So this is what everyone’s been laughing about

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The social media has been going viral about “80 years in Tasmania according to Abbott” and I had no idea what anybody was talking about. A quick Google search with a few key words soon enlightened me. Here it is:

In a forum in Launceston last night, Mr Abbott made the ridiculous claim that it would take 80 years for the NBN to be fully rolled out across the state.

“Malcolm (Turnbull) reckons that at the current rate of rollout it will take 80 years before the whole of Tasmania has broadband rolled out under this Government.”- Tony Abbott, Sky News Forum, 25/7/2013.

Knowing what it was about, I too can laugh.

Really, where did he get that one from? If he had have said something like five or ten years then I might have found his statement somewhat credible. But 80 years! Come on, who does he think he’s fooling? And where is someone from the media asking him to back up this latest brain fart?

How does that saying go? “In your guts, you know he’s nuts”.

With statements like the one above, how could you possibly argue with that saying?

Let’s Pretend

The Australian Independent Media Network

Guest post by Doug Evans

Let’s pretend.

Let’s play a little game of make believe. At the moment it seems that everyone is talking about Australia’s enormous intractable problem of asylum seekers and how to deal with them. But this is in large measure a function of the last decade of policy history in this area. What if we could roll it all back and construct exactly the asylum seeker policy we believe we should have. What would its main features be? Here is my attempt.

1. ONSHORE PROCESSING

• I think all processing of refugee/asylum applications should be carried out onshore. 80 or 90% of Australia’s asylum seekers arrive by plane with valid papers, usually a tourist visa and simply overstay before applying for asylum. They are processed onshore why not the rest? Australia is the only industrialized country in the world (out of some 44 countries) to have offshore…

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Who looks the best?

Rather than a post, I pose a question. Over the last month, who has been the better performer: Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott?

This isn’t a question about Labor versus Liberal, who the polls tell us are fairly even, but Rudd versus Abbott.

In that regards the polls tell us that Rudd has taken the points. No doubt he is more popular with the electorate that many of us, including myself, gave him credit for. Over the last month we’ve been given the opportunity to once again see how he performs as a Prime Minister, but more importantly, if he is performing well enough to be given the chance to lead us again after September (or whenever the election is held).

The man he is up against, Tony Abbott, in my opinion looks rattled. He has just as much chance of winning the election as Rudd has, but leading into the election he simply hasn’t look prime minister material. He looks reactive, rather than proactive. For example, his latest border protection plan – the one with the silly name that currently escapes me – really comes across as a ‘back of the envelope policy’.

But I digress. Back to the question: Who looks the best going into the election? Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott?

The “Don’t Look At Me” Newspoll

Archie’s on the money!

Ærchies Archive - Digital Detritus

A couple of weeks ago I was stunned to see that the widely reported Newspoll showed a 50/50 split in voting intentions. This seemed to be an aberration as Newspoll has not been closer than 4 points for several years. Although, for the first time, we were being told that there is a “Margin of Error” of around 3%. So the result could be up to 47/53 either way. We were left to draw our own conclusions.

Obviously the change from Julia Gillard to Kevin Rudd had had a big effect on the electorate. This hurt me on a personal level as I consider Julia Gillard to have been our best Prime Minister since Whitlam. Still, the effect would have to be confirmed over the next poll or two.

So it was with interest that I saw a new Newspoll on Tuesday. Rudd had had quite a good week…

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I laughed ’til I cried

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Sometimes when Joe Hockey opens his mouth the most stupidest things spill out. Such was the case when he complained yesterday that the Opposition was drowned out by celebrity’ Kev. For your amusement here is the complaint filled article in full:

Shadow treasurer Joe Hockey has complained that coalition policy announcements have been drowned out by “celebrity” Kevin Rudd.

Mr Hockey again referred to the prime minister as “Kevin Kardashian” and said sooner or later people would see through him.

