An Open Letter to the Parliamentary Labor Party

I will cheerfully admit that I have been a long term Labor man…the concept of greatest good for the greatest amount of people and your focus on socially responsible policies has always resonated with me.  Being the only party concerned with long term vision and projects instead of governing for the next election has been a refreshing change from the Howard years of middle class welfare and pork barrelling.

After the events of last night however, my disillusionment is total and you will never receive my vote again. That fact that you could even consider promoting to leader the one individual that has been continually undermining your every effort to govern through this Parliament is just baffling and to my eyes unforgivable.

Despite whatever spurious justification you may get out of polling hypotheticals, you have effectively consigned the ALP to at least 2 terms in Opposition and possibly facing a Queensland-style wipeout, unless of course Abbott is as useless as I suspect and you might scrape in after 3 years.  By then the damage will have been done and you will have allowed the legacy of the fine work that has been achieved in this hung Parliament to be destroyed…all to satisfy one person’s need for revenge and others’ needs to keep their job.

If you think that the media and Opposition don’t have a raft of anti-Rudd advertising ready to roll you are kidding yourself, especially when you have handed them the “untrustworthy Rudd” angle with him breaking his word on challenging.

You have sacrificed a thoroughly capable and dynamic leader and replaced her with a proved liar and betrayer, who will stop at nothing to achieve what he sees as rightfully his…the position of Prime Minister.  In effect he is the ALP version of Abbott.

I briefly considered becoming a member of the ALP to show my support for PM Gillard but that will never happen now.

I will never vote for the ALP while the likes of Rudd, Shorten and Fitzgibbon are involved…and I am not alone.

I will also make sure that my family and friends do the same.

Enjoy your time in the political wilderness…I hope you learn from it.

Death Throes of Australian Democracy

It’s been quite a long time since I last posted. I gave it away because I got sick of writing the same thing every time…media is crap, Opposition are nothing, Rudd is white-anting, blah blah blah.

However, after the insanity of last night I thought I’d saddle up the keyboard once more and dive right in.

We the Australian public should be disgusted and mortified by the calibre of media we are forced to put up with.  Without a shadow of a doubt they make the crapulence of Fleet Street look like Woodward & Bernstein in comparison.  For the past 3 years they have blatantly ignored their role of keeping the public informed on what the Government is doing and how it affects them, and have instead turned Australian politics into a reality show by focussing on gossip and speculation instead of policy and substance.

The past two weeks has been a perfect example of how crap they really are.  Despite it being well known that Rudd backers were making crap up and leaking to the media, they still accepted it with no hesitation or any thought of verifying it…you know, doing their job.  Couple this with them actually believing that Christopher Pyne has sources within the ALP and that he gets phone messages from ALP supporters and there is a yawning credibility gap just begging to be filled.  The cherry on top was the absolutely appalling interview Leigh Sales did with Craig Emerson…the transcript is pretty much documentary evidence that the media are all actively working against the Government in any way that they possibly can.

Which all finally leads to the events of yesterday, starting with the mystery “petition”, or as Possum Comitatus coined it the “ninja petition”…no-one had seen it at all but it was apparently still there.  It’s not hard to work out that the Ruddbots had floated this out there to the uncritical and complicit media in an attempt to use “popular opinion” i.e. media beat-up to force the PM’s hand and cause the spill.  Unfortunately it worked, and because certain  ALP politicians have the testicles of tiny little girls they folded and believed that Rudd was the answer to all their polling woes and would lead them to the Promised Land…sacrificing one of the best leaders the country has had to date who performed superbly under extremely trying conditions.

Now the ALP have effectively rewarded someone who has betrayed and actively worked against them for the past 3 years by giving them the leadership.  This is the same as making Graham Richardson ALP President…a ludicrous proposition in anyone’s language.

I’m confused as to why they think that Rudd will be their saviour at the election…surely it can’t be because of some shonky polling about alterntive PMs?  Surely they are aware that the figures would be gamed by LNP supporters throwing a cat amongst the pigeons…much the same way that ALP supporters do the same for Turnbull?  Surely they are aware that the LNP would have reams of anti-Rudd propaganda ready for a campaign, including his own behaviour over the past 3 years?  Surely they are aware that this just reinforces the LNP/MSM meme that Labor is not fit to govern because they can’t keep their own house in order?  Surely they aren’t so blindingly stupid to think that these events reflect in any way favourably on them in anyone’s eyes apart from Rudd fanatics?

