Rudd vAbbott

Nick Xenophon is not right leaning - he seems more centrist to me. That guy from the Sports Party seems a bit ambiguous as well. There's also a chance (albeit small) of Greens getting an 11th seat in Canberra.
 
So glad Rudd is gone.

Thanks to him wasting some 60bn on NBN this country has gone from a rich cashed up nation to one struggling to repay debt. In some countries such economic mismanagement would earn you capital punishment.

Don't know where you get your figures from but the bonds issued to pay for the NBN rollout are issued in stages as funds are required.
When the NBN is finished it will be a valuable assets that will be sold. Maybe to a super fund that would appreciate utility types of income.
It's also an asset that will produce an income (set at 7%).
Borrowing rates are 3.5% for the bonds.
The cost to taxpayers is only the interest bill on the bonds issued to cover its construction.
It's up to the NBNCo to pay the bonds back.
 
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Tony Abbott has today been quoted as saying that "returning a budget surplus is more importanter than investing in education".........
 
Tony Abbott has today been quoted as saying that "returning a budget surplus is more importanter than investing in education".........

I just did a google search for the phrase: "returning a budget surplus is more importanter than investing in education"

I got 1 hit.

This thread.

Nice one.

People continue to misunderestimate Tony Abbott.

And they appear to contimuously make **** up too.
 
I find it disappointing to see some of the vitriol which has come out after the election- fortunately little of that here.

The "losers" are pouring manure all over the "winners", the "winners" gloating like love struck roosters.

Whatever the viewpoint, there's not too much which can be done now, except to try to keep them honest- and even then there's not much we can do.

As investors, we just need to keep an eye on what is happening to take best advantage of whatever regulations and conditions which happen to change.
 
I find it disappointing to see some of the vitriol which has come out after the election- fortunately little of that here.

The "losers" are pouring manure all over the "winners", the "winners" gloating like love struck roosters.

Q and A was interesting last night - on the panel the virulent Labor supporters were rude and demanding and misquoting, whilst the LNP's were calm and concise and ready to move on
 
Q and A was interesting last night - on the panel the virulent Labor supporters were rude and demanding and misquoting, whilst the LNP's were calm and concise and ready to move on

To my mind political journalist Lenore Taylor was very good. She made both sides of politics shut up because she knows her facts and can cut through the political spin.

Especially when she tripped up Brandis.

The Coalition attacked Labor for negotiating with the Greens and independents calling their compromises backflips. So how will negotiating with Labor, Greens, PUP and the micro parties in the Senate to pass their legislation go. Or will it be my way or the highway. No compromises.
 
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Q and A was interesting last night - on the panel the virulent Labor supporters were rude and demanding and misquoting, whilst the LNP's were calm and concise and ready to move on

I stopped watching that Leftie Love-In many months ago. Made me vomit each time the audience clapped their hands.
 
Segment on HACK yesterday was about all the people that are going to migrate to another country due to TA getting in. Was quite amusing.
 
Q and A was interesting last night - on the panel the virulent Labor supporters were rude and demanding and misquoting, whilst the LNP's were calm and concise and ready to move on
Aaron_C said:
I stopped watching that Leftie Love-In many months ago. Made me vomit each time the audience clapped their hands.
Same show, two totally opposite viewpoints.
 
A great article on Crikey today...


Part one -- busting myths about the election result

1. "Labor’s lowest primary vote for a century!" Well, yes, but no. The point is that every Labor primary vote is going to be low from now on. The knowledge/culture/policy producer class has broken away and is voting for the Greens. Barring truly weird events, Labor ain’t coming back. That’s minimum of 7% -- and as much as 12% -- down from the mid-40s votes the ALP hitherto enjoyed.
That happened to the non-Labor forces of course in the 1920s, when the Country Party broke away. Out of that, we got the preferential system, and as a trade-off to Labor, compulsory voting. But the alliance with the Country Party didn’t turn United Australia Party/Liberal voters to Labor. Many of Labor’s voters won’t accept any sort of alliance with the Greens. Good luck working out that one.

2. "It was a landslide." No, it wasn’t – 88 to 57 seats, give or take, isn’t a landslide. It’s a zero-sum game, so when five seats change hands, a 10-seat gap opens up between the two parties. Fewer than 50 seats and you can talk landslides. Mind you, getting 18 or so seats back to regain power at the end of a first term is a big ask and hasn’t been done since, oh that’s right, 1998, when Kim Beazley won a majority of the overall vote two years after Labor had been reduced to 49 seats. Despite a 5.5% swing to Labor and a 51%-49% two-party preferred margin in Labor’s favour, the Coalition held 80 seats to Labor’s 67. The next decade of our history was built on this manifest absurdity.

3. "It was a total repudiation of the Labor Party." Wrong again. The two-party preferred vote was 53.5% to 46.5%, a serious enough margin in Australian politics. But the effect of two-party preferred in a single-member system is to amplify the gap. The previous vote was more or less 50:50. This result is the equivalent of one Labor two-party preferred voter in 16 changing his vote. That’s being made out as if it were on the level of say the ANC’s 63% vote in South Africa 1994, or Ramos-Horta’s 70% vote in East Timor’s first election. Those are expressions of a substantial public will -- 53.5-46.5 ain’t.

