Three High Court challenges to the Commonwealth’s emergency monitoring powers for people released from immigration detention have been scrapped over the summer after ankle bracelets and curfews were removed from the plaintiffs.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-01/immigration-detainee-challenges-dropped-ankle-monitoring-lifted/103409080

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

We started watching “The Wall” last night. It looks so cold – it’s set in Quebec. One of the characters commented that “It was -50 last week”. But I suppose Quebecers looking at Australia would have trouble understanding one of our 40+ days. Judging just from the first episode…seems good.

Episode guide

sarahs mum said:

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

Fark that’s pretty serious.

Spiny Norman said:

sarahs mum said:

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Spiny Norman said:

sarahs mum said:

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

Fark that’s pretty serious.

Yes. I will have to refresh my memory of this. So much crazy stuff.

sarahs mum said:

Spiny Norman said:

sarahs mum said:

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Heinious.

roughbarked said:

sarahs mum said:

Spiny Norman said:

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Heinious.

I wonder if anybody downloaded the video he was referring to?

roughbarked said:

sarahs mum said:

Spiny Norman said:

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Heinious.

It’s woo.

Peak Warming Man said:

roughbarked said:

sarahs mum said:

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Heinious.

It’s woo.

there was the story about barilaro becoming manager of a bowls club, taking out a huge loan, running the place till it was debt ridden and unfiniancial and then buying it out and redeveloping it.

sarahs mum said:

Peak Warming Man said:

roughbarked said:

Heinious.

It’s woo.

there was the story about barilaro becoming manager of a bowls club, taking out a huge loan, running the place till it was debt ridden and unfiniancial and then buying it out and redeveloping it.

He’s a sleaze.
One does hope that there is a place called hell for such people.

sarahs mum said:

Spiny Norman said:

sarahs mum said:

statement from friendlyjordies

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRqUVh29LGQ

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Nods.

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

Spiny Norman said:

Fark that’s pretty serious.

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Nods.

well, nice to know journalist have a reason to be crap instead of just being crap like you read people here saying.

JudgeMental said:

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

no wonder journalists don’t want to be proper journalists anymore. I’m guessing it was more about what he dug up than his poking fun.

Nods.

well, nice to know journalist have a reason to be crap instead of just being crap like you read people here saying.

But, (unless they’ve changed drastically since the days when i had to deal with them, which i doubt) some of them are crap because they want to be crap.

Cut and paste from the news services, publish PR handouts verbatim with your by-line attached, simply make shit up when you’ve got gaps in the story or it’s not jazzy enough etc. etc.

That kind really want to be Virginia Trioli or Andrew Bolt, writing about what they had for dinner last night, or selecting a dog-whistle topic at random from a hat and recycling a couple of thousand words about that. All that reporting the news of the day without fear or favour stuff is just too hard.

Tea: Ham cheese and tomato fried sanger washed down with a cup of tea (black and one)
Over.

roughbarked said:

sarahs mum said:

Peak Warming Man said:

It’s woo.

there was the story about barilaro becoming manager of a bowls club, taking out a huge loan, running the place till it was debt ridden and unfiniancial and then buying it out and redeveloping it.

He’s a sleaze.
One does hope that there is a place called hell for such people.

Prosecute
Fine
Jail – ten years no parole

Ha, more evolved than the states eh…

“The Australian Government collects more money from HECS than it does from the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax”.

Coronation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZivPIRvi0U

—-

okay. i have not seen this one before.

it’s about a very nasty sounding kidnapping and car chase. a suspected murder. there is about 30 minutes of the nastinesses involving some arab property developers and a bikie gang? and the gang squad. the witness withdraws refusing to say anything in court. The DPP ends up paying out the arab boys.

finally, we get to the company called coronation. and it marries the characters from the first bit…with John Barilaro who becomes a director of said.

Considering- it isn’t surprising jordies house was burnt down.

sarahs mum said:

Coronation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZivPIRvi0U

—-

okay. i have not seen this one before.

it’s about a very nasty sounding kidnapping and car chase. a suspected murder. there is about 30 minutes of the nastinesses involving some arab property developers and a bikie gang? and the gang squad. the witness withdraws refusing to say anything in court. The DPP ends up paying out the arab boys.

finally, we get to the company called coronation. and it marries the characters from the first bit…with John Barilaro who becomes a director of said.

Considering- it isn’t surprising jordies house was burnt down.

also donations to Liberals.

I’m sure this would make more sense to me if i followed NSW politics in more detail.

Well after watching that i would say Barilaro never appeared to me to be THAT awful. But what do I know.

Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull reflect on how ‘bonk ban’ blew up their political partnership
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/barnaby-joyce-malcolm-turnbull-reflect-on-bonk-ban-for-nemesis/103242534

Beetroot still does not get it.

It reflects on the ethics of being in office, being fit for office in such a high position while being Deputy PM being married while having an affair while being religious, supposedly following religious ideology and then doing the opposite in front of all of Australia via the media covering his affairs. Sure it involves someone else, sure private relationships should stay that way, but hypocritical behaviour while being Deputy PM puts that position into an unethical relationship.

Something like that.

To be Deputy PM, having multiple relationships, in front of all of Australia, he clearly has problems seeing himself from a distance.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull reflect on how ‘bonk ban’ blew up their political partnership
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/barnaby-joyce-malcolm-turnbull-reflect-on-bonk-ban-for-nemesis/103242534

Beetroot still does not get it.

It reflects on the ethics of being in office, being fit for office in such a high position while being Deputy PM being married while having an affair while being religious, supposedly following religious ideology and then doing the opposite in front of all of Australia via the media covering his affairs. Sure it involves someone else, sure private relationships should stay that way, but hypocritical behaviour while being Deputy PM puts that position into an unethical relationship.

Something like that.

To be Deputy PM, having multiple relationships, in front of all of Australia, he clearly has problems seeing himself from a distance.

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull reflect on how ‘bonk ban’ blew up their political partnership
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/barnaby-joyce-malcolm-turnbull-reflect-on-bonk-ban-for-nemesis/103242534

Beetroot still does not get it.

It reflects on the ethics of being in office, being fit for office in such a high position while being Deputy PM being married while having an affair while being religious, supposedly following religious ideology and then doing the opposite in front of all of Australia via the media covering his affairs. Sure it involves someone else, sure private relationships should stay that way, but hypocritical behaviour while being Deputy PM puts that position into an unethical relationship.

Something like that.

To be Deputy PM, having multiple relationships, in front of all of Australia, he clearly has problems seeing himself from a distance.

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull reflect on how ‘bonk ban’ blew up their political partnership
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/barnaby-joyce-malcolm-turnbull-reflect-on-bonk-ban-for-nemesis/103242534

Beetroot still does not get it.

It reflects on the ethics of being in office, being fit for office in such a high position while being Deputy PM being married while having an affair while being religious, supposedly following religious ideology and then doing the opposite in front of all of Australia via the media covering his affairs. Sure it involves someone else, sure private relationships should stay that way, but hypocritical behaviour while being Deputy PM puts that position into an unethical relationship.

Something like that.

To be Deputy PM, having multiple relationships, in front of all of Australia, he clearly has problems seeing himself from a distance.

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

and that worked out so well.

sarahs mum said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

and that worked out so well.

It s the hypocrisy of it all that rankles, not the act. This is a man who stood up in parliament to oppose Federal Government funding of Guardasil with the argument that a woman with a faithful husband doesn’t need it.

party_pants said:

sarahs mum said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

and that worked out so well.

It s the hypocrisy of it all that rankles, not the act. This is a man who stood up in parliament to oppose Federal Government funding of Guardasil with the argument that a woman with a faithful husband doesn’t need it.

i think the greatest hypocrisy was the Indue card system. Because those Aboriginals are all pissed and have bad sexual morals and can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

sarahs mum said:

party_pants said:

sarahs mum said:

and that worked out so well.

It s the hypocrisy of it all that rankles, not the act. This is a man who stood up in parliament to oppose Federal Government funding of Guardasil with the argument that a woman with a faithful husband doesn’t need it.

i think the greatest hypocrisy was the Indue card system. Because those Aboriginals are all pissed and have bad sexual morals and can’t be trusted to do the right thing.

Barnaby is often pissed on the job.

party_pants said:

sarahs mum said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

and that worked out so well.

It s the hypocrisy of it all that rankles, not the act. This is a man who stood up in parliament to oppose Federal Government funding of Guardasil with the argument that a woman with a faithful husband doesn’t need it.

Beetroot has poor observation.

Poor observation leads to poor understanding of logic which then leads to having poor ethics.

Being unable to see his behaviour from a distance .

You would want a Deputy PM to have good observation.

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Barnaby Joyce and Malcolm Turnbull reflect on how ‘bonk ban’ blew up their political partnership
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/barnaby-joyce-malcolm-turnbull-reflect-on-bonk-ban-for-nemesis/103242534

Beetroot still does not get it.

It reflects on the ethics of being in office, being fit for office in such a high position while being Deputy PM being married while having an affair while being religious, supposedly following religious ideology and then doing the opposite in front of all of Australia via the media covering his affairs. Sure it involves someone else, sure private relationships should stay that way, but hypocritical behaviour while being Deputy PM puts that position into an unethical relationship.

Something like that.

To be Deputy PM, having multiple relationships, in front of all of Australia, he clearly has problems seeing himself from a distance.

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

Does anyone remember Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi?

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

Does anyone remember Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi?

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

sarahs mum said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

Does anyone remember Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi?

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

and the list goes on. la de de da da da.

So Beetroot came into the Deputy PMs Office with his behaviours and attitudes which were in conflict with the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM, steps were taken to improve people’s behaviour, Beetroot clearly could not see that his own behaviour was in conflict with the office he was holding and Beetroot threw a tantrum being caught out, having terrible observation skills.

Tau.Neutrino said:

So Beetroot came into the Deputy PMs Office with his behaviours and attitudes which were in conflict with the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM, steps were taken to improve people’s behaviour, Beetroot clearly could not see that his own behaviour was in conflict with the office he was holding and Beetroot threw a tantrum being caught out, having terrible observation skills.

He seemed to get along fine thinking that everyone else was drunk as well.

ABC News:

It’s either that, or get a job.

Population of critically endangered numbats in WA’s is out of control and needs to be culled.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/endangered-numbat-numbers-higher-than-thought-southern-wa/103419552

captain_spalding said:

ABC News:

It’s either that, or get a job.

good?

I’ve only met him once and I was not floored. But many of my friends think he is the real deal. Over the years I have been unimpressed. Maybe he is better than the party. let’s see.

Peak Warming Man said:

Population of critically endangered numbats in WA’s is out of control and needs to be culled.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/endangered-numbat-numbers-higher-than-thought-southern-wa/103419552

sarahs mum said:

captain_spalding said:

ABC News:

It’s either that, or get a job.

good?

I’ve only met him once and I was not floored. But many of my friends think he is the real deal. Over the years I have been unimpressed. Maybe he is better than the party. let’s see.

definitely higher on the ballot than Eric.

sarahs mum said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

Does anyone remember Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi?

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

Not the same power play as for Barnaby.

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

So Beetroot came into the Deputy PMs Office with his behaviours and attitudes which were in conflict with the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM, steps were taken to improve people’s behaviour, Beetroot clearly could not see that his own behaviour was in conflict with the office he was holding and Beetroot threw a tantrum being caught out, having terrible observation skills.

He seemed to get along fine thinking that everyone else was drunk as well.

And he wants to get back in again.

Maybe the Libs could teach their MP’s to observe their own behaviours and how those behaviours impact and affect the office that they hold.

Tau.Neutrino said:

roughbarked said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

So Beetroot came into the Deputy PMs Office with his behaviours and attitudes which were in conflict with the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM, steps were taken to improve people’s behaviour, Beetroot clearly could not see that his own behaviour was in conflict with the office he was holding and Beetroot threw a tantrum being caught out, having terrible observation skills.

He seemed to get along fine thinking that everyone else was drunk as well.

And he wants to get back in again.

Maybe the Libs could teach their MP’s to observe their own behaviours and how those behaviours impact and affect the office that they hold.

Add attitudes after behaviours.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/03/australian-undercover-police-autistic-13-year-old-fixation-islamic-state

How Australian undercover police ‘fed’ an autistic 13-year-old’s fixation with Islamic State
Court finds counter-terrorism unit’s conduct fell ‘profoundly short’ of minimum standards expected of law enforcement officers

Thomas spent three months in custody before he was granted bail in October 2022, after an earlier bail was revoked because he failed to comply with conditions.

Thomas, an NDIS recipient with an IQ of 71, was first reported to police by Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and then by his parents because of his fixation with Islamic State, which included him accessing extremist material online and making threats to other students.

On 17 April 2021, his parents went to a police station and asked for help because Thomas was watching Islamic State-related videos on his computer and had asked his mother to buy bomb-making ingredients such as sulphur and acetone.

Thomas was investigated and charged with two terror offences by the Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT), which comprises Australian federal police, Victoria police and Asio members.

buffy said:

sarahs mum said:

roughbarked said:

Does anyone remember Jim Cairns and Junie Morosi?

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

Not the same power play as for Barnaby.

It highlights the dangers for staffers in Federal Parliament.

Involving themselves sexually or romantically with MPs already in a relationship.

Also the dangers between staffers themselves involving alcohol consumption and how other staff can abuse their responsibility towards other staff when alcohol is involved.

Tau.Neutrino said:

buffy said:

sarahs mum said:

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

Not the same power play as for Barnaby.

It highlights the dangers for staffers in Federal Parliament.

Involving themselves sexually or romantically with MPs already in a relationship.

Also the dangers between staffers themselves involving alcohol consumption and how other staff can abuse their responsibility towards other staff when alcohol is involved.

Federal Parliament has thousands of staffers.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Peak Warming Man said:

Population of critically endangered numbats in WA’s is out of control and needs to be culled.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-04/endangered-numbat-numbers-higher-than-thought-southern-wa/103419552

Just to be clear, PWM is joking here. The numbers are around 1900, higher than the 1000 or so expected but the beast is still critically endangered.

dv said:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/03/australian-undercover-police-autistic-13-year-old-fixation-islamic-state

How Australian undercover police ‘fed’ an autistic 13-year-old’s fixation with Islamic State
Court finds counter-terrorism unit’s conduct fell ‘profoundly short’ of minimum standards expected of law enforcement officers

Thomas spent three months in custody before he was granted bail in October 2022, after an earlier bail was revoked because he failed to comply with conditions.

Thomas, an NDIS recipient with an IQ of 71, was first reported to police by Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and then by his parents because of his fixation with Islamic State, which included him accessing extremist material online and making threats to other students.

On 17 April 2021, his parents went to a police station and asked for help because Thomas was watching Islamic State-related videos on his computer and had asked his mother to buy bomb-making ingredients such as sulphur and acetone.

Thomas was investigated and charged with two terror offences by the Joint Counter Terrorism Team (JCTT), which comprises Australian federal police, Victoria police and Asio members.

that’s pretty bad.

sarahs mum said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Has I see it Malcolm Turnbull was doing his job of protecting the integrity of the Office of Deputy PM. It does not make Malcolm a shithead.

Bonk ban was put in place to improve people’s behaviour in Federal Parliament.

and that worked out so well.

Bonk Ban was bought in around Feb 2018

Brittany announces rape allegation Feb 2021.

Tau.Neutrino said:

buffy said:

sarahs mum said:

Gareth Evans and Cheryl Kernot?

Not the same power play as for Barnaby.

It highlights the dangers for staffers in Federal Parliament.

Involving themselves sexually or romantically with MPs already in a relationship.

