Tag Archives: ALP

Two Charts Prove Labor Was A Lousy Government

10 Sep

Despite enjoying the highest Terms of Trade (ToT) in the nation’s history …

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… the Rudd/Gillard/Swan Labor government still could not balance the budget.

Not once.

Indeed, from 2009-10 onwards, as the ToT quickly rebounded from the 2008-09 GFC “dip” — thank you China — to scale new all-time record highs, the difference between their May Budget estimate, and their Final Budget Outcome, grew steadily worse*:

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Moral of the story?

If you cannot manage a budget, you should never be allowed to manage other people’s money.

* The Final Budget Outcome (FBO) for 2012-13 has not yet been released by Treasury. Presently, the “estimate” is -$19.4 billion. On past form, the FBO is sure to be worse.

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5 Years After The GFC, ALP Admits Economy Has Not “Recovered”, And 3 More Won’t Help

3 Aug

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The Global Financial Crisis peaked in 2008-09.

Since then, the ALP has relentlessly talked up the “strength” of our economy — by comparing to basket-case northern hemisphere countries — and by extension, the brilliance of their economic management.

Many hundreds of times, they promised a “return to surplus”. And fair enough too.

After all, our economy was — so they said — the “strongest advanced economy” in the world.

We had a “huge pipeline of investment”.

“Low unemployment”.

“Low inflation”.

“Low interest rates”.

And record-high Terms of Trade (ToT), from a Chinese stimulus-fuelled mining boom.

A mining boom that — so they said — would give us a period of “unprecedented prosperity”, “stretching to 2050”.

They should know.

After all, their leader is fluent in Mandarin.

And yet, despite all this … no surplus.

Only more, and deeper deficits.

Yesterday, they admitted that their latest budget — released less than 3 months ago — has already developed a $33 billion black hole.

Word is, they are now going to call an election, for September 7.

So we should, perhaps, pause for a moment to reconsider the strength of our supposedly “strong economy”, according to the ALP’s own words, and their own yardstick.

In the August Economic Statement released yesterday, in one little paragraph, the ALP has conceded that 5 years after the GFC, the economy has not “recovered”:

August Economic Statement, page 29 (click to enlarge)

August Economic Statement, page 29 (click to enlarge)

And their newest revised forecasts, showing deficits to 2016/17, tells us that 3 more years of their brilliant economic management won’t help.

The simple truth is this.

By their own measure — a budget surplus — the economy has not “recovered”.

And with their revised “forecasts” now predicting rising unemployment, and no surplus till 2016/17, there is no hope in sight for an economic recovery.

Under their management, at least.

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Raising The Ruddy Standards

8 Jul

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“On Tuesday I Will Blow The Bloody Show Up!”

14 Jun

From The Daily Telegraph’s Simon Benson:

Bill Shorten, who is doing the dance of the seven veils, says publicly he still supports Julia Gillard.

But he will only support her until he doesn’t. And that could be very soon.

Shorten’s choice of words this week was telling.

When asked if he thought Gillard would still be leader by the time of the election, he said: “I believe so.”

These are not the words of a powerbroker confident in the survival of his leader.

As The Daily Telegraph revealed, Shorten is now counting numbers. And those numbers are falling Rudd’s way.

The mood even among many of Gillard’s supporters is bleak. And, after this week’s performance, their support is said to now be soft at best.

One senior Labor MP said that, unless something happens, he was prepared to walk into caucus on Tuesday next week and challenge the PM himself.

“I’ll blow the bloody show up,” they said.

Do it.

Do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it do it.

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“I Am No Longer Angry. I Am Ashamed” – ALP Heavyweight

31 May

Ashamed+head-in-handsFrom the Daily Telegraph, Paul Sheehan writes an epitaph on “the worst week, of the worst year, of the worst parliament in the history of Australian parliaments”:

Tony Abbott described it, in a more unique use of subtleties: “We are now at the fag end of a very contentious parliament.”