Of course the answer to all those questions above is Yes, they really are that stupid.

I want to congratulate the mainstream media for finally achieving the goal they have worked so hard for over the past 3 years on behalf of their LNP partners…the removal of our first female Prime Minister.  Of course they were supposed to achieve this by Christmas 2010, but better late than never hey?

They ran a really strong campaign and were rarely burdened by things such as ethics, facts or even a modicum of self-awareness.  How else do you explain them predicting “Gillard gone” every week for the past 3 years, resulting in 1.5 spills up until the end last night?  Not the best strike rate in the world, but that lack of self-awareness comes in really handy in these situations…how else can they pat themselves on the back otherwide?  Reading Twitter last night was a window into the tiny little minds of the Canberra Press Gallery.  Chief Arseclown Phil Coorey was his erudite best with a sarcastic “so that #leadershit stuff was all made up huh”…conveniently “forgetting” that he has been peddling the same brand of crap every week for the past 3 years…hell even a broken watch is right twice a day, and his strike rate was well below that.

He (and by extension the entire CPG) are either blissfully unaware that they have been well and truly used by the Ruddbots to force this issue, or as is more likely they knew what would happen and didn’t care because of the theatre of it…never mind what the ramifications would be for the country, it would mean sales/hits/ratings.

You can never rule out good old revenge as a motive as well, after all they have been permanently pissed off that Gillard never sucked up to them and in fact made a point of calling them out on their shit…not that they tried to improve their ways or anything, they just tightened the spiral into the gutter that they were on.

Anyway that’s it for me.  At one point I briefly considered joining the ALP to show my support for Gillard, but now they can get fucked.

I will never vote for or be associated with a party that rewards self-interested, betraying narcissists and gutless poll watchers.  They get my second last preference…LNP will always be last. It’s time for the Independents to reap the rewards…who knows we may get another Windsor or Oakeshott.

You’ve done your dash.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 15,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 3 Film Festivals

Click here to see the complete report.

MSM bottoms out

I know it’s been a loooong time between drinks, but my rage-o-meter has tripped off the scale this week and it’s either vent or explode, so without further ado…

This week has proven beyond a doubt to even the most insular of shut-ins that the political media in our country is shit, in fact beyond shit they are an industrial fertiliser plant of crapulence foisted on the public.

With their bull-headed insistence on propagating the AWU non-troversy tirelessly and mindless despite even a subtle hint of anything approaching evidence of wrongdoing, even the most rigidly one-sided partisans are saying “dude, you’ve got nothing”.

And their partners in  crime the Coalition have only succeeded in showing how truly incompetent they are, with Julie Bishop sacrificing her own career to shield Abbott, and then culminating in the LNP being absent from Parliament for the passing of the NDIS legislation…a watershed moment for the Australian people.  Instead they are scurrying around feverishly trying to shore up their lame-arse “scandal” as it unravels from beneath them.

Of course the Old Media are with them every step of the way, because to inject any reality into proceedings would show that they have bet all their money on the wrong horse…the nag that fell over out of the gate.  They fail to realise that the public has long since woken up to that fact that they are pushing their own agenda and do not has the public’s interest in heart…you only have to recall the spectacular fail they manged over the misogyny speech.

Now a lot of people would come to the conclusion from this week’s goings on that all of the OM is in the pocket of the LNP and is merely their propaganda arm, but apart from News Limited I think this is probably off the mark.

I think it’s something a bit more callous and cynical than that.  For the past 6 or 7 years the OM has reported on politics like they report on sport…there is always a winner or loser, emotive terms like “debacle” are thrown around willy-nilly regardless of how applicable they are, and even the most lopsided arguments are given some semblence of faux-balance to make it appear that things are closer than they are (no-one likes a walkover).

