Theres been some articles in the age recently about the split in the Liberals and the difference between the conservative faction and the liberal faction. One went into how the liberal party and the conservative party used to be split and how they merged around 1910. A different one suggested that they split now. Which really may not be the worst of ideas. It discussed the demographics in the middle class that the Liberals have to court and how a significant percentage of them are the right on eco/left on social people that are more likely to switch to voting green as they bail on the Liberals than vote Labor. I personally won't be voting for Abbott or any other conservative but depending on circumstances could vote for someone like Turnbull, but instead looks like I'll be voting Green. Also the fact is that they are going to lose the next election regardless, so if theres a time to split it would be now.
Yeah, we're kinda screwy in that our Free Trade and Protectionist parties merged. It's a kinda of nonsense argument, it's like saying that the Labor Party should break between the Social Conservatives and the Socialists. It's not going to happen, people just seem to think this is a bright idea when the party's suffering post election loss in-fighting. I mean, it's not really a nonsense argument per se. Why shouldn't they separate? Two party preferred voting is why they shouldn't separate. And meddling with that would me more trouble then it is worth. A break away party (Say, Liberals and Conservitives) would only end up having to unite to form a coalition to hold government meaning that nothing would change. The current political parties have institutionalized too much to do anything.
I could see myself voting for a fiscally conservative Labor party member, but my sitting member is a hardcore socialist. Should I therefore suggest that the Hardcore socialist go off and form the Australian Marxist Party Of Tasmania? No. Not really. Just as the Labor Party has to deal with its socialist wing the Liberal Party has to deal with the hardcore nuts.
I'd definitely support the type of breakaway party mooted in that article because the Liberal Movement, as the writer called it, is the kind of party I'd happily vote for. But yeah, if it didn't get enough support, then we'd be back to a coalition.
Actually, would it be a three-way coalition? I mean, no one's really mentioned the Nationals, but they're still there and they seem to be aligned with the more conservative elements of the Liberals. Ideally (for me), the conservative conservatives would pile into the National party and leave the moderates with the Liberal party. But that's a rather screwy idea.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the conservatives have sway in the Liberal party and are "The party" per se. Which is why we are lucky there is a dissenting minority. And to be fair, that the majority of them aren't nutty right, just fairly right.
I mean, they don't ALL go around hiring male prostitutes to set up a high court judge just because he's gay. I mean really, what the fuck was that about?
Ha! I remember that. Back in Year 11 English, it was do an essay on either that or the Israel/Palestine situation. Mum advised that I do the Kirby thing because Gaza was just too damn complicated.
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
Notice that they have both a shadow minister for Seniors *and* a shadow minister for Ageing. They need to keep those oldies alive as long as possible to keep their vote up
Notice that they have both a shadow minister for Seniors *and* a shadow minister for Ageing. They need to keep those oldies alive as long as possible to keep their vote up
Ha! I remember that. Back in Year 11 English, it was do an essay on either that or the Israel/Palestine situation. Mum advised that I do the Kirby thing because Gaza was just too damn complicated.
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
You can't take Ruddock out of the shadows, if you put him into direct sunlight he'll either crumble into dust or sparkle.
Ha! I remember that. Back in Year 11 English, it was do an essay on either that or the Israel/Palestine situation. Mum advised that I do the Kirby thing because Gaza was just too damn complicated.
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
You can't take Ruddock out of the shadows, if you put him into direct sunlight he'll either crumble into dust or sparkle.
Great. Now all I can think of is Ruddock wearing black in a long black wig. Like those chief vampires or whatever they are in the current Twilight trailers.
e: I hate myself for actually looking for this, but these dudes:
I could answer that question mark with "In about 50 years' time the way we're going". :P
There was an interesting interview on Lateline last night with Dr James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Science and a key figure in climate change science, about his opposition to emissions trading schemes. His preferred solution is, as I understand it, to simply introduce a rising carbon tax on (big) businesses to wean them off fossil fuels, which are still the cheapest energy source.
Unless you attack the fundamental problem, you cannot solve the problem. And the fundamental issue is that fossil fuels are the cheapest energy. You must put a price on carbon emissions.
And the way to do that, and to make it acceptable to the public and actually very beneficial to the public, is to return the money that's collected from a carbon tax, and that tax needs to be applied at the source, at the mine or the port of entry.
You then distribute that money to the public, so that they will have the money to invest in more efficient vehicles, in insulating their homes, and that would encourage innovations, innovators would develop carbon free or low carbon energy sources.