He was referring to the very issue that started the PM’s Hebdomas Horribillis, and ended it. The bungled attempt by the government to pass new electoral funding laws that proposed to take $60 million from taxpayers and put it in to political parties campaign coffers is emblematic of just how out of touch the political class in Canberra is with the rest of the country.

How Labor strategists didn’t twig to the potential for Abbott to back away from it is staggering in itself. But Gillard’s own failure to walk away, even after it was dead, instead continuing to back it, is symbolic of how out of touch her leadership team is with the mood not just in the electorate but inside her own caucus.

Labor elder John Faulkner couldn’t have been more blunt about his views on it when he labelled it a “disgrace”.

But it wasn’t the only thing that ruined the PM’s week and diverted attention from the one issue Labor does have over the Coalition and is desperately trying to find clear air to campaign on: education.

The well known Rudd supporter Anthony Byrne, the chair of the intelligence committee, fired the second missile on Monday when he attacked the government in parliament over funding cuts to the spy agencies. That too, was labelled a “disgrace”.

Then there was the Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’ spectacularly inept response to suggestions that Chinese hackers had stolen the blueprints to its new $650 million office block. It all went pear shaped from there.

The PM couldn’t buy a trick when it was revealed the NBN was exposing people to asbestos. And then news that a suspected terrorist wanted by Interpol had been living in low security detention centre in South Australia for a year as an asylum seeker.

Labor MPs this week were even talking of just “bringing on” an election to put them out of their misery. The malaise that has been hanging over Labor MPs has now become a blanket of abject despair.

Most MPs, if they are honest, now live day to day under Murphy’s famous law: If anything can go wrong, it will.

And this week it has.

A greater symbol of the despondency that now grips the federal Labor Party there is not than Martin Ferguson’s decision this week to pull the pin on an 18 year career as a parliamentarian. Labor sources claim he won’t be the last to hang up his boots before the end of June.

Ferguson was rightly and ironically hailed as a true Labor hero by Tony Abbott.

Well may the Prime Minister have rolled her eyes when the Opposition Leader wiped tears from his, but his words were nonetheless true.

Ferguson was a Labor warrior, and not in the class war sense – which he abhorred. Not only did his departure deliver a final vote of no-confidence in Gillard and the new Labor she has fashioned, it revealed a man who believes there is nothing more he can do to save the party from itself.

Another Labor heavyweight, Faulkner, is equally dispirited. “I’m no longer angry,” he wearily told the caucus this week of the party funding bill. “I am ashamed.”

Thank God there are only three weeks of parliament left before the September election.

At least such shame will be fleeting.

Well might we all join hands with Senator Faulkner — of what was once the “working man’s” party — and cry “Hear Hear!”

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Conscience Vote A Sick Joke

10 Apr
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A conscience vote or free vote is a type of vote in a legislative body where legislators are allowed to vote according to their own personal conscience rather than according to an official line set down by their political party.

In many liberal democracies, particularly those that follow the parliamentary system of government, the elected members of a legislature who belong to a political party are usually required by that party to vote in accordance with the party line on significant legislation, on pain of censure or expulsion from the party. Sometimes a particular party member known as the whip is responsible for maintaining this party discipline. However, in the case of a conscience vote, a party declines to dictate an official party line to follow and members may vote as they please.

Conscience votes are usually quite rare…

Source: Wikipedia

Our politicians and media laud these rare occasions as somehow representing a wonderful beacon of light, a shining example of the intrinsic excellence of our parliamentary democracy.

Never do they pause to consider the obvious truth.

Every vote is a choice.

And every choice is either Right or Wrong.

It is when we act according to Conscience that we do what is Right.

What do you think that implies for every vote that is not a Conscience vote?

Our very system of governance is a sick joke.

And the joke’s on us.

Australia is a parliamentary democracy. This means that our political system is based on the idea that Parliament is supreme, or sovereign.

I don’t know why we believe in government.

