Shit, or get off the pot, Malcolm.

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Turnbull potty Complete with Text

Bolt today:

“Turnbull must virtually start all over again, but not just with a new team.

Now, with just three months to go before his first Budget and only eight or so until the election, he must find a new economic plan.”

Yes… well… uhm… d’errr.

The amazing thing about the public is that it has given Turnbull the Big Tick because they want to believe that a new captain – with virtually the same old team – can turn the side around from wooden-spooners to premiers in the space of a couple of months’ brainstorming.

It happens in schlok Hollywood baseball movies about baseball and gridiron – the new man, now off the booze, inspires a gaggle of numpties and misfits etc. – or every now and again in, say, an ice skating race – where you’re so far behind that when the rest of the competitors fall over each other you’ve got enough time to coast around them and win gold.

Not so often in real life.

Of course we are not addicted to real life. We are addicted to Reality Life, which is different.

In real life you work hard to achieve your goal. You genuinely innovate, “do the math”, “work the problem”, “science the shit out of” your predicament.

In Reality Life, your little brother dies, you write a song about the poor little blighter, go onto to Australia’s Got Talent and wow the judges (who look about as un-real as can be managed, which means they are “Reality Real”). You can’t write. You can’t sing. You can’t dance. But the promos for the show make out you aced it, all the way to the semis and then the finals. All it needed was a bit of a tragedy, mixed-in emotion and a modicum of good looks. And the inspiration to believe you could do it. It’s All Australia’s “Must See” episode.

I used to write here that Australia lacked confidence. Years of pre-Treasury Joe Hockey droning on about “debt and deficit disasters” and “School Hall” waste finally convinced the punters that we could have survived the GFC simply by simply inspiring ourselves to do it. His (and his cronies’) “relentless negativity”, as PMJG put it, got the idea into the voters’ minds that there probably hadn’t been been a GFC and, if there was, it was in the Northern Hemisphere. It didn’t have anything to do with us. Labor just liked racking up debt and spending our money for its own sake. As a result the nation lost confidence in its economic management (which had, in fact been the envy of the world).

Come Tony Abbott, with Hockey his John the Baptist hailing the advent of a Three-Word Messiah, and we made-believe that it was Muslim boat-people, Pink Batts and shoe malfunctions that caused our woes and the reversal of these would restore confidence. With an economy that was ready to boom with mining money and China’s insatiable urge to Buy Australian, all we needed was the confidence thing.

“Now there’s yer problem!”: now we have too much confidence.

Turns out the Chinese fascination with all-things-Oz was waning, their economy was finally levelling out, permanent growth was exposed as an impossibility and we found ourselves with a lot of holes in the ground that other people were making money out of… but only because they didn’t pay their taxes.

The Coalition’s Surplus fetish (and Labor’s half-hearted participation in it during a precariously hung parliament), borne of a classic tail-wags-dog belief that the government’s over-taxing of the people and under-management of their basic services brought prosperity for all (and votes for the government) just made things worse.

Enter Sir Galahad, Malcolm Turnbull. The Turnbull Renaissance was at hand. His witty insouciance, his urbane but cruisey style got the punters to thinking that all they needed to put the mix together was a businessman who could cut red tape, beat unwilling heads of slow thinkers together and Go For Growth via Ideas.

Unfortunately this was the bloke who had shed ideas and ideals like a snake with sunburn: the Republic, a decent NBN, gay marriage, Climate Change and many more. There wasn’t a Turnbull passion that couldn’t be discarded in the pursuit of office. But we – and I use “we” with obvious exceptions – loved him for it, or at least became infatuated. Here was another Easy Way Out: we’d charm our way back to prosperity… even better… Malcolm Turnbull could do it for us.

No need to work, or really innovate. Just talk about it and it would be so. Someone else, anyone else could take care of the details.

What no-one twigged to was that “innovation” is not an innovative idea. Innovation is “core”. It’s basic. You have to have it or you may as well not get out of bed in the morning. Talk of innovation being the new “thing” shows how much of a failure the Coalition’s time in office had been. But let’s hang onto it. Maybe something will happen, something new like innovation.

We had the confidence at last, but where was the other bit? Don’t know what I mean? It’s the Economy, stupid. The Coalition’s negativity finally bore fruit: they went out of their way to fuck the economy by talking it down. and they succeeded, just in time for them to win office.

The solution was easy: just talk it up again. All their mates were in on the scam. It was like the annual Lurk Merchants and Sleeve Tuggers’ Convention.

