Tag Archives: clive palmer

Barnaby: “This Is How Stupid They Are”

30 Apr

Dear reader,

Please enjoy a few minutes of politico-economic sanity:

2GB Chris Smith Afternoon Show Transcript
Tuesday 23 April, 2013

Topics: Chris Smith, Senator Barnaby Joyce
Subjects: Budget black hole

Chris Smith: Senator Barnaby Joyce, good to have you on the program.

Barnaby Joyce: My pleasure, how are you?

Chris Smith: I’m well. Where are you today?

Barnaby Joyce: Well I’m actually making my way to Canberra, but I’m stopping off in Tamworth on the way. The bloke I used to stay with, he and his wife, unfortunately he passed away from cancer so I’m going to the service for that. I was going to go to Rockhampton but changed direction.

Chris Smith: So, you’re heading to, hopefully, a new place. Have you done any polling of late to work out how close you’re going to get to Tony Windsor?

Barnaby Joyce: It’s going to be tough. Mr Windsor will desperately say he wasn’t there, he’s not responsible for this government and he didn’t put them there. I will keep on reminding people that he did. The only reason that we’re $270 billion in debt is because he put them there. The only reason that we’re heading towards another $12 billion deficit is because he put them there. The only reason we have a carbon tax is because he put them there. He’ll be saying it wasn’t me, it was somebody else, I was away that day.

Chris Smith: The Prime Minister’s big budget black hole, estimates now putting the budget deficit anywhere between ten and $20 billion which is not a bad effort considering we were told that less than a year ago that we’d have a surplus of $1.3 billion. How is it possible that $21 billion goes missing Barnaby?

Barnaby Joyce: Bad management, simple as that. What happens is, they’re spending 12 bucks and only bringing in 10 and sure enough you start running out of dough. All of your listeners would understand that the deficit is just like the loss of the government for the year. The real problem of course is the debt that sits behind it. The debt is getting bigger and bigger. They had a good week last week, they only borrowed another half a billion dollars last week. The week before they borrowed another two billion. If you put the price of your house out to $300,000 a pop that’s 6,000 houses that they borrowed for the week a fortnight ago. They borrowed for another thousand or so last week.

Chris Smith: They keep talking about their debt to GDP ratio. “It falls in line with the rest of the world”. The rest of the world is a basket case right now, how dare they compare us with the rest of the world right now.

Barnaby Joyce: Yes Chris, that’s like walking around the graveyard saying: “This person’s more dead than that one”. It’s irrelevant. Once you’re out the backdoor, it’s irrelevant. It becomes an argument in sophistry, an argument in rather large numbers you can’t repay. This is a garbage argument: “Oh, we’re not as bad as Greece. We’re not as bad as Portugal”. I hope not. If we keep going the way we’re going, Ms Gillard, Mr Swan, Mr Windsor and Christine Milne if they keep running the show, don’t worry we’ll get there.

Chris Smith: I had to laugh when I was hearing this long speech of 33 minute duration, off and on through my commercial breaks here yesterday. I was hearing this reference to company tax revenue being down and company tax revenue usually gives us, company tax revenue has hit us and company tax… I thought to myself, no wonder company tax revenue is down, because if they open their damn eyes they would have seen companies close left, right and centre.

Barnaby Joyce: People are doing it tough. I was talking to a manufacturer the other day. He travelled 500km to have dinner with us and amongst the things he wanted to show me was his carbon tax bill: $12.1 million for the year. He said: “What that means to me is that I should go to another country. Why do you guys do this? What is wrong with you people? If I moved to America this is my cost. If I move to Asia here’s my cost but I choose to stay here. Guess who gave me these costs – the government!”

Chris Smith: They change the goalposts so often. The other goalposts they’re about to change if you believe some of the scribes today, is this Medicare levy. We’re going to get to the stage where we’re upping the Medicare levy for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Shouldn’t they be looking at the bank, that is, our bank, the National Bank and say: “Hang on a second we’re in such crisis at the moment, maybe we’ll hold off on that for a while”, like most people do in business, like most people do with their house budgets.

