There are two situations vacant currently in the federal parliament: member for Eden-Monaro, with Mike Kelly’s successor to be chosen at a by-election on a date to be determined, and Victorian Greens Senator, with Richard Di Natale’s vacancy to be filled by a party membership ballot following a timeline I’m not privy to. The latest developments on these fronts are as follows:
• With Andrew Constance now in the rear mirror, the Liberals are going through a preselection process that has brought them to the closure of nominations, with the candidates not yet formally announced. David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald reported three likely starters: the presumed front-runner, Fiona Kotvojs, who ran in 2019 and remains popular in local branches; Jerry Nockles, an international relations expert and former Navy seaman; and Pru Gordon, a manager at the National Farmers Federation. Canberra news magazine CityNews reported that names being tested in Liberal polling included Nichole Overall, a Queanbeyan freelance journalist. Please note that there’s a dedicated Eden-Monaro by-election thread below this one.
• The Victorian Greens have attracted nine nominees to fill Richard Di Natale’s Senate vacancy, and helpfully laid them out on their website. The highest profile is human rights lawyer Julian Burnside, who ran unsuccessfully for the party in the seat of Cooper at last year’s federal election. However, Noel Towell of The Age reported in March that Lidia Thorpe, who won Northcote in a by-election in November 2017 but failed to retain it at the general election a year later, is also rated highly. The report said the same of Huong Truong, who held an upper house seat in Western Metropolitan region in the nine months before the election, but she is not among the nominees.
Mike Kelly hasn’t been a minister for 7 years Stuart. Pine/Pyne walked straight out the door into a conflict of interest. Big difference.
Edit: Pine/Pyne
Aqualung
Fair comment.
Aqualung
Fcuked optics though. Too “ill” to see out his term but well enough to take on a job like that within ‘days’
I should have added something like that to my comment poroti. I agree the optics aren’t great if you have claimed poor health.
I saw it last year and thought Crowe was brilliant as Ailes.
Burke is right. Real prevention means that people need sick leave for quarantining themselves.
EVERYTHING I NEED TO KNOW TO SURVIVE COVID-19 I LEARNED BY WATCHING SCIFI & HORROR MOVIE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUdV7Xf9sT4&feature=youtu.be
lizzie @ #55 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:23 am
I think Burke doesn’t get enough credit generally speaking for being arguably Labor’s best communicators.
Lizzie, I heard that was one of the problems at Ceded Meat Works. The workers there are employees through a labour hire company. If you don’t turn up you don’t get paid. The fear was the person picked up on the 2nd April turned up to work and sparked the cluster.
It is imperative that infected people retain their salary while at home.
PeeBee @ #58 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:27 am
Unless they’re guilty of acts of cruelty, in which case they should be lock up, not down.
PeeBee
The gov could have made testing for the virus refundable on medicare PLUS doc’s cert for quarantining self drew sick pay.
Burke is doing very well on Insiders. Answering all the questions directly and with as much substance as he can. Speers has not had to resort to tactics.
Some workplaces have introduced an additional sick leave entitlement for staff called Covid Leave. My employer has done this for anyone infected with coronavirus who needs to take 2 weeks off work to quarantine.
BK
Burke definitely a clear communicator. Better than Albo, frankly.
BK @ #61 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:31 am
Albo or Burkey? I have given this serious thought.
lizzie @ #63 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:32 am
🙂
Fess
That’s good, but it seems the casuals suffer most. In a health crisis, the gov should have picked it up.
Best interview with anyone from Labor all year.
Mundo is very happy.
Lizzie, and so it should, but some people don’t get sick pay. For instance, those working for cash in the black economy. They are usually not well off and a sniffle would hardly stop them from fronting up to work.
lizzie:
Yes casuals have definitely fallen through the cracks, if not tossed by the wayside.
PeeBee
All part of our dreadful inequality.
Yabba, from last night,
Alone among the industry experts, independent privacy consultants and software gurus (who all, unaccountably, missed it), our very own Yabba, and on short notice too, finally gets his hands on the source code and unearths the true live-tracking betrayal at the heart of the app.
“It’s a cookbook!” he cries, from a Twilight Zone all of his own, as the gullible rest of us, too late to turn back, trudge slowly onto the alien spaceship.
It’s far less interesting when Insiders return to gossipy considerations.
Morning all bludgers, thanks BK for the roundup, and happy mothers day to all relevant.
On Mike Kelly, I have no problem with that job. He is returning to a field he worked in at a high level as an army officer with a PhD before he went in to parliament. He could have won that job on his prior experience. Plus he is well clear of any conflict of interest period from being a minister under current public service guidelines. So it doesn’t breach any rules or conventions.
This is another reason why the rules for politicians should be the same as for public servants. It stops rorting and allows those doing the right thing to pursue a career.
On social distancing and the scrums in shopping centres yesterday, some retailers said consumers had to start taking responsibility. Why aren’t the retailers taking responsibility??
Before the crowd inside gets too large to meet distancing requirements they should stop people entering the shops. What happened to all those queues on entry?
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-09/shoppers-raise-alarm-over-coronavirus-social-distancing/12231780
There is no reason not to enforce the rules on supermarkets. Food retailers have seen revenue go UP during Covid 19.