Good one Liberals! Good one Nationals! All hail the troglodytes! The village was destroyed in order to save it. Their recovery plan? Flog everything off. Reward their mates and party donors. Re-establish the old order. Telstra’s on top. Rupert’s still in charge. Miners are ripping squillions out of our earth. Transurban’s putting up its tolls and having a bumper year. Tony Abbott still lurks. What’s not to love about any of that?

But digging holes for one-time sales of dirt, building toll-roads to nowhere, selling off The Farm, applying duct tape to Foxtel cracks only puts off the inevitable crunch. Even the well-worn observation that we were “starting again” – two years into a government that said it had all the ideas ready to go in 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 – but which had systematically cut the country off at the knees as a favour to vested interests in fields as far apart as media, communications and even the education industry – should have rung hollow.

“Can’t bat. Can’t bowl.”

Sadly, to a nation addicted to the quick fix, the easy solution, the Grand Scheme where the other bloke has a go while you coast along doing the same thing you’ve always done, the appeal of Malcolm Turnbull was irresistable. Our national torpor could be maintained, and we could afford to wait for another miracle. Someone else had come along to save us. No wonder we gave him the Audience Vote. He let us believe it was just a matter of snapping our fingers and telling ourselves destiny was on our side again. An innovative new idea: “Innovation”.

I’m surprised the Stump-Jump Plough wasn’t trotted out. Or the Hills Hoist. Instead we got how wonderful the CSIRO was in detecting gravitational waves… omitting to mention that the branch that helped do was was sacked en masse years ago. Tomorrow it’s the Climate Change’s mob’s turn to join the Centre Link queue.

Where to now? Looks like Waffles’ polls are going off the boil, and the cavemen thirsting for revenge in his own party will be salivating. A bloke that was good at kicking helpless boat people around in secret isn’t exactly shining when it comes to sophisticated economic management in public. The commentators are getting bored (it was going to be so exciting). The ministry’s in a shambles. The nation’s going nowhere, with no plan and no leadership. All that excitement for nothing. As we enter the cold months ahead, there’s not even a Budget plan on the horizon. The back benchers must be restless. They’ve seen all this before. And they don’t like it.

Sure, Bill Shorten’s always good for a “question that must be answered”. “Labor waste” will be produced. Newspaper editorials will still give Turnbull the benefit of the doubt, but there’ll be less “benefit” and more “doubt”. Our Messiah, in that hesitant, “I-could-say-so-much-but-I’ll keep-it-simple-for-you-little-people” way he has of talking, will continue to pretend it’s all part of The Plan. Let’s have a Union Bashing recovery.

There’s a firey red Federal Police car parked on the corner outside the Turnbull residence in Point Piper. Who’s it there to protect him from?

Malcolm, there are so many threats, and so little time. Please shit, or get off the pot.

 

503 thoughts on “Shit, or get off the pot, Malcolm.”

  8. puffyTMD

    While in the air were the “Night witches” .

    “Night Witches: The Female Fighter Pilots of World War II

    Members of the 588th Night Bomber Regiment decorated their planes with flowers … and dropped 23,000 tons of bombs. ”

    The Soviet Union was the first nation to allow women to fly combat missions — to be able, essentially, to return fire when it was delivered. These ladies flew planes; they also dropped bombs.

    Last week, one of the most famous of the Night Witches — Nadezhda Popova, a commander of the squad who flew, in total, 852 of its missions —

    Its members, who ranged in age from 17 to 26, flew primarily at night, making do with planes that were — per their plywood-and-canvas construction — generally reserved for training and crop-dusting. They often operated in stealth mode, idling their engines as they neared their targets and then gliding their way to their bomb release points. As a result, their planes made little more than soft “whooshing” noises as they flew by.

    Those noises reminded the Germans, apparently, of the sound of a witch’s broomstick. So the Nazis began calling the female fighter pilots Nachthexen: “night witches.” They were loathed. And they were feared. Any German pilot who downed a “witch” was automatically awarded an Iron Cross.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/night-witches-the-female-fighter-pilots-of-world-war-ii/277779/

  9. Looks like the next major manufacturing facility’s in trouble.

    http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/massive-portland-smelter-risks-closure-as-losses-and-costs-surge-20160217-gmw82h.html

    The Libs of course give some lip service about it but privately I bet they’re grinning about being able to tick off another box in their planned total destruction of Australian manufacturing.

    So 500-2000 jobs will be lost (and if they don’t suck it up and stock shelves at Coles or accept some other minimum wage job within 6 months they can work for the dole instead), but it sure is one in the eye for the unions, eh? Bastards.