I do know, we will never know freedom … or peace … until the only government is Conscience.

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Do You Know How Much We Pay These Cretins?

21 Mar

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard – $495,430

Deputy PM Wayne Swan – $390,627

Cabinet Minister – $328,698

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott – $352,517

Speaker – $333,462

Shadow Minister – $238,187

Backbencher – $190,550

Source: The “independent” Remuneration Tribunal. Accurate at July 1, 2012.

UPDATE:

US President Barack Obama – $380,488

UK Prime Minister David Cameron – $214,747

Source: mywage.org.au/main/salary/celebrity-pay/politician-pay

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Owed To Me – Gillard vs Rudd (Reprise)

21 Mar

A moment or two of deja vu:

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Barnaby Defines “Dodgy”

14 Feb

From Senator Joyce’s column today in the Canberra Times:

Dodgy is plural; the repeated unexpected actions that make others uncomfortable. Dodgy floats from town to town on a raft of promises. Dodgy believes that results are a “scratch-it” ticket where the prize is owed to you by innate luck. Dodgy believes that people are fools and statements and facts will never be crosschecked. Dodgy is clothed in mannerisms which mimic the grace of professionalism.

Insightful.

Think about it.

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More Dirt On Gillard & Swan’s Dirty Deal

14 Feb

MacroBusiness.com.au reader and commenter “Mav” draws our attention to journalist Paul Cleary’s book, “Too Much Luck”.

In it, we find more dirt on Gillard and Swan’s dirty deal with the multinational miners.  Cleary’s tome sheds new light on the collusion between ALParatchiks such as then ALP national secretary Karl Bitar and BHP Billiton, the foreign-owned miner leading the anti mining tax campaign, in overthrowing a popularly-elected prime minister:

As soon as Rudd sprang the new tax on the industry, the big three companies decided they had to kill this plan – and they decided to play dirty. When London-based Rio Tinto, Melbourne-based and London-listed BHP Billiton and Swiss-based Xstrata put their collective weight together, they are a formidable combination. Their total combined value on global sharemarkets is $450 billion, 86% of which is in foreign hands. The three companies are worth more than the size of Australia’s federal budget, about one-third the size of the entire Australian economy. Together they embarked on a savage lobbying effort to bring down the proposed tax by attacking the government and its prime minister. They began this extraordinary campaign before the proposal had even been put into legislation, and before the parliament had had the opportunity to review it.

BHP led the offensive, establishing a ‘war room’ inside its Melbourne head office. Run by senior financial executive Gerard Bond, along with senior staffers and external consultants, this team worked on the project for about seven weeks. BHP commissioned its own focus-group research, which was used to drive a $22 million TV and print-media blitz and a targeted lobbying campaign that included Geoff Walsh, a former national secretary of the ALP and former staffer to prime ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. BHP spared no expense on the campaign, which reported directly to CEO Marius Kloppers.  External talent included the market-research specialist Tony Mitchelmore and the corporate strategist John Connolly. Mitchelmore had been plucked from obscurity by Labor to work on the Kevin07 campaign and had stayed on doing qualitative research before working for BHP on this campaign. He organised an intensive round of sixteen focus-group sessions, which revealed that many participants believed Rudd’s proposal had come out of left field and was likely to derail the one industry that was keeping Australia’s head above water. Realising that they had a good chance of killing the tax, the miners adopted a ‘whatever it takes’ approach…

The miners’ efforts were spectacularly successful. Seven weeks and four days after unveiling the preliminary plan, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was deposed and so was his tax… Big Dirt, as the three companies were now known, executed regime change two months before the voters exercised their democratic rights at the ballot box. Having subverted a functioning democracy [TBI: aided and abetted by Gillard & Swan], mining executives were celebrating in airport lounges around the country…

Immediately after becoming prime minister on 24 June, Julia Gillard turned her attention to thrashing out a deal with the three multinational miners. Eight days later, she announced a breakthrough that cut the marginal tax rate from 40% to 22.5%, restricted its scope to coal and iron ore, and added some creative accounting concessions for the big miners… A raft of emails released under FOI shows that BHP was very much running the show. Its executives drafted the heads of agreement before emailing it to Wayne Swan’s office for approval.

