demotions or personality conflicts or to widen experience?
Confessions @ #1416 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 10:48 am
tl:dr Karma’s a bitch! It bites you on the bum when you least expect it or want it to. 🙂
c@t
yep. and it didnt stop the media hounding JGillard regarding a relationship she had with someone, before she even entered politics. they even hounded her ex boyfriend, and staked out his house etc. I also recall the media going to the ex partner and children of the ex boyfriend. it was insane and ridiculous stuff.
yet, here we have a situation where the DPM had to go to a by election cause he was sitting as an ineligible MP, and the whole campaign was stage managed to avoid any mention of his current circumstances. please spare me!!!!!
Asher
Which came first, chicken or egg?
I might bet that the journalists who knew about Joyce’s affair also knew about Ms Campion’s employment shifts. After all it seems there was disfunction in Joyce’s office and that sort of information gets about.
But how would they go about exposing the jobs rort without exposing the affair, which it seems they had determined not to do.
Any story about somebody being moved to a job that didn’t previously exist without mentioning that the person was in a relationship with Joyce the would have people thinking “typical Canberra” and moving on.
How convenient that would have been.
and as Fess notes when you have the MSM reporting on those stories they should be reporting on the MDB and other rorts.
i would hope that the media would scrutinise the destruction of the NBN under Turnbull as well as the contrived set up of the AWU raid to garner information already in the possession of powers that be. yet here we are dealing with the stupidity of BJoyce and Turnbull with regard to a personal relationship.
IIRC the original ‘Bill & Chloe’ rumours / stories started as a way of Abbott and ‘team’ in opposition to chip away at Quentin Bryce.
Righto
Now what if you lot find out hthat Bill or Albo or Tanya has been bokning a staffer? Shuffled the person sideways (or up) to avoid conflict.
Will you scream “we wos wobbed”
Now there IS an issue with Barnaby – that is his obvious propensity to imbibe of the fruit of the vine.
Does this impair his capacity and judgement – well like Peter Slipper and others the answer is yes.
There comes a point with drunks where they can no longer perform well (in all senses) and it is at that point that the issue is a problem. It manifests itself in silly indiscreet sexual behaviour and carelessness in other matters.
However the issue is NOT whether he bonked his staffer – or even got her a job, it is whether his red nose is indicative of failing judgment and his affair is just a symptom.
Player One @ #1393 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 7:03 am
You’ve completely missed the point. The problem is *created* by the appointment of the family member, whether it is secret or not. The knowledge that the person is a family member of someone powerful changes behaviour, generally to the detriment of the organisation, which you rightly pointed out from your own personal experience, and is why in most large organisations it’s not acceptable to have a family member of a senior person working within the sphere of influence of that senior person.
dtt
fmd could your posts get any more stupid
vic,
Don’t forget the way the media found the ‘resources’ to go after Bill Shorten’s first wife; or that spiteful first wife of Mark Latham.
And, as I always cryptically say, there’s a story about Tony Abbott that would blow everyone’s socks off. What do we get? *crickets* And, but, ‘Resources’!
Give. Me. A. Break.
Anyway, good on The Daily Telegraph, even if the word came from on high to do it. I don’t know. Though, Mr Murdoch likes to be ahead of the curve.
Also, something else I found interesting over the weekend was the new story that Turnbull let filter out that he had changed his mind about a 2018 election and it would now likely be in 2019. Obviously he has decided that he needs to ride the bucking bronco back into the stables and calm the horses down before he goes to an election.
I guess the irrigator water thieves aren’t Armadills, and the APVMA move was a side of pork that turned rancid.
Nah, that smell is boar taint.
c@t
of course. my view is that for some very good reason BJoyce has become a big liability to the party and they wanted to definitely get ahead of the curve. they wanted him to resign gracefully and make it easy for Turnbull to move onwards and upwards. 2019 is looking like a better option for them. lol!!
Victoria @ #1445 Monday, February 12th, 2018 – 11:20 am
Yeah. I just had to think of one politician that blows that theory out of the water. Winston Churchill.
And again, this could’ve been uncovered without even knowing the woman was sleeping with Barnaby if the press gallery had done this at the time she was moved there!
‘Fess I find Bemused’s vitriol directed at you irrational and over the top.
But what drugs are you on?
How or why on earth would this even be a thing other than as a consequence of the Joyce affair? How or why on earth would a journalist go trawling through the minutia of National Party whip’s office appointments outside of the context of the Joyce affair?
I have more than a lot of sympathy for your position that the media’s failure to properly examine and expose policy failures is a greater black mark against them. That goes without saying. But how can we get them to that higher standard if we can’t even get them to the standard of following up a scandal that they all pretty much had the starting point handed to them on a platter?
Absolutely everything here starts with Joyce’s private behaviour and what it says about the yawning chasm between what he portrayed himself to be in public and what he actually is. Only by picking up the start of the thread can you follow it. The media made a conscious decision not to. It was a grave fault that merely reinforces how far from a useful structure they are.