Sportsbet just closed the bet on the person to lead the ALP at the next federal election, but has kept open the bet on the Liberal leader. Bill Shorten was briefly favoured to lead Labor at $2.00 with Julia Gillard at $2.50 just after she announced her plans to introduce a price on carbon a couple of days ago. The bet was still available when Google captured a snapshot of the page on 26 February 14:14 AEDST.
Eric Ripper might recall that Alannah MacTiernan lost her licence twice for drink driving and a third time for speeding.
She stayed on in the transport portfolio despite misleading the public about her previous driving offences.When asked whether it was her first time, she said "No, I lost my licence in '94, I think it was, yeah, '94"—she lost her licence for drink driving in 1986 as well as 1994.
MacTiernan's conduct was debated in Parliament on 2/5/2001:
Any Australian who has been through our primary school education system would have immediately been struck by the Daily Mail’s article about the disastrous flooding in Queensland that was published on their website on 30 December, 2010. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just the scale of the disaster that would have struck Australian readers, but the addition of a new breakaway state from Queensland displayed on their map of Australia.
Northern Queenslanders have long felt that they need a state of their own that focuses on the needs of the rural and regional communities living in this area. Outspoken independent Bob Katter recently said that Queensland needs to be split to save the region from economic ruin. While many Northern Queenslanders would welcome the splitting of the state across the 22nd parallel south, they would have been just as unimpressed as the rest of Australia with this glaring geographical error.
Capricornia was the name for the proposed state dreamt up by Ian Johnston in his personal campaign for the creation of new states back in 2005.
How did they make such a blunder with a state seven times the size of the United Kingdom? Perhaps they ran a story on the North Queensland secessionist movement at some stage and accidentally used the map that includes the proposed state instead of the current map of Australia.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Labor government’s decision to release children and their families from immigration detention centres into the community, she evoked those well known emotive images of children detained behind razor wire:
I don’t think it’s the Australian way to have kids behind razor wire in the hope that will be a deterrent.
It was a misleading statement, because children seeking asylum in Australia are no longer being detained behind razor wire. Furthermore, contrary to what is widely believed, the previous Howard government actually abolished—not introduced—detention of children behind razor wire, and this was acknowledged by the Prime Minister in Question Time:
Mr FORREST (Mallee) (2:15 PM) —My question is addressed to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to her statement: ‘I don’t think it’s the Australian way to have kids behind razor wire.’ Will the Prime Minister confirm that by 2005 the Howard government had overturned the Hawke and Keating governments’ policy of mandatory detention of children behind razor wire and that there have been no children held in these conditions since that time?
Ms GILLARD (Lalor) (Prime Minister) —I genuinely thank the member for his question. Can I say to him that I just referred to the 2005 reforms in my last answer to a question from the shadow minister and I respect the role that the member asking the question played in advocating those reforms from the back bench of the then Howard government.
…
Mr ABBOTT —Given the question that was asked by my colleague the member for Mallee, and given the Prime Minister’s answer, which referred to changes made by the Howard government in 2005, I ask her by way of supplementary question: why did she create the impression yesterday that there were still children behind razor wire?
…
Ms GILLARD —The question of children and razor wire is directly relevant to this reform, so I say again to the Leader of the Opposition: if he wants to say, ‘Good on the government, but the Howard government thought of this first,’ that is fine by me. …
Section 34 of the Constitution generated some excitement among Labor supporters because they believed that it meant that the new LNP Member for Longman, Wyatt Roy, who is just 20 years old, is not legally permitted to hold a seat in Federal Parliament:
COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA CONSTITUTION ACT - SECT 34
Qualifications of members
Until the Parliament otherwise provides, the qualifications of a member of the House of Representatives shall be as follows:
(i) he must be of the full age of twenty-one years, and must be an elector entitled to vote at the election of members of the House of Representatives, or a person qualified to become such elector, and must have been for three years at the least a resident within the limits of the Commonwealth as existing at the time when he is chosen;
(ii) he must be a subject of the Queen, either natural-born or for at least five years naturalized under a law of the United Kingdom, or of a Colony which has become or becomes a State, or of the Commonwealth, or of a State.