Barnaby Joyce: The first thing they should be getting, as a little old bush accountant, they should be getting their day to day finances under control. Then other good things that you want to happen like the National Disability Insurance Scheme can be paid for. This idea that: “Oh we don’t know where the money is going to come from so what we’re going to do is borrow more money and if we can’t borrow it, we’re just going to tax you”. That’s just a sign that they’re financially out of control. The people with disability are a soft spot for me and I do want to do something to help them. My gosh you get frustrated when you find the money that has been put up against the wall and all these nutty ideas and when a good idea comes up they have no money for it. We’re beyond not having any money for it. We’re getting to the point where we can’t borrow. We won’t be able to extend our credit limit and we won’t be able to borrow more money.

Chris Smith: You said as soon as they get money they spent more, remember they didn’t get a zap from the mining tax and they spent that on handouts remember before they even got anything.

Barnaby Joyce: This is how stupid they are. They basically said” “We’ve got this ticket in the lottery and now we’re going to buy the house and oh gosh, the lottery didn’t come in. That’s a bad plan, that’s bad luck. Let’s put out a media release blaming somebody about that”.

Chris Smith: Yesterday was a shocker and as I said at the beginning of the program, someone who stands there for as long as the Prime Minister did to come up with a series of excuses as to why everything is stuffed, is a person who is more culpable every minute she speaks.

Barnaby Joyce: I don’t think anyone is listening. I had to deal with the same thing in this area, I had Mr Windsor say that he wanted to bring about a referendum on gay marriage, however he wasn’t going to bring it up with the Prime Minister and if it did come up he wasn’t going to vote for it. I was trying to translate that for people and it’s called confusion – mass confusion.

Chris Smith: The race to become Prime Minister doesn’t just involve Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott, Clive Palmer’s thrown his hat in the ring. Is the Coalition under threat of having their votes diluted because of Palmer?

Barnaby Joyce: Clive’s a mate but a lot of things he’s doing of late things are getting out there. Clive’s a good bloke. I don’t know why we’ve got this distraction here. It doesn’t quite work like that. As you know to set up a political party you’ve got to have members, branches, policies, people willing to give up their jobs and go campaigning for you. It costs a lot of money and I know he has a lot of money but it takes a lot of money to run a campaign.

Chris Smith: I’ve got to tell you that Clive Palmer may be one of your mates but he doesn’t count Tony Abbot as one of his mates. This is what he told me yesterday when he was in the studio.

Chris Smith: Tony Abbott has never been Prime Minister.

Clive Palmer: Thank God for that.

Chris Smith: His party has never been in the position of running the country, is there a sense of vengeance?

Clive Palmer: Not really. My number one criticism is that all sides of politics wherever they’re from, have lobbyists who are not elected, who advise them. If you go to Parliament House, there’s a box in Parliament House, on the floor of Parliament where the advisers sit. Tony Abbott goes over and gets advice from his advisor and someone else gets advice from theirs. Those advisers have direct links, were or are or will become in the future, employed by lobbyist companies. If you go to those companies, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Liberal or a Labor Government who you want to influence policy, they’ll assist you for a fee. I think that’s subrogating the Australian rights.

Chris Smith: Thank God Tony Abbott has never become Prime Minister he said.

Barnaby Joyce: That’s not helpful. The thing is, if Clive’s got a problem with advisers and lobbyists, that’s great, let’s deal with that problem. What are we going to do? Leave the Labor Party there and the Greens and the independents to run the show for another three years? What do you think is going to be left of this country if they stay there for another three years? You won’t have to worry about me campaigning there for another three years because honestly I would be lying to you if I said I’d know how to fix it.

Chris Smith: This is all about vengeance isn’t it?

Barnaby Joyce: Vengeance is a bad thing. Vengeance eats you up and gets you nowhere. You have to learn to park grief and move on. If you start carrying around a bucketful of bile no one cares about it, it just eats you up.

Chris Smith: What’s your message to Clive?

Barnaby Joyce: Clive help us get the country back on the rails. We don’t need any more instability. I’ve got to give up my job, an easy-paying job to have a crack at a seat where the bloke has 71 per cent of the two-party preferred vote. Why? Because our nation has got to get back on the rails. We all have to put our shoulder in to get the show back on the rails, not try and sink the boat. If we sink the boat we all go down with it.