That's the way that you can drive the system to slowly phase out fossil fuels, but the cap and trade doesn't do that at all, and it's impossible. As long as fossil fuels are the cheapest energy, you're not going to phase them out.
That's become the source of my opposition to the ETS as it was opposed. Why something like that should cost the taxpayers money seemed damned weird, since all you had to do was send all the money you make straight back into taxpayer pockets.
Businesses then have a huge incentive to try and drop costs by reducing carbon emissions, while taxpayers are compensated for price increases in services and encouraged to try and buy from people with lower emissions as they become available.
EDIT: I suspect the major benefit of emissions trading schemes is that it introduces flexibility into the way your reductions proceed if you reduce the number of permits each year and don't give them out like candy in the first place. Industries which take time to re-engineer their base can buy permits in the interim to give them more time to transition, more flexible ones adapt faster but also get to reap economic benefits from being the first to do so.
EDIT 2: Also some politician needs to smack down all the utilities who keep scaremongering that prices will rise. Yes they will rise - they will rise because prices have been going up like 60% since they were privatized.
Any tax on emissions it inevitably going to end up in higher energy prices, at least in the short term, unless you propose taxing the emitters and passing a law forbidding them from passing on the cost. As it stands I believe the ETS will compensate the average consumer for more than the expected price rise anyway. The goal is to provide an incentive to reduce emissions, in this case by making them pay for what they do emit. Thus any company that doesn't need to buy as many emissions can charge lower prices and thus undercut the competition. It also has the benefit of allowing the government to explicitly reduce the cap to their target level rather than hoping that a high tax on pollution will be sufficient to ensure reduction.
Well my point was to make it a 1:1 relation. Consumers get monies from the taxes provided by the government in as fair a way as we can give them, biased towards the low socioeconomic groups.
If there's one thing the liberals are right about it's that most Australian's don't know WTF with the ETS. My speculation is just that - it's really really unclear what they've done, and we need a big flow-chart about it to be published.
Even then, the only ones who would read it would probably be those who already follow the news closely enough to already have a decent understanding. I suspect all the average voter knows about the ETS they saw in 2 minute segments on the news, which isn't nearly enough time to cover something as complex at the ETS. The best time to explain it would probably be during an election campaign, when people actually start paying attention.
Ha! I remember that. Back in Year 11 English, it was do an essay on either that or the Israel/Palestine situation. Mum advised that I do the Kirby thing because Gaza was just too damn complicated.
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
Joyce is going to be hilarious.
As for Bishop, talk about a tin ear. Or a tin nose, since apparently Abbott's forgotten about that whole kerosene baths incident...
Annabell Crabb is always funny, assuming she's the SMH's political lulz columnist that I'm always reading. I think she is, anyway.
Yeah, she's just made the switch to the ABC. Probably sensible; I wouldn't want to be sharing page space with Gerard Henderson and Miranda Devine. The stupid might be contagious.
What, she's gone forever? Goddamnit, she was the best part of the SMH's politics spreads.
Ha! I remember that. Back in Year 11 English, it was do an essay on either that or the Israel/Palestine situation. Mum advised that I do the Kirby thing because Gaza was just too damn complicated.
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
Joyce is going to be hilarious.
As for Bishop, talk about a tin ear. Or a tin nose, since apparently Abbott's forgotten about that whole kerosene baths incident...
He actually mentioned it in an interview and claimed something like the response to that incident was to improve accountability or something equally humorous.
Annabell Crabb is always funny, assuming she's the SMH's political lulz columnist that I'm always reading. I think she is, anyway.
Yeah, she's just made the switch to the ABC. Probably sensible; I wouldn't want to be sharing page space with Gerard Henderson and Miranda Devine. The stupid might be contagious.
What, she's gone forever? Goddamnit, she was the best part of the SMH's politics spreads.
Nah, she's writing heaps of stuff, its just at abc news's site.
Hey what's up with everyone going "Abbott's so charismatic and likeable!" now? I thought it was agreed amongst the average Australian that the guy was a backwards dumbarse.
But today he took a swipe at the ABC Lateline host Tony Jones, who conducted that interview, describing him as a respected journalist but saying “He's really pumped on this climate change thing. Good luck to him but hard to get a word in”.
Mr Abbott is also trying to play down a Nazi reference he made yesterday in relation to climate change talks in Copenhagen. He described the current global climate change talks in Copenhagen as “some latter-day environmental Munich agreement kind of thing”.
