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AusPoliGAF |OT| Boats? What Boats?

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hidys

Member
he's the go to man to shit on his own party second only to mark latham and at least latham wrote a fucking hilarious book out of his failed election campaign

Mark Latham did not bring corrupt people like Eddie Obied into the party.

Also I quite liked The Latham Diaries.
 

Fredescu

Member
B4NOnY6CQAAodW0.jpg
.
 

Arksy

Member
PUP strikes me as a weird experiment into how money works in politics. You have PUP and Katter's party, both hopeless vague political parties with no message aside from fuck the other guys. Katter who is an established political player and PUP who is seen as basically as Scrooge from A Christmas Carol.

PUP gets three senators and wins his lower house seat while Katter is barely able to fight off the libs.
 
It works for as long as the candidates you gather up to follow orders, follow those orders. As soon as they realise that they don't have to it tends to fall apart.

Yeah that the kind of the point. 3 federal senators, already lost one. Signed up 2 in Queensland, neither lasted. Signed up 3 in the NT, lost one. Might have one over the line in the Victorian upper house.

Candidates and voters were sold the line that this time politics would be different, they are now just realising they were sold a line of BS by an unstable billionaire with a chip on his shoulder the size of the Titanic and are already jumping ship. When Palmer goes at the next election so does the party.
 

Arksy

Member
I don't particularly understand how it works in the Senate, I think there's a current legal challenge to the DLP Senator who quit his party to stand down...A by-product of the Whitlam fallout was a referendum which determined that a resigning (as in leaving the Senate for one reason or another) senator would be replaced by the same political party.

So the challenge is to replace Madigan with an actual DLP Senator.
 

bomma_man

Member
I guess the Hare-Clarke system used in the senate doesn't work too well for by elections? There's like a 99% chance they'd get replaced by a labril. Obviously the current solution isn't ideal though.
 

Jintor

Member
The television and radio advertisements are set to an upbeat tune and tell the audience "Uni graduates can earn 75 per cent more than school leavers and have more career opportunities" and "That's why the Australian Government will continue to pay around half your undergraduate degree and HECS covers the rest".

"So you pay zero course fees up front," the ads say.

"These bits are the same. Don't ask about the other bits!"
 
Saw one on my bus-stop today. Basically said "Don't worry HECS still exists you can still pay 0 up-front". I think this campaign is massively under-estimating how savvy the target audience is, but I could be wrong.

Yeah, I don't think anyone was actually worried about changes meaning students would have to pay upfront.
 

hidys

Member
So the PM's literary awards are about as much of a joke as I expected. One of the books which received the award was about how unionists sabotaged the Australian war efforts during WWII.

Mike Carlton did an interesting take-down of the book in Crikey but unfortunately it is pay-walled so I won't link it here.
 

Fredescu

Member
So they've "repackaged" the co payment by giving doctors $5 less and making it optional to pass the cost on. Of course the headlines are saying "Co Payment Dumped" which is a load of shit.
 

Quasar

Member
So they've "repackaged" the co payment by giving doctors $5 less and making it optional to pass the cost on. Of course the headlines are saying "Co Payment Dumped" which is a load of shit.

Yeah. Now doctors can take the heat instead.

The whole 10 minutes thing is curious though. I mean does that mean making all consultations 10 minutes or more mean they evade the 5$ loss?
 

Quasar

Member
Kind of like the states and gst measures, ey? Cause the shortfall and try and push the tough decisions on to someone else

Yeah. Pretty much.

Not that I'd be totally against a GST rise myself, well I'd prefer a rise in income taxes as they aren't regressive. But generally speaking I'd rather see a tax increase over the large cuts the LNP is pushing through.

I do think we should have a total re-examination of the kind of revenue needed to create the kind of society social net is good for the country and they look at a tax system that can generate that.

Though thats probably crazy talk and I should move to one of those crazy scandinavian countries instead.
 

r1chard

Member
So they've "repackaged" the co payment by giving doctors $5 less and making it optional to pass the cost on. Of course the headlines are saying "Co Payment Dumped" which is a load of shit.

That's pretty fucking transparent. Still has to make it through the senate, doesn't it? I can't see people saying no to the $7 thing and approving a $5 thing instead.
 

Jintor

Member
You guys certainly have a knack for melodrama. :p

I'm not saying they're going to knock a hole in the bottom and going to sink the continent or something, but you have to admit that a government does have power to set the system conditions for decades to come and that the current government is doing some pretty weird things
 

Quasar

Member
http://www.smh.com.au/digital-life/...s-under-copyright-reform-20141208-122rmj.html

Australians will be blocked from accessing popular overseas websites hosting pirated movies and TV shows but would escape punishment for downloading illicit content under copyright law proposals being presented to federal cabinet on Tuesday.

Attorney-General George Brandis and Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull have developed a minimalist set of reforms to be debated at the final cabinet meeting of the year that avoids harsh penalties such as throttled speeds for repeat illicit downloaders.

This is kind of surprising if true. I really expected them to push something much harder.
 
Probably looking for an easy win that can be ramped later. Probably under considerable pressure to do something and really don't want to spend months with senate debate drawing attention to this and their retention proposals.
 

Quasar

Member
Probably looking for an easy win that can be ramped later. Probably under considerable pressure to do something and really don't want to spend months with senate debate drawing attention to this and their retention proposals.

Or the fact that anything serious would catch untold numbers of Howard battlers rather than teenagers/young adults. Which might make their election prospects worse.
 

bomma_man

Member
Or the fact that anything serious would catch untold numbers of Howard battlers rather than teenagers/young adults. Which might make their election prospects worse.

On the topic of Howard's battlers, I'm surprised more conservative parties around the world didn't try the same trick, in the same way that Clinton and Nu Labour copied Hawke/Keating.
 

markot

Banned
On the topic of Howard's battlers, I'm surprised more conservative parties around the world didn't try the same trick, in the same way that Clinton and Nu Labour copied Hawke/Keating.

They did, Howards Battlers was the same sort of thing Thatcher and Reagen did. Its just we had Labour in power then, so it was sort of delayed.
 
My in-laws are staying with us at the moment and I have to admit that I LOL'd when a news report came out about cracking down on pirates by blocking websites.

Oh noez they be takin mah access!

Explaining to them why it was futile only got me blank stares.

Of course, I am against these laws because they set a bad precedent and brand ordinary citizens as criminals, regardless of whatever efficacy they may or may not have.
 

Arksy

Member
Essex Man, Howard Battlers, Reagan Democrats. The most successful conservative leaders in the last half century have been those who've managed to capture the "traditional blue collar" vote.
 
Yeah. Now doctors can take the heat instead.

The whole 10 minutes thing is curious though. I mean does that mean making all consultations 10 minutes or more mean they evade the 5$ loss?

If this goes through expect bulk billing to be a thing of the past. They can't get enough GP's as it is, if the GP's end up paying for this (You can bet the big providers won't be paying for it) they will see around a 10-15% cut in wages. Not happening, the GP's will move elsewhere. Once one big provider stops bulk billing to hold onto GP's they'll all follow, most probably past the $5 fee to recoup the costs of lower numbers. Bottom line, the patient will end up paying, they'll just blame the GP instead of Tony Abbott.

And don't forget GP's are some of the lowest paid when compared to other medical specialists in Australia. So the most important field in medicine, the front line, is paid lower than all the others and they shit on them again for fun. Who as a newly qualified Doctor would even consider going into General Practice when they can earn double in other fields.
 
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