Insiders panelists sound pretty confident the JobSeeker and JobKeeper payments will be extended beyond September.
Kelly’s new boss seems a nice chap 🙁
————————————————
Writing in Cato Unbound, the organ of the Cato Institute……. Thiel wrote…..
..…I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible… Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel
Confessions @ #64 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 7:31 am
I mentioned this back at the start.
For me the Government should have covered all sick leave related to COVID-19.
That way there would be no barrier to people being tested, with people not having their current sick leave impacted on.
Also this would cover workers who had no sick leave entitlement.
We saw early on a case in Hobart where the person got tested and then went to work.
lizzie says:
Sunday, May 10, 2020 at 9:32 am
BK
Burke definitely a clear communicator. Better than Albo, frankly.
_______________________
Yes all the ALP now is a leader from the SDA. Should just about complete its destruction. Good idea.
Tony Burke for leader.
You all know it makes sense.
Confessions @ #77 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 7:47 am
The Government just don’t want to give any impression that these are more permanent measures, especially JobSeaker.
Barney:
That’s why our employer has Covid Leave. To stop people with infection who don’t have adequate leave provisions coming to work because they can’t afford to take unpaid leave.
nath
As an ordinary voter not connected with Labor history, I am more concerned with having the right leader than worrying over each person’s background. If that is what’s holding Labor back, they (and you) have a problem.
STA has 2 weeks Covid 19 leave as required. A 74yo driver at my depot was told to stay home for his safety and paid under these arrangements. He was told to stay home for a further 2 weeks under the same arrangements.
Confessions @ #83 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 7:54 am
Yep, but it shouldn’t be based on having a rational employer.
I should add to my last;
… who can afford to do so.
Good Insiders discussion this morning with three notable exceptions.
New information came to light in the last month that showed that Morrison misled Parliament about the authorizations for the sports grants. There are two aspects to the authorizations issue. The processes that enable the minister or the prime minister to authorize the expenditures under the Constitution did not exist.
The Panel failed to nail either aspect. Instead they did a bit of chat about whether the voters would be interested at all.
Secondly, the Panel failed to nail Taylor’s direct link to the finding of Ley’s Department that Taylor’s company was directly involved in the illegal poisoning native grassland.
Instead the Panel discussed whether it was appropriate for the Opposition to be raising Taylor when Parliament sits.
Thirdly, the Panel missed a key issue for our democracy – how rarely our parliament sits at all. This goes to the heart of Morrison’s systematic avoidance of accountability and transparency.
All three of these lead straight to Morrison as the prime minister of the most corrupt Federal government since Federation. FAIL by Insiders.
All three of these lead straight to Morrison as the prime minister of the most corrupt Federal government since Federation. FAIL by Insiders.
_______________________
That’s why I’m not interested in watching it. The same ‘insiders’ who see politics through the prism of game playing also routinely wring their hands over why there is so little trust in our ‘leaders’.
nath
Credit where credit is due, Tony Burke did give a good interview on Insiders….clear communication, no evasion….answered the questions
Aqualung,
How’s the new grandkiddy going? Have you been able to see them yet?
Discussed in the context of: whether the public would care at this time of the pandemic….they have probably already made their minds up about it…..they all rort.
Likewise, the discussion on the other 2 issues focused on what priorities needed addressing in these “unprecedented times”….whether to focus on “business as usual ” aka party politics in the parliament.
lizzie @ #82 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:56 am
Amen.
James Campbell is 100% correctemundo. How many businesses can survive with a virus trundling along for ~ 2 years until a vaccine, maybe, is developed to counteract it, with only 10 customers allowed, and no overseas tourist traffic? Not. Very. Many.
There is going to be a fundamental reorganisation of the economy that WILL happen and it’s not going to be pretty and Josh Frydenburg and Scott Morrison and their Shiny Happy People Sunny Uplands view of the nation and the world just aren’t going to be able to cut it that way forever.
There are no bigger fans of Tony Burke than the mining interests in the Tarkine.
nath @ #78 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 9:49 am
Hands up all those voters out there who know/care what SDA stands for.
Didn’t think so.
After the announcement of the various hundred billion dollar Morrison Government initiatives everyone was hailing Morrison.
My comment at the time was that the announcements were the easy bits.
What Insiders did nail was that the time was coming when the true economic impacts of the massive deferred loans, the masses of businesses that will not re-open and the close of the Jobseeker and Jobkeeper on roids will shock many people.
Other than that, the Panel missed another item. The ‘reason’ our unemployment rate is only partly the result of Jobkeeper. Huge amounts of unemployment was forced overseas. While these do not reflect in either the jobless numbers or a direct impact on the Budget, they do reflect a huge loss of economic activity.
The Libs have opened the door on politicking during the virus with the attacks on Andrews. Labor have to fight back in a controlled way.
She’s gorgeous C@tmomma. I’ve been over a couple of times and got to hold her.
I was a bit reluctant to go but after a few weeks off and keeping pretty well to myself I indulged.
I’m not sure her parents feel the same way at the moment.
She sleeps during the day and performs of a night time. 😁
nath @ #93 Sunday, May 10th, 2020 – 10:20 am
Amazing how forensic people are when it comes to Labor.
Just as well Scrotty speaking in tongues and talking about the end times is such a turn off for voters otherwise we’…..oh, wait….