The first few words of Section 34 allow the minimum age for members and senators to be reduced by an Act of Parliament without amending the Constitution, and this was in fact done with the passage of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918, which reduced the minimum age for members and senators to 18:
COMMONWEALTH ELECTORAL ACT 1918 - SECT 163
Qualifications for nomination [see Note 6]
(1) A person who:
(a) has reached the age of 18 years;
(b) is an Australian citizen; and
(c) is either:
(i) an elector entitled to vote at a House of Representatives election; or
(ii) a person qualified to become such an elector; is qualified to be elected as a Senator or a member of the House of Representatives.
(2) A person is not entitled to be nominated for election as a Senator or a member of the House of Representatives unless the person is qualified under subsection (1).
One thing is abundantly clear, however: Kevin Rudd's big-government experiment was a disaster. Whichever party is returned, this ugly revival of old-style central planning must be buried and cremated. The Australian regrets taking Mr Rudd at his word in 2007 when he presented as an economic conservative who believed governments step in only when markets fail. The trouble was markets were deemed to have failed when Mr Rudd decided they had failed, and that was often. Long before the global financial crisis, the dead hand of government was touching the private sector in inappropriate places, and its behaviour grew steadily worse. GroceryWatch and FuelWatch were early signs of the hubris that resulted in the atrocity of a mining tax.
…
Our doubts towards Labor are about the party, not Ms Gillard, who has an abundance of courage and a talented frontbench team. Yet the financial crisis has revived a command economy culture we thought had been purged by Mr Hawke a quarter of a century ago. It was not big government that saved Australia from recession but the courage of leaders like Mr Hawke, Mr Howard and Paul Keating, who spent their own political capital on economic reform. The true test of a prime minister is not how he or she survives an external shock but how well they prepare us for the next one. It comes down to a question of trust in a contest between a leader who learned his trade under Mr Howard and one who served under Mr Rudd. On those grounds, we endorse Mr Abbott as our 28th prime minister.
The Australian Financial Review:
…By instinct, the Coalition would be less likely to waste taxpayers' money on risky projects than Labor, less inclined to sacrifice efficiency for "fairness" and protect weak industries, and more likely to embrace productivity-boosting reforms in welfare, tax and — hopefully by the 201 3 election — the workplace. Such reforms require real leadership. They are less likely to happen under Labor, which allows focus groups and unions to decide national policy and who should be prime minister.
We prefer the Coalition — which steered the economy through the 1997 Asian crisis and the fallout of the 2001 US recession. We hope, if elected, it learns better in office than Labor.
This campaign has lacked detail on how to deal with those complex political and economic challenges, reducing the choice to a decision about what sort of country we want – one dominated by big government, or one where government gets out of the way to allow enterprise to thrive.
…The reason the Rudd/Gillard Government lost its way is that it believed fervently in the former and, in the process, squandered the trust and goodwill it received from Queensland voters in 2007, when it promised to confront contemporary issues more aggressively than the Howard government.
The past three years have been a story of government being presented as the solution to the nation's challenges, when in fact it only added to them…
…
This, in fact, is a strength and shows a commitment to the people he aspires to serve. We know well what Mr Abbott stands for because his positions are well chronicled. Like this newspaper, he stands for the strength of free enterprise empowered by less regulation and lower taxes. So does his party. The nation will be better for their return to government.
In an interview on Sky News Australia, former leader of the federal ALP gave this blunt assessment of the honesty of the leaders of the two major parties:
Mark Latham: So every single slip, every wrong word, almost every misplaced syllable by a party leader it’s seized on. I’ve seen that already in this campaign. It’s seized on, as a story way out of proportion with its public interest value. So that encourages the politicians to narrow down, give them absolutely nothing and what we’ve seen so far in this campaign is that Gillard is really a changed person. She used to be fairly sort of free-wheeling and open about things. She has mastered the art of narrowness in public life whereas Abbott who, you know, really can’t sort of restrain himself from being a little bit honest is more likely to lead himself into an answer that, you know, is more honest than what Gillard’s giving people.