- ENDS -

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Bravo! To “Conspiracy Nut” Elizabeth Farrelly

12 Apr

Wonders will never cease. A mainstream journalist with the courage to write a column whose content will inevitably invite her public vilification as a “conspiracy nutter”. As she clearly foresaw … and yet, wrote it anyway:

I’m not given to conspiracy theories, incompetence being so much easier to imagine, but one thing gives credibility to Clive Palmer’s otherwise nutty CIA phantasm about US influence in Australia.

It is Julian Assange, a story that hinges on the uncomfortable relationship between truth and power.

We expect truth-telling from our four-year-olds but not from our politicians. In the case of Assange, truth is actively and repeatedly punished.

This implies that, as you move up through society’s power strata, there’s a point where morality flips.

A sort of moral inversion layer, beneath which the rules apply but above which they’re reversed.

The modern Labor Party seems to illustrate this as well as anyone.

…

I mention all this not just to illustrate that high-level grubbiness is so normal we almost expect it, but to highlight a more sinister possibility; that we, like the Philippines, are a puppet US state, where truth comes second to power.

This kind of talk I’ve always resisted. Yet it is now undeniable that, at US behest, Julian Assange stands to lose his liberty, indefinitely, for telling the truth. And the very same Labor Party, with its CIA-assisted PM and its concern for truth re-education, lifts not a finger to help him.

It’s quite clear that Assange is not guilty – not of rape, not of treason. As Malcolm Turnbull, responding to Gillard’s “illegal” claim, told a Sydney University law school audience last year, it is prima facie clear that Assange has broken no Australian law.

In words of one syllable, the Australian Federal Police agrees. There has been no breach of our law.

Bravo!

Isn’t truth a wonderful thing, dear reader?

Prioritising the quest for Truth above all else allows one to agree with those who you would, on other subjects, vehemently disagree with.

Like mainstream journalists.

And Malcolm Turnbull.

Elizabeth Farrelly is right.

And she is not the only female journalist who smells conspiracy in our government. And has finally found the courage to publish her observations of what is, in fact, nothing more than an uncomfortable yet blindingly obvious reality.

Here is Their ABC’s Annabel Crabb on the FWA/Craig Thomson protection racket, and the Australia Network/Chris Conroy totalitarian censorship fiasco:

Everyone knows that when faced with a choice between conspiracy and incompetence, the best explanation is usually incompetence, but in this case we are now dealing with some pretty special incompetence.

As of this week, conspiracy is now the more obvious conclusion.

Quite so Annabel.

Quite so.

Oh yes, and about the “conspiracy theory” of covert (and increasingly overt) US “influence” in Australian governance.

Regular readers may recall my irony-laden post This Will End Well in November last year, on the Gillard announcement of a permanently increased US military presence on our sovereign territory.

Today, a former leader of the Australian Army agrees that I was right.

Exactly right:

General Peter Leahy warns of US-China collision

FORMER Australian army chief Peter Leahy has urged Australia to tread warily in expanding its military ties with the US to ensure they do not “lead to increased tension and even conflict” with China.

Warning against becoming “caught” between the US as its security guarantor and China as its economic underwriter, Professor Leahy has welcomed Australia’s decision to play host to US marines, but noted that “too much of a good thing” could put unnecessary pressure on China.

His comments, in an opinion piece in today’s edition of The Australian, came as the China Daily state-owned newspaper hit out at Australia’s expanding links with the US, warning they could spark a collapse of trust and endanger Sino-Australian economic ties.

In a strongly worded editorial, the newspaper yesterday also warned that the Gillard government’s decision last month to ban Chinese communications giant Huawei from bidding for work in the $36 billion National Broadband Network had created the perception in Beijing that Australia wanted to obstruct Chinese companies.

…

Relations between China and Australia have been under pressure since US President Barack Obama visited Canberra in November to announce plans to station up to 2500 US marines in Darwin within five years. The deployment, which started last week, was part of a US push to shift its defence posture towards Asia in recognition of the growing influence of China and India.

Chinese suspicions were further provoked last month when The Washington Post reported that the US was interested in using the Australia-controlled Cocos Islands as a base for surveillance drones.

Professor Leahy, who led the army between 2002 and 2008 and is now director of the University of Canberra’s National Security Institute, argues against Australia becoming too closely tied to the US. “As a sovereign nation Australia should maintain the ability to say ‘no’ to the US and separate itself from their actions,” he writes, predicting the US marines agreement will lead to US pressure for even closer military ties with Australia, including greater access for American air and naval forces.

