"I for one welcome our insect overlords" - The Politics Thread

[curious]

Curious posted ... A whole of lot of stuff that I agree with ... then ..

So, what's left? A vote for the greens when they preference Labor?

It doesn't matter who they preference .. it is your choice to chose your own preference. Just don't be lazy or ill informed - vote below the line and write your own preferences ... that's of course presuming you can find someone worthy ... it is certainly getting harder!

Very hard, indeed.

 

[bjw]

.

 

[dibo]

ENROL TO VOTE!

www.aec.gov.au

If the election is called over the weekend you have until 8pm Monday to enrol or update your enrolment. You might not be able to vote!

 

[fedelta]

dibo the local AEC Officer?

 

[kevrenor]

ENROL TO VOTE!

www.aec.gov.au

If the election is called over the weekend you have until 8pm Monday to enrol or update your enrolment. You might not be able to vote!

 

[dibo]

Game on. Click here to start your enrolment electronically.

 

[midfielder]

Last election ... the libs offered football 16 million to develop footballs youth & W leagues ... Sudd offered 32 million for the same thing... we all know who won...

Wonder can we get some more funds...

 

[dibo]

Election on the 21st = no clash with Sydney away as there would have been on the 28th! Also means for me no clash with staffing local Grand Finals! w00t!

 

[FFC Mariner]

Can confirm I am moving forward

 

[Arabmariner]

What I'd like to know is why would anyone who intended voting for the Libs when Krudd was the boss change their mind and vote labour just because his partner in crime is now the boss ?

Everyone knows Krudd was outed because they couldn't win with him in charge.

Why they should suddenly be favourites just because he's not there doesn't say much for some of the voting public imo.

 

[dibo]

What I'd like to know is why would anyone who intended voting for the Libs when Krudd was the boss change their mind and vote labour just because his partner in crime is now the boss ?

Everyone knows Krudd was outed because they couldn't win with him in charge.

Why they should suddenly be favourites just because he's not there doesn't say much for some of the voting public imo.

I think you'll find Rudd would've won anyway. He was dumped because the ALP couldn't get a news cycle that didn't shit on them. People had stopped listening to Rudd. Labor was leaking votes leftwards so they made the move more to get primary votes back from the Greens than anything.

The thing is that the electorate have never been listening to Abbott and they still don't like him (the Liberal vote has barely moved in months) but Labor felt they had to make a change simply to get the press going in the right direction again.

 

[bjw]

Earlobes.

 

[jiggles]

Earlobes.

Massive.

 

[midfielder]

I bet ya this is the last time Kevin 07 eats any of Julia's home cooking...

 

[midfielder]

Is the shoe on the other foot now... http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/global-warming-to-political-warming-rudds-judas-kiss-20111012-1lk1n.html

 

[dibo]

Are you serious? f**king hell, the Government puts through legislation to achieve a price on carbon at something like the 4th attempt and the story is about how the Foreign Minister congratulates the Prime Minister?

Either the press are all idiots if they think this is what passes for political commentary these days, or we're all idiots for accepting it, or both.

 

[dibo]

Another angle:

Damn the torpedoes. PM puts the pedal to the metal

By ABC's Annabel Crabb Posted October 12, 2011 15:43:33


Photo: The Prime Minister is nothing if not determined.
The criticism of Kevin Rudd's government used to be that it was afraid of doing hard things; bound-up with its fixation on polls, too addicted to love to take a political risk.

Inside Rudd's office, they used to speak of "kicking the can down the road" - delaying decisions for a future date by which time conditions, it was hoped, would improve.

Of all the criticisms that can validly be made of Julia Gillard's Government, this is not one. Today's passage of the Gillard carbon tax bills constitutes a substantial achievement in political terms, and a potent demonstration of the lengths to which this Prime Minister will go - including extensive self-harm - to get difficult jobs done.

On her way to this point, the Prime Minister has misled the Australian public, engaged in some less than elegant policy reversals, and thus further irritated an electorate and business community already jaded by the serial inconstancy of both sides of politics on the difficult issue of climate change.

But today, the object is achieved. Not without catastrophic damage, but it is achieved; a government has pushed through a reform in which it believes, and it will take the consequences when they come.

What the Australian Parliament has legislated today is an emissions trading scheme. The initial fixed-price period (which Julia Gillard has agreed to call a "carbon tax", in a further demonstration - as if one were needed - that there is no painless grenade in existence on to which she would not be willing to throw herself) is, in the long term, a distraction.