4. "Labor will need to totally recondition itself to be electable and this will take a decade." Labor needs to recondition itself for all sorts of reasons -- and Australian politics may be in for a more comprehensive transformation -- but let’s not awfulise this. Quite aside from the 1996-98 result, there’s the passage from 1975 -- 44.3% to 1980 -- 49.6%, and then victory in 1983. The telescoped relationship between the two-party preferred vote and seats won gives an entirely false impression of just how far there is to come back from. Whether that happening without a reconstruction of Labor would be a triumph or a tragedy is another question.

5. "Tony Abbott has a mandate, therefore Labor and the Greens should vote up his new legislation." Where did this come from? Abbott has a mandate to govern, and therefore to introduce proposed legislation to Parliament. The 46.5% who wanted someone else elected their people to oppose it. The idea that a mandate abolishes opposition is totalitarian by definition.

6. "Australian democracy is the best in the world." Yeah, a lower house that does not fairly represent the party vote, a compulsory voting/exhaustive preferential system/matched funding system that makes it easy for multimillionaires to get a seat and murder for anyone else, a Senate where the balance of power is held by five people with 4% primary vote between them, where the sheer size of the ballot paper sends the donkey vote skyrocketing towards a quota, where Tasmanians have five times the representation of New South Wales, two elections in 20 years with a majority vote not gaining government, and a prime minister-governor-general relationship that still hasn’t been clarified since it brought us to the brink of government collapse -- and where blatant falsehoods in a near monopoly media is subject to no immediate sanction. Yeah, nothing needs to be looked at here, finest in the world. Nothing can possibly go wrong ...

* Watch out for more mythbusting from our roaming reporter Guy Rundle in the coming days.
 
On this mandate idea, Tony Abbott didn't respect Kevin Rudd's mandate from 07 on an ETS so I really struggle to see why Labor should suddenly fold on this. If they did, I could only conclude they are a bunch of completely spineless jellies who believe in nothing. IMO they have a duty to represent the people who voted for them on the policies they took to the election.

Some have been talking about how the Liberals respected the mandate of Labor to repeal Work Choices. This is a clear misrepresentation - the Libs changed their own IR policy because they had comprehensive feedback from the electorate that it stunk. Current Liberal party IR policy is nowhere near Work Choices.

And yes, Senate voting rules have to be changed. We are staring down the barrel of getting a WA Senator who got 0.22% of the primary vote! Completely ridiculous - nobody voted for this guy!
 
cimbom you forgot to mention that the Greens' primary vote dropped by a quarter as well. :)

Seems the only people who wanted the Green were the latté sippers in Fitzroy....
 
A great article opinion piece on Crikey today...

It's just another opinion piece. And, truth be told, coming from Crikey certainly doesn't mean it was written on stone at Mt Sinai.

1. "Labor’s lowest primary vote for a century!"

So it is factually correct, if not contextually dubious.
But it is still factually correct.


2. "It was a landslide."

Well, compared to where they were just 2 elections ago, this was part 2 of a landslide....
The ALP has gone from 83 seats in 2007 to to 57 in 2013
And the LNP from 65 in 2007 to 88 in 2013.


3. "It was a total repudiation of the Labor Party."
That’s being made out as if it were on the level of say the ANC’s 63% vote in South Africa 1994, or Ramos-Horta’s 70% vote in East Timor’s first election. Those are expressions of a substantial public will

Imo comparing the results of the 48th election in an highly democratic nation with a 110+ yr history of democracy, with those of the first democratic elections in a couple of basket-case 3rd world nations is just plain silly. Please find a more meaningful comparison.


4. "Labor will need to totally recondition itself to be electable and this will take a decade."
...there’s the passage from 1975 -- 44.3% to 1980 -- 49.6%, and then victory in 1983..

I don't see how using the example of an 8 year period of a return from electoral purgatory in any way helps your argument against a claim that it could take 10 years to bounce back from this one. Note to Crickey writer - the last 2 federal governments before this one lasted 11 years, and 13 years respectively....

5. "Tony Abbott has a mandate, therefore Labor and the Greens should vote up his new legislation."

Whoever won this election by whatever clear majority was always going to claim a mandate (again - note to writer - that is what governments do...). But the Greens backing the LNP?? Yeah... That aint gonna happen.


6. "Australian democracy is the best in the world."
Yeah, nothing needs to be looked at here, finest in the world. Nothing can possibly go wrong .

What the writer fails to do here is actually name a better democracy. Yeah, there are all sorts of things that are not right or less than ideal about our system of government - but name for me, if you will, a system you actually consider better than ours and that you would - no questions asked and with NO alterations - replace with ours.

Also... labeling something as "less than perfect" doesn't mean it isn't world's best. It just means that it is "less than perfect". Economists call this the Nirvana Fallacy -> the tendency to judge anything that is not perfect as somehow inferior. Our system of government can still be world's best and "less than perfect" at the same time. The two are not mutually exclusive.
 
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