David Speers: But you’re saying Tony Abbott’s more honest in this campaign than Julia Gillard?
Mark Latham: Well he’s more inclined to speak his mind which you know should be a virtue, in a normal system it would be a virtue but in a system we’ve got now where the narrowness is absurd, there’s absolutely nothing in it for a politician to have an opinion that is outside the narrowly scripted message of the day on the campaign trail and this will be an ongoing problem for Abbott. Abbott who, for whatever reason, can’t sort of control himself in that regard is obviously going to find some …
Julia Gillard wants voters to forget that Australia is a federation of states with rights that are enshrined in the Australian Constitution, because they don’t sit well with Labor’s agenda to further centralise power in Canberra.
One of the central themes of the Rudd-Gillard Labor government’s campaign to win votes for its proposed Minerals Resource Rent Tax (MRRT) is that the nation’s minerals are owned by all Australians. As the government realises, this statement is misleading, as talkback radio host Alan Jones pointed out in his interview with the Prime Minister on 2GB last week:
JONES: -All company tax is profit-based, Julia. All company tax is profit based.
PM: Yes, but Alan, Alan, let’s just, absolutely right, I’m agreeing with you, we’re not having an argument about that. What’s different about mining? The key resource us a resource that is owned by everyone and we’ve got to work out what that’s worth. Historically-
JONES: -That’s not quite right, either. Constitutionally, what’s under the ground is owned by the States.
PM: Well, you know, Australians, Alan - whether they’re sitting in their States or sitting in their nation, it’s owned by Australians.
Australia’s minerals are owned by the Crown in the right of the states (excepting the territories), not in the right of the Commonwealth as the government is suggesting with its spin. It is clear from Section 114 in Chapter V of the Australian Constitution that while our minerals are owned by Australians, not all Australians own all our minerals:
114. A State shall not, without the consent of the Parliament of the Commonwealth, raise or maintain any naval or military force, or impose any tax on property of any kind belonging to the Commonwealth, nor shall the Commonwealth impose any tax on property of any kind belonging to a State.
Remember Clippit, the animated paper clip that would appear and offer assistance when you started using a Microsoft Office application for the first time? It might have impressed some people with its animated stunts, but when it came to delivering the help you needed, all too often it responded with irrelevant answers to your questions. It looked very friendly, but when you wanted to get down to doing serious work it became an annoying, unwelcome intrusion. Now just imagine what it would be like to have a Kevin Rudd variant of this feature running in the background on your PC all the time, because this is in essence what might pop up after downloading and installing the application that the Rudd Labor government just announced would be available for parents seeking protection for their children online.
When Senator Conroy's desktop panic button was launched last week, it was derided by the online community as a waste of taxpayers' money because it was nothing more than a help button which connects the child to resources online—or so they thought. It would be naive to think that this button—reported to cost $73,000 to develop and includes the ability to update itself automatically—will do nothing more in future.
Perhaps the Rudd Labor government intends to quietly dump its unpopular plan for mandatory ISP-level filtering by sneaking in an update for PC-based filtering. However, this is a custom-built application and development is ongoing—not an existing commercial product available off the shelf—so we can only guess what the government plans to do next with its panic button.
The intentions of the Rudd Labor government's ideas for the Internet need close scrutiny, because a picture is emerging of a government obsessed with centralised monitoring and regulation of activity on the Internet. If the government is planning to make ISPs retain the browsing history of Internet users as some people in the industry claim, then it is more out of touch than it seemed at first with its plans for mandatory ISP-level filtering. Internet users can conceal their browsing history via the same methods as those used to circumvent ISP-level filters, such browsing via a Web proxy. It is obvious that they are not listening to expert advice in the development of their policies.
Despite being included in a list of resources that may merit exemption in the Henry Tax Review, lime, phosphates, sand and gravel will be subject to the Rudd Labor government’s proposed Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT). Senator Wong couldn’t explain why the government chose to include these resources in the proposed tax on mining in yesterday's session of Question Time in the Senate.
