A short history lesson for the LOTO

Follow @MigloCW

Here’s a short history lesson for the leader of the Opposition . . .

On the 25th of April 1915 the ANZACS landed at Gallipoli.  It was a campaign that we did not win, but it is the date we commemorate all those who have served in our armed forces; those mates who fought for their country, many of whom never returned.

Thank goodness Tony Abbott was not Prime Minister in 1915.   How many more thousands of young men would have died while he waited to call them home, UNTIL THEY HAD A WIN UNDER THEIR BELT.

Winning is not everything, you can not win a war at any cost, for what is lost is more valuable that what was gained.  History has recorded that our decision not to win at all costs was our best decision of the campaign.

The most successful operation of the campaign was the evacuation of the troops on 19–20 December under cover of a comprehensive deception operation.  As a result, the Turks were unable to inflict more than a very few casualties on the retreating forces.  The whole Gallipoli operation, however, cost 26,111 Australian casualties, including 8,141 deaths.  Despite this, it has been said that Gallipoli had no influence on the course of the war.

How many young lives ,would Tony Abbott be prepared to be lost from our nation, while we try to secure a win under the belt?

How much psychological damages to young brains, physical damage to young bodies . . ?  To our country’s spirit?

AND . . . if it was ANY ONE OF HIS DAUGHTER’S LIVES ON THE LINE, how different would he see the situation?

Tony Abbott, the AFGHANISTAN CAMPAIGN is NOT a sporting event . . . the lives lost to all mean more to many people than POINT SCORING.

You’re an unfit person to hold the position you do, when you consider a WIN UNDER THE BELT more relevant than the lives of Australians.

But to you, winning is everything, isn’t it?  Whatever the cost.  As long as someone else does the fighting . . . your dirty work.

A big thank you to JooR for the above post.

Blast from the past: Meet the “New Tony”… Same as the “Old Tony”

Follow @MigloCW

Tony Abbott certainly is a topical issue, as he was when B Tolputt wrote this piece for Café Whispers in September 2010.  The first part of the article is outdated as far as news go, but not Tony Abbott’s modus operandi.  It’s still the same.  He hasn’t changed.

Tony Abbott will never change to be like the people.  Instead, Rupert Murdoch is changing the people to be like Tony Abbott.

I’m digressing.

Read B Toplutt’s post (re-posted below) and you’ll agree that there’s nothing different about Tony Abbott in 2012 as there was in 2010.  A leopard never changes its spots.

Here’s the original article:

Been a little while since I wrote something political. Combination of the daily bullshit dropping since the independent’s decision (though still daily, and still bullshit, it’s not the sole focus of the nation anymore) and the fact that my mind (and free time) were not in a place that makes article writing easy.

Well, this morning, as I watch my kids get ready for school from the lounge-room, I read yet another article about the “new Tony Abbott” and cannot help reflecting on recent events and noting he is no different to the “old Tony Abbott” – just as unfit for leading the nation and just as political (as opposed to honest) as before.

I’ll start with something that actually had my wife and I equally ticked off a few days back. The Liberals and Oakeshott’s bid for Speaker. The background being that both the Liberals & Labor signed off on principles of parliamentary reform they would enact – regardless of who gained government. The principle in question was the ability for an independent Speaker of the House with vote pairing. Now that the Liberals did not get government however, they are breaking their promise.  Apparently, they didn’t do “due diligence” and didn’t know what they were agreeing to. Sorry, but that’s bullshit and I cannot think of anyone that actually believes that (though rusted-on voters might accept it with a wink and a nudge).  The concept is so simple my ten year old understood it and yet the Liberal Party did not? Come on, you guys used up your quota of “frankly unbelievable bull-puckey” with the $11 billion difference of opinion in costings.

Quite simply, the issue is that the Liberals were willing to say anything to get into Government and now that they have to lose a vote to a left-ish independent on a variety of issues.  Like core and non-core and their independently audited (*cough*bogus*cough*) costings – it still appears that a promise from the Liberals isn’t worth squat… even if it is “written down”.

Secondly is the meme that the right-wing talking heads are picking up from Tony’s talking points and running along with, regardless of reality.  That is the one where “Labor are breaking promises already” along with implication that the Liberals wouldn’t. Which is complete and utter tripe! Both major parties were willing to discuss which promises they would & would not break in order to win over the independents. The Liberals did not front up to talks stating “We’re not going to change anything we promised”, they too provided a list of things they were willing to change in order to win power. Perhaps they never intended to keep promises made to the independents – they have form for that.

Then this morning’s headline of Tony Abbott to lead ‘party of ideas’ comes along with the story only making it to the second paragraph before stating:

But the Opposition Leader warned Julia Gillard he will stick to his guns on the mining tax, climate change and broadband policy.