Also the dangers between staffers themselves involving alcohol consumption and how other staff can abuse their responsibility towards other staff when alcohol is involved.

In the case of Juni and Jim, I believe it was LSD that sparked their fantasy relationship.

Lowitja O’Donoghue has died, aged 91. She was the first chairperson of ATSIC, and had been an aboriginal rights advocate since the 1960s.

dv said:

Lowitja O’Donoghue has died, aged 91. She was the first chairperson of ATSIC, and had been an aboriginal rights advocate since the 1960s.

She did good with her life and had a long innings.

If Beetroot cannot observe that his own behaviours and attitudes were in conflict with the office he holds then how good are is observation skills in relation to other people and world events?

I guess Malcolm was wondering about that too.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-06/malcolm-turnbull-week-of-madness-leadership-dutton-morrison/103378808

It’s kind of bonkers that the original plan was to elevate Dutton. He’s been one of the least popular Libs for ages.

Coalition won’t stop the Stage 3 changes

buffy said:

Coalition won’t stop the Stage 3 changes

Good.

Dr Monique Ryan
1 h ·
Really? Here’s a pic of the Liberal/National Coalition’s Barnaby Joyce standing with an anti-renewables rally – taken today. In 2024.

sarahs mum said:

Dr Monique Ryan
1 h ·
Really? Here’s a pic of the Liberal/National Coalition’s Barnaby Joyce standing with an anti-renewables rally – taken today. In 2024.

F-wit.

1st order f-wit.

sarahs mum said:

Dr Monique Ryan
1 h ·
Really? Here’s a pic of the Liberal/National Coalition’s Barnaby Joyce standing with an anti-renewables rally – taken today. In 2024.

Should just throw lumps of coal at him, and then tie him to a tractors exhaust pipe outlet, then ask him if he would prefer to be tied to an electric cars exhaust outlet.

Kingy said:

sarahs mum said:

Dr Monique Ryan
1 h ·
Really? Here’s a pic of the Liberal/National Coalition’s Barnaby Joyce standing with an anti-renewables rally – taken today. In 2024.

Should just throw lumps of coal at him, and then tie him to a tractors exhaust pipe outlet, then ask him if he would prefer to be tied to an electric cars exhaust outlet.

Ha!

Good solution. Maybe tie him to the electric car’s exhaust first.

OCDC said:

Seems about right as an analysis of Mr Potatohead’s thinking.

This is the video that caused the serious death threats against FriendlyJordies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dU9ui9SkB4

Spiny Norman said:

This is the video that caused the serious death threats against FriendlyJordies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dU9ui9SkB4

The suggestion was for people to download it, to keep it safe.

kii said:

Spiny Norman said:

This is the video that caused the serious death threats against FriendlyJordies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dU9ui9SkB4

The suggestion was for people to download it, to keep it safe.

Is that the coronation link? I kept that here.

roughbarked said:

kii said:

Spiny Norman said:

This is the video that caused the serious death threats against FriendlyJordies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dU9ui9SkB4

The suggestion was for people to download it, to keep it safe.

Is that the coronation link? I kept that here.

Yeah. If you look at the link it says, ‘reupload’. Which is obvious that they took it down and reuploaded it anyway.

roughbarked said:

kii said:

Spiny Norman said:

This is the video that caused the serious death threats against FriendlyJordies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dU9ui9SkB4

The suggestion was for people to download it, to keep it safe.

Is that the coronation link? I kept that here.

I’ve downloaded my own copy of the video, which i probably wouldn’t have bothered to do if Barilaro and his henchmen hadn’t been such arseholes.

captain_spalding said:

roughbarked said:

kii said:

The suggestion was for people to download it, to keep it safe.

Is that the coronation link? I kept that here.

I’ve downloaded my own copy of the video, which i probably wouldn’t have bothered to do if Barilaro and his henchmen hadn’t been such arseholes.

true.

OCDC said:

Ha!

ABC News:

When an Australian Labor govt alters the tax-cut promise made by the preceding L/NP govt, the headlines scream that Labor’s credibility is destroyed, what cads, what bounders, you can’t trust them, they’re irresponsible.

Now, a new NZ conservative govt scraps NZ Labour’s prison population reduction plan.

Will we hear similar caterwauling from the Murdcoch media about this?

captain_spalding said:

ABC News:

When an Australian Labor govt alters the tax-cut promise made by the preceding L/NP govt, the headlines scream that Labor’s credibility is destroyed, what cads, what bounders, you can’t trust them, they’re irresponsible.

Now, a new NZ conservative govt scraps NZ Labour’s prison population reduction plan.

Will we hear similar caterwauling from the Murdcoch media about this?

Murdoch doesn’t have the same control over NZ I believe.

OCDC said:

:)

(although why that should raise a :), I don’t know)

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

CCS.. NUCULAR

Excellent

sarahs mum said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

Because NASA “lost” all the plans.

Bogsnorkler said:

sarahs mum said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

Because NASA “lost” all the plans.

typical.

Ian said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

CCS.. NUCULAR

Excellent

Most interesting – I used to follow a lot of those cookers rants on Twitter, but when it changed to X and you suddenly had to have an account to read anything, I stopped.

Some things, it seems, have not changed.

sarahs mum said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

LOL

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

LOL

“Mr. Zarkov. Paging Mr. Zarkov. If Mr. Zarkov is here, please make yourself known. Paging Mr. Zarkov.”

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

sarahs mum said:

Cookers rally to Parliament! | The West Report

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Cfepf344k

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

LOL

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to no-one that I hadn’t heard of the cookers before.

Have they been around for long?

The Rev Dodgson said:

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

LOL

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to no-one that I hadn’t heard of the cookers before.

Have they been around for long?

really came out at the beginning of covid.

Bogsnorkler said:

The Rev Dodgson said:

Michael V said:

LOL

I’m sure it will come as a surprise to no-one that I hadn’t heard of the cookers before.

Have they been around for long?

really came out at the beginning of covid.

https://cookerpedia.org/wiki/Cooker

Link

captain_spalding said:

Michael V said:

sarahs mum said:

So why aren’t we building pyramids to make energy? If the ancients could get it together why can’t we? These and other questions.

LOL

“Mr. Zarkov. Paging Mr. Zarkov. If Mr. Zarkov is here, please make yourself known. Paging Mr. Zarkov.”

Thers something wrong with that video, the lips are not matching the words.

Peak Warming Man said:

captain_spalding said:

Michael V said:

LOL

“Mr. Zarkov. Paging Mr. Zarkov. If Mr. Zarkov is here, please make yourself known. Paging Mr. Zarkov.”

Thers something wrong with that video, the lips are not matching the words.

That’s because the thoughts are not matching reality.

Tasmanian early election edges closer as independent MP John Tucker rejects ‘extreme’ deal
By Bec Pridham
Posted 10h ago10 hours ago, updated 6h ago

In short: John Tucker has joined fellow Liberal-turned-independent MP Lara Alexander in rejecting the Tasmanian premier’s new deal to keep the minority government alive and avoid an early election.
Mr Tucker wants policy changes from the government or he will call a no confidence motion, but the premier says he won’t be held hostage and the rogue MPs must now agree to a more restrictive deal

What’s next? Mr Tucker and Ms Alexander will hold a meeting with the premier at 1:30pm on Friday, where they will see if they can negotiate their way out of an early election.

A Tasmanian state election could be called imminently as an independent MP whose vote props up the minority Liberal government announces he cannot work under “extreme” terms forced upon him by the premier.

Last week Premier Jeremy Rockliff issued Liberal-turned-independent MPs John Tucker and Lara Alexander with an ultimatum — sign a new, more restrictive agreement, or risk an early election.

more..
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-08/john-tucker-early-tas-election-closer-after-rejecting-deal/103440944

Bizarre video emerges reportedly of Barnaby Joyce lying on footpath swearing into his phone looking completely off his face.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1755803557406933147

Spiny Norman said:

Bizarre video emerges reportedly of Barnaby Joyce lying on footpath swearing into his phone looking completely off his face.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1755803557406933147

Funny but not exactly out of character

Spiny Norman said:

Bizarre video emerges reportedly of Barnaby Joyce lying on footpath swearing into his phone looking completely off his face.

https://twitter.com/i/status/1755803557406933147

The person taking the photo from a skateboard?

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

Bubblecar said:

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

Bloody hell. Even in Tasmania I’m surprised this can be done without a legal decision.

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

Bloody hell. Even in Tasmania I’m surprised this can be done without a legal decision.

It’s madness.

Bubblecar said:

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

why do I get the feeling that this is because there is an upcoming state election, and it is time to play the division card again?

Centrelink currently has 34,000 age pension claims waiting to be processed and the average processing time is 72 days.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/months-of-waiting-for-age-pension-causes-stress/103450110

—-

shit.

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

Bloody hell. Even in Tasmania I’m surprised this can be done without a legal decision.

Surely there’ll be an appeal.

roughbarked said:

dv said:

Bubblecar said:

Nineteen Tasmanians banned indefinitely from entire public native forestry estate after logging protests

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-09/tasmanians-banned-from-forests-indefinitely-after-protests/103440548

Bloody hell. Even in Tasmania I’m surprised this can be done without a legal decision.

Surely there’ll be an appeal.

To whom? This isn’t even a decision by a law body. It is an administrative decision by a publicly owned company.

dv said:

roughbarked said:

dv said:

Bloody hell. Even in Tasmania I’m surprised this can be done without a legal decision.

Surely there’ll be an appeal.

To whom? This isn’t even a decision by a law body. It is an administrative decision by a publicly owned company.

It is madness.

09 February 2024
‘Chaos continues’ after Rockliff’s election threat failure

Jeremy Rockliff is being labelled a weak premier after he failed to immediately follow through on his threat to call an early election.
Mr Rockliff met with independents John Tucker and Lara Alexander on Friday after the two members rejected his ultimatum that they must vote with the Liberals to avoid an early election.

The opinion polls failed spectacularly to predict the outcome of the 2019 election. But should these surveys be used at all to predict election results? Dr Jacob Deem, political scientist from Central Queensland University explains.
After the meeting Mr Rockliff issued a statement that he would be taking time to consider what was discussed with Mr Tucker and Mr Alexander.

“It was an opportunity for them to put forward their position, as I have mine. I will now take the appropriate time to consider and to consult with my colleagues,” Mr Rockliff said.

“This is an important matter, Tasmanians need stability and certainty, and I am focused on delivering that.”
Mr Tucker and Ms Alexander remained firm against Mr Rockliff’s recent hardline request.

They said they want to maintain their independent status but would continue to guarantee supply and confidence and vote to pass all appropriation and revenue bills.

Labor MLC Josh Willie said the failure by Mr Rockliff to call an early election and act on his threats was embarrassing.
Mr Willie questioned who was leading government.

“Tasmanians trying to work out what the strategy is behind Mr Rockliff’s strange behavior will still be scratching their heads,” Mr Willie said.

Earlier on Friday Mr Rockliff said he would not be making an election call over this weekend, which is a long weekend in Hobart, but indicated that an election might be held within two months.

How it led to this?
Negotiations between the former Liberal MPs have continued since May last year when their departure from the party raised the risk of a minority Liberal government.
The Liberals need the independents’ votes to ensure minority government.
Since becoming independents, agreements between the parties have been struck over mandatory CCTV footage in abattoirs and AFL projects.

On Thursday Mr Tucker said he would not agree to Mr Rockliff’s terms to vote with the Liberals unequivocally.

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/02/10/the-broken-record-broken-promises#mtr

Link

Bogsnorkler said:

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/02/10/the-broken-record-broken-promises#mtr

Link

It ties in with Spud’s declaration that he’d fight an election on ‘character’ issues (which would be like him bringing a rubber knife to a gunfight).

He and his party have no policies (other than pandering to lobbyists, pork-barrelling, and looting/plundering), so they just want to focus on flinging made-up shit.

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

kii said:

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

Apparently it all the fault of the person who filmed it and din’t stop to help the poor man who had accidentally fallen over.

kii said:

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

just goes to show, money can’t buy you class.

Bogsnorkler said:

kii said:

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

just goes to show, money can’t buy you class.

Well in Michaels defense, like the rest of us he enjoys a drink on a hot day but he does so responsibly.

Peak Warming Man said:

Bogsnorkler said:

kii said:

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

just goes to show, money can’t buy you class.

Well in Michaels defense, like the rest of us he enjoys a drink on a hot day but he does so responsibly.

Ha!

kii said:

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

i love the try to make it sound like it was the greens at fault. weak as.

Bogsnorkler said:

kii said:

Michael V said:

:)

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-11/barnaby-joyce-asked-to-explain-canberra-footpath-footage/103453420

Drunkard. Alcoholic. Piece of shit. Useless fucking idiot.

just goes to show, money can’t buy you class.

There’s so much that money cannot buy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQN7Buq80J0

Link

Peter Dutton’s 730 howler

Swollen Pickles

I had the pleasure of catching what may well be – if he can help it anyway – Peter Dutton’s last appearance on ABC’s 730. The short version, he was asked a bunch of questions, didn’t seem all that well prepared, and didn’t offer much in the way of substance. We can look forward to a lengthy left vs right culture war heading toward the next election though, because it’s pretty clear that’s all he has at the moment.

Bogsnorkler said:

Well said Mr Farquhar.

roughbarked said:

Bogsnorkler said:

Well said Mr Farquhar.

Unfortunately his followers (and electors) will see it as “loveable larrikin” behaviour.

Bubblecar said:

roughbarked said:

Bogsnorkler said:

Well said Mr Farquhar.

Unfortunately his followers (and electors) will see it as “loveable larrikin” behaviour.

“Oh that Barnaby, he’s a naughty boy”. Then they go out and vote National anyway.

Joyce reminds me somewhat of Robert Ley, the Nazi Gauleiter who headed the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945, but was entrusted with fewer and fewer responsibilities due to his habitual public drunkeness.

Bubblecar said:

Joyce reminds me somewhat of Robert Ley, the Nazi Gauleiter who headed the German Labour Front from 1933 to 1945, but was entrusted with fewer and fewer responsibilities due to his habitual public drunkeness.

Ley (right) pictured after his arrest in 1945.

roughbarked said:

Bubblecar said:

roughbarked said:

Well said Mr Farquhar.

Unfortunately his followers (and electors) will see it as “loveable larrikin” behaviour.

“Oh that Barnaby, he’s a naughty boy”. Then they go out and vote National anyway.

While all the time condemning aboriginal people who are drunk and loiter in public.

sarahs mum said:

roughbarked said:

Bubblecar said:

Unfortunately his followers (and electors) will see it as “loveable larrikin” behaviour.

“Oh that Barnaby, he’s a naughty boy”. Then they go out and vote National anyway.

While all the time condemning aboriginal people who are drunk and loiter in public.

Yes.

I don’t suppose he was drug tested…

sarahs mum said:

I don’t suppose he was drug tested…

He wasn’t driving. Thank the gods.

Barnaby Joyce says he “made a big mistake”, blaming medication for his behaviour, after being filmed swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra street late last Wednesday night.

OCDC said:

Barnaby Joyce says he “made a big mistake”, blaming medication for his behaviour, after being filmed swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra street late last Wednesday night.

blaming his lack of taking medication…

Arts said:

OCDC said:

Barnaby Joyce says he “made a big mistake”, blaming medication for his behaviour, after being filmed swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra street late last Wednesday night.

blaming his lack of taking medication…

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

Tamb said:

Arts said:

OCDC said:

Barnaby Joyce says he “made a big mistake”, blaming medication for his behaviour, after being filmed swearing into his phone while lying on his back on a Canberra street late last Wednesday night.

blaming his lack of taking medication…

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

I suggest that he needs to take more medication that he is currently on

Arts said:

Tamb said:

Arts said:

blaming his lack of taking medication…

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

I suggest that he needs to take more medication that he is currently on

than*

Arts said:

Tamb said:

Arts said:

blaming his lack of taking medication…

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

I suggest that he needs to take more medication that he is currently on

Or drink less. Or both.