Senator WILLIAMS (New South Wales) (2:28 PM) —My question is to the Minister representing the Minister for Resources and Energy, Senator Wong. I refer to the detailed analysis of the Henry tax review, table C1-1, headed ‘Resources that may merit exemption from the resource rent tax’. It lists more than 33 resources that may merit exemption. Why will these resources—including lime, phosphates, sand and gravel—still be subject to this massive new tax grab?
Senator WONG (South Australia) (Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water) —As I made clear in a previous answer, obviously the Henry tax review falls within the Treasurer’s portfolio, so if you have questions on the detail of that, Senator, I would suggest you put them to Senator Sherry, who represents the Treasurer. I can assist in relation to a number of the issues raised, however. For example, I would make the point that the move to a profits based regime will obviously, in general, be of greater assistance than a volumes based regime for more marginal operations. I make that as a general proposition.
The second point I would make is that a number of the commodities that you have discussed—not all, but some—are traded on world markets and obviously have their price set by world markets. For example, you mentioned phosphate. ABARE has advised that the price of phosphate is determined on world markets and by movements in the Australian exchange rates. I also make the point that, as I responded in response to an earlier question, the government’s modelling has indicated that the introduction of this reform, the replacement of royalties and the reduction in the company tax rate for all companies has, in fact, been independently modelled to bring down consumer prices by 1.1 per cent as well as to ensure that there is an increase in output as I have previously described. It may suit those opposite to run scare campaigns around a whole range of issues here; the fact is that this is about economic reform. It is about building a stronger economy and recognising that the benefits of the resources sector should be more fairly shared amongst all in Australia and should be utilised to make investments in other parts of our economy such as regional infrastructure, superannuation and reduction in the company tax rate. (Time expired)
Senator WILLIAMS (New South Wales) —Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. Given that the small quarries will face an effective tax rate of 57 per cent despite the Henry review advice, what modelling has the government done in relation to the effect of the obvious price increases in these infrastructure and fertiliser products?
Senator WONG (South Australia) (Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water) —Again, I do not know where you are quoting your figure from. I again remind you that this is a profits based regime which obviously only applies after a certain threshold which incorporates a rate of return. In relation to some of the fertiliser and fertiliser ingredients that you reference, I have indicated to you that a number of these commodities are in fact traded commodities and would have their prices set on world markets. The low-value commodities that are used as agricultural inputs are usually lower profit—
Honourable senators interjecting—
Senator Brandis —Mr President, a point of order: the question was limited to whether or not modelling had been done with relation to the effect on these commodities. Nothing that the minister has said has gone anywhere near the question of whether or not modelling was done. You should bring her directly to the question.
The PRESIDENT —I am listening to the answer that the minister is giving. It is a little bit difficult with the interjections that are taking place across the chamber. If they were not happening, it would be much easier to hear the comments that are being made.
Senator WONG —The modelling is the Econtech modelling which I have previously referred to. I was attempting to be of some assistance to the senator and to give him a specific answer in relation to the agricultural inputs he raised. The advice I have is that these are usually lower profit and, therefore, unlikely to face a higher tax burden under the RSPT, particularly given the replacement of royalties with an RSPT. I also indicate that the government is clearly consulting on this implementation. (Time expired)
Senator WILLIAMS (New South Wales) —Mr President, I ask a further supplementary question. Will the government pay financial compensation to state and local governments that will face obvious increased costs in road construction and community infrastructure because of this big new tax on all quarries that supply these resources?
Senator WONG (South Australia) (Minister for Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water) —What the government is doing, as the Prime Minister has announced, is implementing a $6 billion regional infrastructure fund. This demonstrates why tax reform is so critical to Australia. A fund means that we can begin to tackle our urgent infrastructure needs now and put something back into the mining communities that make our economy strong. The reality is that this is a tax that is about investment in infrastructure, investment in superannuation, investment in a reduction in the company tax rate for the other sectors of the economy, a fairer share and a stronger economy.