That’s right, Abbott will lead a “party of ideas”… except he will only go along with any ideas that came along prior to 1980! On the mining tax, at least, we know where that is coming from. The Liberals are both the party of Big Business and would love to see Labor unable to meet spending commitments made on proviso of the mining tax. It wouldn’t matter that the Liberals wouldn’t fund those services/infrastructure either, that the mining tax was the prerequisite for providing them, or that it is the Liberal’s intransigence that prevented Labor from providing them – it is broken promises they can highlight for their talking heads in the Murdoch newspapers.

Honestly, my favourite line of the news story (and why I focus on Tony Abbott, not the Liberal Party as a whole) is the following:

But in a message to Labor and his own troops, he signaled he was not for turning on a carbon price…

In other words, the Liberals are a “party of ideas”… but only the ideas Abbott himself likes.

Meet the New Tony Abbott, same as the old authoritarian, dishonest, and frankly unelectable old Tony Abbott.

The Leopard Man (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Tony Abbott caption competition

I’m preparing my budget reply but I don’t know what to say.  Any ideas, people?

Update: I love this, courtesy of Mick P.

The Opposition Says . . .

Follow @MigloCW

At the time of writing the 2012 Budget had not yet been handed down, yet the media is filling its sites with “the Opposition says . . .” rubbish.  Here are some examples:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott told his shadow cabinet that while Mr Swan would trumpet a budget surplus, it would be a surplus based on “fiddled figures”.

“Whether it will be the things that have been moved from next year into this year, whether it’s the things that are moved off the budget that should be on the budget, it will be a cooked books surplus,” he said.

Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey questioned how Labor could be returning the budget to surplus after a series of budget leaks suggested it was spending more than it was saving.

“Wayne Swan doesn’t know whether he is Santa Claus or the Christmas Grinch,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“On the one hand the government is making large announcements and handing out money, and on the other hand they’re talking about tough cutbacks.”

Mr Hockey wants to see the detail of Mr Swan’s “loss carry-back” benefit before supporting it, claiming it is an idea stolen from the coalition.

“I wish they would stop stealing our initiatives. They lambasted it at the time. Now they’re doing it,” he said.

He also refused to say whether he would back a new education rebate.

He described the government’s revamp of the education tax refund into twice-yearly payments as “dressing mutton up as lamb”.

Mr Hockey said the policy change amounted to giving out money to people whether they needed it or not.

Monday in Canberra

Follow @MigloCW

Sue earlier wrote:

Miglo

We have been following the “slippery slipper” across a few stories . But it may end up with its own thread with the revelations today in the Age.

Just how many Liberals are involved will soon be left to the bookies, I guess.

Who knew what and when is like the classic defense “I smoked dope but never inhaled”

So getting to today’s story, we have Julie Bishop, Tony Abbott and Warren Entsch.

Tony Abbott must think the James Murdoch style of answer to probing questions is good.  As according to Warren Entsch, his message to Tony must have gone to the message bank, “cause he didn’t pick up”.

Then as a side dish to the main course we have good ol’ Barnaby Joyce with “he seems only slightly less dodgy than Slipper”.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/opposition-slipper-story-slips-20120506-1y72f.html#ixzz1u85eO4os

Due to not having a lot of spare time on my hands I wasn’t able to meet Sue’s request, however, in a moment of inspiration I thought I’d build this post around her comment and throw it open as a Monday in Canberra thread where we can discuss the news coming out of our capital.

Over to you.

(Photo credit: paolaharvey)

Unforgettable

Politics has dominated the mainstream media and the social media in 2012 and we bloggers have responded with some great media of our own.  I’m enjoying the quality discourse this has provided.

But for today, to entertain those who might want to briefly drift their focus away from the mental whirlpool of politics, like Wixxy’s latest topic, I present something with a difference.  My regular Sunday Abbott bashing frenzy can wait another week.  He’ll still be there in a week’s time providing us with something to mock.  One of his uncontrolled thought bubbles will float to the surface over the next few days and his motor mouth will do the rest and bingo, another blog topic will be born.

Until then, feel free to partake in Unforgettable.

Unforgettable is about those events throughout your life that you will never, unsurprisingly, forget. Those events whose details have stuck in your mind. You remember what you were doing when news of them came through.  They may have shocked you. Or saddened you. Or thrilled you. They might have changed your life. They, not necessarily, may have directly involved you or they may have been totally unrelated to you.

It might have been the moment you met your future husband or wife, your first day at school, or maybe world breaking events such as the terrorist attacks on 9/11 or the death of Princess Diana. You tell us.