“These are momentous decisions with far-reaching consequences. They potentially implicate Australia in a series of actions that could lead to increased tension and even conflict with China.

“War is improbable but not impossible. Australia needs to be careful that it does not make inevitable the future that it should fear the most.”

Yesterday’s China Daily article accused Australia of jumping on “the bandwagon” of a US push to “contain” China, putting at risk the close economic ties developed since diplomatic relations were normalised four decades ago.

“As an old Chinese saying said . . . the person attempting to travel two roads at once will get nowhere,” the article said. “Canberra is in danger of learning the truth of the Chinese saying that he who does not trust enough will not be trusted.

“If Canberra continues to place more importance on its alliance with Washington, the trend of giving China the cold shoulder will eventually hurt the good momentum that the two countries have worked hard to build.”

China is Australia’s largest trading partner, with the emerging giant’s hunger for coal and iron ore the key driver of Australia’s ongoing resources boom.

Truly, we are governed by muppets.

Dangerous muppets.

And the governing muppets are opposed by more muppets who, if given the chance to govern, would, on this particular topic, be even worse.

God help us.

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What Your TV Will Leave Out Of The Clive Palmer “CIA” Sound Bites

20 Mar

Apparently the Canberra media gallery and the social mediasphere are all abuzz over comments by anti-CO2-derivatives-scam activist, self-made billionaire and recently honoured National Living Treasure, Clive Palmer.

Naturally, the “buzz” is 99.999% abuse and insults, rather than objective, calm, reasoned assessment of Mr Palmer’s comments. And certainly there is no attempt whatsoever to calmly and methodically investigate the evidence Mr Palmer has cited in support of his comments.

Now, I haven’t had time to follow up and check his purported evidence either.

But then, neither am I making any rush-to-judgement call about whether he is right or wrong.

And I am certainly not jerking the knee in a self-glorifying display of imagined-witty insults, spewed bile, and general ad hominem abuse.

Like many journalists.

I am curious to follow up, to decide for myself whether there is any substance to Mr Palmer’s claims.

Especially since my own research over many years suggests there may be more than a little ring of truth in what he has said.

In the meantime though, here is a news article from the Brisbane Times this afternoon that does at least include a number of complete quotes from Mr Palmer’s press conference.

Since you will only see/hear selectively edited sound bites on the TV and radio news this evening – because after all, it is vital to smear the character of anyone threatening a legal challenge to the bankers’ CO2 derivatives scam – I’ll reproduce the Brisbane Times’ piece in full.

I assume that readers of this blog are significantly less predisposed to hasty judgements and attacking the messenger rather than dispassionately assessing the message, than the average egotistical narcissist twit on Twitter … and in the Canberra press gallery:

Mining magnate Clive Palmer has accused the Australian Greens and Queensland environmental campaigners of “treason” in conspiring with US powers to destroy the nation’s coal industry.

Mr Palmer was expected to give his response to the passing of the Gillard government’s mining tax at a media conference called this afternoon, but the multi-billionaire was concerned only with perceived collusion between the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency and the environmental lobby.

Mr Palmer turned his attention to a report by Greenpeace and other anti-coal groups, titled Stopping the Australian Coal Export Boom, which outlined an environmental campaign designed to disrupt and delay the expansion of the industry.

While brandishing a copy of the report this afternoon, Mr Palmer said it was the result of a CIA conspiracy involving the US-based Rockefeller Foundation.

“This is funded by the CIA,” he said.

“You only have to go back and read … the reports to the US Congress that sets up the Rockefeller Foundation as a conduit of CIA funding.

“You only have to look at the secret budget which was passed by Congress last year – bigger than our whole national economy – with the CIA to ensure that.

“You only have to read the reports to US Congress where the CIA reported to the president that their role was to ensure the US competitive advantage – that’s how you know it’s funded by the CIA.”

Mr Palmer argued descendants of US oil magnate John Rockefeller had bankrolled the report, in a bid to disrupt and damage the Australian coal industry.

He went on to say that the document confirmed local environmental campaigners, including Lock the Gate Alliance president Drew Hutton and Greens leader Bob Brown, were improperly collaborating with foreign multinationals.