Tamb said:

Arts said:

Tamb said:

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

I suggest that he needs to take more medication that he is currently on

Or drink less. Or both.

I suggest that he needs more of both.

He’s vastly more entertaining when he’s right off his face on drugs and booze.

How about we have one Drunken Parliament, every sitting season?

Every MP and Senator is breath-tested, and not allowed to enter unless they blow at least 0.10 blood alcohol.

Drinks will be served on request as they sit in the House or Senate.

Arts said:

Arts said:

Tamb said:

He said that his medication + alcohol caused his collapse.

I suggest that he needs to take more medication that he is currently on

than*

or
see a different doctor.

captain_spalding said:

How about we have one Drunken Parliament, every sitting season?

Every MP and Senator is breath-tested, and not allowed to enter unless they blow at least 0.10 blood alcohol.

Drinks will be served on request as they sit in the House or Senate.

The fifth century BCE historian Herodotus claimed not only that the Persians were very fond of wine, but that they routinely made important decisions while drunk on it. According to Herodotus, the day after such a drunken deliberation, the Persians would reconsider their decision and if they still approved, adopt it

Arts said:

captain_spalding said:

How about we have one Drunken Parliament, every sitting season?

Every MP and Senator is breath-tested, and not allowed to enter unless they blow at least 0.10 blood alcohol.

Drinks will be served on request as they sit in the House or Senate.

The fifth century BCE historian Herodotus claimed not only that the Persians were very fond of wine, but that they routinely made important decisions while drunk on it. According to Herodotus, the day after such a drunken deliberation, the Persians would reconsider their decision and if they still approved, adopt it

:)

12 February 2024
Labor’s Bryan Green is angry at sitting member Jane Howlett’s signs up and down the highway
Sue Bailey

Labor candidate for Prosser in the Legislative Council Bryan Green is crying foul over sitting member Jane Howlett’s advertising signs saying they are illegal – with a council already asking for one to be removed.
The Southern Midlands Council has written to the Liberal Party and landowner saying one sign needs development approval and that trailer signs must be moved every day.

The council said it did not “want a proliferation of signs of this nature as they detract from the visual amenity of the area”.
Liberal Party director Peter Coulson said the signs in question “are registered trailers, not fixed signs”.
“We are engaging with the Southern Midlands Council as to an appropriate interpretation of the Planning Scheme,” he said.
Jane Howlett MLC’s advertising signs.

Mr Green, a former Labor leader, is seeking a ruling from the Tasmanian Electoral Commission on the signs.
He said Legislative Council elections had strict advertising rules including that an election sign must not encroach on any road or other public land, have a maximum area of 1.5 m2 and not be erected more than eight weeks before the polling date.
“Jane Howlett has been so desperate to retain her seat she has willingly flouted the provisions of the Tasmanian Planning Scheme for 12 months, erecting large electoral advertising signs across the electorate,” Mr Green said.

“With the election for the seat of Prosser not due until May 4 and the signs being on large containers and box trailers beside main roads, they are clearly in breach of the Electoral Act, giving her an unfair advantage over all other candidates.
“You do not see similar signs for other MLCs. Why not? Because they are illegal.

“What about all the business owners in Tasmania, I’m sure they would like to back 40ft containers up to the fence advertising themselves – McDonalds, KFC you name it, there could be hundreds up and down the highway.
“The signs would likely cost a years’ wages.”

Mr Green said the five councils in Prosser had indicated that no planning approval was sought for the banners.
“We also understand that electoral advertising in Prosser is capped at $19,500 – and we are seeking answers on whether the cost of these banners complies with that,” he said.

“The electoral laws are in place for a good reason and we need a ruling on this issue to uphold the integrity of our electoral system.”
Mr Coulson said instead of complaining Mr Green should get on with “some campaigning of his own”.

susan.bailey@news.com.au
https://www.themercury.com.au/…/9022a20da4064d1a6b3dbf6…

Linda Reynolds won’t contest the next election

She’s been pretty quiet lately.

kii said:

Agree.

kii said:

Yeah, honestly fuck that guy. And Dutton for saying people should have helped him. I can’t stand hypocrites. He’s a pontificating sin-soaked heartless leech.

Michael V said:

kii said:

Agree.

Could the practice of making drunken phone calls with profanities in public places become known as ‘Joyceing’? Or ‘beetrooting’?

As in, ‘…and there was a bloke on the seat at the bus stop, having a big ol’ Joyce into his phone, swearing the air blue’.

captain_spalding said:

Michael V said:

kii said:

Agree.

Could the practice of making drunken phone calls with profanities in public places become known as ‘Joyceing’? Or ‘beetrooting’?

As in, ‘…and there was a bloke on the seat at the bus stop, having a big ol’ Joyce into his phone, swearing the air blue’.

:)

kii said:

yeah. thats what I said.

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

yeah. thats what I said.

Yes, I saw your posts. Joyce is a despicable man.

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

yeah. thats what I said.

Yes, I saw your posts. Joyce is a despicable man.

also, it occurred to me last night after fucking up his first marriage and embarrassing his wife and daughters by running off with a pregnant staffer, she is now at home with the kids learning what it he is all about.

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

yeah. thats what I said.

Yes, I saw your posts. Joyce is a despicable man.

also, it occurred to me last night after fucking up his first marriage and embarrassing his wife and daughters by running off with a pregnant staffer, she is now at home with the kids learning what it he is all about.

I reckon she knows.

Alysha Rose
Lyshrose ‘Trust us to implement the Tasmania_COI recommendations’ they will say.

I don’t. I would be a fool, on evidence, to trust those words. Let alone stomach them, again.

Perhaps, the only appropriate words now are ‘We acknowledge we are not able to responsibly or safely govern’.

Because no competent or remotely ethical person, or government could say anything else at this point.

The
RockliffTeam enabled & covered up child sexual abuse. They then spent $30 million+ dollars of tax payers funds to pretend to care & launch a Tasmania_COI
.

Despite the staff at the COI having the UTMOST dignity & skill, the
@RockliffTeam couldn’t let the truth be known – & failed to legislatively empower this work to make misconduct findings final & public.

My job, was to implement reform for kids & this gov ensured I couldn’t even report risk of rape by staff at AYDC without me being assaulted & seeing records being destroyed, perpetrators protected. You destroyed my families entire lives by relentless efforts to break me as a key witness. Rapists, kept working for 11 months as I left the site to stay safe for my own children. I never stopped reporting.

They then used every resource at the OSGs disposal to legally cripple & harm me. I’ve never acted improperly at work nor have I been accused of it. But you did it anyway.

Still, I offered cautious trust when a
@Tasmania_COI was announced. Because no one, could be that evil right?

It turns out, they can. Not the
@Tasmania_COI team, but a pedophile protection racket can and is. It’s unusual that they are also a State Government.

That is a reality I do not wish to accept, but the evidence is clear & indisputable.

All 8 volumes of it.

I will be boycotting these hearings as someone who gave evidence FULL TIME to this process for its entire duration. My capacity for being gaslit has been surpassed.

If this government cared even a little about child sexual abuse in Tasmanian Gov Institutions – extra scrutiny about this Commission wouldn’t be required. The Commission WAS the scrutiny. Or so we were told.

If
RockliffTeam did care, & a series of catastrophic failures had occurred WITHIN the Tasmanian Government to hamper the Tasmania_COI work as the Commissioners detail in their final report, they have had the ability to explain how and why this happened to us – since August 31st.

Most importantly – it could have been prevented too. Couldn’t it? There was choice. There are a number of people involved that know the truth of what has occurred.

If there was any intention of holding people to account & addressing a culture of cover up, it would have been clear by urgent, heartfelt & deeply remorseful truth telling.

They don’t deserve my trust. I offered it, along with every bit of good will, as did many colleagues and friends – it has been betrayed in the most inconceivable ways.

Got your back kiddos, always ❤️ but I have more important work to do than listen to more bullshit when you’re at current risk.

My written evidence, whilst not public due to widespread criminal conduct, is secure, entirely corroborated & factual. It ought to be de-identified & released by
@RockliffTeam
.

It is my document, but it could be released by way of consensual & appropriate process to ensure accountability & justice can occur for the children it is about.

I have faith that the politicians with integrity in #tasmania , will do everything they can to ensure accountability occurs & will also understand entirely why no witness should be expected to listen to another word from this government until then.

I’m so sorry kiddos, that this is not over & that you STILL aren’t safe. We, like you, were betrayed. Hang in there. 🙏😢 #boycottingbullshit

https://twitter.com/Lyshrose/status/1728751437222646102

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/rockliff-government-vies-for-corruption-crown,18322

Doxxing and Bomb Threat – The West Report

Westy with the latest on the Botany bomb threat where a man was doxxed and threatened with a bomb for flying the Palestinian flag. MSM were offered this story but declined.

Media seemed to ignore it and now the police have seemed to have ignored it as well

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KY6cxrTeZQ

I am quietly confident that this election will result in a Labor-led minority government.

dv said:

I am quietly confident that this election will result in a Labor-led minority government.

the divisionism is yet to play.

It could come down to football.

The worst is I can’t see Abetz not getting in and I can’t see Abetz not leading the party at some stage soonish. Even if he is a dutton he wil still be constantly in the news.

sarahs mum said:

dv said:

I am quietly confident that this election will result in a Labor-led minority government.

the divisionism is yet to play.

It could come down to football.

The worst is I can’t see Abetz not getting in and I can’t see Abetz not leading the party at some stage soonish. Even if he is a dutton he wil still be constantly in the news.

Luckily I pay very little attention to the news.

Many MPs — Labor MPs included — believe it’s grubby to target Joyce and as one put it to me “he does enough damage to himself”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/barnaby-joyce-drunk-video-who-gets-forgiven-politicians-canberra/103459208

Na. Set the dogs on him.

one mistake? Two mistakes? or he’s a mistake?

sarahs mum said:

Many MPs — Labor MPs included — believe it’s grubby to target Joyce and as one put it to me “he does enough damage to himself”.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-13/barnaby-joyce-drunk-video-who-gets-forgiven-politicians-canberra/103459208

Na. Set the dogs on him.

one mistake? Two mistakes? or he’s a mistake?

FF gawd’s sake..
Is this Australia where we keep forgiving people we wouldn’t invire into our homes, to run the country?

Public Service Association of NSW
6 February at 19:25 ·
Most toll roads in Australia are owned by a publicly listed company called Transurban. While most of this company’s business is operated in Australia, it also operates toll roads in North America and Canada.
Transurban does enough business to develop a staggering market capital of $42.619 billion, and posted a huge profit of $92 million in 2022-2023. And forecasts show this profit will only grow.
Transurban paid no tax in between 2016 and 2022. Not one dollar.

sarahs mum said:

Public Service Association of NSW
6 February at 19:25 ·
Most toll roads in Australia are owned by a publicly listed company called Transurban. While most of this company’s business is operated in Australia, it also operates toll roads in North America and Canada.
Transurban does enough business to develop a staggering market capital of $42.619 billion, and posted a huge profit of $92 million in 2022-2023. And forecasts show this profit will only grow.
Transurban paid no tax in between 2016 and 2022. Not one dollar.

One good thing about WA is the lack of toll roads

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Public Service Association of NSW
6 February at 19:25 ·
Most toll roads in Australia are owned by a publicly listed company called Transurban. While most of this company’s business is operated in Australia, it also operates toll roads in North America and Canada.
Transurban does enough business to develop a staggering market capital of $42.619 billion, and posted a huge profit of $92 million in 2022-2023. And forecasts show this profit will only grow.
Transurban paid no tax in between 2016 and 2022. Not one dollar.

One good thing about WA is the lack of toll roads

Ditto Tas.

I sort of didn’t mind paying the bridge toll when i was in Sydney. but toll roads everywhere is a drag. it adds up if you’re a commuter.

the put eric abetz last facebook group seems to have disappeared.

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Public Service Association of NSW
6 February at 19:25 ·
Most toll roads in Australia are owned by a publicly listed company called Transurban. While most of this company’s business is operated in Australia, it also operates toll roads in North America and Canada.
Transurban does enough business to develop a staggering market capital of $42.619 billion, and posted a huge profit of $92 million in 2022-2023. And forecasts show this profit will only grow.
Transurban paid no tax in between 2016 and 2022. Not one dollar.

One good thing about WA is the lack of toll roads

Toll roads are a good thing.

It would be better if the revenue went to the government and was used to subsidise public transport, but what is wrong with people having to pay to use expensive non-essential infrastructure?

The Rev Dodgson said:

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Public Service Association of NSW
6 February at 19:25 ·
Most toll roads in Australia are owned by a publicly listed company called Transurban. While most of this company’s business is operated in Australia, it also operates toll roads in North America and Canada.
Transurban does enough business to develop a staggering market capital of $42.619 billion, and posted a huge profit of $92 million in 2022-2023. And forecasts show this profit will only grow.
Transurban paid no tax in between 2016 and 2022. Not one dollar.

One good thing about WA is the lack of toll roads

Toll roads are a good thing.

It would be better if the revenue went to the government and was used to subsidise public transport, but what is wrong with people having to pay to use expensive non-essential infrastructure?

Also:

I hate the big trans-national profit makers as much as anybody, but:

If a company makes its business by building stuff that costs a fortune then drawing revenue from it, it’s not surprising they can go a number of years without paying tax.

Also a profit of $92 million on a market cap of $42,000 million is tiny.

Services Australia employees publicly shamed for toilet breaks over 5 minutes, say staff.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/staff-publicly-shamed-for-toilet-breaks-over-minutes/103465210

Michael V said:

Services Australia employees publicly shamed for toilet breaks over 5 minutes, say staff.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/staff-publicly-shamed-for-toilet-breaks-over-minutes/103465210

One word: constipation. What are they supposed to do, return to the office with stools half in, half out?

Bubblecar said:

Michael V said:

Services Australia employees publicly shamed for toilet breaks over 5 minutes, say staff.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/staff-publicly-shamed-for-toilet-breaks-over-minutes/103465210

One word: constipation. What are they supposed to do, return to the office with stools half in, half out?

Constipation, indeed.

When i worked for Centrelink, it constantly gave me the shits.

Michael V said:

Services Australia employees publicly shamed for toilet breaks over 5 minutes, say staff.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/staff-publicly-shamed-for-toilet-breaks-over-minutes/103465210

That’s not OTT. Everyone knows that working for Services Australia gives you the shits.

Regardless of his grog problem, Joyce is useless for our veterans

We’re facing the most important moment for Australia’s veterans in a generation, but the shadow minister is more interested in campaigning against renewables.

Barnaby Joyce’s tendency to self-destructive behaviour has rarely elicited anything other than a wry smile and blokey indulgence from his colleagues in the Nationals — those MPs who now, hilariously, are complaining that people filmed a drunken Joyce lying on a Canberra footpath rather than helping him. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept, perhaps — and Nationals MPs have been walking past Joyce’s antics for two decades. Indeed, they chose him to lead them despite the problems with alcohol, the unresolved accusations of sexual harassment (accusations he denies), and the very public marriage breakdown.