  10. Kirsdarke

    Would you believe it is a cunning ploy by the world’s best mini’, Mr Grunt, to close coal fired power stations ? …… Thought not 🙂

    “The smelter is responsible for almost 10 per cent of Victoria’s electricity demand.

    Its exit would exacerbate the massive oversupply of power in the national electricity market and could put further pressure on coal-fired electricity generators to shut.”

  11. So what was the Pub Patrons verdict on Scrott ? Was it the same old same old or exciting agile and innovative ways to give us the same old same old ?

    • Kaffeeklatscher,

      I think Leone’s brilliant find (above) encapsulates The Pub’s patrons’ verdict on morriscum:


      .

    • I must add that there’s absolutely no way I want a repeat of what happened to the unfortunate Ms Bingle.

      The idea of a naked morriscum emerging from the waves

      shower is way more than I wish to contemplate at any hour of the day.

  13. Fiona

    Thanks. Scrott’s policy must be held up in the same queue as the “200 fully costed policies” HoJo told us about.

    • Still haven’t seen any of those. I wonder how many they will tell us they have ‘costed and ready to go’ for this election.

    • Right click on the image.
      Choose ‘copy image address’
      Paste it here – if it ends in ‘jpg’ or ‘png’ it will work. If it ends in something like ‘jpg:large’ delete everything after the jpg.
      Post your comment.

  16. http://www.afr.com/news/policy/budget/morrison-needs-the-answer-not-just-the-question-and-what-was-the-question-20160217-gmwiy9

    http://www.twu.com.au/home/campaigns/safe-rates/$70,000-underpayment-of-drivers-shows-need-for-nat/

    http://www.news.com.au/national/breaking-news/qld-mp-found-in-contempt-of-parliament/news-story/30980799eee9b222751ce1e5176bdfa8

    Click to access draft_reps_legislation_autumn_week_3.pdf

    http://www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/superannuation

    http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/feb/17/sanctioning-radio-station-over-royal-prank-sent-a-clear-signal-says-outgoing-media-regulator note how the media company took the regulator all teh way to the High Court

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3449979/Islamic-speaker-Hamza-Tzortzis-defended-child-marriage-speak-United-Muslims-Australia-conference.html

  18. Now I have a Banana Splits earworm.

    Tra lah lah
    Lah lah lah lah
    Tra lah lah
    Lah lah lah Arrrrrgggghhhhh!

  21. Good morning Dawn Patrollers.

    Mark Kenny says Morrison is aiming low in his first budget.
    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/morrison-aims-low-in-first-preelection-budget-20160217-gmwea0.html
    The SMH was unimpressed with Morrison’s appearance at the NPC.
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/smh-editorial/scott-morrison-muddies-the-message-on-tax-reform-20160217-gmwjr8.html
    Gareth Hutchens on the CEDA report on the potentially difficult economic future in front of us.
    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australias-economy-facing-hazards-unlike-any-see-in-20-years-ceda-20160217-gmwf6i.html
    James Massola writes about the failure of the Coalition’s workplace policies and the reactions from the usual boosters.
    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/the-coalitions-industrial-relations-policy-agenda-has-failed-20160217-gmwah4.html
    Ouch! Mehajer gets a $10m kick in the goolies.
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/salim-mehajer-loses-millions-as-land-decisions-are-reversed-20160217-gmwtk6.html
    Adrian Piccoli nails it again.
    http://www.smh.com.au/national/education/atar-charade-bring-back-student-caps-says-nsw-education-minister-adrian-piccoli-20160214-gmu1v3.html
    Pater FitzSimons on cutting a mate’s lunch.
    http://www.smh.com.au/sport/the-fitz-files/g-20160217-gmwoll.html
    And now it’s a councillor from Hurstvlle that shows why property developers should never be in local government.
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/hurstville-councillor-con-hindi-investigated-for-misconduct-20160217-gmwqcy.html
    “View from the Street” wonders why the Greens are trying to kill themselves. Good question.
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/view-from-the-street/view-from-the-street-say-why-are-the-greens-trying-to-kill-themselves-20160217-gmwlnp.html
    Peter Martin tells us that there is more than one way to kill negative gearing. How we tolerate institutionalised dishinesty.
    http://www.theage.com.au/comment/capital-gains-tax-theres-more-than-one-way-to-kill-negative-gearing-20160216-gmvict.html