Four events stick in my mind and I can still recall the emotions I felt and what I was doing at the time.  Here they are:

1. The assassination of President Kennedy.  I was in a class at school when a teacher came in sobbing with the news.  Even at my young age I knew of the appeal of JFK and that he was a good man.  Apparently being President of the USA was a big thing.
2. The Beatles in Adelaide.  Sadly, I missed it as I was living on Kangaroo Island.  The islanders were excited that the Fab Four would be coming to the island to do some fishing, which turned out to be another media beat-up.  It was the first beat-up I ever experienced and wondered if the media really behaved like that.
3. The sacking of the Whitlam Government.  I was angry and bought a bottle of Jim Beam to drown my sorrows.  It changed nothing, but I acquired a taste for Jim Beam.
4. The assassination of John Lennon. I was on an army exercise at the time.  I felt so sick, I couldn’t eat.  It was shattering for someone who idolised him, and there were millions like me.  His death killed everyone’s dream that the Beatles might perform together again.

The John F. Kennedy Assassination (Photo credit: Jesse757)

There’s gotta be a better way

How often have you encountered a situation whose events are so ludicrous that you are left simply wondering why someone hasn’t thought of a better way of managing those events?

I had one recently.

I dropped into my chemist and left a prescription for Diabex XR 1000 while I went off on an important shopping mission (cigars, booze).  When returning to collect the script I was dutifully informed they were out of stock. None were available anywhere. Not a problem, I still had enough to last over a week.

Yesterday, with my supply running low I returned with the prescription. Same story. Can’t get any yet as the distributor is out of stock.  Apparently the factory burnt down (wow, that’s original). They suggested I try the 500 milligram dose, as long as I didn’t mind rattling from all those tablets.

“Fine, I’ll take them”.

“Sorry, you’ll need a prescription from your doctor”.

Why mention them in the first place, would have been an obvious response. Instead I humorously snarled: “Great. So I have to make an appointment with my doctor who is usually booked out for a week in advance, leave work early and sit in his waiting room for the customary two hours before parting with $75 for a prescription for medication you know I take”.

It wasn’t as if I was asking for a larger dose for goodness sake.

There’s gotta be a better system than this.  How about those poor buggers who don’t have private transport, or who can’t get away from work so easily?  What a horrible inconvenience!  Worse still, what about the poor soul about to drop dead?

Last year I was in Rome and came down with a severe dose of the very deadly man flu. Noticing a chemist near to hotel I wandered in and after moaning to the poor young lady behind the counter that I had only moments to live I asked if there was possibly a life-saving doctor nearby.

“You don’t need one” she said. “I can sell you the medication you need. You don’t need a prescription”.

Brilliant. I took the drug and was a happy fellow. Until Paris.

In Paris, shock horror, I discovered I hadn’t brought enough of my Diabex with me. Frantic, I tried my luck with a chemist and produced a letter from my doctor in vain hope of having some success.  Note to all: if ever you travel overseas carry with you a letter from your GP listing your medication.

Saints be praised, that’s all I needed in order to obtain medications. Why can’t it be that simple or logical in Australia?  It’s just one of those instances where we can’t do things effectively, efficiently or economically in this country. Can you think of some other examples?

Returning to my saga with the chemist, after candidly demanding some logic they offered to phone my doctor to see if they can supply me with the 500 mg dose of Diabex. They phoned me this morning with the good news he’d given the OK and my script was available for collection.

When I called in after work to collect the script I noticed they had only given me two week’s supply.

“Oh. If you need more you’ll have to get another prescription from your doctor”.

Sigh.

Why can’t we take a leaf out of Europe?  There are some things they just do better than us.

Chemist (Photo credit: rutty)

Pedlars of Fear

Tony Abbott’s ‘mandate’ to scare every Australian half to death about the consequences of the ‘carbon tax’, whilst annoyingly desperate and overly passionate, is not unusual behaviour from a Coalition leader.  I have witnessed this code of conduct from Liberal leaders with monotonous regularity over the last couple of decades.

They have generally been powerful enough to win elections for them.

Malcolm Fraser provides an exception.  During the election campaign in 1983 he stridently attacked Labor’s financial integrity suggesting that the banking system would be ruined if the Commie Labor Party was elected and thus peoples’ money would be safer kept under the bed than in a bank.  There was no substance in this claim.  It was a failed attempt to scare the electorate.  In 1983 the electorate wasn’t as ignorant as they would later turn out to be.

Future attempts have been more successful as the average IQ of the electorate plummeted.

Opinion polls in 2001 showed that the Howard Government was facing massive defeat.  The terrorist attacks of September 2001 changed all that, but not enough to Howard’s satisfaction.  He was able to terrorise the gullible electorate into believing that terrorists were hopping onto any rickety old boat heading to Australia and only he could protect us from the murderous intentions of these alleged evildoers.  Abdullah the Butcher and his mates were coming to sacrifice us all.  Oh how different it might have been if an election wasn’t around the corner.  From 1996 to that point of time 221 boatloads of refugees sailed unhindered into Australian waters.  Number 222 – just after the September 2011 attacks -  ran into a bit of trouble and running to its aid was the Norwegian vessel the Tampa.