The Canberra footpath incident has now placed at least a pro forma question over Joyce’s continued position on the Dutton frontbench. What, exactly, is Joyce’s position on the frontbench? He’s shadow veterans’ affairs minister — something few if any people outside Canberra would be aware of.

A key reason for that is that, as a shadow minister, Joyce is apparently uninterested in his work.

Since the election more than 18 months ago, Joyce has asked just three questions in Parliament of Labor’s Veterans’ Affairs Minister Matt Keogh. He’s asked just 34 questions on notice — a key mechanism for obtaining information from the government for the opposition.

And while media releases aren’t a particularly accurate guide to the quality of a frontbencher, Joyce has issued just 23 media releases on veterans’ issues in his entire time as shadow minister — or around one a month. His own website includes far more releases on his own electorate — fair enough — but also Joyce opining on regional Australia (portfolio responsibility: Bridget McKenzie), the road toll (also McKenzie) multiple media releases on the Voice referendum (portfolio responsibility: Jacinta Nampijinpa Price), and net zero (now deleted — portfolio responsibility: Ted O’Brien).

In fact, carbon emissions, and protecting the industries that produce them, is Joyce’s main focus in opposition: attending rallies to attack renewables, going on Sky to attack renewables, backing a motion to remove net zero from his party’s platform, going on Sky to attack renewables again, telling Parliament in September the Coalition’s commitment to net zero by 2050 had an “untenable” cost, attacking net zero on Sky in July, trying to undermine leader David Littleproud over net zero, going on Sky News again to attack renewables, going on Sky yet again to tell Andrew Bolt how terrible net zero is, doing videos about the “mad fantasy” of renewables.

Renewable energy, and fighting it, gets Joyce far more enthused and energised than his day job of speaking up for veterans.

And a distracted shadow minister couldn’t come at a worse time for Australia’s veterans. The defence and veteran suicide royal commission is slowly wending its way to a conclusion later this year. In September last year, royal commissioner Nick Kaldas gave a remarkable speech at the National Press Club in which he savaged the Department of Defence. “We’ve heard contemporary lived experience accounts of abuse, assault, bastardisation, bullying, harassment, discrimination, misogyny — and physical and sexual violence within the ADF,” Kaldas said. He feared that “the defence hierarchy is simply waiting for this inquiry to end so that it can go back to business as usual.”

Kaldas said his commission has found no evidence the department “is prioritising the mental health and wellbeing of its people in a sustainable way, nor does it seem to be responding adequately to the pressing issue of suicide and suicidality in its ranks with any sense of urgency”. And the Department of Veterans’ Affairs had an “adversarial culture” that was re-traumatising veterans.

It’s hard to think of a more important time in veterans’ affairs in a generation, yet Joyce is off literally tilting at windmills in his crazed determination to prop up fossil fuels. Imagine if he’d devoted half of his Sky interviews to speaking up for veterans.

Regardless of his alcohol intake, or the other behaviours readily dismissed as “Barnaby being Barnaby”, Australia’s veterans are owed the Coalition taking its obligations to them seriously. And that would start with replacing Joyce.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/02/13/barnaby-joyce-veterans-useless/

Tasmanian state election called, as Australia’s only Liberal premier sets March 23 date for poll

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/tasmania-jeremy-rockliff-calls-early-election/103420790

——

Tasmanian Greens

BREAKING: After weeks of ‘will he or won’t he”, Premier Rockliff has just left Government House. Tasmanians will go to the polls on March 23. This is the second term in a row we’ve seen a Liberal premier call an early election. So much for “stable majority government”

In short: Federal MPs have voted in favour of a motion calling for the return of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Australia.

The US government is seeking Assange’s extradition from the UK on espionage charges that could see him spend the rest of his life in jail.

What’s next? The UK High Court of Justice will hold a hearing into whether Assange can appeal his extradition to the US next week.

The prime minister and other federal MPs have voted in favour of a motion urging the United States and the United Kingdom to end the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow his return to Australia.

The 52-year-old Assange is wanted in the US for espionage, and faces 18 charges related to the publication of a range of highly classified information relating to the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Next week, the High Court of Justice in the UK will hold its hearing into whether Mr Assange can appeal his extradition to the US.

Mr Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 and potentially faces up to 175 years in prison.

Julian Assange looks to the camera as he is photographed from behind glass with graffiti etched into it. His grey hair is back.
Assange is facing extradition to the US, where he is wanted for espionage.(Reuters: Simon Dawson)
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie successfully moved the motion with 86 votes in favour and 42 against, with support from Labor, independent and Greens MPs.

Cross-party delegation in US to push for Assange’s freedom
An unlikely coalition of Australian parliamentarians converged on Washington last year to lobby the US government to drop the legal pursuit of Julian Assange.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition voted against the motion, while Liberal MP Bridget Archer crossed the floor to vote in favour.

The prime minister has previously labelled the punishment of Assange as disproportionate and called for the matter to come to a “conclusion”, but this latest vote indicates his strongest position yet.

In October, Mr Albanese said he discussed the case of Assange with US president Joe Biden – but did not demand Mr Biden intervene in the justice process.

“It has been too long and, in my view, as I’ve said before, I see nothing is served from the further incarceration of Mr Assange,” Mr Albanese said in May last year.

On Tuesday, the Attorney-General’s Department told Senate estimates that Australia’s attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, raised the case with his US counterpart last week.

I asked about Julian Assange’s case in Estimates again last night. There are real concerns that if Julian loses next week he will be immediately extradited. We were told for the first time that Attorney General Mark Dreyfus raised Julian’s case with his US counterpart last week. pic.twitter.com/mXtIiLoBkb

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) February 14, 2024

Mr Wilkie — who will fly to London for the second hearing next week — told the parliament that “we have just about run out of time to save Julian Assange”.

“There are people who loathe the man, there are people who worship the man … but just about everyone agrees that this has gone on too long, but it must be brought to an end,” Mr Wilkie said.

“Regardless of what you think of Mr Assange, justice is not being done in this case.

“If Mr Assange is extradited to the US, it would be a direct attack on media freedom, as it would set a frightening precedent for all journalists that they, too, are at risk of being locked up just for doing their job.”

Independent Andrew Wilkie speaking on whistleblower protection

Mr Wilkie will fly to London for the High Court hearing next week.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
After the vote was successful, Mr Wilkie said it marked an unprecedented show of political support for Assange by the parliament.

“The vote today is the biggest demonstration yet that Mr Assange’s incarceration is unjust, and once again demonstrates the widespread support for him in the halls of Parliament House. The US must recognise the weight of Australia’s political support and abandon the extradition proceedings.”

Last month, Assange’s lawyer warned he was mentally unwell and would be at risk of suicide if his final appeal was rejected.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/house-representatives-julian-assange-extradition-us-wikileaks/103468048

——

good on bridget.

sarahs mum said:

In short: Federal MPs have voted in favour of a motion calling for the return of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Australia.

The US government is seeking Assange’s extradition from the UK on espionage charges that could see him spend the rest of his life in jail.

What’s next? The UK High Court of Justice will hold a hearing into whether Assange can appeal his extradition to the US next week.

The prime minister and other federal MPs have voted in favour of a motion urging the United States and the United Kingdom to end the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and allow his return to Australia.

The 52-year-old Assange is wanted in the US for espionage, and faces 18 charges related to the publication of a range of highly classified information relating to the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Next week, the High Court of Justice in the UK will hold its hearing into whether Mr Assange can appeal his extradition to the US.

Mr Assange has been held in London’s high-security Belmarsh prison since 2019 and potentially faces up to 175 years in prison.

Julian Assange looks to the camera as he is photographed from behind glass with graffiti etched into it. His grey hair is back.
Assange is facing extradition to the US, where he is wanted for espionage.(Reuters: Simon Dawson)
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie successfully moved the motion with 86 votes in favour and 42 against, with support from Labor, independent and Greens MPs.

Cross-party delegation in US to push for Assange’s freedom
An unlikely coalition of Australian parliamentarians converged on Washington last year to lobby the US government to drop the legal pursuit of Julian Assange.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton and the Coalition voted against the motion, while Liberal MP Bridget Archer crossed the floor to vote in favour.

The prime minister has previously labelled the punishment of Assange as disproportionate and called for the matter to come to a “conclusion”, but this latest vote indicates his strongest position yet.

In October, Mr Albanese said he discussed the case of Assange with US president Joe Biden – but did not demand Mr Biden intervene in the justice process.

“It has been too long and, in my view, as I’ve said before, I see nothing is served from the further incarceration of Mr Assange,” Mr Albanese said in May last year.

On Tuesday, the Attorney-General’s Department told Senate estimates that Australia’s attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, raised the case with his US counterpart last week.

I asked about Julian Assange’s case in Estimates again last night. There are real concerns that if Julian loses next week he will be immediately extradited. We were told for the first time that Attorney General Mark Dreyfus raised Julian’s case with his US counterpart last week. pic.twitter.com/mXtIiLoBkb

— David Shoebridge (@DavidShoebridge) February 14, 2024

Mr Wilkie — who will fly to London for the second hearing next week — told the parliament that “we have just about run out of time to save Julian Assange”.

“There are people who loathe the man, there are people who worship the man … but just about everyone agrees that this has gone on too long, but it must be brought to an end,” Mr Wilkie said.

“Regardless of what you think of Mr Assange, justice is not being done in this case.

“If Mr Assange is extradited to the US, it would be a direct attack on media freedom, as it would set a frightening precedent for all journalists that they, too, are at risk of being locked up just for doing their job.”

Independent Andrew Wilkie speaking on whistleblower protection

Mr Wilkie will fly to London for the High Court hearing next week.(ABC News: Nick Haggarty)
After the vote was successful, Mr Wilkie said it marked an unprecedented show of political support for Assange by the parliament.

“The vote today is the biggest demonstration yet that Mr Assange’s incarceration is unjust, and once again demonstrates the widespread support for him in the halls of Parliament House. The US must recognise the weight of Australia’s political support and abandon the extradition proceedings.”

Last month, Assange’s lawyer warned he was mentally unwell and would be at risk of suicide if his final appeal was rejected.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/house-representatives-julian-assange-extradition-us-wikileaks/103468048

——

good on bridget.

Surprising

captain_spalding said:

Bubblecar said:

Michael V said:

Services Australia employees publicly shamed for toilet breaks over 5 minutes, say staff.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-14/staff-publicly-shamed-for-toilet-breaks-over-minutes/103465210

One word: constipation. What are they supposed to do, return to the office with stools half in, half out?

Constipation, indeed.

When i worked for Centrelink, it constantly gave me the shits.

Don’t have to work for them to get the shits with them.

roughbarked said:

captain_spalding said:

Bubblecar said:

One word: constipation. What are they supposed to do, return to the office with stools half in, half out?

Constipation, indeed.

When i worked for Centrelink, it constantly gave me the shits.

Don’t have to work for them to get the shits with them.

Way back when, Disability Support Pensions were always a hassle, because EVERY application had to be sent to a capital city for evaluation by a medical assessment panel to determine the level of disability.

But , Age Pensions were usually pretty straightforward, provided that applicants provided the requested information and necessary documentation. For most people, that wasn’t a big problem. There was plenty of times when people would sit down with me, we’d go through the paperwork together, i’d ask a few questions, they’d go away, i’d enter the necessary data, and presto! pension granted same day.

Some people had complicated income and assets situations that took a while to sort through, but not that long. And there were a few people who tried to be smart bunnies: ‘oh, that doesn’t count as an asset because…’, and ‘i used to have that, but i signed it over to so-and-so, six months ago, what a coincidence’, and ‘i know, that makes a lot of money, but i don’t get any assessable income from it because, look, my accountant has provided an explanation here…’.

Actually, not all DSP applications had to go to medical assessment panel.

There was some conditions known as ‘manifest conditions’. Once there was a creditable diagnosis of one of those conditions, it was instant grant of pension.

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

Gives me a 404.

OCDC said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

Gives me a 404.

+1

Bubblecar said:

OCDC said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

Gives me a 404.

+1

it reloaded for me with same address.

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I opened Google and pasted the link there and it worked. But pasting it directly in address / search bar didn’t. Anyway.

OCDC said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

Gives me a 404.

maube.

Link

Awful website though.

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

kii said:

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

Yep. nobody has posted which medication this is.

kii said:

dv said:

sarahs mum said:

Secondly, as Jenna points out, ‘like the rest of us, Barnaby Joyce doesn’t read the side effects pamphlet ‘.

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/why-barnabys-drunken-planter-tumble—and-other-mad-acts—matter,18330

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

Being a generous soul I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard

dv said:

kii said:

dv said:

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

Being a generous soul I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

dv said:

kii said:

dv said:

When you are prescribed drugs, you’re given a little chat by the GP about any contraindications, particularly in regard to alcohol. I suppose Barnaby can’t help being illiterate but he should still be able to listen.

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

Being a generous soul I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard

too many benefits.

kii said:

dv said:

kii said:

I think the medication angle is utter bullshit. He’s a drunken liar. I’d love to see CCTV footage of him prior to the incident.

Being a generous soul I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

dv said:

Being a generous soul I wanted to at least give him the benefit of the doubt in that regard

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

there is a lot that crushed along the way. and there are some good ones. we all know some good ones.

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

You’re not the only one.

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

kii said:

Joyce does not deserve your generous nature. He is like so many entitled white men. Lying is his natural cesspit approach. I wouldn’t trust him with a lump of dog shit.

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Watch it you’ll get the Rev all riled up…

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

Witty Rejoinder said:

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

exactly.

Witty Rejoinder said:

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

I don’t think you’ve thought this through.

I said i wasn’t there when they were handing out the brains.

“After the ATO has hidden a claimed debt from me for 19 years it gave me two weeks to pay an amount I am unable to verify or disprove,” the retired teacher said.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/feb/16/i-was-distressed-retired-teacher-slams-decades-old-ato-robotax-debt-demand

——

When will this shit end?

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

sarahs mum said:

not putting down white men. I’m putting down the sleaze from Tamworth.

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

kii said:

captain_spalding said:

kii said:

I’ll gladly put down white men. The majority of them have nfi about the reality of life. They are born with instant privilege.

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

wookiemeister said:

kii said:

captain_spalding said:

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

Is your skin colour an “ability”? Is your gender an “ability”?

wookiemeister said:

kii said:

captain_spalding said:

Blimey, i was absent when they were handing out the brains, and when they were handing out the good looks.

Now, it seems that i wasn’t there when they were issuing the privilege, as well.

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

Personally, I would hesitate to declare that i was born with ‘ability’, either.

I think i could produce a parade of witnesses who would confirm that i was not. :)

kii said:

wookiemeister said:

kii said:

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

Is your skin colour an “ability”? Is your gender an “ability”?

some white males have a wrong idea about privilege. they compare their perceived lack of privilege with other white males who are usually more successful or powerful and think they aren’t privileged.

One of you artistic people should be able to turn this into a Toulouse Lautrec poster.

dv said:

One of you artistic people should be able to turn this into a Toulouse Lautrec poster.

:)

dv said:

One of you artistic people should be able to turn this into a Toulouse Lautrec poster.

Imagine the movie.

kii said:

wookiemeister said:

kii said:

Are you white?
Are you male?
You are born with privilege.

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

Is your skin colour an “ability”? Is your gender an “ability”?

Ask any 100m sprinter that question.

Gender and race DO engender ability

Its why female sports is up in arms when men play against them , they lose to the men

ONE all male netball team entered the Australian netball championships – they win. The complaints of the women? The men were too fast, too powerful, too agile.