  22. Section 2 . . .

    Now there’s smoke around the relationship between Cunneen and Fred Nile.
    http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/margaret-cunneen-a-special-guest-at-fred-nile-political-fundraiser-20160216-gmvbdf.html
    With a simple tweet Jeb Bush exposes the American nightmare.
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/17/jeb-bush-gun-tweet-american-nightmare-gun-republican-trump
    A heartfelt piece from Kristina Keneally on the Tim Minchin song about Pell.
    http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/17/when-i-first-heard-tim-minchins-song-about-cardinal-pell-i-laughed-then-i-started-crying
    Some extraordinary results in blood cancer treatment give hope.
    http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/extraordinary-results-in-blood-cancer-therapy-for-terminally-ill-patients-20160217-gmwi46.html
    Obama has faith in the US voters would ultimately make a sensible choice that will not be Donald Trump who, he says, simply does not have the temperament to do the job. He hits out at him in many ways.
    http://www.smh.com.au/world/donald-trump-will-not-be-president-us-president-barack-obama-20160217-gmwy74.html
    Peter Martin on the Productivity Commission’s proposal to include part of the value of pensioners’ homes in the pension asset test.
    http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/make-pensioners-rely-on-home-equity–productivity-commission-chief-20160217-gmwrnk.html
    Paul Sheehan and a sorry tale of dealing with Telstra’s customer service.
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/a-sorry-tale-of-dealing-with-telstras-customer-service-20160216-gmw2ws.html
    Why Bronwyn Bishop deserve to stay on in parliament. See what you think.
    http://www.smh.com.au/comment/why-bronwyn-bishop-deserves-to-stay-on-as-an-mp-20160216-gmv5ds.html

  23. Section 3 . . . Cartoon Corner

    Alan Moir infers that Barnaby may not be a compliant companion for Turnbull.

    A sombre contribution from John Spooner.

    David Pope continues his good work with this one about Morrison’s budget development.

    Mark Knight and night time terrors for the Victorian Infrastructure Minister.
    http://cdn.newsapi.com.au/image/v1/ddd6712bd9b934fcbe7a3c6c86344373?width=1024&api_key=zw4msefggf9wdvqswdfuqnr5
    David Rowe takes us into the operating theatre with Scott Morrison.

  24. I’m wondering if the “softly-softly” approach the MSM. (of all stripes) has toward the LNP. coalition is not a kind of ” begging you pardon mass’er…your ‘umble servant begs…” forelock tugging obsequiousness toward those they consider their (and our!!)social betters.
    Crawlers!!

  25. The Bronwyn Bishop article –

    Why is Jeremy Mitchell, coyly claiming to be a former Bishop staffer, writing puff pieces about why his long-ago boss should stay in parliament?

    Mitchell has done very well since he left Bronnicopter’s office. Employment advisor to Abbott, until 2004, then two years as Public Affairs Manager at the Australian High Commission in London, no doubt a gift from a grateful Liberal Party. After that two years at Telstra as Senior Media Relations Manager. Now, since September 2009, with Huawei, their Director of Corporate & Public Affairs, Australia, New Zealand & South Pacific.

    So why is he so keen to see his former boss stay in parliament? It’s been a long time since he worked for her. What’s going on?

    Remember the fuss over Huawei courting Julie Bishop and Andrew Robb back in 2011? Mitchell was behind that.
    http://www.smh.com.au/it-pro/government-it/chinese-tech-giant-huawei-courts-mps-20120326-1vtnn.html

    Huawei also paid all Bronnie’s expenses for a trip to Singapore and China around the same time.
    http://www.brw.com.au/p/blogs/rear_window/spooks_spoil_huawei_spin_party_DmE2NC9JXhzXJWyfBXORdM

    The Gillard/Rudd government banned Huawei from tendering for equipment for the NBN on security grounds. Now, with a Coalition government back, the NBN destroyed and talk of breaking up what remains and flogging it off, Huawei might have plans.

    Just start connecting a few dots …………..

    • Quite amazing that he got his article published
      Fairfax has bled journalists

      I reckon the old bat should return to her cave and enjoy her Parliamentary pension. I guess her hobby is politics

  26. Joke: Q; ‘What do you get if you join all the LNP. members of the House together?…

    A ;The morse-code string for ; “Fuck knows!” “

  28. ZIKA A few days ago I heard that amongst microbiologists the blame for the outbreak of microencaphalitis has been linked to a campaign to immunise all women with a triple antigen. The vaccinations started in the state where microencephaly first appeared.
    The vaccine manufacturer, ???, immediately withdrew the drug as it had never been tested on pregnant women – wasn’t designed for use by them
    The Brazilian government is not trusted by the poor people and so the government is very scared that they will be accused of killing the populace, hence the rush to blame microencephaly on the Zika virus

  29. Unemployment back up to 6.0%, a day after Morrison was patting himself on the back for keeping it under 6% for so long. Great timing, Scrott.