In bringing the Parliament to this point, Julia Gillard is picking up the can that has been kicked down the road by John Howard, Kevin Rudd and, in his own way, Malcolm Turnbull. It's maimed all of them, this diabolical issue, but Julia Gillard is still standing, and has today pulled off a legislative feat that - under the circumstances - deserves recognition even among the non-enthusiasts.

Bringing regional independents together with the Greens, to reach agreement on a fiendishly difficult economic reform like this one? Convincing the Greens to exempt petrol from the scheme?

Prevailing upon Bob Brown - hardly an International Man of Steelmaking, ordinarily - to rescue $300 million in assistance to steelmakers after Tony Abbott refused to vote for it?

All of these outcomes looked fairly unlikely as the New Paradigm was lowered nervously into place, and yet they have come to pass. Where her predecessor ached to be popular, this prime minister has made unpopularity into something of a personal art form.

There's a compelling, almost cinematic quality to her determination; it's like watching a slalom downhill skier deliberately hitting every peg. Even the hoary old issue of repairs to The Lodge, urgent recommendations for which have come across the desks of various prime ministers regularly over the last decade, has been picked up by this can-collector of a prime minister, for whom it seems no job is too fraught.

John Howard ignored the recommendations to spend money on The Lodge; Kevin Rudd, who had to live among its dodgy wiring and damp walls, likewise shrank from the politically unappealing prospect of deploying taxpayers funds to fix up the residence.

So it's Julia Gillard who will spend the money, who will move out of The Lodge, who will invite the ready allusions about her own impermanency, right at the exact time she needs them least. Even the timing of that announcement - yesterday, just as the Prime Minister was about to clinch her hard-fought victory on carbon pricing - seemed designated by an invisible hand bent on self-harm. Bloodied but unbowed, the Prime Minister steams on.

Annabel Crabb is the ABC's chief online political writer.

 

[dibo]

On another topic, and a disturbing read:

It's time for the truth to allay, or confirm, our fears about SIEV X
Steve Biddulph
October 19, 2011

Opinion

It's 10 years since the SIEV X disaster took the lives of 353 people, including 142 women and 146 children, at the height of a federal election campaign fought, and won, largely over refugees. Despite other incidents, nothing has come close to this scale of loss. SIEV X remains an unsolved mystery, with many disconcerting undertones that go to the heart of our national conscience.

During the five-year project to build a memorial to SIEV X in Canberra, I made friends with survivors of the sinking, and their stories add to the disquiet that was already starting to grow around the voyage.

The journey began for most through persecution by Saddam Hussein. Faris Shohani had been taken from his school classroom as a child by police and, with his parents, was forced across the border into Iran. His father died from the stress. Faris grew up, married and had a family in refugee camps, but never stopped dreaming of a better life. Today he is haunted by the memory of his wife and daughter drowning as he struggled to keep them afloat. Amal Basry was an educated woman whose engineer husband defied the regime with his political activity. She was the first person rescued after 20 hours in the water, and begged the fishermen to search for her young son. They saved another 40 people, before finally finding the boy, still alive. All around them though, across miles of ocean, the bodies bobbed ''like birds on the water''.

Nothing about the SIEV X story adds up. The passengers were taken hundreds of kilometres across Indonesia in a fleet of blacked-out buses, with motorcycle escorts. In Bandar Lampung they were kept in a hotel owned by the chief of police. Police with guns forced them to board the decrepit vessel, it was loaded until its gunwales were barely above the water. Nineteen metres of boat with three decks and more than 400 people, many had to stand or hold children on their knees in the crush. This did not look like a voyage designed to succeed.

The SIEV X had a cargo of women and children, for an Australian reason. The diabolical temporary protection visas, still mooted by Tony Abbott, took away the fathers' rights to family reunification. Their families were thus trapped back in Indonesia. Vulnerable mothers and young children, running out of funds, they were easy prey for people smugglers. One man, safe in Australia, actually flew back to bring his wife and ageing mother on SIEV X. All three of them died.

Two years ago, I met Senator John Faulkner, whose forensic mind and fierce integrity are the stuff of legend. Faulkner had argued for the children overboard inquiry to widen its terms and, in the course of his formal and informal enquiries, had found out more about SIEV X than anyone. He gave a disturbing, yet guarded, testimony in the Senate that ended with these words: ''At no stage do I want to break, nor will I break, the protocols in relation to operational matters involving ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence Service] or the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. But those protocols were not meant as a direct or an indirect licence to kill.''