I don’t defy gravity – you shouldn’t either

wookiemeister said:

kii said:

wookiemeister said:

See captain

This is the mass psychosis afflicting civilisation.

Men are born with ability , not “privilege”.

Is your skin colour an “ability”? Is your gender an “ability”?

Ask any 100m sprinter that question.

Gender and race DO engender ability

Its why female sports is up in arms when men play against them , they lose to the men

ONE all male netball team entered the Australian netball championships – they win. The complaints of the women? The men were too fast, too powerful, too agile.

I don’t defy gravity – you shouldn’t either

As putin put it

“The empire of lies”

Scam of the Week
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZBcaVnwt_E

It’s still dan andrew’s fault.

Suspected asylum seekers taken to Nauru as political storm over boat arrivals intensifies

Suspected? I suppose it can be alleged that we heard him tell us in Afghani, where he came from?

roughbarked said:

Suspected asylum seekers taken to Nauru as political storm over boat arrivals intensifies

Suspected? I suppose it can be alleged that we heard him tell us in Afghani, where he came from?

They know where they are from. The article tells you.

Bogsnorkler said:

roughbarked said:

Suspected asylum seekers taken to Nauru as political storm over boat arrivals intensifies

Suspected? I suppose it can be alleged that we heard him tell us in Afghani, where he came from?

They know where they are from. The article tells you.

Ja.

Interesting article:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-18/can-these-economists-turn-things-around-for-younger-australians/103480052

Michael V said:

Interesting article:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-18/can-these-economists-turn-things-around-for-younger-australians/103480052

Yes, I have been following this in recent days. I even watched their NPC presentation.

kii said:

Couldn’t actually a better way to envisage this moment iin their history.

roughbarked said:

kii said:

Couldn’t actually a better way to envisage this moment iin their history.

Actually nmeant to put envisage earlier in the sentence. Don’t quite know how that worked out.

Bogsnorkler said:

roughbarked said:

Suspected asylum seekers taken to Nauru as political storm over boat arrivals intensifies

Suspected? I suppose it can be alleged that we heard him tell us in Afghani, where he came from?

They know where they are from. The article tells you.

Turning up in a remote part of the Kimberley. I wonder what they thought as they came ashore. Was it what they expected to find? I suspect they could easily have died of heat and lack of provisions in that country.

dv said:

Fair.

dv said:

yep yep.

Liberal Party provides an early delivery on one thing — an election
David Killick
Tasmanian Premier Jeremy Rockliff press conference at The Tasman Hobart after calling an election for March 23rd.
Jeremy Rockliff has danced the last steps of his oh-so reluctant tango towards the surprise everyone saw coming — the phony election campaign has ended and the real one has begun.
Unlike the new Bass Strait ferries, the Bridgewater Bridge, a bus, an ambulance or a hospital bed, it is coming earlier than expected.
As Labor beat the cost of living like a cheap gong, Mr Rockliff’s first three days of campaigning included media appearances at a $3300-a-night hotel suite, at a luxury restaurant and alongside Tasmania’s richest man — who is doing just fine, thanks for asking.
The Liberals’ major policy announcements were a cap on the taxpayer contribution to the stadium and abandoning the fire levy that only months ago was being described as the “most significant reforms in 44 years for our fire and emergency services”.
Aside from sending voters a bunch of spammy text messages under the sobriquet “JRock”, Mr Rockliff’s Liberals appear to be keeping their powder dry.
It was a slow start from the only party which knew when the election was going to be called.
Mr Rockliff announced he alone had the “2030 Tasmania Plan” or “2030 Strong Plan” or “Strong Plan”.
And it was true. Mr Rockliff alone has it. It may be in a safe somewhere. Hopefully we will all get to see it at some point.
Labor has hit the ground running with announcements and reannoucements of a cap on power prices and more childcare places under a Labor government.
There’s no sign of the traditional imploding candidates or factional infighting yet. It is only early days.
The first week of the campaign has also been a time for old campaigners to dust off the corflutes bearing the retouched decade-old photos.
Former Attorney-General Elise Archer — who would have been a strong contender in Clark — announced her intention to run, only to withdraw the following day.
Jacqui Petrusma accidentally revealed she was running via an ad in a newspaper that belled the cat well before she was due to announce she was now ready to spend less time with her family.
And Jane Howlett surprised everyone by revealing she wasn’t campaigning for the upper house like everyone thought all along, but the lower house.
And evergreen campaigner Tony Mulder too has stuck his hand up for another go on democracy’s merry-go-round.
Three days down, five weeks until polling day. There’s just the slightest chance it may seem longer.

-mockery.

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

Should we or shouldn’t we…. fifty years later maybe we should have but it is too late now.

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

Michael V said:

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

to see what you know about avocados numbers.

Michael V said:

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

Bogsnorkler said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

to see what you know about avocados numbers.

Yeah that’s pretty funny

dv said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

So is he advocating for the legalisation of marijuana?

dv said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

M’boy is prepping for a Hass test.

Hmm.

OTOH they do make an interesting point about the incomplete separation of powers in Australia due to the blurry distinction between the legislative and executive branches.

What is a Hass test?

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

Thanks.

Michael V said:

dv said:

Michael V said:

What is a Hass test?

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

Thanks.

I take it you didn’t like my answer?

Bogsnorkler said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

Thanks.

I take it you didn’t like my answer?

I didn’t trust your answer.

Bogsnorkler said:

Michael V said:

dv said:

Humanities, Arts, Social Sciences

Thanks.

I take it you didn’t like my answer?

Maybe he doesn’t read your posts :p

Michael V said:

Bogsnorkler said:

Michael V said:

Thanks.

I take it you didn’t like my answer?

I didn’t trust your answer.

wise move.

It’s time for Australia to break out of its ‘timidity’: Keating
In a wide-ranging interview, Paul Keating draws together a critique of Australia and its place in the world from his 55 years of public life since he first entered federal parliament in 1969.

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/it-s-time-for-australia-to-break-out-of-its-timidity-keating-20240219-p5f66h

Child Protection Campaigner Jack Davenport to Run as Independent in Bass
By Tasmanian Times

Media release – Jack Davenport, 22nd Febuary 2024

Child protection campaigner enters election fray as independent candidate for Bass

Child protection campaigner Jack Davenport has announced that he will stand for election in Bass as an independent candidate, based on a platform of child protection reform, integrity and accountability, and promoting community engagement to deliver change.
An established and vocal advocate for child protection reform, and a whistleblower to the Commission of Inquiry, Jack will pledge that if elected he will use any balance of power position to deny confidence and supply to any new government that refuses to initiate the early closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre.

Comments attributable to Jack:

“Tasmania is facing a child protection crisis; children held in Ashley Children’s Prison are exposed to high risk of abuse, while systems designed to keep vulnerable children safe have deteriorated beyond recognition. The message to major parties is clear; close Ashley; close it now.

“The most vulnerable in this state should be able to rely on the protection of the government and instead are being left exposed to harm, while state institutions and agencies circle wagons around enablers of abuse in senior positions.

“The Commission of Inquiry exposed not just the scale of the abuse, but also the failure of integrity and accountability. We need a government that will work for the people, but too often we see public good set aside for its own interests.

“Eighty-one state servants have been suspended due to allegations of child sexual abuse; not one has been terminated.
“We live in a state where a senior police officer was being investigated for child sexual abuse but still received a state funeral.
“The laws have been exposed to be deficient, and allow both public servants and the government itself to escape accountability.
“No more of this.

“I have always argued that for meaningful reform to occur there needs to be a parallel process through parliament and community. Being an independent candidate strengthens my ability to fight for improved democracy in the state, and to demand transparency from all sides of politics. People are sick of the dodgy deals and hidden agreements in politics. The message for parliament and government is clear; no more secrets.

“I am calling on the people of Bass to make the change this election; vote for me to deliver an independent voice in parliament, one that will strive to deliver integrity in Tasmanian politics, and hold the Tasmanian government and state agencies accountable for their failures to protect children.”

Jack Davenport has received an endorsement from Launceston-local Tiffany Skeggs; a victim-survivor, whistleblower to the Commission of Inquiry, and National Survivors’ Day Ambassador.

Comments attributable to Tiffany Skeggs:

“I have full confidence Jack will provide a truly independent voice of integrity to Parliament ensuring the wellbeing of our state’s most vulnerable remains the highest of priorities.

“Jack’s involvement with the Commission of Inquiry and his tireless efforts to advocate for improvements to child safety at the highest levels is a testament to his good character. His clear calls for transparency and accountability further demonstrate he is not afraid to ‘rock the boat’ when required to ensure Tasmanians are provided with the truth.

“Jack has a wealth of knowledge and understanding of complex policies and procedures that only serve to improve his ability to question and genuinely critique any actions of Parliament.

“I know Jack will ensure the early closure of Ashley Youth Detention Centre is a condition of any confidence and supply he offers any government.

https://tasmaniantimes.com/…/child-protection…/

Witty Rejoinder said:

It’s time for Australia to break out of its ‘timidity’: Keating
In a wide-ranging interview, Paul Keating draws together a critique of Australia and its place in the world from his 55 years of public life since he first entered federal parliament in 1969.

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/it-s-time-for-australia-to-break-out-of-its-timidity-keating-20240219-p5f66h

Paywalled.

22 February 2024
Anti-vax Julie Sladden ‘untenable’ Liberal candidate in Tasmania | The Examiner | Launceston, TAS

AMA Tasmania is concerned about Liberal state candidate GP Julie Sladden who is against COVID-19 vaccines. Picture: Facebook
A Liberal party decision to support an anti-vaxxer GP has brought early controversy to the major party’s election campaign.

The state’s “highly concerned” peak medical group has slammed Premier Jeremy Rockliff’s decision to allow GP Julie Sladden to stand for the Liberals.

Dr Sladden, who has a “passion for transparency in healthcare”, publicly voiced her latest opposition to COVID-19 vaccines two weeks before her candidacy announcement.

AMA Tasmania vice president Annette Barratt said the GP’s views were “dangerous and misleading” and directly conflicted with government health advice on COVID vaccines.

“It is untenable for any government trying to urge Tasmanians to follow the best clinical advice and vaccinate to have one of its own undermining that message,” Dr Barratt said.

Labor’s Dean Winter has jumped onto the issue, repeating a call for Dr Sladden to be disendorsed.

“This has now become a critical question of principle and trust for Mr Rockliff and what he actually stands for,”

“He’s made a serious error of judgment, and for the sake of his credibility and his party’s, he needs to disendorse her and find another candidate, hopefully, one that’s not an anti-vaxxer, climate change denier or under investigation by the integrity commission.

Who is Julie Sladden?

Dr Sladden, a George Town native who sits on the West Tamar council as a Legana representative, was announced as a Liberal candidate two days ago.

On February 6, Dr Sladden wrote for Spectator Australia against COVID-19 vaccines.

“I argued that mandates violated someone’s ability to give their consent because there was pressure, coercion, and manipulation,” she said.

“Also, people couldn’t give fully informed consent to a product that had been around for less than a year as the risks were not yet entirely known.”

AMA Tasmania vice president Annette Barratt said the community looked to its leaders for accurate information.

“Doctors have standing in the eyes of the community when talking about health matters. With that privilege comes a responsibility to be careful about what you say and ensure your medical opinions are based on peer-reviewed evidence,” she said.
“COVID vaccines have saved lives and continue to do so.”

-examiner

sarahs mum said:

22 February 2024
Anti-vax Julie Sladden ‘untenable’ Liberal candidate in Tasmania | The Examiner | Launceston, TAS

Adrian Schrinner is about to be the nation’s most senior Liberal

captain_spalding said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

It’s time for Australia to break out of its ‘timidity’: Keating
In a wide-ranging interview, Paul Keating draws together a critique of Australia and its place in the world from his 55 years of public life since he first entered federal parliament in 1969.

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/it-s-time-for-australia-to-break-out-of-its-timidity-keating-20240219-p5f66h

Paywalled.

Sorry. The AFR wasn’t up when I read it.

Witty Rejoinder said:

captain_spalding said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

It’s time for Australia to break out of its ‘timidity’: Keating
In a wide-ranging interview, Paul Keating draws together a critique of Australia and its place in the world from his 55 years of public life since he first entered federal parliament in 1969.

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/it-s-time-for-australia-to-break-out-of-its-timidity-keating-20240219-p5f66h

Paywalled.

Sorry. The AFR wasn’t up when I read it.

S’ok, i got around it.

The text, for anyone interested:

Save

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Gift this article

Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating has used his 80th birthday to urge Australians and their political leaders to break out of a “timidity” in the nation’s intellectual structure, its economic and business aspirations, its constitutional links with Britain, its security dependence on the United States and its failure to reconcile with its original inhabitants.

“The country is so timid,” Keating tells The Australian Financial Review. “To come of age, Australia has to have a new and altogether different idea of itself.

“There is no premium on self-capacity, self-assurance, or belief in our ability to divine our own way forward,” he says.

“Our circumstance is a sad indictment of our lack of pride and wilful incapacity to do anything material to head down a new pathway.”

Former prime minister Paul Keating: “We should be killing it … This timidity sort of seeps, it’s like a perspiration in the country.” Louie Douvis

In a wide-ranging interview, Keating says union-backed industry super funds will likely start seeking board representation on major Australian companies, as the $3.6 trillion compulsory superannuation system he started between 1985 and 1992 becomes more “sophisticated”.

He says a top marginal personal income tax rate higher than 39 per cent is “confiscatory” and backed indexation of the personal income tax scales.

He suggests Joe Biden is too infirm to seek to remain US president into his mid-80s.

Indonesian president-elect Prabowo Subianto will likely take a “strategically sympathetic” view of Australia, he says.

And he reveals that he had advised Indigenous leaders against pursuing a constitutionally enshrined “Voice” to the Australian parliament.

In an exclusive interview with the Financial Review, Keating draws together a critique of Australia and its place in the world from his 55 years of public life since he first entered federal parliament in 1969.

The critique combines his sharp opposition to the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal struck with Washington and London to counter the strategic challenge of China, his support for an Australian republic and a lament over a lack of a bold economic policy reform agenda to come close to matching that of the Hawke-Keating Labor governments from 1983 to 1996.

“It’s always been timid, you know,” Keating says of Australia. “We’re always trying to handhold a strategic guarantor when we could do these things ourselves. There’s not enough confidence in who we are and what we’ve achieved, kind of everywhere ….

“We have a sophisticated services market, we have mountains of iron ore … we’ve got the fourth-biggest pool of savings in the world, we’ve killed a structural current account deficit, and we’ve got sunlight and sunshine every day of the week.

“So we should be killing it. Instead of that we’re all the time timid, the whole thing is timid and there’s no what I call successful thinking … this timidity sort of seeps, it’s like a perspiration in the country.”

Keating celebrated his 80th birthday on January 18, quietly marking the day with some of his children and grandchildren in Sydney.

Interviewed in the North Sydney boardroom of Nine Entertainment, Keating reflects on turning 80, his earliest memories growing up in Sydney’s Bankstown, leaving school at 14 for his first job, being elected to federal parliament at 25, becoming Labor treasurer at 39 in 1983, prime minister at 47 in 1991 and then finishing his political career aged 52.

“I was 40 for 30 years,” Keating says. “I always felt like I was 40. All of a sudden, you look around, and you’re not 40 any more and people who were in their 20s, you look at them, and now they’re in their 50s.”

Keating has outlived his father, Matt, who died aged 60, by 20 years. He says he was “dead lucky” not to have smoked because “everyone around me smoked” in his younger days, to have had a better diet and to have benefited from more advanced medical procedures, such as diagnostic imaging. He maintains a focus on longer life expectancy as part of the role of compulsory superannuation.