“The Greens have not been providing you with the full information about where their money comes from or what it’s about,” he said.

“I think the Greens [candidates] in this upcoming state election … should resign if they’re being funded by an offshore political power.

“It’s paramount [sic] to treason and something needs to be done about it.”

Mr Palmer made little mention of mining tax legislation, passed last night in the Senate, saying he had no concern with it.

“I don’t care about any tax. It won’t affect my life one way or the other,” he said.

Mr Palmer said the controversial tax, which aims to distribute the spoils of Australia’s mining boom, would have no affect on his businesses.

“It probably won’t cost me anything, because I’m not mining anything that comes under the classification of it. So, you know, it’s not something that’s worried me,” he said.

Mr Palmer said he would not join Australia’s third largest iron ore miner, Fortescue Metals, owned by Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest, in mounting a legal challenge.

“Certainly Andrew Forrest has indicated he’ll do that – he has major concerns with it, because it affects him, affects his business and affects the ability of his workers,” Mr Palmer said.

UPDATE:

Andrew Bolt at least shows some restraint in joining the mockers, but does make one worthy observation (emphasis added) -

The Opposition will be thinking, oh, damn.

That’s not to say there wasn’t a straw from which this grass castle was built. From the CIA’s website, this book review:

She also does a fine job in recounting the intriguing story of how the CIA worked with existing institutions, such as the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, and established numerous “bogus” foundations to “hide” its funding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and its other covert activities. Everything came a cropper in 1967, however, as a result of press articles, especially revelations in the long-gone Ramparts magazine.

UPDATE 2:

ABC News video clip here.

UPDATE 3:

Twitterer @pyrmontvillage sagely observes -

According to #WikiLeaks, we have people in the federal ALP, who REPORT to the US Embassy…Not much of a stretch..#auspol#ClivePalmer#CIA

Pyrmontvillage is right.

From The Australian, December 9, 2010:

WikiLeaks outs Mark Arbib as US informant

FEDERAL Labor powerbroker Mark Arbib has been outed as a key source of intelligence on government and internal party machinations to the US embassy.

New embassy cables, released by WikiLeaks to Fairfax newspapers today, reveal the influential right-wing Labor MP has been one of the embassy’s best ALP informants, along with former frontbencher Bob McMullan and current MP Michael Danby.

The documents say the Minister for Sport had been secretly offering details of Labor’s inner workings even before his election to the Senate in 2007, dating back to his time as general secretary of the party’s NSW branch from 2004.

Senator Arbib was one of the “faceless men” who was instrumental in the decision to oust Kevin Rudd and install Julia Gillard as Prime Minister in June.

Those leaked US State Department cables show that sitting members of the Federal ALP Government are informants for the USA.

So it is no stretch at all to believe the possibility that some (or all) of Clive Palmers’ claims regarding the CIA and the Greens are true.

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Carbon Tax Legal Challenge By Evil Aussie Miner

14 Mar

There are so many ways in which the CO2 derivatives scam (aka “Clean Energy Future” aka “carbon tax”) can be challenged as unconstitutional, it beggars belief that we have to wait for a good ol’ Aussie-made-good mining billionaire to step up and actually do it:

MINING billionaire Clive Palmer has escalated his campaign against the Gillard government, vowing to use his resources to mount a High Court challenge to the carbon tax.

Mr Palmer told the ABC’s 7.30 last night he had legal advice that the carbon tax, set to take effect on July 1, was unconstitutional.

Asked on what grounds it was unconstitutional, he said: ”The grounds are set out in legal advice and they’ll be coming out in the High Court. I can’t answer that question because I’m not a lawyer. I can only go on the advice that I’m given.”

The move comes weeks after Treasurer Wayne Swan accused Mr Palmer and other wealthy mining magnates Gina Rinehart and Andrew ”Twiggy” Forrest of wielding too much power and being a threat to democracy.

Last night, Mr Palmer hit back, saying: ”I’ve given away each year more than a hundred times the Treasurer’s salary to Australians who are needy. I wonder how much of his salary has he given away to Australians who need that wealth?

”In the spirit of love and reconciliation we can forgive the Treasurer, but the Australian people will never forgive the Labor Party for destroying the opportunities of our children, our future generations.”

He said the carbon legislation acknowledged the possibility of it being declared unconstitutional. ”When it says it’s found to be unconstitutional, the government will create charges through other acts, that’s in the legislation.