  30. This from someone who has a farm of unicorns

    The treasurer, Scott Morrison, has dismissed claims of an eventual $7bn yearly budget boost from Labor’s negative gearing package as “a unicorn”, implicitly casting doubt on estimates by the independent parliamentary budget office.

    And the PBO! Who would trust them?!

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/18/scott-morrison-says-labor-selling-a-unicorn-with-negative-gearing-savings

  32. Shaun Carney’s back at The Age:

    5 months in, and nothing. Turnbull is giving us incumbency, not leadership http://www.theage.com.au/comment/-gmuxz1.html … @theage #auspol

    It’s written in that “more in sadness than in anger”, patrician way of his.

    His expressed faint hopes remind me of the faint hopes journos had for Abbott to be variously a “statesman”, “Prime Ministerial” and “visionary”.

    Several of them flashed out of the gate too early on one or all of the above, declaring the Abbott Prime Ministership fully functional and mature well before the data was in.

    Now, of course, they have joined the ranks of hecklers, without the slightest embarrassment about their previous stances. Tony Abbott was always going to be a failure. He was never a statesman. So the stunning disintrospection of the commentariat goes: “We’re never wrong. So we must have been right both times.”

    Carney is at pains to state that he is “not carrying water” for Labor. As if he needed to tell us. His history as a writer for The Age has been replete with barely disguised adoration for the conservatives and disdain (at his most generous) for their opponents. He comes at politics from the born-to-rule end of the stick. While he may criticse the Coalition, he’ll never advocate for Labor. The best you’ll get out of him is the grudging admission that Labor’s “scare campaign” on the GST was also their policy position of 31 years. It was also completely justified on the facts, but Shaun will never admit that.

    Oh well, at least there’s some progress. The dimming of the Turnbull Enlightenment is becoming somewhat of the topic du jour among the pundits lately. They still hold out hope, but more and more are drifting away from The Renaissance Man.

    Scott Morrison’s pathetic display yesterday at the NPC did not help, nor did his equally pathetic, literally mouth-breathing effort at filibuster this morning on the ABC’s AM add to confidence that he had a clue what he was talking about. Even Michael Brissenden fluked a few boundaries off the “Treasurer’s” lazy off-spinners. Yes, Morrison’s performance was that bad.

    A few more innings like that and we might find his urbane, sophisticated boss hankering for another ministerial scandal so he can reshuffle Morrison off to “12th man” status. Intimidating a bunch of hacks with stern “On Water” dismissals, with military noddies and Aussie flags for cover, is easy. Waffling to the experts on a subject he clearly does not have anything but an ideological connection to, is another “matter” altogether. Funny Photoshops of Shorten with smoke blowing out his ears are even less impressive (and oh-so-Tony-Abbott).

    Fact is, Shorten is now leading the debate, and people who matter (or who think they matter) are starting to notice. Morrison mouthing “debt and deficit” or “backing in Australia” won’t cut it for too much longer without some substance – well thought-out substance that has a chance of passing through the Parliament (as opposed to Hockey-style bluster and bullshit) – to back it up.

    That’s what Carney is really afraid of: that there might be nothing there.

    • If Brissenden fluked a few boundaries, they must have been edges through the slips or French cuts. Can’t see him driving or pulling, even Carney’s gentle offspinners.

    • Either the Coalition have
      – no ideas for The Budget
      – or a fully formulated list of shockers to advance the welfare of their foreign business mates that no sensible elector would vote for

      Probably waiting to receive the list from BCA and IPA

  36. You gotta laugh:

    NBN Co getting excited about a development of DOCSIS3.1 that would allow 1Gbps both up and down.

    “A newly unveiled project at CableLabs illustrates how DOCSIS 3.1 technology provides the basis for continued evolution of system capacities by supporting symmetric multi-gigabit service over the cable network,” CableLabs vice president of Research and Development in Wireless Technologies Belal Hamzeh wrote.

    http://www.zdnet.com/article/nbn-hails-game-changing-docsis-3-1-gigabit-speeds-on-hfc/

    A great comment there:

    dcstartiger 2 HOURS AGO
    And the fact that the HFC infrastructure in Australia has to be virtually rebuilt to provide adequate backend resources is always conveniently overlooked when these PR stories are published.

    HFC is still a massive shared collision domain (just ask those who use it now how well it performs during peak demand) and the cost of segmenting the existing HFC infrastructure to provide an acceptable level of service for NBN use over the next 20 years will end up being far higher than the cost of rolling out FTTP.

    DOCSIS 3.1 may be useful in Australia at 3AM when no one else is using the HFC NBN,but it won’t do much else until billions are spent pushing this aging infrastructure to do a job for a few more years.

