Hello Pubsters
Due to a variety of circumstances this will be be my last” Friday Raffle” post for awhile,and I will only be dropping in to say hello sporadically
Everything at “THE PUB”
will continue as is .
Fiona and CK raffle night/BB with his excellent threads and comments and you, the pubsters with your thoughtful insights. WE are all
A TEAM
Things are looking good atm for us the good guys.
But still a few years to go so lets not be complacent.
Abbott is a grub and a liar
So a one term Tony /Lnp Govt. is a distinct possibility.
The winner of the raffle will be a Sat lotto Ticket till I can return full-time.
Our doggie mascots just because. ( Cant Find One of Cossie BB. Sorry)
As always enjoy the place.
THE PUB 
Fiona
We changed telephone providers in Feb. For two months we go an A/C with money owing to us. I rang and asked to send the amount. Last month we got another A/C still show same amount owing to us. I rang again, woman gave me date of last phone call and again promised cheque would be in the mail. I said if I receive another one telling me you owe us money I would go to the Ombudsman. We got the cheque in the mail two weeks later.
Fiona and Leone,
I had my own administrative problems with power utilities since I moved to my new residence in Portland. Oddly enough they were only indirectly about my supplier.
I should mention that I signed up for one supplier for electricity and gas at the time I took this lease. No problems once the connections were made … except that a few weeks later I got an email from my supplier. The gist was that another supplier had been nominated and was seeking to ‘churn’ my account. I was concerned because I’d only ever spoken to the one supplier. Worse still, unless it was clarified immediately, my supplier would have to terminate my contract and the supply. So I rang them.
My supplier wasn’t all that helpful. They would not name the rival supplier. They gave me the number of some authority to ring to clarify. I rang and after working my way through the automated selections, I spoke to someone. When he found out I was country-based, he gave me another number to ring. At the next number I went through the same experience even down to getting another number to ring. At the third number, after the various delays and automatic answers, I got cut off while patiently waiting. So I tried my supplier again but just got fobbed off.
Still with the concerns about them ceasing supply, I emailed my supplier pointing out the whole sorry saga and WTF was going on. I got no reply to the email. So I sent them another one, repeating that I had made four phone calls and several emails and still knew no more about the mystery second supplier. Could they kindly tell me what was going on? Eventually I got an email from them saying that I’d continue as their customer and words to the effect that they wouldn’t bill me for the period in dispute.
Eventually I got a bill from them, which did seem fairy modest for the time we’d been here – so maybe I did all right.
I still have no idea which supplier tried to pinch me, nor what tactics had been used. Victoria has been notorious for door-to-door utilities salespeople seeking to change you over, often with unethical strategies and always unwanted. We have had none of them, nor of phone canvassers. We are located in a lane, which seems to be well off the beaten track of such canvassers.
So I still don’t know who the supplier was or what dodgy saleperson it might have been and what fiddle he/she worked to try to claim this residence.
Life seemed so much easier with the state-owned suppliers.
I am a little worried in the mild way the ALP is protecting its economic success over its 6 years in Government. It seems they never learned anything from their previous years in Opposition.
Now it seems they have already agreed to some of Abbott’s Budget, which in my minds says that the ALP believe there is a Budget Crisis.
I have been having problems posting comments with my wordpress login that is why I tried the Twitter login.
Also good to see Senator Boswell – the man picked for his salesman skills to sell the budget – confused. Apparently his constiuents think the budget is unfair. So does the AMA president:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/breakfast/new-ama-president-to-address-alcohol-speeding-and-the-budget/5477082
The ALP have only agreed to allow a few thigs in the budget. Labor will support the deficit tax and that’s good, because it is a tax on the wealthy. Labor looks like supporting the freeze on family benefit payments, which they would probably have done if they were still in government.
This article explains where things are at and who supports what.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/26/labor-agrees-to-family-benefits-freeze-as-clive-palmer-stonewalls-coalition
Today’s stunt. Hefferan within senate hearings with security. Bough in false bomb. Yes, stunt number two. First was the attack on Burke. Also a beat up.
Kathryn King now talking in the lower house.
I suppose they’re trying to attack Tony Burke because he questions the Speaker’s fundraising.
Mathias Cormann thinks this agency is ‘window dressing’ so he axed it in the budget.