Mr Palmer is right.

That particular point is precisely what this blog has argued throughout 2011.

The CO2 derivatives scam legislation totals some 1,000 pages and 18 different bills. Much of this – especially the multiple bills – is purely a result of the Government banksters’ lawyers trying to deliberately circumvent sections 51 and 55 of the Constitution – see The Carbon Pricing Scheme Is Unconstitutional and More Proof The Carbon Tax Is Unconstitutional.

The State Governments can also challenge the CO2 derivatives scam as unconstitutional, under section 114. This blog has endeavoured to encourage NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell to do exactly that, without success to date … despite the recent direct assurance of Premier O’Farrell that he would have the state Attorney-General look into it – see Premiers’ Appeal – Carbon Tax High Court Challenge and No Excuses, Mr O’Farrell.

Premier O’Farrell’s lack of credibility – indeed, his hypocrisy and complicity – was amply demonstrated within hours of his giving that personal assurance, when he stood beside PM Gillard and gushingly accepted the siting of the Greens’ $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation Carbon Bank / slush fund in Sydney … benefiting NSW by a whole 40 new jobs. At a cost to all NSW residents of billions, in higher costs for everything.

So as usual, we cannot rely on politicians from either “side” of politics … even when their primary election campaign pledge is to “fight the carbon tax”, and “I’ll go to Canberra to argue that point” if elected.

It takes deep pockets to challenge the power of the Federal Government.

Let us hope that “evil” Aussie-made-good local miner, Mr Palmer, is as good as his word.

Because one thing is certain.

Australian politicians of all stripes and colours are not.

UPDATE:

From a different news report, Mr Palmer is quoted as having said “I think the constitution of Australia is much more important than having a number of lawyers or parliament trying to slip around it.”

Indeed. And as readers of barnabyisright.com know from the abovementioned posts in 2011, “trying to slip around” the Constitution is exactly what the 18 bills of the Clean Energy Future package are designed to do. It is so obvious, it is disgraceful, and any so-called “judge” who failed to recognise the patently obvious attempt to circumvent the clear meaning and intent of the Constitution should be sacked … and disbarred.

UPDATE 2:

You can watch the interview with recently declared National Living Treasure (how apropos!) Clive Palmer here.

UPDATE 3:

With thanks to @wakeup2thelies

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Better Late Than Never: Hartcher’s Conscience Jarred

11 Mar

At last, a journalist from the lamestream media spots the galactic hypocrisy in Wayne Swan’s rants against 3 local miners.

Without actually calling it that, of course (emphasis added):

Swan’s pronouncements strike a jarring note, for three reasons. First, the contemporary playbook for “vested interest” campaigning was written not by the miners but by the unions.

It was the ACTU’s campaign against Howard’s Work Choices that established the power of an aggressive third-party thrust into politics. The union movement’s $30 million Your Rights at Work campaign discredited Work Choices, forced the Howard government into retreat and, finally, helped destroy the Coalition government. In the final humiliation, it even contributed to Howard’s loss of his seat of Bennelong. Swan was a beneficiary of this campaign.

Second, the miners that Swan demonised are not the miners that successfully emasculated his original mining tax. It was BHP Billiton, Rio and Xstrata that aggressively campaigned against the tax and funded its $22 million worth of lobbying and advertising, and it was Twiggy Forrest who went into private negotiations with Kevin Rudd to try to reach a compromise on the tax.

It was the three multinationals that helped discredit the Rudd government, accelerated Rudd’s downfall and forced the Gillard government to come to terms. Yet Swan does not mention these three multinationals in his critique of vested interests. Swan does not criticise the “vested interests” to whom he capitulated but the ones who were shut out of the negotiations. He is, in effect, punishing them for continuing to complain about a special deal to which he would not admit them.

The rest of Fairfax political editor Peter Hartcher’s article is well worth reading too. Even if it does continue to refrain from calling a spade a spade.

A little tip, Peter. That “jarring note” you feel, is called your Conscience.

The polar opposition between Wayne’s words, and his actions, pricks the inner sense of right and wrong once known as “morality” that we all possess, but few (especially politicians, and journalists) ever seem to recognise. Much less heed. And even less … act upon.