At 80, Keating says he is mentally “sharper than I’ve ever been” but admits he does not have the physical stamina for the long hours he had worked in the cabinet room in the 1980s and early ’90s. “It’s no accident people are at their peak in their 40s,” he says. “You know, certainly I was.”

Reflecting this, he says that “relative infirmity” meant the 81-year-old Biden ought to “put his cue in the rack” rather than seek re-election at the US presidential ballot in November. Rather than automatically elevating Vice President Kamala Harris, the alternative Democrat candidate could be chosen on the floor of the Democrat convention, scheduled for August.

Last year’s failed Indigenous Voice referendum was “a mistake from the start”, says the prime minister who negotiated the Native Title Act (“the hardest thing I did”) in the wake of the High Court’s 1992 Mabo ruling.

He reveals he had told Indigenous leaders of the Voice, Marcia Langton and Megan Davis, in 2016 that he opposed the constitutional route.

“A lot of clever Aboriginal people have wasted a lot of years on this issue,” he says, whereas they should have been seeking a form of treaty that had now “drifted away from them”.

Keating supported a legislated representative Indigenous body – or a “small p parliament” to advise on Indigenous issues but which, unlike the former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, would not have a budget to run.

Such a representative Indigenous body would build on the close to 50 per cent of the Australian landmass now covered by native title.

“If I was in the game today, that’s what I would be doing,” he says. “In other words, put them in charge of their affairs. We’ve given them the land, we give them the revenue, and you’re trying to administratively help them. But you’ve given them a voice to government by letting them be a representative body, and how today in the modern age could any government ignore them?”

The former Labor treasurer who, along with then prime minister Bob Hawke, did the most to open up Australia’s over-regulated and protected economy in the 1980s, wants Australia to aspire to an economic growth rate “in the threes” rather than the 2.2 per cent projected for the next four decades in the official Intergenerational Report.

The Australian economy, on average, posted annual economic growth of 3.1 per cent over the past four decades.

While seeking to keep out of current tax policy controversies, he says the top personal income tax should be no higher than 39 per cent, compared with the current 45 per cent rate (plus the 2 per cent Medicare levy).

“There’s an issue that all societies should have of how much a person’s conscientious efforts and wealth should be delivered to the state,” he says.

“Once you start getting the top rate over, in my opinion, 39 , it becomes confiscatory and when they become confiscatory you just lose all that impetus to make a dollar and do clever things.”

At Labor’s 1985 tax summit, treasurer Keating failed to secure backing for a broad-based consumption tax. But he still introduced a capital gains tax, a fringe benefits tax, dividend imputation that ended the double-taxation of company profits, a cut in the company tax from 49 per cent to 39 per cent and a cut in the top personal income tax rate from 60 per cent to 47 per cent.

Keating recalls debating his proposed top income rate cut in the cabinet room with then finance minister Peter Walsh and ministers from the Left faction.

“And Peter said, ‘I thought I joined a party that believes in a progressive rate of tax’,” Keating says. “And I said, ‘Well you did Peter, a progressive complied with rate of tax. People won’t pay the 60.’”

“We could do more on the revenue side other than personal income tax,” Keating says. Louie Douvis

Keating blames former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott and former National Party leader Barnaby Joyce for the lack of a broad-based carbon price to reduce Australia’s carbon emissions.

“A carbon price fixes a penalty on polluters and the revenue goes to the transition,” he says. “It is the obvious thing that any conscientious country should have.”

The contrast with today’s lack of tax reform ambition, from both sides of politics, was largely left unspoken. Keating insists he does not want to enter current political controversies.

Keating says that, unlike the GST consumption tax later introduced by John Howard and Peter Costello, his other big tax reforms changed behaviour in ways that promoted economic growth.

The Financial Review countered that the GST had allowed the burden of tax to be shifted away from incentive-blunting income tax.

Keating accepts that, but says it required indexation of the personal income tax scales for the incentive effect to stick and to “keep governments honest”.

“Fiscal drag is a pernicious tool,” he says.

And he favours some sort of federal resources rent tax amid the high prices being paid to iron ore exporters such as BHP, Rio Tinto and Fortescue.

“We could do more on the revenue side other than personal income tax,” Keating says. “Of course, today nobody’s going to reduce the top rate down to 39.”

But Keating says the tax debate needed to be accompanied by more of the sort of spending discipline delivered by the Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s.

“The prioritisation of discipline in government spending is not there today like there was then,” he says. “So it means everything gets trowelled on. And when it gets trowelled on, where’s the revenue?”

He says the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which the government actuary has warned could cost $125 billion a year within a decade, was “an unsustainable tearaway”. “So, the pain’s got to come somewhere,” he says.

Keating says the big challenge for Australia’s $3.6 trillion and growing compulsory superannuation system is to transition from the accumulation phase to the retirement phase while helping to finance Australia’s low-carbon transition away from a fossil-fuel-based economy.

From July 2025, the compulsory superannuation guarantee levy to be paid by employers is scheduled to rise from 11 per cent of wages to 12 per cent.

“We have the savings and we have the sunlight,” he says about super and the low-carbon transition.

Asked about the conflict between “nation building” tasks and the requirement for super fund trustees to maximise returns to superannuation investors, Keating says he agrees with the funds that “in the end a fund must operate in the best interest of individual members”.

“So if national projects can return, say, inflation plus 3 per cent, OK, but if they have inflation only or sub inflation, they just don’t qualify,” he says.

The Financial Review pressed Keating on the political economy of this, given the combination of a Labor government and union-influenced super funds.

Keating points to the creation of the new Super Members Council of Australia dominated by eight big industry super funds, chaired by former Labor health minister and attorney-general Nicola Roxon, that would negotiate with government to avoid the conflict.

Asked about the growing impact of industry funds on Australian listed companies, Keating says: “The likelihood is that big funds will take positions of substance inside 10 or 12 companies, of which in some cases they might have board representation.”

As treasurer running the Foreign Investment Review Board, Keating says he had regarded effective “control” as being reached with ownership of about 23 per cent of a company’s equity.

He thought the industry funds would stop short of this.

“But they’ll probably go for double-digit or high single ,” he says. “And on the bigger ones, I’ll go for a board position.”

Keating says he agrees with AustralianSuper chief executive Paul Schroder, as reported in the Financial Review, that the system should provide for one “account for life” that would include super income and age pension income.

Ayear ago, Keating sensationally lashed Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Defence Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong over the government’s commitment to the Morrison government’s multi-decade $368 billion AUKUS nuclear submarine deal.

He accused the Albanese government of conspiring with the US to contain China, which he said was not a threat to Australia and which in any case could be deterred through non-nuclear and less expensive defence measures.

“The prevailing nostrum is we remain tucked up under the British monarchy,” Keating says. “And under that structure, for assurance, we further insist on holding the hand of a strategic guarantor. It used to be Britain and its navy, now it’s the Americans.

“Devoid of confidence in making our own way in the region with all of its opportunity, the overriding strategic instinct remains fear of abandonment – being left to fend for ourselves in a potentially hostile setting.”

He points to Fear of Abandonment, the 2021 book by his former foreign affairs adviser Allan Gyngell, who died last year.

Keating says the public consciousness he inherited as treasurer just over 40 years ago was one of a defensive “fortress Australia”.

“It was not only not open, but not to open, not to go out,” he says.

The economy was ring-fenced with import tariffs. The exchange rate was set administratively. A sclerotic financial system did not work. Labour market prices and conditions were centrally set. The balance of payments was in a structural deficit of 4½ per cent of GDP.

And overlaying all that was the strategic timidity.

“Instead of saying, ‘God, are we lucky, we’ve got a continent of our own, a border with no one, we sit at the foot of the fastest-growing part of the world, all we have to do is want to be in it’ … we say ‘no, no, no, we’re going to have friends in the Atlantic, we’re going to hold hands with a strategic guarantor’.

“It was the British Navy. And now it’s the Americans, where in fact we could defend Australia well and easily in my opinion too …

“So what I wanted to do was to, was to say, to the, to the neighbourhood, ‘Look, we’re not like South Africa, we actually turned over a new leaf. We’re coming to terms with the indigenes. We’ve said thanks and goodbye to Britain and the monarchy …’

“Yes, of course, we keep a traditional relationship with the United States, but not one where they dominate us, which they do now. And ditto for China. At 26 million we are big enough, strong enough.”

“What I wanted to do was to turn the continent towards Asia, where we live.” Louie Douvis

Keating suggests that newly elected Indonesian president, the 72-year-old former military commando and defence minister Prabowo Subianto, has a strategically sympathetic view of Australia that stemmed from the 1995 bilateral security treaty between the two countries, then led by president Suharto and himself.

This treaty, superseded by the 2006 Lombok treaty, meant that the Indonesians regarded Australia as a “friendly southern flank”. It meant that the Indonesian archipelago that stretched across Australia’s northern flank was no longer a source of strategic instability for Australia.

And training of Indonesian officers in Australian military colleges had helped foster a culture of respect to civilian authority.

Arguing against the AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine policy adopted by the Albanese government from the previous Coalition government, Keating says he would have built another six of the Collins-class submarines on top of the six built in Australia in the 1980s and ’90s.

“So we would have had a permanent submarine fleet, defending the Australian coast not sitting off the Chinese coast or any other coast,” he says.

Keating acknowledges Australian business and entrepreneurial success, citing BHP, Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue, software company Atlassian and graphic design outfit Canva as examples.

But he complains about a lack of Australian investment in Indonesia, with its population of 260 million people. The Financial Review replied that Indonesia was a risky, inward-looking and crony-based economy.

Keating counters that he had unsuccessfully pressed Telstra to cheaply buy Suharto-mandated assets during the East Asian financial crisis of 1997 and 1998. The world’s biggest noodle maker similarly was on the market.

“What I wanted to do was to turn the continent towards Asia, where we live,” he says, “and fit us up psychologically for that.”

Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating has used his 80th birthday to urge Australians and their political leaders to break out of a “timidity” in the nation’s intellectual structure, its economic and business aspirations, its constitutional links with Britain, its security dependence on the United States and its failure to reconcile with its original inhabitants.

Wow, nothing we do is good enough for this guy.

dv said:

Former prime minister and treasurer Paul Keating has used his 80th birthday to urge Australians and their political leaders to break out of a “timidity” in the nation’s intellectual structure, its economic and business aspirations, its constitutional links with Britain, its security dependence on the United States and its failure to reconcile with its original inhabitants.

Wow, nothing we do is good enough for this guy.

He isn’t wrong though

In short: The Rockliff Liberal government signed a deal in May 2023 for a Tasmanian club to enter the national competition on the condition a 23,000-seat roofed stadium is built at Macquarie Point in Hobart.
There has been public opposition to the stadium plan, with the Greens outright opposed and Labor saying they will renegotiate the contract terms.
What’s next? The AFL and Labor are at loggerheads, with Labor claiming a stadium cannot be built at Macquarie Point and the AFL saying it must.

Details remain scarce about how Tasmanian Labor would “re-negotiate” the state’s contract with the AFL for a state team and stadium at Macquarie Point — with the league again re-affirming its position that a deal is a deal.

more…

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-22/afl-says-deal-done-tasmanian-team-stadium-labor-claim/103494626

US Taylor Swift fans baffled by ‘bizarre’ Aussie concert detail
As the singer marked her biggest concert to date – international fans could not wrap their heads around one technical detail.

The Eras Tour in Melbourne has garnered much international attention as Taylor Swift marked her biggest concert at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG).

Naturally fans were curious about the size of the stadium, as pictures of the 96,000-strong crowd went viral.

Zoomed-out images showed the mammoth stadium surrounded by a train line and greenery — a picture no Aussie would think twice about.

However, those in the US were baffled by the fact the stadium was not surrounded by a major carpark.

“I’m losing my mind over the fact there are 96,000 people here tonight,” Swift said during the concert to crowds, played as a sound over a TikTok of the stadium.

“This is the biggest show that we have done on this tour or any tour I have ever done.

“So that’s the version you get of me tonight, that’s actually completely starstruck by the fact that so many of you wanted to hang out with us on a Friday night in Melbourne.”

“I’m just trying to figure out where all the cars are?” a TikTok user said on a video of the stadium posted by Visit Melbourne Tourism.

“How did y’all park that many people?” another questioned.

“How bizarre to have no car parks around the stadium,” added a user.

Aerial shots of US stadiums and arenas often show them surrounded by giant car parks for those attending events at the venue.

However, this isn’t the case in Australia, with most fans making the most of nearby train stations and public transport options.

The Eras Tour concertgoers even get free public transport to and from the stadium.

Ahead of the Eras Tour in Sydney this weekend, Transport NSW issued a message urging fans to leave their cars at home.

“With 300,000 fans expected over four nights from Friday to Monday, ticketholders are urged to leave the car at home and catch public transport to avoid getting caught in traffic delays,” the statement said.

https://7news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/us-taylor-swift-fans-baffled-by-bizarre-aussie-concert-detail-c-13656235

This is hilarious.

The L/NP has a candidate for election to the Brisbane City Council who they believe is shonky, has lied to them, is currently facing three charges of unlawful stalking and two charges of breach of bail, who they’ve reported to police, who they don’t want on the ballot paper, but who they’re stuck with.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/lnp-makes-complaint-to-police-about-brock-alexander/103500862

50 – 50 poll in Queensland.

Wouldn’t surprise me if ALP ends up in a minority govt with Green help.

captain_spalding said:

This is hilarious.

The L/NP has a candidate for election to the Brisbane City Council who they believe is shonky, has lied to them, is currently facing three charges of unlawful stalking and two charges of breach of bail, who they’ve reported to police, who they don’t want on the ballot paper, but who they’re stuck with.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/lnp-makes-complaint-to-police-about-brock-alexander/103500862

Must be bad for the LNP not to run him.
Normally it’s a prerequisite to be a criminal to join the LNP.

Spiny Norman said:

captain_spalding said:

This is hilarious.

The L/NP has a candidate for election to the Brisbane City Council who they believe is shonky, has lied to them, is currently facing three charges of unlawful stalking and two charges of breach of bail, who they’ve reported to police, who they don’t want on the ballot paper, but who they’re stuck with.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/lnp-makes-complaint-to-police-about-brock-alexander/103500862

Must be bad for the LNP not to run him.
Normally it’s a prerequisite to be a criminal to join the LNP.

Considered blue collar crimes perhaps

Spiny Norman said:

captain_spalding said:

This is hilarious.

The L/NP has a candidate for election to the Brisbane City Council who they believe is shonky, has lied to them, is currently facing three charges of unlawful stalking and two charges of breach of bail, who they’ve reported to police, who they don’t want on the ballot paper, but who they’re stuck with.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-23/lnp-makes-complaint-to-police-about-brock-alexander/103500862

Must be bad for the LNP not to run him.
Normally it’s a prerequisite to be a criminal to join the LNP.

Well, you don’t actually have to be a criminal, you just have to be willing to learn.

Unbelievably stupid pollies in Tasmania.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-24/row-over-antique-firearms-licensing-in-tasmania/103503860

Michael V said:

Unbelievably stupid pollies in Tasmania.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-02-24/row-over-antique-firearms-licensing-in-tasmania/103503860

Is the Tasmanian antique gun lobby that influential that both major parties are influenced by them?

Advance Australia flexing it’s muscles: will PWM make the trip south to doorknock in Dunkley?