I’m sure that most readers here will have fresh in their mind the stench surrounding the politicisation of the Tampa incident and how it was the turning point for Howard’s fortunes so I won’t recap it here. Dissecting individual incidents is not the intention of the post but will be welcomed in reader’s comments.

Howard didn’t need any more scare campaigns until 2004, and incidentally, during his calling of an election.  Electing a Labor Government, he warned, would cost you the family home.  Interest rates would go through the roof and as a result his little Aussie battlers would lose the roof over their heads.  He was very affective in pushing this message across, taking aim at Labor’s historic spending patterns and Mark Latham’s record as Mayor of Liverpool, both of which were irrelevant points in this election.  Didn’t he look stupid when he rode us through eleven straight interest rate rises over the next three years?  But it mattered not.  We had been saved from the merciless Abdullah and on that point we needed to be reminded.

Dr Hanif helped him.

Howard had to convince the dumbed down electorate that his unpopular counter terrorism legislation was for the good of the country.  It protected us from the likes of the despicable and ill-intentioned Dr Hanif.  It would protect us from every body and every thing that Howard saw as a threat to his battling Aussies.  We were saved by his fridge magnets.  Terrorist alerts were upgraded every five minutes and I have it on good advice that these always coincided with political maneuvers.  They were not real.  Howard only wanted us to be afraid.  Very afraid.  The only thing he wanted to protect was his job.  The terrorists, to him, were the Labor Party.

So were Aborigines, in particular the Stolen Generation.  Saying sorry to them would send the country broke.  An apology to the Stolen Generations would have legal ramifications and pave the way for huge compensation bills.  And that was the unproven basis of his argument, which was rabidly supported from those loyal battlers who didn’t mind the interest rate rises.  It didn’t matter if you lost the family home, just as long as those Aborigines didn’t get any money.  During Howard’s gloating about the healthy state of the economy he had the complete morons fearful that we couldn’t afford to pay some Aborigines compensation for the mistreatment they had received at the hands of the State.  You can read about his hypocrisy here.

Now we have prophet Abbott as the pedlar f fear.  Today it’s the carbon tax, which by the time of the next election may well be proven to not be as damaging as he squawks.  He’ll have to move onto something else.  On the eve of the next election what will it be?  My money’s on boat people.

John Howard (Photo credit: Takver)

Could Abbott Deliver?

Tony Abbott keeps telling everybody, probably even the Queen, the Governor General, the British PM and definitely Rupert Murdoch that we’re a whisper away from a federal election, the result of which will see him take up residence in The Lodge, his rightful home.

He could be right.

But he is only focusing on getting his hands on the keys to the door.  God knows what he plans to do after that.

He hasn’t told us!

Well, he sort of has.  We know he’s going to stop the boats, rip up the NBN, tear down public departments, give the billionaires billions more, return a surplus by within the hour, scrap the carbon tax and save us from the fires of hell, but for a man who’s going to be Prime Minister by this time next month I’d say he’s fairly well under-prepared for the job.  Is he that convinced the electorate will punish Labor that he only need to rely on this?  I believe he does.  Why else would he have nothing to offer?

Imagine starting a new job and when you turned up on your first day you simply sat on your bum and did absolutely nothing.  We’ve seen that in New South Wales.  The job’s too hard for the new kids on the block.  They knew they’d win the election so took nothing of substance to it.  Abbott mirrors this.  The man has absolutely no idea what he’s going to do.

Neither do we.

He’s a bit like the pub with no beer.

It’s a bit of a worry than a man a whisper away from an election has shown us nothing that he stands for.  I imagine it’d be easy to deliver nothing when you stand for nothing.  I doubt he could even deliver a pizza.

What do you think?

This is a copy of an earlier topic here at the Café which I thought would be a good follow up on yesterday’s open forum.

Open forum: is Tony Abbott damaging our country?

Sometimes a blogger at the Café will say something that is worthy of a topic by itself.  Jane did just that yesterday when she wrote that Tony Abbott:

. . . couldn’t care less about the damage he is doing to this country as long as he brings down the government.

Since taking over the leadership of the Opposition Tony Abbott has only on goal and that is to be Prime Minister.  The damage he causes along the way in inconsequential.

He has trashed Parliament, he has denigrated the position of the Prime Minister, he threatens to take us back into the Dark Ages.

He wants to take from the poor and give to the rich.  He tells us our country is an economic and social mess and the media believe him, as do many people.

He hasn’t a good word to say about our country.

I could go on and on, but as an open forum I’d rather throw this open for your views.

Over to you.

Tony Abbott don't risk him (Photo credit: haikugirloz)