Oz Election Thread #7 - Turnbull's LNP

From the BBC website.

http://mediaserver.dwpub.com/press-release/35429/Bagpuss+turns+40!.jpg

Quote:

As Australia gets used to another prime minister, here are 11 things you may not have known, or perhaps have forgotten, about the member for Wentworth, Malcolm Turnbull.

1. He has political lineage. George Lansbury, a British politician and social reformer who led the UK Labour Party from 1932 to 1935, is Mr Turnbull's great-great-uncle.

2. Also a family history in entertainment. British actress Angela Lansbury, famed for her role in the US TV series Murder, She Wrote, is a distant relative...

3. ...and Oliver Postgate, the late creator of much-loved British children's shows including Bagpuss, The Clangers and Ivor the Engine, is a cousin.

4. Bruce Turnbull brought up his son Malcolm single-handedly after his wife, Coral Lansbury, left the family when Malcolm was nine years old.

5. Mr Turnbull invested A$500,000 ($355,000; £231,000) in Australian internet provider OzEmail in 1994 and sold his share five years later for A$57m, making him one of the richest ever Australian politicians.

6. Working for Australian media mogul Kerry Packer, Turnbull visited Hugh Hefner's Playboy headquarters in Chicago in the 1970s to obtain the rights to bring the controversial adult magazine to Australia.

7. Famed editor of the Sunday Times Harold Evans offered Mr Turnbull a job at the paper in 1975, warning him not to finish his law degree. "Don't do law", Evans reportedly told him. "Terrible things could happen. You could become a judge, or worse, a politician!"

8. Australian businesswoman and former Sydney Lord Mayor Lucy Turnbull is married to Australia's new leader.

9. Mr Turnbull's beloved Maltese terrier, Mellie, carved out her own profile with a popular online blog. Sadly, Mellie passed away in 2011. The blog lives on with JoJo and various guest blogs from doggy friends.

10. Like his predecessor Tony Abbott, Mr Turnbull is a keen swimmer. He is a member of Sydney's exclusive early morning, winter swimming club, the Bondi Icebergs.

11. The public face of the republican movement in the late 1990s, Turnbull savaged John Howard as "the prime minister who broke this nation's heart" when a referendum to ditch the monarchy failed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-34253012

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

Pretty sure that packer/playboy story is bullshit. He worked for the Nation Review as a journalist for a little while in the seventies, but most of the time he studied, graduating from Oxford in 1980. He worked with packer in the 80s (on an abortive Fairfax takeover) but never for him. The rest seem true.

1 Reply

@hingehead,

I never pass up an opportunity to post a picture of Bagpuss.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

What is bagpuss?

1 Reply

@hingehead,

Oliver Postgate gave us some brilliant kid's TV. Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss.

Bagpuss was a cloth cat who lived in a Victorian/Edwardian junk shop. Every episode something would come in, Bagpuss would wake up, and so would his friends, other assorted stuffed/wooden animals and dolls. They'd investigate the object, sing a few songs about it, mend it, tell a story, and then go back to sleep.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02818/bagpuss2_2818683b.jpg

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

I'm guessing, looking at him, that bagpuss had a deep, slightly dopey, voice?

1 Reply

@hingehead,

A sleepy voice.

0 Replies

David Pope in a rich vein of form, and I'm not just saying that because I knew him in Canberra when he was just a good lefty shelver.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPTgTUtUEAARii2.jpg

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http://www.canberratimes.com.au/content/dam/images/g/j/x/m/q/o/image.gallery.galleryLandscape.940x628.1t3j0.png/1443525346981.jpg

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Well it's been oddly quiet since Malcolm took the reigns after throwing Tony under the 372 bus.

Massive boost in the polls as preferred PM but after prefs not much has changed electorally.

A couple of minor stumbles so far, from both sides. ALP appearing churlish on the Caymans and too many old policy positions rearing their ugly heads and belying Turnbull's ability to change anything.