Axing of asbestos watchdog shocks head
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/axing-of-asbestos-watchdog-shocks-head-20140525-38wwy.html
A good chance that QT in the Reps will be lively today. Bronnie will be a bit hostile over questions being raised re her fund-raising activities.
Should see a number of Labor Members expelled under 64A! 😉
leone
Not surprised. Remember Abbott’s comments on Bernie, and J Bishop’s on some of the people affected by emphysema.
I think the general Labor line is to defend the economic record, muski, but arguably it is as you say not a forceful as might be desired. I don’t know that it needs to dominate everything at present. The present situation of allowing the government to dig enormous credibility holes for itself, and all the time occupying centre stage, is gradually exposing them for the hollow men they are. It is the sort of scrutiny that they should have been given in Gillard’s time.
Eventually, Labor will have to get to their record. It is a great pity that the Rudd revenge and media obsession with it had to cloud the record so much at the time. The loss of Gillard and other achieving ministers such as Combet, Emerson, Swan, Smith, Garrett, Conroy at the finale made it just that much harder to defend.
I am not sure that having the Chief Rudd Cardinal Bowen as Treasury spokeman is the right way to go. I have heard mixed reports:some that he has been both logical and forceful, and others that he has few attention-grabbing skills and is only marginally less boring than Truss and Andrews. Wong remains an asset, of course.
Swan, with occasional Guardian pieces, can defend his record well. But he has rightly taken a back seat to put the bad blood behind. And it’s a pretty good record to defend, unlikely to be surpassed easily – fate has saved him from copping major down times.
Whether Shorten is brave or strong enough is the main question, but I’d favour elevating the articulate and learned Andrew Leigh. If Bowen has to be kept in the tent, maybe shift him to Trade.
I think the ALP is getting the mix just about right.
They want to remind the people that they are in there fighting the budget but at the same time the Govt is in such a shambles and is so disliked let them remain the centre of attention.
The Govt is doing enough damage to itself without the ALP having to raise the issues.
I’m listening to the questions and mostly muting the answers in QT today, just to get an idea of what each side wants to talk about. It’s already clear that the Coalition want to hammer ‘debt and deficit’ into our craniums. I guess it’s all they have to work with at the moment, but it’s mostly the same old lies and fudging of figures. ALP have gone Indigenous rights (Shorten) and family benefits (Macklin) so far, and received the usual waffly guff from Abbott. Plibersek’s backing up Macklin’s question to Abbott.
Bronnie doesn’t like the noise from the ALP, but she hasn’t thrown anyone out yet. Abbott’s off the hyperbowl scale now, going on about “pseudo-generosity” from the ALP in the last term.
Bandt’s just asked Morrison about Reza Berati. Get set for a massive lie-a-thon from Morrison.
And sure enough, Morrison’s telling us, in effect, that people have to be beaten to death under his care or the boats won’t stop.
Yuck! Hojo. Muted.
Another one to Hockey about the debt. I’ll have to go on facial expressions here because I’m not listening to set pieces. Thankfully the picture is smaller because Sky are showing us a thing on fire in Lane Cove. But it looks to me as if he’s just going through the motions. A little shout here, a finger point there.
Hockey still comes across as completely obnoxious even when you can’t hear his voice.
Justine Elliott again on Family Tax cuts. Abbott clunking along again. He’s got his electorates mixed up too. And now he’s off on the carbon tax again.
Ken Wyatt with something to Pyne. Not only am I not going to listen to the answer, I’m not even going to watch.
Labor is targeting budget questions towards electorates that the Libs picked up from Labor at the September election.
Good move because they are reminding people why they should now have buyers regret by throwing out their good labor member for the rabble which is now taking a heap of benefits off them!
Abbott expects pensioners to be happy to give up their concessions on transport, rates, electricity bills and drivers licences so ‘we can all be better off’.
Macklin’s back up, this time on pensioners. Abbott, having cut funding for states for pensioner concessions, now says it’s their responsibility. Abbott launches into hand-wringing which Macklin cuts off with a POO. It wasn’t worth it.
A drone – barely able to read his own question – gives Dutton a dixer. A chance to parade his ignorance as usual.
Bronnie is all sixes & sevens today. She must be nervous waiting for questions regarding her fund-raising activities.
I reckon she has got more Electorates wrong than she has got right.
Abbott: “Australians were looters under the previous govt.” Some were, I agree. I’m thinking of himself and Frances.
Dutton muted. He does a pretty good impersonation of a goldfish. Never noticed that before. A goldfish woiuld actually know more about the health portfolio.
