The NEXT coming Oz election thread!

Yeah, it's a bit like Bollywood......... a hit one week, and **** the next.:wink:

Howler has been a shining light on the multicultural issue.

This one was great, msolga.

I googled >liberal politics< and look what came up.

This very serious thread has become a mere cartoon swapping exercise!






More of it, I say!

I think, perhaps, JH & co have opened an uncontrollable can of worms with their recent rediscovery of accountability & integrity <gasp> as worthy objectives in parliament! Where will it end? :



PM rules out sacking Santoro over biotech shares
Prime Minister John Howard says his Minister for Ageing did the right thing by donating the profit he made from selling shares he had failed to declare.... <cont>

http://abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200703/s1870849.htm

MORE!

Can you believe it?
What happened to a proper election campaign, with real issues being discussed?

When will it end?



.... But our PM dining with a porn king?

Really? :

Making a meal out of PM and porn king
March 15, 2007 - 2:10PM/SMH

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott says Prime Minister John Howard doesn't willingly associate with dodgy characters despite attending a lunch with a porn mogul.

Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper reported today that Mr Howard attended a July 2004 luncheon at Mount Cotton in Queensland at which porn mogul Scott Phillips was a guest.

Phillips was one of 20 people who paid $2000 a head to dine with the prime minister.

Proceeds went to Liberal candidate Andrew Laming, who went on to win the seat of Bowman.

Phillips is now in jail after pleading guilty to a range of violent crimes, the newspaper reports.

Mr Abbott says Mr Howard has been unfairly portrayed in the report.

"I think that particular story this morning was right over the top," Mr Abbott told ABC Radio. ... <cont>

http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-and-the-porn-king/2007/03/15/1173722623952.html?page=fullpage

(yawn>

I guess we'll have to make our own fun, while they energetically smear each other, then?

It's getting rather tedious, yes?

OK, then!

Here's the opportunity you've been waiting for!

Match favourite dogs with particular politicians:


Jon Faine (774/ABC radio Melbourne) interviewed a fellow who'd apparently done some serious research (?) into matching particular dog breeds with politicians. (This actually went to air. Maybe Jon Faine is as bored with the current state of political dialogue between the two major parties as we are?)

Anyway ... the idea was to match the most appropriate breed of dog with it's political counterpart - the one with similar characteristics ....

John Howard was described as a nippy, determined Jack Russell .... Then A Jack Russell lover complained bitterly about the species being insulted by the analogy ...

Kevin R was seen as a poodle ...

Something very nasty was said about the likely Mark Latham dog .....

... & a number of caller described all politicians as mongrels .....




Can you do better than this while you're waiting for the level of political discourse in Oz to lift its game?

I'm particularly interested in Ruddock & Abbott canines!

Msolga.
Quote...

I just want all the entrenched horror's of Howard's rule to be gone. It has been the ugliest & cruelest of times. Sigh.

It would definitely be an improvement to have a government that has more loyalty to the people of Australia & that president of the USA, though .....

I'm not exactly chuffed by everything Oz being sold off to the highest bidder from anywhere, either, but I'm not aware that Labor has some clear policy to address this. Someone fill me in if I've missed something important here... unquote.

I've lived under both party's over the last 62 years, the hardest was when the working mans labor party was in power, before Howards liberals... remember all the people with investments, getting interest in the teens.. remember paying 16% on my home mortgage.. remember the high unemployment. Yeah! it was great ( like bloody hell ) I aint got much room for any of the political party's in any country. However, I' de rather back a horse that's won a couple of races than one that's lost em all. Got no complaint with Howard, spent a long long time starting a business that has taken 20 years to come to friutation, now being run by my 3 son's, and employing many other people, the worst time was under Labor paying 18% on a overdraft, at one stage we were earning less than the dole... running a semi trailer and two delivery trucks. Don't tell me about changing this leader... bet you are a bloody sight better off than you were before the Liberals were in power.

Alexander = Golden Retriever

Oh, and I started it??? LOL

Downer in drag? He's such a pretty boy.

Pity he don't know **** from clay.

Ooooh, that was too evil.

I'm so bad.

Sorry Johnny.

From where I stand, the business community is very well looked after by Bonzai and Co. Seems to be no end of grants for this and that, tax concessions for this and that, low interest loans etc etc. .. What did the wage earners get ? I R laws which just take away from their pay packets, and penal clauses to enforce it. No wonder business people love Bonzai.
Good luck to anton bonnier for being successful, I take my hat off to you, but remember, we all can't be employers.

Well, you retaliated, in response to my cartoon posting compulsion, by posting even more!

It's completely out of hand, I tell you!