My lowlight was the man who said the age of entitlement must end, retiring with full pension to become American Ambassador - very few go so far on so little.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CR81r20UsAEMxM-.png

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Well it's been kind of quiet. Nation breathed a sigh of relief as Turnbull continued to 'not be Abbott'.

Abbott continues to snipe, after promising not to, but all his sniping achieves is that the electorate is reminded how grateful they are to be shot of Abbott, the ructions within the Coalition are a bit more difficult to understand, but there has been some weird **** going on - McFarlane move to the Nats and back again was just weird - and something of a slap for Turnbull, Truss and Joyce.

The gloss is slowly coming off Malcolm as it become clearer he's a great salesman, decent communicator, but doesn't know **** about actually delivering - at least not using the apparatus he currently heads.

The MYEFO statements with the deficit blowout and calls for 'patience' are laughable in contrast to what the LNP did in opposition on much smaller ALP deficits.

Already we're seeing discredited Abbott policies rebranded and shoved through e.g. the Medicare Co-payment by stealth story http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/turnbull-government-introduces-copayment-by-stealth-doctors-say-20151215-glob9j.html
and half a billion off Medicare, half a billion off age pensions but no change to the fossil fuel subsidies.

And then Albo tweets this, with the caption 'you couldn't write this stuff'

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWUoTuTW4AEGt4o.png

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This came up on twitter yesterday

http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/3/a/w/d/6/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.3awd4.png/1403829768227.jpg

It's Hunt, Abbott, O'Dwyer, Pyne and Dutton celebrating the repeal of the carbon tax.

I want it on t-shirts and on the doors of the ministerial offices. Another triumph of politics over common sense - a true gaggle of geese staring down a budget black hole and having Australia as a near pariah in the Paris climate talks. If we still had the carbon tax both situations would be much better - and we be much further up the renewables development ladder.

There's never been a better time to be an Australian dickhead.

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From Crikey

https://scontent-syd1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpa1/v/t1.0-9/12644647_10154484865564018_91302830508021227_n.jpg?oh=a3d94380cdb7fd1ee7deff1edbfb43e8&oe=5737DEC7

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Finally some good news auspol wise.

https://fbcdn-sphotos-g-a.akamaihd.net/hphotos-ak-xtf1/v/t1.0-9/12802967_10153216459771292_2692122455770096141_n.jpg?oh=80a1b1d1f56a3a87e495480381c4197d&oe=574E0E6C&__gda__=1464740936_ef4aefd53c0b66aec2c3bf26192a89f8

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If Newspoll shows 50/50, then Labor is ahead.

1 Reply

@Wilso,

I think right now ALP's chief goal is to discredit Turnbull - not that it will turn away core LNP voters, or attract new ALP voters, but it will get Greens voters to direct prefs to Labor - and I think that's crucial for them.

What do you think of the double dissolution option?

I think/hope most Australians will see it as cynical manipulation to bring an election just a couple of months forward and it will bring back separate half senate elections.

1 Reply

@hingehead,

Eof course it's a cynical manipulation, especially considering that they've already got at least one DD trigger .Hard to see what the reasoning is. I can't understand any Liberal power broker wanting to fight an election on an essentially industrial relations battleground. That's an area where they'll always lose

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With the Senate voting changes passes, seems we're almost certainly heading for a double dissolution

1 Reply

@Wilso,

On a personal level - we're off to the Greek islands before the budget and returning after the probable July 2 poll.

So we will probably miss both the election announcement and the election itself. Given that we will be nowhere near Athens (the only embassy in Greece - there is a consul in Thessalonika, but we never get anywhere near it) by the time there are ballot papers, I wrote to the AEC asking how we could vote.

They sent stock reply that gave two options (neither of which matched the situation I'd outlined). I used to trust the AEC but after the lost WA senate votes and this neanderthal use of a CRM they've gone down in my estimation.

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https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9a66ec45bf303ca84e33cfd0a941b92b9eae486f/0_0_2400_5870/master/2400.jpg?w=940&q=55&auto=format&usm=12&fit=max&s=5f17aaafd842863e990f0e247606d811

0 Replies

Oz Election Thread #7 - Turnbull's LNP

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