He insisted the coalition had big plans for Australia and its pitch was far broader than just abolishing the carbon tax and stopping the boats.

“We’ve been making announcements every day for our plans for Australia’s future, but they’ve been drowned out by the celebrity Kevin Rudd,” he told the Ten Network Bolt Report program.

Mr Hockey said Mr Rudd was all smoke and mirrors.

He said Australia could end up paying social security and Medicare benefits to asylum seekers for the rest of their lives under the PNG solution.

The carbon price was also set to rise to $38 a tonne under Mr Rudd’s move to an emissions trading scheme, he said.

But climate change minister Mark Butler said it was Opposition Leader Tony Abbott who predicted Australians would have to pay $100 for a roast dinner and that some towns would be wiped off the map under the carbon tax.

“The time has come for the opposition to get off the political posturing,” he told Sky News.

Oh, the irony. Does this bloke expect us to take him seriously?

He’s good for a laugh, nothing else.

bullshit.com.au – otherwise known as news.com.au

In my article The AIMN, The growing irrelevance of the Murdoch media I wrote:

Another direction we’ve seen the MM (Murdoch media) lean towards are those stories that are trivial, narrow, shallow and sensationalist. And often untrue.

I’ll admit that not everything they write is trivial, narrow, shallow, sensationalist or untrue. They often broach topics that are in the national interest, politically or socially, but they sure do stuff it up when it comes to the headline. Take this headline: Riot on Nauru in wake of Rudd PNG asylum boat solution. Then read the article. Here’s a paragraph from it:

There was confusion over the motivation for the riot, with some reports from Nauru suggesting it was linked to the Mr Rudd’s hard line announcement. This has not been confirmed (my bold), but chants of “freedom” were heard at the centre as the riot ignited.

So it had not been confirmed. What has been confirmed is that bullshit.com.au, I mean news.com.au intend to take over with Kevin Rudd where they left off with Julia Gillard. That is, a Labor Prime Minister is an evil person who is responsible for everything that’s wrong in this world.

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PNG

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You’d have all heard by now Kevin Rudd’s announcement that any asylum-seeker arriving in Australia by boat will be sent to Papua New Guinea for processing and resettlement. You can read it here on news.com. It’s not worth me repeating what the main features of this announcement are, rather, preferring instead to hear your views.

Personally, my wish is that asylum seekers be processed in Australia with the view of having them settled in Australia. But neither do I endorse people smuggling nor like the idea that people drown because of the people smugglers.

Will this fix the latter?

That’s a load of rubbish, Andrew

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Following the drowning of four asylum seekers off Christmas Island yesterday, Andrew Bolt had the audacity to comment that:

. . . if these people drowned under Tony Abbott, especially after a boat turnaround, imagine the media uproar. Yet Rudd’s policy has contributed to the deaths of more than 1000 people and a complicit media lays no blame at all.

Well, that’s a load of rubbish, Andrew.

Why?

Because only a small section of our community are despicable enough to attempt to draw political mileage out of the deaths of innocent people. Most people are appalled at these deaths, whether they be Rudd supporters, Abbott supporters, or vote for Daffy Duck. And most people are intelligent or realistic enough to accept that no one person can be held responsible for these deaths.

You do not fall into that category.

The condemnation you received over your comment in 2010 that the Gillard Government had blood on its hands after drownings off Christmas Island have done little to thwart your spring-heeled eagerness to use deaths for political mileage. I’ve not encountered any other journalist so keen to do so.

No, the media isn’t complicit like you say it is. It’s just that even they have some morals.

How to make a perfect meal

Pick a subject. Any subject. Then get Tony Abbott to talk about it.

Then listen to him make a perfect meal of it.

In the last couple of weeks we’ve been treated to a couple of absolute gems to add to what has become a mile long list of ignorant or stupid statements. Each one more ludicrous than the last. The laughter from his revelation that Malcolm Turnbull invented the Internet in Australia had hardly died down when we were treated with this:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has poured scorn on Labor’s new plan to move to an emissions trading scheme one year early, describing an ETS as ”not a true market”.