…

Liberals distance themselves from right-wing group’s ‘rapists, murderers’ scare campaign

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/liberals-distance-themselves-from-right-wing-group-s-rapists-murderers-scare-campaign-20240223-p5f78z.html

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

Fuck paul keating and the horse he rode in on. He interfered in the free market and completely fucked the rural areas and trashed the economy by crippling where the wealth was created. Then claimed it was “the recession we had to have”.
He sucked up to the reporters to get good press, and shat on everyone else. Selfish prick.

Kingy said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

Fuck paul keating and the horse he rode in on. He interfered in the free market and completely fucked the rural areas and trashed the economy by crippling where the wealth was created. Then claimed it was “the recession we had to have”.
He sucked up to the reporters to get good press, and shat on everyone else. Selfish prick.

I heard the ABC arts presenter just about having an orgasm over Keating the Musical.

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

—-

You could say the same regards USA.

Ian said:

We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

—-

You could say the same regards USA.

The USA is doing fine economically. They have food and energy security, friendly neighbours, and an easily defenadable territory, with easy access to both major ocean basins in the world. China has none of these things. China will moslt likely do a Japan and go into a prolonged period of stagnation.

The USA’s biggest threat is from domestic politics.

party_pants said:

Ian said:

We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

—-

You could say the same regards USA.

The USA is doing fine economically. They have food and energy security, friendly neighbours, and an easily defenadable territory, with easy access to both major ocean basins in the world. China has none of these things. China will moslt likely do a Japan and go into a prolonged period of stagnation.

The USA’s biggest threat is from domestic politics.

I wasn’t talking economics.

party_pants said:

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

FCOL

Having an ever expanding population is in no way a requisite for a successful economy.

Ian said:

party_pants said:

Ian said:

We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

—-

You could say the same regards USA.

The USA is doing fine economically. They have food and energy security, friendly neighbours, and an easily defenadable territory, with easy access to both major ocean basins in the world. China has none of these things. China will moslt likely do a Japan and go into a prolonged period of stagnation.

The USA’s biggest threat is from domestic politics.

I wasn’t talking economics.

It’s what world politics all boils down to in the end, IMHO.

The USA is far from perfect, but they will remain asuoerpower for a very long time. I can’t see anyone being successful at matching them. The USSR tried and failed spectacularly, Japan tried and then popped and they spent 2 decades going nowhere. The EU is too disunited. The UK is a spent force. Who else?

party_pants said:

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

I wouldn’t count them out yet. Xi has been an absolute disaster for China but reform is possible. Here’s a map of Chinese provinces by USD GDP per capita:

They still have hundreds of millions of cheap workers. All they need to do is start building factories close to the 50 million empty apartments.

I believe that if China goes backwards it will be the result of poor governance and belligerent foreign policy and not because of their competitive export sector imploding or demographics.

Witty Rejoinder said:

party_pants said:

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

I wouldn’t count them out yet. Xi has been an absolute disaster for China but reform is possible. Here’s a map of Chinese provinces by USD GDP per capita:

They still have hundreds of millions of cheap workers. All they need to do is start building factories close to the 50 million empty apartments.

I believe that if China goes backwards it will be the result of poor governance and belligerent foreign policy and not because of their competitive export sector imploding or demographics.

Stoopid Wikipedia. Map here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita

The Rev Dodgson said:

party_pants said:

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

FCOL

Having an ever expanding population is in no way a requisite for a successful economy.

It is a bit more nuanced than that. If your primary economic model is cheap manufactured goods for export, made with low-skilled labour, then you need a large pool of available cheap young labour. An aging population means less of it available, so wages go up. Labour costs in China are now higher than places like Vietnam or Mexico.

party_pants said:

Ian said:

party_pants said:

The USA is doing fine economically. They have food and energy security, friendly neighbours, and an easily defenadable territory, with easy access to both major ocean basins in the world. China has none of these things. China will moslt likely do a Japan and go into a prolonged period of stagnation.

The USA’s biggest threat is from domestic politics.

I wasn’t talking economics.

It’s what world politics all boils down to in the end, IMHO.

The USA is far from perfect, but they will remain asuoerpower for a very long time. I can’t see anyone being successful at matching them. The USSR tried and failed spectacularly, Japan tried and then popped and they spent 2 decades going nowhere. The EU is too disunited. The UK is a spent force. Who else?

It’s as much about super corporations as superpowers these days. Be nice when we get beyond both.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

party_pants said:

I really don’t know why people like Keating are so bullish about China. They have already peaked and their best days are behind them.

Firstly, they are in a demographic collapse that is too late to reverse now. Their population is aging rapidly and they are already declining in real numbers. They are no longer the country with lots of cheap young labour.

Secondly, and related to that, their whole economic model is based upon exports of manufactured goods to wealthy developed regions like North America and Europe. It is not sustainable to be reliant upon foreign consumers while at the same time conducting an aggressive and hostile foreign policy towards them. Eventually these countries will get fed up and move their supply chains somewhere else – which is already happening .. e.g Mexico and Vietnam.

China will be undone by their own aggressive approach to foreign policy. We do not need to sacrifice our national sovereignty to appease a declining power.

I wouldn’t count them out yet. Xi has been an absolute disaster for China but reform is possible. Here’s a map of Chinese provinces by USD GDP per capita:

They still have hundreds of millions of cheap workers. All they need to do is start building factories close to the 50 million empty apartments.

I believe that if China goes backwards it will be the result of poor governance and belligerent foreign policy and not because of their competitive export sector imploding or demographics.

Stoopid Wikipedia. Map here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP_per_capita

They have some potential if they can re-focus their efforts to domestic consumption.

So far the dominant drivers of their economy are manufactured exports (to foreign consumers), real estate development (which is now in massive oversupply), and infrastructure spending (which is subject to diminishing returns as yet more km of toll roads and bridges and railway lines etc get built).

It is going to be a hard one to change the fundamental economic strategy.

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

Doesn’t embarrass in public.

Can string a sentence together.

PermeateFree said:

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

I’d say he’s China’s man.

party_pants said:

They have some potential if they can re-focus their efforts to domestic consumption.

So far the dominant drivers of their economy are manufactured exports (to foreign consumers), real estate development (which is now in massive oversupply), and infrastructure spending (which is subject to diminishing returns as yet more km of toll roads and bridges and railway lines etc get built).

It is going to be a hard one to change the fundamental economic strategy.

Instead, perhaps they could do real estate development here to the point of massive over supply. That would be a win/win wooden tit?

It’s not clear to me that the disunity in the EU is greater than that in the US…

But yeah the Americans have the biggest nuclear arsenal. They aren’t going to be irrelevant as long as that’s the case.

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

…… and the clocks. Don’t forget what he did for the clock economy.

Woodie said:

party_pants said:

They have some potential if they can re-focus their efforts to domestic consumption.

So far the dominant drivers of their economy are manufactured exports (to foreign consumers), real estate development (which is now in massive oversupply), and infrastructure spending (which is subject to diminishing returns as yet more km of toll roads and bridges and railway lines etc get built).

It is going to be a hard one to change the fundamental economic strategy.

Instead, perhaps they could do real estate development here to the point of massive over supply. That would be a win/win wooden tit?

Well not really. The big real estate developers in China are renown for their shoddy build quality.

What would be lovely is if we could do that here all by ourselves. But there are too many vested interests for major policy reform. There is no physical reason ewhy we couldn’t do it.

Bubblecar said:

PermeateFree said:

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

I’d say he’s China’s man.

Wouldn’t that be Gough?

sarahs mum said:

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

Doesn’t embarrass in public.

Can string a sentence together.

:)

Woodie said:

PermeateFree said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

In power, Keating was a gift. Now, at 80, he’s a tragedy

Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor
February 24, 2024 — 5.00am

Paul Keating in power was a very great gift to Australia. Most Australians have enjoyed a generation’s worth of prosperity they think was normal, natural, inevitable. It was not.

Keating marked his 80th birthday with an interview published in The Australian Financial Review this week where he lamented that Australia “is so timid”.

In his years as treasurer and prime minister, no one ever accused Keating of timidity. Often, his methods were ugly. He is a self-described bastard. At one point he was the most unpopular man in the nation. But he was boldly ambitious for Australia and the country is vastly better for it.

Checked your superannuation balance lately? Yes, Keating created the compulsory superannuation system and its $3.5 trillion in assets, in partnership with then ACTU chief Bill Kelty. But that is a mere fraction of the wealth Keating midwifed for Australia.

Australia was falling slowly and inevitably into genteel poverty when Bob Hawke won the 1983 election with Keating as his treasurer. In the ’80s, Singapore’s founder Lee Kuan Yew famously foretold that Australians would become “the poor white trash of Asia”.

It was a shocking indictment that such a blessed country, enjoying First World living standards, could surrender itself to avoidable failure. It was an era where economists wondered whether Australia might need emergency IMF support merely to stay solvent, a time when Keating warned that Australia could end up a “banana republic”.

Keating’s reforms reversed the national trajectory. By the late 1990s, US economist Paul Krugman had anointed Australia a “miracle” economy. The OECD hailed it as “a model” for others to emulate. In 2010, the front page of France’s Le Monde declared that “Australia astonishes”.

The economy withstood enormous global shocks that shattered other countries – the Asian financial crisis, the US “tech wreck” recession, the global financial crisis – and continued to prosper. Without Keating, this would not have happened.

Ultimately, Australia achieved a world record for any developed country – 30 years without a recession. Beyond a generation of prosperity, Keating gave Australia a sense of possibility and a tutorial in success. He wrenched the Labor Party out of an ideological fixation on redistribution at the expense of growth.

Labor, he said in 1981, was full of people wanting to spend money: “What’s wrong with trying to create it?” He was right, and the Labor Left and Centre Left factions hated him for it. The essence of the Keating reform program was to open Australia to market forces. Which sounds simple. But the county was locked into a century-old economic fortress. It was comfortable for each player yet ruinous for the whole.

At one point Keating was opposed by every major section and institution of the Australian system, he later confided, except for the Canberra press gallery, which he cultivated intensively and relentlessly.

“Australia, like a bunny in the headlights, was caught in a near-terminal bout of stagflation,” as Keating put it to the AFR two years ago.

“Every important price in the economy was set on the cabinet table – the rates of exchange, the rates of interest, wage rates through centralised wage fixing, prices through tariffs.”

He dismantled the lot. He allowed the foreign exchanges to set the price of the Australian dollar. He allowed the market to set the price of money in the financial system. He created enterprise bargaining to allow bosses and workers to negotiate worker wages flexibly at the company level instead of the national. He abolished high tariffs.

Where America had Reagan and Britain had Thatcher, Australia had Hawke and Keating. One big difference is that where Reagan and Thatcher reshaped their economies in ugly clashes with the unions, Hawke and Keating did it in co-operation with the union movement.

But they forced a reluctant Australia into a transformational pro-market reform program nonetheless.

The Howard and Costello governments that followed consolidated by further reforming the tax system. But that was the end of ambitious Australian economic reform. Everything since has been mere housekeeping or tinkering.

The sense of possibility, the tutorial in success, have been lost. The economic oomph of the reform years has been exhausted. Australia now limps along in what a former secretary of the prime minister’s department, Martin Parkinson, has called “a slow-motion recession”, a permanent state of sub-par growth. No longer any sort of “miracle”, Australia is just ordinary.

On 10 December 1992, former prime minister Paul Keating gave a speech on Aboriginal reconciliation which addressed issues faced by indigenous Australians.

One of the ingredients of Keating’s success was his towering ego. In his own words, he was the “Placido Domingo of Australian politics”, casting himself as the operatic virtuoso with all the other singers in lesser roles. The ego sustained him through all the combat.

He is an illustration of the adage that one’s greatest strength can also be one’s greatest flaw. His ego is an envious one that cannot share credit. He trampled others and dismissed their efforts.

In his need to be the great diva singing solo, he never was able to acknowledge the vital work of two other leaders. In truth, Keating was nothing without Hawke. As treasurer, he was only able to impose painful change on the country because the folk hero Hawke kept winning elections, keeping Keating in a job.

But Keating could not see Hawke, his enabler and ally, as anything other than an obstacle. As treasurer, Keating spent years furiously denouncing Hawke in obscene terms to others in Labor, to the press gallery, to anyone who’d listen, until finally, he challenged openly in the party room and succeeded at the second attempt.

After that, the pair that had been named the duo “made in heaven” by Labor pollster Rod Cameron would not speak to each other for many years. When Hawke was dying, Keating left it to the older man to initiate a reconciliation in his last days.

Similarly, Keating never has been able to bring himself to credit John Howard for lending bipartisan support from the opposition benches to some of Keating’s most important reforms.

More than mere egoism, Keating appears to have an obsessiveness, with shades of an autocratic tendency. He confessed to biographer Troy Bramston that he had “the crazy gene”. Not news to the former Labor national secretary Gary Gray, who dubbed him “Captain Wacky”.

As PM, a livid Keating once tried to order the Defence Department to deploy tanks to Parliament House to break up a truckies’ protest blockade. Gratefully, defence protocols and quick interventions by Kim Beazley prevented a potential national embarrassment.

The tragedy of Keating, however, is in his retirement. In the 1990s, he developed the view that a growing China had an inherent right to expand its “strategic space” in the Asia-Pacific and that the US should allow it. At the time, China commonly was envisioned to be a beneficent power.

The former PM has some advice and criticism for the government on how it deals with the rise of China.

But China under Xi Jinping has changed. It has become ever more repressive at home and expansionist abroad in Xi’s quest to impose dominance and extinguish liberty. The world has revised its view of China accordingly. Keating, however, has not.

The same dogged determination that was an asset in driving economic reform has become a liability in Australia’s effort to defend its sovereignty. Keating has emerged in recent years as Australia’s foremost apologist for the Chinese Communist Party, demanding that Australia appease Beijing, withdraw from AUKUS and break with the US.

He routinely sides with the Chinese Communist Party against the Australian Labor Party. Even to the point of publicly insulting Penny Wong, Richard Marles and Anthony Albanese.

Increasingly frantic to win the argument against the facts, Keating has fallen to repeating party propaganda. He said last year that China “has no record of attacking other states”. This is simply wrong. It attacked India in 1962 and Vietnam in 1979, for instance.

But so what? Does anyone care what a retiree PM says? When Beijing delivered a suspended death sentence to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun this month, a professor of Chinese studies at UTS, Feng Chongyi, said China’s regime would have been encouraged by Keating. Beijing wanted to subdue Australia by dividing it from the US: “This is a false expectation but the voices of Paul Keating and Bob Carr keep fuelling it,” Professor Feng said.

Keating doesn’t want Australia to be timid in economic reform; he shouldn’t wish his country to be timid in defending its sovereignty. He is an authentic national hero for his time in power. It would be a tragedy if this is lost to memory because of bloody-mindedness in retirement.

Happy birthday, Paul.

https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/in-power-keating-was-a-gift-now-at-80-he-s-a-tragedy-20240222-p5f75e.html

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

…… and the clocks. Don’t forget what he did for the clock economy.

Bastard fixed his own instead of giving me a job.

Woodie said:

Bubblecar said:

PermeateFree said:

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

I’d say he’s China’s man.

Wouldn’t that be Gough?

I think Keating favors developing good relations with countries in our region, rather than following the whim of those halfway around the world. Who can say at this point in time, but it would seem that putting all our defense eggs in America’s basket might lead to wars in our region that are very likely to be disastrous for us.

I can understand Keating’s utter disdain for the USA in its current form, and even the UK to a lesser extent. But I thought the EU would be a more attractive model for someone like him, rather than China.

party_pants said:

I can understand Keating’s utter disdain for the USA in its current form, and even the UK to a lesser extent. But I thought the EU would be a more attractive model for someone like him, rather than China.