I'm having trouble (being a cat person myself!) coming up with suitable pointy nosed breeds. With the correct personalities to match the politicians, of course!

... like Julia G. It would have to be some very sharp, red coated variety!

... & Tony A. This critter would have to have deeply religious characteristics! And a nasty streak!

But I have decided the Mr Ruddock, our attorney-general, is most definitely a variety of sneaky rotweller!

Now I've got myself thinking!: Amanda, anyone?

No, actually anton, I'm not exactly a "bloody sight better off" under the Libs at all. Far from it. But then, unlike you, I'm a public sector worker. (Education) I'd rather not go into my particular personal details online, but speaking in general terms, the public sector has taken quite a thrashing from the Liberals. Both the recipients of public education & the workers in the sector.
From my observation the quality (& availability) of public education, health, transport, etc, has been undermined by years of Liberal rule, as funding has been systematically transferred from the public to the private sector. Want a decent education?: Pay fees in a private school. What reasonable health care?: Take out private (subsidized by the tax payer) health insurance. Want a degree? Take out one of those crippling (for the not-so-wealthy) HECS loans ... & delay your home-buying, marriage & family as you pay off this debt into your late 20s/yearly 30sa. I could go on ... The point is, that there are many, many Australians who cannot do these things, through no fault of their own.

The thing is, this government has severely widened the gap between the "haves" & the "have nots". You might argue that if everyone worked hard (as you have) that this gap could be bridged. But it's much harder to do that these days, particularly with casualization of the workforce & the the new IR laws. (Go back a few pages in this thread & read the information from the Bureau of Statistics on the huge under of Australians who are currently under-employed & want more work (& job security!) than is actually available. The government's spin on "full employment" is a myth. We now have sizeable proportion of "working poor" in the workforce (as in the US) despite the government's rosy employment statistics.)

So it seems this government has been "good for business" but not so terrific for the public sector & for many workers & their families.

Just the other side of the coin to yours, anton.

anton (or anyone else), I'd be curious to hear your response to this article by AGE writer Kenneth Davidson. He argues that economic management, under the Liberals, has not be so wonderful at all! And he discusses the reasons for "the recession we had to have" under Keating & argues that serious measures need to be taken urgently, to address Australia's huge current balance of payment debts.:

It's about time the economy was managed
Kenneth Davidson
March 15, 2007/the AGE

"THE Labor Party has successfully created the impression that … the economy runs on autopilot and it has nothing to do with good governance. That could not be further from the truth." (John Howard in Tokyo on Monday trying to explain Labor's poll lead.)

The key difference between the economic policies of the Howard-Costello Government and the Hawke-Keating government was the different attitude to foreign debt.

Labor was prepared to engineer a recession in the late 1980s to slow the economy and slow the recently deregulated banks' appetites for foreign debt so they could profit from financing an explosion in share and property values that the banks themselves largely engineered.

Until the election of the Coalition Government in 1996, all Australian postwar governments were constrained by the balance of payments. The lessons of the 1890s land boom, and the excessive and wasteful state government borrowing during the 1920s and the resulting depressions when agricultural commodity prices fell were that the prime task of economic policy was to keep foreign debt at manageable levels.

It was understood that when Australia's export and import competing industries couldn't generate or save the necessary foreign exchange to finance the debt, it was the government's responsibility to apply the brakes to the domestic economy to curb imports even if that led to recession, lost jobs and the threat of electoral defeat.

Thus Keating's statement about the "'recession Australia had to have", which the electorate still remembers. He was saved in the 1993 election by the unpopularity of John Hewson's Fightback! policy.

Howard didn't make the same mistake in 1996. He eschewed Fightback! and promised to make Australians "relaxed and comfortable", while in the background his deputy, Peter Costello, ran the "debt truck" with a counter showing how much Australia's foreign debt was growing each second to create the impression that the re-election of Keating would lead to another recession.

At the time of the election, net foreign debt was $193 billion.Since then, net foreign debt has grown 170 per cent to $520 billion and is continuing to grow by nearly $50 billion a year despite the biggest export commodity price boom since the Korean War. Now, more than half the build-up in debt each year is the interest on the existing debt. Until the 1980s, there were capital controls to ensure that foreign borrowings were used to finance direct investment, which, provided it generated a return in excess of the cost of borrowing, would not add to the foreign debt burden of the nation.

Now, the lessons of the 1890s and 1920s have been lost. Most of the borrowings that aren't used to pay the interest on the existing stock of borrowings have been used by the banks to finance the housing bubble. We are assured by authorities that the growth in household debt doesn't matter because the debt burden has been reduced by low interest rates and rising house values. .....

http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/its-about-time-the-economy-was-managed/2007/03/14/1173722553786.html?page=fullpage