It has now gotten to the point where every single event in the political sphere is reported through the prism of sensationalism…the more hyped and emoted the better.  When it comes to dry policy passing through the Parliament, it doesn’t have the “sexy” factor that appeals to the “punters” so it doesn’t get reported on…so instead we get reams of Gillard is dressed funny, she has a big arse, Rudd is on TV it must mean he wants the leadership etc. ad nauseum until it finally culminates in the shocking beat up of nothing we have seen this week.

All for money…which is the end result.  They want sales/page hits to satisfy their advertisers and the truth can go and get stuffed until it becomes sexy…in the meantime “look over there, it’s a Ruddstoration”.

To mind the only thing we can do is to crack down on this shit in the media and borrow Canada’s truth in reporting law.  After all, you don’t see Fox News in Canada do you?  That can only be a good thing.

 

UPDATE:  The Opposition’s week of #fail rounded itself off nicely yesterday when Tony Abbott accused the Prime Minister of criminal behaviour based solely on an inaccurate media report from Mark Baker.  The report initially stated that the WA Registrar asked Julia Gillard for confirmation that the association “was not linked to a union”, when it actually asked if the association was a union.  Of course it was not and the PM’s reply stated this very non-controversial fact, leaving the Coalition’s “smoking gun” as a vary damp squib.  This left Abbott and Bishop with absolutely nothing to stand on…and in fact highlighted that Abbott is such a lazy prick that he can’t do his own research.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is almost exactly a re-run of UteGate with the LOTO making unfounded accusations of criminality against the PM with zero evidence.  Following the precedents set earlier this should be the end of Abbott and Bishop well and truly…unless of course the Coalition are massive hypocrites and won’t uphold their own principles…….

 

It’s bottom of the barrel time

It’s becoming readily apparent just how desperate the Opposition is getting in their efforts to topple the Government.

Before we go into the details of their effort in subverting democracy in this country, let’s have a quick look at the beat-up checklist:

1. Is it leading up to a Newspoll week?…..check.
2. Did the Opposition have a bad week?….check.
3. Did the Government have a good week?…check.
4. Was Tony Abbott shown up to be a hypocritical arseclown?…check.

So having met all the criteria it’s full steam ahead for yet another beat-up over something trivial to attempt to derail the Government.

So what rabbit do they pull out of a hat?  Nothing less than a 15 year old corruption slur against the PM, which was disproved at the time and has done so every time they wheeled it out for another airing.  Of course, the talking heads are treating this like earth shattering new revelations but it has been raised at least once before and shot down rapidly.  When it was raised yesterday by the paragon of relevance Paul Kelly *snigger* the PM basically said put up or shut up…as in send the allegation on to the relevant people or STFU.  Didn’t that get the pantswetters all excited.

The was no other luminary than that bastion of fairness Graham Richardson (sarcasm alert) spruiking that the PM handled it poorly and she is in “big trouble with caucus” before once more floating out a hint of Ruddstoration.  In short he pretty much hit all the beat-up memes quite thoroughly, with no regard for the reality of the world that we live in.

And the crapulence cherry on the top of shithouse journalism in this country?  Some faux-concern that the PM was being disrespectful by wearing a bronze medal in a photo that she was obviously given by an Olympian.

 

Seriously, it boggles the mind that the LNP PR wing mainstream media in this country can be this shit and still take itself seriously as a necessary part of our democracy.

The Queensland Chainsaw Massacre

You’ve got to say one thing about the LNP…they are remarkably consistent.  As we’ve seen recently, it’s most consistent about putting ideology before good governing.

It pretty much started from the get-go, with the “jobs-for-the-boys” scenario of plum DG positions for LNP “luminaries” and continued with the “audit” of the financial situation.  With Costello on board for that one you could almost guarantee that it would get the result they were after and lo and behold, the situation in Queensland was “catastrophic” with us going to be “$100 billion” in debt by the end of the decade.  Of course in the fine print they said that this was if we got natural disasters every year and the Government didn’t do anything at all to correct the budget, but why let reality intrude on a big stick to beat the former government with.

One very under-reported section of this audit ties in with public service staffing, or over-staffing as the case may be.  The report recommended a freeze on hiring and that natural attrition would do it’s part to resolve the issue.