He distained Darwin.

PermeateFree said:

Woodie said:

Bubblecar said:

I’d say he’s China’s man.

Wouldn’t that be Gough?

I think Keating favors developing good relations with countries in our region, rather than following the whim of those halfway around the world. Who can say at this point in time, but it would seem that putting all our defense eggs in America’s basket might lead to wars in our region that are very likely to be disastrous for us.

There are plenty of other countries in the region apart from China. Like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam etc. And don’t forget India with its nearly billion and a half.

I mean is it too crass to suggest that he’s just a paid mouthpiece? China is fucking dreadful. We take their money because we are filthy whores but we can’t stop saying they are a cruel and repressive country.

party_pants said:

I can understand Keating’s utter disdain for the USA in its current form, and even the UK to a lesser extent. But I thought the EU would be a more attractive model for someone like him, rather than China.

Engagement with China: Keating believes that engagement with China is essential. He argues that it builds a better political framework for everyone. According to him, China seeks and deserves respect, and its rise to power is legitimate. Rather than usurping the global order, Keating contends that China aims to reform it1.

In summary, Paul Keating’s perspectives on China are multifaceted, reflecting the complexities of Australia’s relationship with this influential global power.

Hardly the views of someone about to jump ship from the USA or Australia. All seems to be a reasonable outlook.

party_pants said:

PermeateFree said:

Woodie said:

Wouldn’t that be Gough?

I think Keating favors developing good relations with countries in our region, rather than following the whim of those halfway around the world. Who can say at this point in time, but it would seem that putting all our defense eggs in America’s basket might lead to wars in our region that are very likely to be disastrous for us.

There are plenty of other countries in the region apart from China. Like Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam etc. And don’t forget India with its nearly billion and a half.

Yes he favors improving relations with all.

PermeateFree said:

party_pants said:

I can understand Keating’s utter disdain for the USA in its current form, and even the UK to a lesser extent. But I thought the EU would be a more attractive model for someone like him, rather than China.

Engagement with China: Keating believes that engagement with China is essential. He argues that it builds a better political framework for everyone. According to him, China seeks and deserves respect, and its rise to power is legitimate. Rather than usurping the global order, Keating contends that China aims to reform it1.

In summary, Paul Keating’s perspectives on China are multifaceted, reflecting the complexities of Australia’s relationship with this influential global power.

Hardly the views of someone about to jump ship from the USA or Australia. All seems to be a reasonable outlook.

To me the assumptions in the first paragraph are wrong. China is aiming to usurp the world order and build a network of subservient client states around itself. This is not “reform”, or at least not reform in the right direction. For me, reform needs to go in the direction of more protection for liberty and a rules-based order, not in the direction of diminishing them.

So fuck China.

party_pants said:

PermeateFree said:

party_pants said:

I can understand Keating’s utter disdain for the USA in its current form, and even the UK to a lesser extent. But I thought the EU would be a more attractive model for someone like him, rather than China.

Engagement with China: Keating believes that engagement with China is essential. He argues that it builds a better political framework for everyone. According to him, China seeks and deserves respect, and its rise to power is legitimate. Rather than usurping the global order, Keating contends that China aims to reform it1.

In summary, Paul Keating’s perspectives on China are multifaceted, reflecting the complexities of Australia’s relationship with this influential global power.

Hardly the views of someone about to jump ship from the USA or Australia. All seems to be a reasonable outlook.

To me the assumptions in the first paragraph are wrong. China is aiming to usurp the world order and build a network of subservient client states around itself. This is not “reform”, or at least not reform in the right direction. For me, reform needs to go in the direction of more protection for liberty and a rules-based order, not in the direction of diminishing them.

So fuck China.

That is your opinion, America is no saint either with their interference in numerous countries including making war since their inception. The point is no country is perfect and very few can be held up as a good example for honest and responsible governance, of which America and China are good examples, but you must be realistic by not being unnecessarily antagonistic or by taking inflexible positions as to who you support would probably a good place to start.

Woodie said:

Bubblecar said:

PermeateFree said:

People disliked Keating when he was Treasurer and then PM. They also dislike him now, so what is different? He is still the witty outspoken person whose love for Australia shows, and sure he upset a lot of people, but those who bring change always do. I would rather have someone like Keating who is his own man, than a sniveling weak-lipped politician who tries to please everyone for their vote, and so is hailed a good party man but really never achieves anything, other than wealth for themselves.

I’d say he’s China’s man.

Wouldn’t that be Gough?

Gough’s dead…

PermeateFree said:

party_pants said:

PermeateFree said:

Engagement with China: Keating believes that engagement with China is essential. He argues that it builds a better political framework for everyone. According to him, China seeks and deserves respect, and its rise to power is legitimate. Rather than usurping the global order, Keating contends that China aims to reform it1.

In summary, Paul Keating’s perspectives on China are multifaceted, reflecting the complexities of Australia’s relationship with this influential global power.

Hardly the views of someone about to jump ship from the USA or Australia. All seems to be a reasonable outlook.

To me the assumptions in the first paragraph are wrong. China is aiming to usurp the world order and build a network of subservient client states around itself. This is not “reform”, or at least not reform in the right direction. For me, reform needs to go in the direction of more protection for liberty and a rules-based order, not in the direction of diminishing them.

So fuck China.

That is your opinion, America is no saint either with their interference in numerous countries including making war since their inception. The point is no country is perfect and very few can be held up as a good example for honest and responsible governance, of which America and China are good examples, but you must be realistic by not being unnecessarily antagonistic or by taking inflexible positions as to who you support would probably a good place to start.

No country s perfect, true. But they are not all equally bad. We can come with an objective rating system by which we can measure them, and there are plenty of organisations who do this on various measures, like press freedom, corruption, equality, liberty, religious freedom etc. China always ranks near the bottom.

I don’t need to be so flexible as to start thinking that a dive to the bottom is morally equivalent to striving for improvement.

The problem with China is that it has an enormous chip on its shoulder.

The refrain is ‘never forget the hundred years of humiliation’, referring the 19th and 2oth century during which China was exploited shamefully by western countries.

The fact that the exploitation was greatly facilitated by China’s own predisposition towards corruption, oppression, backwardness, insularity etc. is conveniently forgotten.

Now, with the ‘never forget’ slogan echoing again and again, China’s leaders, and a lot of its people, feel that they’re ‘owed’ some kind of deference and servility by the rest of the world, and they’ll demand it, and enforce it, if necessary.

Seeking good relationships with China is a worthwhile goal for any country, Australia included. Thee question is, will China see this as a partnership between independent states, or as some degree of submission to the ‘great power’ that China is and perceives itself to be, with with China expecting to have a say in how things are done by and in that other country?

captain_spalding said:

The problem with China is that it has an enormous chip on its shoulder.

The refrain is ‘never forget the hundred years of humiliation’, referring the 19th and 2oth century during which China was exploited shamefully by western countries.

The fact that the exploitation was greatly facilitated by China’s own predisposition towards corruption, oppression, backwardness, insularity etc. is conveniently forgotten.

Now, with the ‘never forget’ slogan echoing again and again, China’s leaders, and a lot of its people, feel that they’re ‘owed’ some kind of deference and servility by the rest of the world, and they’ll demand it, and enforce it, if necessary.

Seeking good relationships with China is a worthwhile goal for any country, Australia included. Thee question is, will China see this as a partnership between independent states, or as some degree of submission to the ‘great power’ that China is and perceives itself to be, with with China expecting to have a say in how things are done by and in that other country?

The strange thing is, that all these things done against China were all pre-WW2, during the age of empires. Post WW2 that system was steadily dismantled and replaced with the US-led new rules-based order, and supported by the powers of Western Europe and other free-world allies. China is seeking redress from a past system that no longer exists.

It must be remembered that China is the equivalent of a Roman Empire that never ended. It is the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet and every Chinese knows this so some of the cultural snobbery is justified.

For much of this period China was the richest and most advanced nation-state on the planet and for a civilisation that deals in millenia the past 200 years have been an unfortunate aberration. Now this is not to state that China is superior in all ways and they had, and still have much to learn from the rest of the world with the system of government largely developed in a couple of uppity islands off the coast of France being a prime example.

Xi is an ideologue who thinks that the CCP should rule China come hell or high water but he too shall pass into the pages of history and China will keep on keeping on and hopefully one day a democratic China will take its rightful place among the nations of the world as a leading and benevolent great power.

It may not happen for 50 or 100 years but it will happen because the proud Chinese people will not let their country suffer under the kind of mismanagement exemplified by Xi’s regime of the past decade with even the smallest of protests like the tank man, or the white paper demonstrations showing that the spark is there in the Chinese psyche.

It will be an interesting next few decades in the PRC.

Witty Rejoinder said:

It must be remembered that China is the equivalent of a Roman Empire that never ended. It is the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet and every Chinese knows this so some of the cultural snobbery is justified.

For much of this period China was the richest and most advanced nation-state on the planet and for a civilisation that deals in millenia the past 200 years have been an unfortunate aberration. Now this is not to state that China is superior in all ways and they had, and still have much to learn from the rest of the world with the system of government largely developed in a couple of uppity islands off the coast of France being a prime example.

Xi is an ideologue who thinks that the CCP should rule China come hell or high water but he too shall pass into the pages of history and China will keep on keeping on and hopefully one day a democratic China will take its rightful place among the nations of the world as a leading and benevolent great power.

It may not happen for 50 or 100 years but it will happen because the proud Chinese people will not let their country suffer under the kind of mismanagement exemplified by Xi’s regime of the past decade with even the smallest of protests like the tank man, or the white paper demonstrations showing that the spark is there in the Chinese psyche.

It will be an interesting next few decades in the PRC.

I think we can all agree broadly on that,

but quibble politely over “empire” being synonymous with “nation-state” :)

(My understanding is that nation-states are formed in the aftermath of the break-up of an empire, as dicreet and logical segments)

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

It must be remembered that China is the equivalent of a Roman Empire that never ended. It is the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet and every Chinese knows this so some of the cultural snobbery is justified.

For much of this period China was the richest and most advanced nation-state on the planet and for a civilisation that deals in millenia the past 200 years have been an unfortunate aberration. Now this is not to state that China is superior in all ways and they had, and still have much to learn from the rest of the world with the system of government largely developed in a couple of uppity islands off the coast of France being a prime example.

Xi is an ideologue who thinks that the CCP should rule China come hell or high water but he too shall pass into the pages of history and China will keep on keeping on and hopefully one day a democratic China will take its rightful place among the nations of the world as a leading and benevolent great power.

It may not happen for 50 or 100 years but it will happen because the proud Chinese people will not let their country suffer under the kind of mismanagement exemplified by Xi’s regime of the past decade with even the smallest of protests like the tank man, or the white paper demonstrations showing that the spark is there in the Chinese psyche.

It will be an interesting next few decades in the PRC.

I think we can all agree broadly on that,

but quibble politely over “empire” being synonymous with “nation-state” :)

(My understanding is that nation-states are formed in the aftermath of the break-up of an empire, as dicreet and logical segments)

I used nation-state because the meaning of empire usually involves governments ruling over a disparate group of geographical regions and cultures. Even at its greatest extent Imperial China ruled over areas with substantial Han populations with longstanding links to central China. Qing China in 1800, which was basically Imperial China at its greatest extent only ruled over Tibet, Xinjiang and Korea with Xinjiang having been a province of Han China 2000 years ago. Succinctly an imperial government does not an empire make.

Witty Rejoinder said:

party_pants said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

It must be remembered that China is the equivalent of a Roman Empire that never ended. It is the oldest surviving civilisation on the planet and every Chinese knows this so some of the cultural snobbery is justified.

For much of this period China was the richest and most advanced nation-state on the planet and for a civilisation that deals in millenia the past 200 years have been an unfortunate aberration. Now this is not to state that China is superior in all ways and they had, and still have much to learn from the rest of the world with the system of government largely developed in a couple of uppity islands off the coast of France being a prime example.

Xi is an ideologue who thinks that the CCP should rule China come hell or high water but he too shall pass into the pages of history and China will keep on keeping on and hopefully one day a democratic China will take its rightful place among the nations of the world as a leading and benevolent great power.

It may not happen for 50 or 100 years but it will happen because the proud Chinese people will not let their country suffer under the kind of mismanagement exemplified by Xi’s regime of the past decade with even the smallest of protests like the tank man, or the white paper demonstrations showing that the spark is there in the Chinese psyche.

It will be an interesting next few decades in the PRC.

I think we can all agree broadly on that,

but quibble politely over “empire” being synonymous with “nation-state” :)

(My understanding is that nation-states are formed in the aftermath of the break-up of an empire, as dicreet and logical segments)

I used nation-state because the meaning of empire usually involves governments ruling over a disparate group of geographical regions and cultures. Even at its greatest extent Imperial China ruled over areas with substantial Han populations with longstanding links to central China. Qing China in 1800, which was basically Imperial China at its greatest extent only ruled over Tibet, Xinjiang and Korea with Xinjiang having been a province of Han China 2000 years ago. Succinctly an imperial government does not an empire make.

Ooops… and Mongolia.

party_pants said:

PermeateFree said:

party_pants said:

To me the assumptions in the first paragraph are wrong. China is aiming to usurp the world order and build a network of subservient client states around itself. This is not “reform”, or at least not reform in the right direction. For me, reform needs to go in the direction of more protection for liberty and a rules-based order, not in the direction of diminishing them.

So fuck China.

That is your opinion, America is no saint either with their interference in numerous countries including making war since their inception. The point is no country is perfect and very few can be held up as a good example for honest and responsible governance, of which America and China are good examples, but you must be realistic by not being unnecessarily antagonistic or by taking inflexible positions as to who you support would probably a good place to start.

No country s perfect, true. But they are not all equally bad. We can come with an objective rating system by which we can measure them, and there are plenty of organisations who do this on various measures, like press freedom, corruption, equality, liberty, religious freedom etc. China always ranks near the bottom.

I don’t need to be so flexible as to start thinking that a dive to the bottom is morally equivalent to striving for improvement.

You seem to forget when Britain had its empire, they really exploited underdeveloped countries, took their resources, caused a lot of strife and imposed an alien governing system upon them to keep them doing what we wanted. Even back home you had the poor houses, transportation for incredibly minor offences and little kids working down coal mines. We are very good at finding fault with others based on our current value system, but forget we were just the same in our day and probably a great deal worse.

I am probably no fonder of the Chinese belligerence than you, but you must consider the behaviors of yesterday to appreciate the evolution of change and that our current attitudes did not exist even a few decades ago and many of Chinas are still at that stage. All developed countries say the bad business that happened in the past should be forgotten, but you can’t expect people who have suffered the consequences of our arrogant actions when this level of abuse was the norm to simply forget, especially as it was US who were responsible, and they don’t want to take it anymore.

Witty Rejoinder said:

Witty Rejoinder said:

party_pants said:

I think we can all agree broadly on that,

but quibble politely over “empire” being synonymous with “nation-state” :)

(My understanding is that nation-states are formed in the aftermath of the break-up of an empire, as dicreet and logical segments)

I used nation-state because the meaning of empire usually involves governments ruling over a disparate group of geographical regions and cultures. Even at its greatest extent Imperial China ruled over areas with substantial Han populations with longstanding links to central China. Qing China in 1800, which was basically Imperial China at its greatest extent only ruled over Tibet, Xinjiang and Korea with Xinjiang having been a province of Han China 2000 years ago. Succinctly an imperial government does not an empire make.

Ooops… and Mongolia.

I’ll leave the quibbling to someone else.