Repeating her ‘moving forward’ mantra, Gillard announced the compromise like this: ‘It moves things forward whether you’re a coal miner in the Bowen basin, a contractor in Karratha, an opal miner in Coober Pedy or a young worker in Sydney’. In fact, the MRRT deal made life worse for smaller Australian-based miners by removing the resource exploration rebate and by awarding big miners a significantly lower tax rate. For iron-ore miners with mature projects, which means the big companies, their projects would be taxed at 36.4 per cent – close to or even below current levels – whereas small or medium-sized projects would pay an average rate of 48.9 per cent, according to modelling produced by Treasury and released under FOI. The big miners benefited from a concession that allows them to calculate deductions for tax purposes using the market value rather than the purchase price (or ‘book value’) of their assets, providing huge depreciation allowances. The small and medium Australian players were not represented in the negotiating room, and the new deal actually reversed the central and laudable aim of the RSPT – that is, reducing the tax burden on start-up operations, which are penalised by the state royalties because the impost is paid when production starts, rather than after the company actually begins to make a profit. The success of the multinational miners in securing these concessions, and in beating voters to the punch, reveals the perverse world order in which we live: an advanced country can possess enormous riches but lack the capacity to do what is clearly in its own long-term interest…

Not only did the miners change the prime minister and change government policy, they went on to brag about how their coup had stopped similar schemes from spreading around the world…

Exactly one week after Gillard announced the compromise, Rio Tinto’s American chief executive, Tom Albanese, told a group of mining executives in London that the Australian experience should send a salutary message to governments around the world. Governments should ‘learn a lesson’ from the episode, he declared. A few months later, Xstrata’s chief executive, Peter Freyberg, was still bragging…

BHP’s executives managed to avoid bragging, although this company did more than any other to bring down the tax and Kevin Rudd. The total cost of the campaign was $22 million. The Minerals Council of Australia, which is largely funded by the big three companies, spent $17.2 million, while BHP spent $4.2 million on its own and Rio $537,000. Cabinet ministers in the Gillard government say that Geoff Walsh delivered the Mitchelmore research directly to the then ALP national secretary, Karl Bitar. These claims are strenuously denied by Walsh. But the BHP research is understood to have panicked the Labor heavyweights, prompting them to move against Rudd even though he still had a commanding 4 percentage point lead in the national newspoll.

If it is true that former ALP national secretary Karl Bitar, in cahoots with Gillard and Swan, acted to overthrow a prime minister on the basis of private research data provided directly to him by BHP, a foreign-owned company demonstrably seeking to change government policy, then this is more evidence of treason on the part of key figures in the ALP.

Gillard, Swan, and Bitar should be in jail.

UPDATE:

Peter Martin has more, in the Age today:

Gathered on one side of the cabinet table were the newly-installed Prime Minister Julia Gillard, her Treasurer Wayne Swan and her Resources Minister Martin Ferguson. On the other were the heads of Australia’s three big mining companies: BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Xstrata.

Absent were the key people from the Treasury – the ones who really understood the tax being discussed.

As the then Treasury head Ken Henry later told a Senate committee: “We were not involved in the negotiations, other than in respect of crunching the numbers if you like and in providing due diligence on design parameters that the mining companies themselves came up with.”

Gillard and Swan consciously chose not only to exclude the locally-owned miners from the negotiations. They also chose to exclude Treasury officials – folks who just might have more of a clue than a dodgy lawyer and a career political hack with an arts degree – as well.

Conclusion? Gillard and Swan did not want any intelligent outside scrutiny of the BHP-drafted deal.

Hence their persistent “commercial-in-confidence” response cited ever since, in attempted justification of their refusal to let the details come out.

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