    Delimiter also carries the NBN Co media release:
    https://delimiter.com.au/2016/02/18/nbn-raises-possibility-multi-gigabit-symmetric-hfc-speeds/

    And there is a great comment there too:

    Bernard W 18/02/2016 at 11:42 am
    Obvious Q’s:

    1) does this require new ‘nodes’ to be deployed at the fibre/coax interface? (I’m gonna go ahead and say ‘yes’ to this one)

    2) what length of coax can this be delivered over (I’m guessing very short, so more fibre to be run & more nodes to build)

    3) can this be done with the type of coax used for Australian HFC builds? (I’m guessing probably not, so all the coax will have to be replaced, in which case why the hell wouldn’t you run fibre?)

    IMHO it boils down to nbn™ doing more hand waving about how there are wonderful technologies to eke more out of copper, see, we don’t need no stinking’ fibre! (i.e. propaganda to fool the masses into thinking the MTM is in some way equivalent, or even better, to FttP)

    A second comment:

    Hubert Cumberdale 18/02/2016 at 11:02 am
    No one needs more than 25mbps yet GimpCo are happy to hype speeds on HFC they’ve previously told us we don’t need. Dullards at GimpCo apparently lack the self-awareness to see their hypocrisy here and don’t even realise their acceptance of these speeds actually proves FttP is needed despite their erroneous claim of the opposite. All speeds mentioned achieved on fibre with greater efficiency. Wasting money on costly upgrades that could be used to build it right the first time not the smartest thing either but considering it has to adhere to the politically motivated policy set by the coalition clowns to appease copper fanboy knuckle-draggers wouldn’t be surprising.

    The Optus HFC stuff is at or beyond end of life and the Telstra stuff is in not that great a shape. Lots of fibre will need to be run to get it deeper into the field. To get the speeds NBN Co is deliriously dreaming of will likely require new nodes, new coax etc.

    FTTH is still the obvious answer. When Labor win the next election they better run fibre out fast, over power poles and get a couple millions or more on fibre. Once we have nearly 3m on FTTH nobody is going to have to want anything else. It is for this reason that the treasonous NBN Co board are doing their best to stop people, stop communities from getting FTTH.

  37. Just received this from Catherine King:

    As a new mum struggling to breastfeed, seven years ago I rang the Breastfeeding Helpline.

    The advice I received at the time from the wonderful volunteers on the end of the line was invaluable.

    Every year in Australia 80,000 mums just like I did pick up the phone and call our national breastfeeding helpline for support. The helpline receives questions from up to 6,000 callers a month!

    It is an invaluable service for mums – particularly new mums – and is run at a modest cost thanks to the work of more than 400 volunteer counsellors. These people offer up their time to provide essential support for mums struggling with breastfeeding their little ones.

    But thanks to Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberals, this service is at risk of being shut down completely.

    Because of the chaos surrounding Mr Turnbull’s $800 million in cuts to the Health Flexible funds, the helpline is about to run out of money.

    This essential service matters so much to Australian mums. I need your support to let the government know how much Australians don’t want this service cut.

    Will you add your name to call on Malcolm Turnbull and the Government to rule out cutting this vital service for Australian mums and guarantee funding for Australia’s Breastfeeding Helpline?

    Of course I signed.

    Many years ago I was one of those volunteer counsellors with the Nursing Mothers’ Association of Australia, the original name of Breastfeeding Australia.

    • Already signed, a few days back, but doubt a petition will change a thing.

      Why would Turnbull want to help breast-feeding mums? They should be good Australians, put their babies straight on to bottle feeding and enrich Nestle and the other overseas owned companies who make baby formula. Companies in which I bet Turnbull and his crocodile-smiling wife have lots of investments. All done though a third party investment guru, of course, so he can deny ever knowing anything about it.

    • These many chickens across all community based welfare and health are quickly coming home to roost,

  39. Bernard Keane, on Scomo’s NPC thing yesterday. Not a good word to say about any of it.

    Paywalled, so you can have the whole thing, just slightly edited to leave out interesting information on Bernard’s dietary issues.

    Waiting for ScoMo — in which no policy happens, twice
    Scott Morrison spoke at length at the National Press Club yesterday, and said nothing except to distance himself from the GST and the Abbott government.

    Seated beside me is another man sent to the underworld for punishment: of all people, I’m next to Tim Shaw. Yes, that Tim Shaw, now working in Canberra, doing the breakfast shift on local station 2CC. He’s shown up for his first NPC address to hear the Treasurer, Scott Morrison, discuss “Backing Australians in our transitioning economy”.