Naturally Campbell decided this wouldn’t be good enough and decided that a scorched earth policy would be best and went about ripping the guts out of the public service.  To date 7000 jobs have gone and today it was announced that a further 4000 would go from Qld Health…of course this would not affect “frontline services” in any way at all.

These morons in charge are either too stupid to realise that the fewer back of house staff available means their workload would need to be taken up by frontline staff leading to a reduction in the frontline services, or once again they don’t care and it’s all aboard the good ship Ideology.

Quite frankly they have stuffed themselves massively in a few months.  By going on this massive rampage against the public service even the died in the wool conservative voter realises that there will be fewer people available to provide help.  Couple this with the fact that the increased unemployment has flow-on effects to other areas particularly retail, and it doesn’t take a genius to realise that mass unemployment doesn’t solve any problems.

I’m sure they are hoping that they can do this early in the piece, then sweeten the pie with Howard-style vote buying in the year before the election and all will be right.

Hopefully the Qld people, in particular the public service employees in Ashgrove, will remember the contempt they have been treated with and cast their votes accordingly.  We can also hope that they get rid of the idiots in charge of the public service union like Alex Scott who for some inexplicable reason thought that the LNP could be trusted to honour their promises.  Anyone who has lived through Campbell’s reign at the BCC should have known better.

 

UPDATE:  And it just keeps getting better.  There are reports today that Campbell has decided to change the definition of “frontline”, meaning that up to 25000 extra public servants no longer meet that criteria.  That’s just standard LNP…if you don’t like the result move the goalposts until it suits.

Ruddstoration mania

There’s now 3 things certain in life…death, taxes and a Ruddstoration beat-up.

In fact it’s now becoming scarily predictable when a Ruddstoration beat-up will waft out of the media orifices.  As far as I can tell it’s based on the following factors:

1. The LNP beat-up de jour is dying a painful death
2. Tony Abbott is out of the country.
3. The government is getting clear air/faint praise/no brickbats
4. A Newspoll is due that week
5. The Canberra press gallery are bored and have nothing to write about.

It wouldn’t surprise me if all of these stories are initiated by LNP staffers and fed to their public relations arm (the MSM) on a regular basis.  After all they have nothing else to offer the country and certainly have no principles at all…at least none that don’t revolve around claiming power and feathering their own nests.

The fact is that Rudd is insanely unpopular, regardless of what the polls say.  Breakdowns have repeatedly shown that his popularity figures have been gamed by LNP supporters…ALP supporters by and large don’t want a bar of him.  The same applies to Turnbull’s popularity figures being gamed by ALP supporters…not that you’ll hear anything about anyone being more popular than the Mad Monk.

It boils down to a fundamental choice by the ALP…do you want to be seen as a party that wants to govern the country or a party that wants to win elections?  The LNP are the latter type and you can see what contempt they hold the average Aussie in…all they are is walking votes.  Have a look at the lived experience of LNP governments in Qld, NSW and Vic if you want to see what a country under Abbott will look like…sends shivers down your spine.

Australians love a fighter and have no time for softcocks.  If the Government decides to switch leaders before the election they will be seen as being the ultimate softcocks bowing to the media and opinion polls.  An election will be called straight away if the Indies don’t immediately switch sides and the ALP will be thoroughly smashed…you’re dreaming if you don’t think the LNP and media will wheel out all the old Rudd attacks again.

The ALP need to stay the course with Gillard and push back hard.  Now is the time to get stuck in.  Any time some media arse-clown throws specious bullshit at you return it back with a healthy serve of contempt and derision.  Don’t award them the respect they don’t have…if the MSM is not playing fair don’t play their game.  Get some decent media people on board and use the new media.  Go for viral videos with a bit of punch…viral videos always get on the news.  Above slap down all furphys the Opposition put out viciously and thoroughly.

The time to be fair and pleasant is over.  It’s time to bring out the warrior.  Bring on the scorched earth.

It’s the end of the world as we kn…wait hang on a second!!!

Just as the Mayan calendar “predicts” the end of the world this year, the Tony Abbott calendar earmarked the 1st of July as the end of the world in Australia and in particular Whyalla would be “disappearing off the map”.