For the full story on Wayne Swan’s hypocrisy … and treason … not just on the mining tax, but on the carbon dioxide derivatives scam too, see this blog’s writeup of almost a week earlier – The Galactic Hypocrisy Of Wayne Swan.

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The Galactic Hypocrisy Of Wayne Swan

6 Mar

The red mist has descended.

Your humble blogger is angry.

Very angry.

Wayne Swan has publicly attacked three local, homegrown Aussie miners.

Ms Gina Rinehart. Mr Clive Palmer. And Mr Andrew Forrest.

Wayne claims that he is fighting for a “fair go”, for “equality”, against “rich” “vested interests” that are “threatening our democracy”.

Oh really?

Wayne Swan did a secret, exclusive deal on the design of the mining tax with the Big Three foreign-owned multinational mining companies, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Xstrata, just before the 2010 election.

Wayne’s secret deal is widely claimed to favour the Big Three foreigners, at the expense of the much smaller local Aussie mining companies.

Wayne’s secret deal is alleged to have come about after the Big Three foreign-owned mining companies “gave the nod” for Julia Gillard to knife democratically-elected PM Kevin Rudd, and promised to pull their anti-mining tax ad campaign.

Tell us again, who is a “threat to democracy”?

Wayne Swan accuses three local Aussie miners – two of whom are self-made, from humble beginnings – of being “champions of privilege”.

Oh really?

Wayne is a career political hack, with an Arts degree, and zero business experience.

Wayne receives $346,000 per annum, $6,653 per week, paid for by the taxpayer.

Wayne voted himself an $84,000 pay rise late last year.

Wayne blew $75,440 of taxpayers’ money on empty RAAF VIP “ghost flights” to collect and ferry him around, in just 6 months last year.

Tell us again, who is a “champion of privilege”?

Wayne Swan is a vile, disgusting, public trough-swilling, grossly overpaid, thoroughly under qualified, pathologically dishonest, monumentally repugnant, morally destitute, vomitous, self-serving, bottom-dwelling, anti-Australian, treasonous, galactic hypocrite.

* I have chosen to keep this piece focussed on Swan and his attack on locals in the mining industry. I could write an entire new piece on other “vested interests” that Wayne oh so conveniently neglects to mention, much less publicly attack. For example, the unions who finance (and rule) the ALP, and the clubs industry whose “power” and political activism prompted the Labor government to brazenly renege on a written contract with Andrew Wilkie for poker machine reform. And that’s just for starters.

** The media in this country are deserving of very similar epithets to those attributed to Wayne Swan above. I am not aware that a single journalist has challenged Wayne Swan on any of the above facts.

*** Note well: this blogger is no fawning acolyte of miners, big business, or “free markets”. On the contrary, if it were within my power I would nationalise all mineral, petroleum, and natural gas resources – see “Why I Hang Farther To The Left Than Bob Brown”.

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Swan’s Anti-Australian Rant A Smokescreen For Treason

2 Mar

Treasurer Wayne Swan has written an essay in The Monthly. Doubtless you will hear about it elsewhere.

What you are highly unlikely to hear, is Wayne’s essay being called out for what it really is.

An anti-Australian rant. And a smokescreen for treason.

How so?

Consider Wayne’s definitive paragraph:

But Australia’s fair go is today under threat from a new source. To be blunt, the rising power of vested interests is undermining our equality and threatening our democracy. We see this most obviously in the ferocious and highly misleading campaigns waged in recent years against resource taxation reforms and the pricing of carbon pollution. The infamous billionaires’ protest against the mining tax would have been laughed out of town in the Australia I grew up in, and yet it received a wide and favourable reception two years ago. A handful of vested interests that have pocketed a disproportionate share of the nation’s economic success now feel they have a right to shape Australia’s future to satisfy their own self-interest.

Note well.

Wayne uses his essay to single out and publicly attack three (3) Australian citizens.

All wealthy miners.

All … how shall I put this delicately … of ordinary physical appearance.

Or less delicately … fat and ugly.

Here is the photo used for the piece:

Billionaire activists: Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart. © Philip Norrish/Newspix; Greg Wood/AAP; Tony McDonough/AAP

Wayne has singled out this Terrible Three as somehow exemplifying the dangers of “vested interests”, a threat to “democracy” and “equality”.