The 1938 Munich agreement resulted in European leaders appeasing Adolf Hitler by permitting German annexation of part of western Czechoslovakia.
.When pressed by Jones last night, Mr Abbott added: “It was a throw-away line in which you would be wrong to invest too much significance.”
Meanwhile, new opposition finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce has rubbished the Rudd government's calls for the Coalition to observe Labor's strict rules on spending, tax and savings.
“That's like the town drunk issuing his manifesto to the temperance league,” Senator Joyce told ABC radio.
That Joyce thing was pretty funny, mind you. The rest...
Abbott really is crazy. He is trying his best to fight the 2007 election all over again, and we know how that one turned out. His real problem is that this time the Liberal's don't have incumbency working in their favour.
e: I wasn't able to see the bit about him wanting to send "his army" to Afghanistan, but then again, I kind of skimmed. Whereabouts was it?
He didn't say that, he just said that he "wouldn't rule out sending more troops to Afghanistan."
It's just the Australian's front page said "Abbott's named his army, and he wants to send the Army to Afghanistan" obviously poking fun at him. And I thought i'd play along. :P
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I'd definitely support the type of breakaway party mooted in that article because the Liberal Movement, as the writer called it, is the kind of party I'd happily vote for. But yeah, if it didn't get enough support, then we'd be back to a coalition.
Actually, would it be a three-way coalition? I mean, no one's really mentioned the Nationals, but they're still there and they seem to be aligned with the more conservative elements of the Liberals. Ideally (for me), the conservative conservatives would pile into the National party and leave the moderates with the Liberal party. But that's a rather screwy idea.
I mean, they don't ALL go around hiring male prostitutes to set up a high court judge just because he's gay. I mean really, what the fuck was that about?
Abbott's announced his new cabinet. Its design is conservative and wooden. Minchin takes energy and resources (haha!), Joyce takes finance, Hockey stays as treasurer, Bishop's doing seniors :winky: and Ruddock's making a comeback as secretary to the shadow cabinet.
Snap!
You can't take Ruddock out of the shadows, if you put him into direct sunlight he'll either crumble into dust or sparkle.
e: I hate myself for actually looking for this, but these dudes:
We're underwater?
There was an interesting interview on Lateline last night with Dr James Hansen, head of NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Science and a key figure in climate change science, about his opposition to emissions trading schemes. His preferred solution is, as I understand it, to simply introduce a rising carbon tax on (big) businesses to wean them off fossil fuels, which are still the cheapest energy source.
It almost makes too much sense to me.
Businesses then have a huge incentive to try and drop costs by reducing carbon emissions, while taxpayers are compensated for price increases in services and encouraged to try and buy from people with lower emissions as they become available.
EDIT: I suspect the major benefit of emissions trading schemes is that it introduces flexibility into the way your reductions proceed if you reduce the number of permits each year and don't give them out like candy in the first place. Industries which take time to re-engineer their base can buy permits in the interim to give them more time to transition, more flexible ones adapt faster but also get to reap economic benefits from being the first to do so.
EDIT 2: Also some politician needs to smack down all the utilities who keep scaremongering that prices will rise. Yes they will rise - they will rise because prices have been going up like 60% since they were privatized.
Joyce is going to be hilarious.
As for Bishop, talk about a tin ear. Or a tin nose, since apparently Abbott's forgotten about that whole kerosene baths incident...
What, she's gone forever? Goddamnit, she was the best part of the SMH's politics spreads.
He actually mentioned it in an interview and claimed something like the response to that incident was to improve accountability or something equally humorous.
Nah, she's writing heaps of stuff, its just at abc news's site.
Exactly, by Liberal party standards he's charismatic and likable.
Oooh. Snap.
Ahem.
In a poor turn of phrase, Abbott has named his "Battlers" (cough) "Abbott's Army" and he's also decided that he wants to send "his army" to Afghanistan...
Edit: some choice quotes
That Joyce thing was pretty funny, mind you. The rest...
He's embarable.
e: I wasn't able to see the bit about him wanting to send "his army" to Afghanistan, but then again, I kind of skimmed. Whereabouts was it?
Old PA forum lookalike style for the new forums | My ko-fi donation thing.
He didn't say that, he just said that he "wouldn't rule out sending more troops to Afghanistan."
It's just the Australian's front page said "Abbott's named his army, and he wants to send the Army to Afghanistan" obviously poking fun at him. And I thought i'd play along. :P