To the surprise of abosultely no-one with a functioning synapse nothing of the sort has happened. Of course if you listened to the media the latest round of polling, coincidentally taken BEFORE the “tax” came in had most people believing that they would be worse off and that it was a bad idea yada yada yada.  How anyone would know this without actually experiencing it is something that should have immediately got everyone calling this for the massive bullshit that it is, but when you are in the thrall of the media pantswetters in their search for the next stick to beat the Government you know this is not going to happen.

The fact that Abbott made his ridiculous statement about Whyalla should be a gift for the Government.  They should be running vision of his statement coupled with photos of Whyalla at every opportunity, highlighting him for the useless prick he really is.

The time to expect the public to accept fact instead of the media/LNP driven ficiton we are exposed to is over.  The Government needs to start pushing back hard, highlighting every single ridiculous statement made against the carbon tax and highlighting it.  The sooner the public start to realise how hideously incompetent the Opposition is the better and now is the time to start.

Though please, no more Skyhooks covers Mr Emerson.

 

Professional journalism…R.I.P

With the massive job losses in Fairfax and Limited News, along with the ongoing decay in standards it is now apparent that the journalistic profession in Australia is on it’s last legs.

The rationale behind the job cuts is simply bizarre, with management obviously hoping that they can continue to produce a “quality” product with far fewer resources…because that’s a realistic approach isn’t it.  Before the job losses Fairfax and NEws Limited were competing in a race to the bottom, with the lowest common denominator the target audience of choice causing a death spiral of celebrity gossip and uninformed opinion supplanting news.  In effect Fairfax and New Ltd have become the Today Tonight and ACA of print media…not something to aspire to really.

The final proof of their complete degradation was of course the response to the Craig Thomson saga. Instead of focussing on the facts of the “scandal” they instead persist in following their own narrative, reinforcing it whenever possible with the flimsiest of rationales and ignoring any evidence to the contrary.

It has taken an independent news site and an amateur blogger to shine the brightest light on this, bringing forth all of the evidence of Kathy Jackson’s hypocrisy and dodgy dealings in the HSU.  Far from being the whistleblower poster child the MSM would like us to think she is, she is even more dodgy than Thomson is claimed to be with mounds of documentary evidence being provided to back up these claims…unlike the Thomson saga itself.

The work done by Peter Wicks on his own site and on the Independent Australia site on the Jacksonville saga is nothing short of classic journalism.  It is everything the mainstream media should be and are obviously to ashamed of themselves to follow up on because it casts them in such a poor light.

I urge anyone who has not already done so to read the Jacksonville articles to get an understanding of the type of person Kathy Jackson really is and why it is looking increasingly likely that Thomson’s claims of being set up are not complete bullshit.

I reckon Wicks deserves a Walkley for his efforts.

The Great Unhinging…now jumping the shark

One of the top headlines on this morning’s news was the “disturbing” image of some anti-Tony Abbott posters in Tanya Plibersek’s electoral office.  This being one of them in fact:

With atypical po-faced seriousness, they proclaimed this and the other poster as “homophobic”, “racist”, and “sexist”.  Not once did they mention that they are piss funny.

And not once did they seem to register how massively hypocritical this was, that the Opposition and their media enablers have been going nuts with character assassination on the ALP and yet some damn funny posters highlighting Abbott’s known foibles is cast as disgusting.

Quite frankly this is the jumping the shark moment for the ongoing media campaign against the Government.  Any normal person will realise that these posters are quite funny and directly relate to Abbott’s stated opinions.  This was obviously fed to the media by yet another LNP troll desperate to keep the negativity rolling after some positive (relatively) press for the ALP and highlights how seriously deranged they are becoming.

Never mind the facts that these posters have been floating around since before the 2010 election…they’re not exactly fresh news.  Even though the website with the poster generator was set up by the ALP (and is now offline) I recall it had a huge number of contributions, not exactly surprising considering the target rich environment Tony Abbot is.

It’s pretty sad when the Aussie tradition of lampooning public figures is cast as malicious and tut-tutted by some media figures that take themselves way to seriously and never miss a chance to sink the boot into the Government.