Hunt in Parliament saying Medicare is stuffed. B’stard.
I crossed the Murray this morning…the Mighty Murray…on the ferry at Swan Reach and I picked up a stone from the one side, carried it across on the ferry and placed it on the other side. I did it because of a story my mother told me years ago that I just remembered as I arrived at the ferry…My mother grew up near the river. She worked as a house-maid at both Punyelroo and Portee stations near Swan Reach. She told me of an old German hand there who, whenever he had to cross the river, he would pick up a small stone, a pebble, carry it across and place it on the other side….my mother asked him why he did it….he was at first reluctant to tell her..but she persisted…
“Well, girlie”…that’s what they all called young women out there….”it is my own little thing…I tink of the stone as my soul,…you see, I cannot swim..and so I take the stone, carry it, and if or when I reach safely the solid ground on the other side, I leef it dzair….when I come back, I do the same”
“What happens if the boat sinks?” my mother asked.
“Dzen I will try to throw it wif all my might, to the other side….and if it reaches , then I feel I too will reach there…”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Dzen, I tink I vill be lost in the waters…”
This morning I crossed the river and I picked up a stone and carried it across and placed it on the other side…I thought of that old man and I thought of my mother,in hospital now, on palliative care for pulmonary fibrosis…she will never again come to the river…so I thought of it as me, her bloodline, carrying HER soul safely across the waters…I don’t know what made me think of it after all these years…but I just did…must be a pagan thing I suppose and since she carried my burgeoning soul for nine months, could I not at least carry her soul for a couple of hundred metres?
We arrived safely…
Blimey! Did whiney Pyney give the hand signal to Bronnie to get to her feet and close down the Labor protests.
Shorten over-egged that question. Abbott said something wrong re payments for doctors visits last week on radio.and Shorten wants him to repeat it in Parliament. Abbott won’t. There was a bit of theatre over insults, and things have got a bit testy in there.
Another drone, this time to Morrison. He’s already given his rant once today.
More on Frances Abbott and that scholarship – it seems her HSC marks were very ordinary, not good enough to get her into a course without ‘help’ from a college head with an agenda. ‘Based on merit’? Not freaking likely.
Frances Abbott seems pretty academically void of merit to me
http://niboswald.blogspot.com.au/2014/05/frances-abbott-seems-pretty.html
For the non-NSW people, a Band 6 is the top level, marks between 90 and 100 for any subject. Frances managed just one, in visual arts.
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/hsc-results/understanding.html
Maybe Bronnie is tuned into the senate. Wong and Falconer doing a first class job there.
according to the commissioner of audit, says Hockey. I believe that Shepherd is also the architect of this budget. Not Hockey, not treasury.
Fed up,
Maybe putting together enough evidence for a Motion of No Confidence in the Speaker towards the end of Question Time.
I was watching that before QT started and was thoroughly enjoying it. Fawkner was devastating there as was Penny Wong.
Blimey! Truzzzzzz on now!
Have not worked out how one can watch all the proceedings.
Here come some more lies, this time from the Minister for Grecian 2000 and Marriage Counselling. The pension is increasing! Hooray. At a slower rate than inflation. Er….
Wong is back I fel a little sorry for the PS
So Burke called Bronny a witch. Good on him. She did stand proudly, on the back of that truck, under that sign.
[…] May 26, 2014 at 8:31 AM […]
Good on him.
Problems with the crockery used. Seems it is reserved for the PM and special functions. They do not know if it has been used before,
Mr Andrws says we are borrowing one billion dollars a month to pay Labor’s interest bill.
Hmmmmm…..HoJo is borrowing almost $2 billion a WEEK – where is it all going?
Two senators that donated, ask if theirs was used. Appears their is in storage.
So, Shorten must have been misinformed about the asbestos program closing down. Or is Abbott lying?
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/26/tony-abbott-adds-family-gifts-to-pecuniary-interest-register
Bridget paid $20 for a designer dress? Really? We have been robbed. Johnny Schembri’s frocks sell for at least $300. See for yourself.
http://byjohnny.bigcartel.com/
Here we go!
Abbott trying to be convincing on pension rises. Yes Tony. the pension will continue to go up every March and September, but your changes to indexation mean it will not go up by as much as it should and so will not keep up with a rising cost of living.
Abbott must think we are all as dumb as his front bench.
An excellent point.