Faulkner emphasised two things to me when we met. That without his investigations, we would have known nothing about a covert program called the people smuggling disruption program, which John Howard and Philip Ruddock set in motion with the help of the federal police and the Indonesian police. This involved agents whose activities may well have drifted into the ethical shadows. The question is whether these activities placed innocent people at grave risk, either by mischance, or as we must pray was not the case, by design. He also told me something of which I had been totally unaware - in the 2004 election, Labor had in its policy platform a promise to hold a royal commission on SIEV X. This policy was quietly dropped in the revisions Kim Beazley brought about after Labor's electoral rout. I would argue that, while the political expedience of an inquiry may have changed, the moral imperative has not.

On the water that night, as more than a hundred people still clung to wreckage, two military boats appeared, close enough for them to hear the voices of the sailors. People called out, some began swimming towards the lights. The boats appeared not to see or hear them, and sailed away. Many people gave up after that, and slipped beneath the waves.

What were those vessels doing? And how did they locate the wreckage? Had the vessel carried a tracking device? If so, whose was it? And since such devices are merely a broadcast radio beacon, would it not have been easily tracked from Shoal Bay or other Australian surveillance? Gough Whitlam once boasted he could hear a walkie-talkie on a building site in Jakarta, courtesy of Shoal Bay.

Those of us who built the SIEV X memorial are just ordinary Australians, we are not investigative journalists, or jurists who can subpoena witnesses. A proper investigation needs to be carried out to either set aside our fears, or confirm them. In a democracy, citizens are responsible for their country's actions. We cannot stand tall as Australians until we dispel the possibility these people died because of us.

Steve Biddulph is a former psychologist and the author of The New Manhood (Finch Publishing).

Just read this bit again:

[quote author="Faulkner to the Senate"]''At no stage do I want to break, nor will I break, the protocols in relation to operational matters involving ASIS [Australian Secret Intelligence Service] or the AFP [Australian Federal Police]. But those protocols were not meant as a direct or an indirect licence to kill.''[/quote]
WHAT. THE. f**k?

 

[hasbeen]

On another topic, and a disturbing read:


Just read this bit again:


WHAT. THE. f**k?

And from the Letters page in today's SMH ...


Cool assessment of SIEV X tragedy needed
Steve Biddulph (''It's time for the truth to allay, or confirm, our fears about SIEV X'', October 19) unfortunately adds to the confusion and paranoia surrounding the October 2001 SIEV X tragedy.

Some survivors report their abandonment by unidentified naval vessels after the sinking. The majority do not.

What Biddulph should have pointed out is that the nearest Australian naval vessel was 250 kilometres away. And an Occam's razor analysis indicates the sinking is more likely to have been a wholly Indonesian activity no matter what the motivation.

The reluctance by Australian authorities to hold a royal commission is probably for four reasons.

First, a lack of legal or other jurisdiction as this Indonesian vessel left an Indonesian port and did not sink in Australian waters.

Second, given the undoubted involvement of corrupt Indonesian officials in organising the voyage, there was a decision to prioritise our long-term strategic relations with Indonesia rather than further complicate them by publicly exposing the extent of Indonesian criminality involved.

Third, there was a belief that holding Indonesia responsible via diplomatic channels instead would achieve more in the long run, including preventing further victims in future.

Fourth, both Australia and Indonesia are signatories to the November 2000 protocol against the smuggling of migrants by land, sea and air of the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime.

It is surely better that measures taken to disrupt people smuggling in Indonesia are undertaken jointly with the Indonesians than by them alone.

Finally, to infer that Australian personnel would deliberately kill women and children as some form of deterrent or punishment is despicable.

So is the inference that they would cover it up if the Indonesian authorities they were working with had done so.

Neil James executive director, Australia Defence Association

 

[Capn Gus Bloodbeard]

Regardless of whom their leader may be, in recent years the Labor party has leaned so far to the the right they now walk with a limp and if they're not careful, I think the traditional non conservative will be looking more and more elsewhere for an alternative.

tbh, that's been my biggest gripe with Gillard. It seems like a shameless attempt to try and win over the conservatives, but Abbott keeps outmaneouvring her on this. If she had stuck to Labor's ideals she wouldn't have had a problem, instead she's trying so hard to gain the new votes that she's not only failing to convince that side but alienating the existing base

Maybe we need a socialist alternative that doesnt insist on loving trees etc. I just cant come at voting green to end up with some smelly f**king hippy who wants us to return to a hunter gatherer society and just love each other

LOL

Move to Melbourne...goddamn Marxists are everywhere...

Julia has too much personality to be liked by the majority of the electorate.

Unfortunately these days the populace will vote for someone conservative, uncontroversial and someone of christian faith.

Years of the drawl John Howard and society becoming more conservative has led to this.

Gone are the days of Hawke and Fraser.

Well, the Mad Monk gets 2/3....