”Just ask yourself what an emissions trading scheme is all about. It’s a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no one,” he said, when addressing reporters in Camden, in south-west Sydney, on Monday.

Unbelievable. But true to form. He should have learned back in July 2011 to keep his mouth shut after this ground-breaker: “It’s actually pretty hard to do this because carbon dioxide is invisible and it’s weightless and you can’t smell it.”

Science clearly isn’t his forté. Here’s my all-time science favourite: “Climate change is a relatively new political issue, but it’s been happening since the earth’s beginning. The extinction of the dinosaurs is thought to have been associated with climate change”.

I love these Abbottisms. A brief search of the internet reveals many more of them (and I’m sure whatever I find you’ve probably seen before anyway) but regardless of what you find I want you to consider what Penny Wong had to say yesterday: “I’d ask you to just pause for a minute and imagine Tony Abbott at an international meeting . . . “.

Think about it. Think long and hard about it.

Can you just imagine Tony Abbott with a microphone to the world? We’d be the laughing stock of the entire planet if we had a Prime Minister who made a perfect meal of everything he tried to talk about on the international stage. Abbottisms might be funny. Incompetence isn’t.

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All of a sudden everybody loves Malcolm

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I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve argued (literally) that the LNP should replace Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull. It’s not because I like Turnbull, but because I dread the thought of Abbott leading this country. I won’t go over my reasons; they’ve been given currency on this site enough over the last three years.

Just recently there has been similar talk all over the social media about replacing Abbott, albeit because the polls have turned pear-shaped for him. There are serious concerns about him leading the Coalition to victory in September and unsurprisingly, Malcolm Turnbull is touted as a genuine replacement. Now the mainstream media, for so long content to guide Abbott into the Lodge, have come to the realisation that they might have been holding the wrong hand. From The Age this morning comes Liberal Party’s best bet: switch to Turnbull. I’ve picked out a few telling sentences:

Tony Abbott now looks an even bet to emulate his former boss John Hewson (Abbott was Hewson’s media adviser), who in 1993 lost what was widely considered an unloseable ballot against Paul Keating.

In their own self-interest, the Liberals would be wise to at least consider replacing Tony Abbott with Malcolm Turnbull. It has long been clear the two leaders Australian voters would like to choose between are Rudd and Turnbull.

But the pivotal assessment is which leader would maximise the Coalition’s prospects of winning office. Many Liberals must be thinking their chances of winning a seat or holding on to one would be better were Turnbull reinstalled in the position he only lost by one vote to Abbott, primarily because Turnbull supported a market-based system to put a price on carbon emissions.

Once the election campaign proper begins, it is hoped there will be increasing focus throughout the community on policy rather than politics, and on ideas rather than ideology. Abbott has excelled in opposing, but has not inspired voters with policy ideas.

So, if Abbott is to win this election, he will need to convince voters he has the policies that will improve their lives. A large part of that will be determined by the substance and detail of the policies. But much, too, will depend on sales skills, and it appears Turnbull cuts through better than Abbott. Outside of the corridors of Canberra, people like Turnbull. There is a lingering, almost intangible, hesitation about Abbott, if the polls are to be given credence.

Elections are won at the margin; they are decided by swinging voters in tight seats. I suspect there are many who will not vote Liberal with Abbott at the helm but who would readily support the party were Turnbull leader.

This prospect might well become increasingly enticing should the Coalition continue to see polls telling it that it may be poised to lose an unloseable election primarily because its leader lacks appeal.

There is an X-factor in political leadership. Turnbull has it. Rudd has it. Julia Gillard lost it. And Abbott probably does not have it.

Well, I certainly agree with most of that. Do you?

Malcolm Turnbull (Photo credit: Wikipedia)