    As it turns out, it’s more a one-hander version of Waiting for Godot, the play in which, famously, nothing happens, twice.

    Some speeches you know while you’re hearing them are weird, or badly misjudged, or pitched wrongly. This one’s a sleeper: it only becomes apparent over the length of the speech —  and Morrison goes on and on, well over the usual time allotted for NPC addresses —  and then in its aftermath that the Treasurer has said exactly nothing, about anything. It’s Tim Shaw’s “but wait, there’s more” in reverse. For hungry journalists trying to get a take-out for afternoon columns, it’s thin gruel. Morrison devotes an extended period to justifying backing away from changes to the GST. He kinda sorta suggests there’ll be spending cuts in the coming budget, but in the Q&A afterward resiles from it, saying he’s merely focused on keeping spending growth in check. He vaguely admits that the government has made no progress in two-plus years on the budget, but later rejects an invitation from Laura Tingle to explain where they went wrong on curbing the deficit.

    There’s not even a by-the-numbers bagging of Labor – the usual accusation that Labor has a “tax and spend approach” only gets a brief airing, possibly because Morrison acknowledges at various moments in the speech that both spending and taxation have increased under the Coalition. And the return to surplus – once upon a time a “budget emergency” — will be, the Treasurer says, a test match, not a T20, affair, requiring “test match-like patience”.

    Samuel Beckett, the only first-class cricketer ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, would have approved.

    Morrison only shows animation when having a brief excursion into justifying the Australian Building and Construction Commission, when he fluently lies about productivity and employment in construction falling after the ABCC was abolished. Nah, Treasurer, they went up.

    The second act, the Q&A, follows, and nothing happens in that, either. Journalists try to get Morrison to offer something, anything, on policy, but Morrison knocks them back, firmly declaring things like “I’m not announcing our negative gearing policy today”. It’s February 17. The budget isn’t due for nearly three months. If it continues like this it’s going to feel like three decades.

    But in concentrating on why there’ll be no GST change, and why there’s been no progress on reducing the deficit, Morrison shows that the problem isn’t merely that he hasn’t got policies to announce, he’s actually got policies to disavow – and, more subtly, a government to disavow as well. His fiscal message is: all we achieved in the last two years is to stop things getting worse, we haven’t actually made any progress on the deficit. The implication Morrison isn’t willing to state openly is that Abbott and Hockey failed, so now “the first Turnbull government budget” will have to commence the process of reining in spending. And his tax reform message is that fiddling with the GST won’t deliver the kind of revenue the Coalition had hoped for, so there won’t be any substantial tax cuts.

    It’s a message almost biblical in its level of inconsistency and contradiction. At one stage, Morrison blames the high level of middle-class welfare for not proceeding with the GST – too many people receiving welfare payments, you see. Those with memories longer than five minutes will remember Abbott and Hockey railing at Wayne Swan’s attempts to rein in exactly that kind of transfer payment as “class warfare” and “the politics of envy”. All that middle class welfare that Morrison now complains of was, after all, a product of the Howard government.

    So the Q&A ends up being a serial effort by journalists to wrestle with smoke, although that rather overstates its entertainment value. Tim Shaw – he and I are at the end of the table, a luxury that means one is not crammed cheek by jowl with one’s colleagues – goes retail with a question on housing affordability; even on a flat deck with no movement and a well-pitched up delivery, Morrison opts to play it back down the wicket, test match style. I rise and politely inquire why the Productivity Commission hasn’t been allowed to conduct an analysis the Trans-Pacific Partnership — Morrison says during his speech that the trade agreements negotiated by Andrew Robb would lead to “generations of prosperity”  — despite asking repeatedly to do it.

    “The work’s been done,” Morrison says dismissively. “The government isn’t going to manage the economy through the rear view mirror.” It’s an interesting concept —  let’s call it the Morrison Doctrine: once a government has made a decision, there’s no point evaluating it to see if it actually achieves what they claim it will achieve, even if they’re continuing to make similar decisions in the future. Just drive on, pedal to the metal, and don’t look back.

    Still, at least it was, finally, policy of a kind

    http://www.crikey.com.au/2016/02/18/waiting-for-scomo-in-which-no-policy-happens-twice/

    • I noticed that too, Morrison was constantly referring to “test match-like patience” when it suited him. He wouldn’t have given J Gillard any time.

  42. I’m seeing more and more talk about Labor’s current poll situation. The first sign of it was Cassidy serving it up to Bowen last Sunday after Bowen had been thoroughly reasonable and persuasive about negative gearing changes. And there’s a bit in the Australian today about Burke dismissing polls indicating the ALP can’t win the next election. They’re trying to make it look as if the polls are reflecting a static situation with no chance of shifting in the short-to-mid term.