Conveniently, Wayne neglects to mention a few relevant facts.

A lot of relevant facts, actually.

He neglects to mention that he and Gillard locked these 3 Aussies-made-good out of the behind-closed-doors negotiation of his “mining tax”, and that instead, he negotiated the design of the MRRT exclusively and confidentially with BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, and Xstrata – the Big Three multinational mining companies.

He neglects to mention that the final design of the MRRT favours the foreign-owned multinationals – quelle surprise! – and that it will in reality act as a tax minimisation mechanism that will not “spread the wealth of the mining boom”, but will instead help the multinationals to increase their oligopoly, at the expense of much smaller Aussie locals like Palmer, Forrest, and Rinehart.

(Do you think that just might have something to do with their choosing to become “activists” against this government’s policy agenda?)

And the carbon tax “vested interests”?

Again, Wayne very conveniently neglects to mention a few highly relevant facts.

He neglects to mention that the Green-Labor government’s anointed chief “designer” of the Clean Energy Future legislation, Ross Garnaut, is a career Big Banker and a member of the Trilateral Commission.

He neglects to mention that the choirmaster for the “eminent economists” who publicly sang in favour of the legislation, Saul Eslake, was at the time the director of the BHP Billiton-founded and funded Grattan Institute; the former chief economist for ANZ Bank; and is now employed by Bank of America Merrill Lynch – a major player in the international CO2 derivatives trade.

He neglects to mention that Mr Eslake conceded (right here on this blog) that 7 of the 13 “eminent economists” who co-signed the Open Letter in support of the government’s plan to “price carbon” were current employees of banks; that 3 more were former employees of banks; and that only 3 of the 13 had no past or present associations with banks “as far as I know”.

He neglects to mention that Mr Eslake conceded (right here on this blog) that “..it is true that banks might make money from an emissions trading scheme..”.

He neglects to mention that just 3 days after the announcement of the draft legislation, leading banks were already announcing plans to cash in via a new carbon derivatives market, one specifically allowed by two tiny clauses buried in the 1,000 pages of legislation; a new market whose value (to banks) would, in their words, “dwarf” the value of the underlying market for basic carbon permits.

He neglects to mention other “vested interests” in our society too – like the unions who finance and rule his own party, and the banks who our major political parties rely on for loans to finance their election campaigns. Conflict-of-(vested)-interest, much?

Wayne has cynically picked out three easy targets to attack, in his class warfare-inciting rant.

Three fat, unattractive, wealthy, Australian Tall Poppies*.

Wayne has conveniently neglected to mention his own appalling hypocrisy.

And his treason.

Because when it comes to Green-Labor’s two big “economic reforms”, loudly touted as being in the “interests of all Australians”, the truth is that Wayne is personally culpable for selling out the financial best interests of the Australian people to multinational miners, and Big Finance.

Foreign-owned “vested interests”, whose wealth and power make our homegrown Ms Rinehart, Mr Palmer, and Mr Forrest appear mere paupers by comparison.

Treasurer Wayne Swan is a cynical, dishonest, anti-Australian, treasonous hypocrite of the lowest order. A disgrace to morally sentient beings.

He revolts me.

UPDATE:

It is alleged that the Big Three multinationals approved the plot to remove elected PM Kevin Rudd (and with him, the original RSPT):

JULIA Gillard was “given the nod” by the big three mining companies – Xstrata, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton—to challenge Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership, knowing the advertising campaign against the mining tax “would be pulled”.

… The revelations come from an article written by Mr Rudd’s friend and actor Rhys Muldoon, published in the latest issue of The Monthly magazine.

Immediately after the coup, Wayne and new PM Julia went behind closed doors with the Big 3 – and only the Big 3 – and quickly locked in a new deal before the election. One that the Big 3 foreigners are “happy with”.

And yet, Wayne Swan has the unmitigated gall to author a rant singling out and publicly vilifying 3 of our homegrown Aussie miners as the “dangerous” “vested interests” threatening our democracy?!

To paraphrase Thomas Beckett:

Will no one rid me of this turdulent Treasurer?

* My sincere apologies for the use of wholly unfair and brutal artistic licence to Ms Rinehart, Mr Palmer, and Mr Forrest, whom I’ve never met and have no reason to doubt are hard working, decent Australians.

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