    I know what that’s all about. They’re trying to force the electorate to see the next election as a foregone conclusion, to see the ALP as ‘losers’, and by extension to accustom us to the idea that whatever the Liberals are planning is inevitable, so we may as well adjust to them and accept them now. It’s forcing the public’s hand.

    And they’re doing it because the polls are closing. The mindset is moving toward that of change, and it needs to be nipped in the bud before the Liberals lose control of the narrative. “Labor, you can’t win” is the tone at the moment. And it’s only happening because it’s looking more and more as if Labor can win.

  43. As a side note, ever since I became persuaded that the ABC and Newscorp are coordinating their attacks (and that was a while ago now), I’ve been able to make a lot more sense about what the ABC have been serving up to us as ‘news’. Some of their tactics are quite obvious, really.

    • Just another reason why I avoid the ABC version of ‘news’ and current affairs like the plague, and have done for a few years now

  44. Remember the good old days when evidence of polls closing was regarded as ‘momentum’ for the team in opposition? A shift from 46-54 to 48-52 made an election win an inevitability back then. The talk was all about what the ‘hamstrung’ government could possibly to do halt the opposition’s march to victory. And we got lots of sneak previews about the wonderful things that opposition would do when they gained the reins of power.

    Don’t see much of that around these days, do we?

  45. Aguirre:

    I know what that’s all about. They’re trying to force the electorate to see the next election as a foregone conclusion, to see the ALP as ‘losers’, and by extension to accustom us to the idea that whatever the Liberals are planning is inevitable, so we may as well adjust to them and accept them now. It’s forcing the public’s hand.

    And they’re doing it because the polls are closing.

    Yep, I agree. Waleed Aly’s take on the polls is exactly this: Labor can’t win. Why don’t they just give up? Turnbull can do anything he wants to. Or not do anything at all. It doesn’t matter. The election is purely an academic matter, a formality that must be gone through for mundane, democratic reasons. Likewise, policy action by the Coalition would be nice, but not essential. We all know who’ll win.

    Aly is starting to elevate himself to the self of smug, self-opinionated prat.

    • Now, now, Aly is a highly intelligent pratt. He fancies himself as a conservative intellectual. A theorist.

      Everything Aly says is couched in tortuous qualification. He bends himself into gymnastic contortions to show to others that he is looking at every side of the issue.

      He has a real problem though being a Muslim. I actually sympathise with him here. He has to watch himself constantly less he be perceived as sensitive to, defensive over, his ethnicity and cultural identity. His plight shows when he has to discuss anything to do with Muslim so-called “extremism”. Aly of course would never put extremism in inverted commas, or precede it with the phrase “so-called”. Oh no. To be the ever-interesting one among his fellow panellists, his fellow journalists, his fellow “conservative intellectuals”, Aly comments on all matters of controversy with an air of erudite detachment. His quizzical and sometimes ironic waffling is so much more impressive that his master Malcolm’s pompous orations.

      That’s your Aly. Plays a deft bat to the spinners.

  46. Your bastard government at work

    Serco guards employed by the Department of Immigration have barred an asylum seeker advocate from visiting Baby Asha and her mother at a Brisbane hospital.

    Doctors at Brisbane’s Lady Cilento children’s hospital are refusing to discharge the one-year-old baby, known as Asha, who was being treated for burns sustained at the Nauru offshore processing centre, because they do not believe the centre provides a safe environment for a child.

    Natasha Blucher, a former Save the Children worker who is now advocacy coordinator for the Darwin Asylum Seeker Advocacy and Support Network (Dassan), has been supporting the family, but said her permission to visit with them has been revoked without explanation.

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/18/serco-guards-bar-asylum-seeker-advocate-from-visiting-baby-asha-in-hospital

    • Serco guards? Serco?

      FFS! Since when do mercenaries (which is what these goons are) get to tell Australian citizens what they can or can’t do in our own country?

  47. Coming, going? Arthur, Martha?

    The Turnbull government has backed away from previously dire warnings about the impact of bracket creep, the phenomenon pushing people into higher tax brackets as inflation lifts their wages.

    The finance minister, Mathias Cormann, said wage inflation was low so the problem was “not there to the same extent as it might have been in the past”, allowing the government to scale back its ambition for big income tax cuts.

    http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/feb/18/coalition-distances-itself-from-previous-bracket-creep-warnings

  48. “wage inflation was low”

    Perhaps they can make it go backward.

    Won’t be for want of trying.

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