In relative terms, Bill Shorten, Labor leader since September 2013, has lived a charmed existence. Until he took the job, Labor leaders had a life expectancy in the big seat up the front that was measured in months, not years.
Reports of cracks emerging between Shorten and his frontbencher Anthony Albanese emanate from a speech Albo made to the Transport Workers Union in Western Australia in which he claimed a victory over the government’s budget. The Turnbull government, Albanese said, had shifted towards Labor policy and platform and this should be celebrated.
Meanwhile, his leader was running around telling anyone who cared to listen that the budget was not a Labor budget at all.
Given leadership spills or even the hint of them are a drug of addiction to many in the media, the clear contradictions caused a stir.
Appearing on the Nine Network’s Today program, Albo’s segment counterpart, Liberal Christopher Pyne, delighted in turning molehills into mountains. But Albo was having none of it and turned to a politician’s quick and easy answer when confronted with a difficult question.
Full column here.
I love Kimmie
I love oppenheimer
I hate canberra
I hate career pollies
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3q8Od5qJio
Wash your mouth out with soap dear smoke, only sweet Mr Baptiste loves Kimmie!
Relax Henry. He’s just trying to blow smoke up your arse.
I’ll admit that I had high hopes for Kevin Rudd when he was elected, but he turned out to be one of the most narcissistic and blame-shifting PMs I’ve seen in action (witness his handling of the fallout from Pink Batts).
I like the pink batts program as a brilliant illustration of what happens when the federal government strays into territory it should never enter.
When the RC came along they went to Kevin Rudd and asked what his role and responsibilities had been in the disaster – he pointed them to his Environment Minister and said, “He was responsible”. They went to Peter Garrett and asked the same thing. He pointed at the State governments and said, “Well, they set the building standards; ask them.” So they went to the States and asked the same thing. The States said, “Well, yes but it’s the installers who are responsible for obeying the law.” So they went to the installers and asked the same thing and they said, “We raised the potential problems with the PM and he wasn’t interested – he just wanted it all done yesterday.”
And around and around it went. People died, houses burned, a big chunk of public money disappeared but nobody carried the can. Nobody took responsibility. The buck stopped nowhere except at the micro level where a few individual installers were prosecuted for providing unsafe work places.
And it’s happening all over the place. Blackouts in SA? Canberra blames Adelaide, Adelaide blames Canberra – nobody’s responsible. Disaster relief a bit slow in Queensland? Brisbane blames Canberra, Canberra blames Brisbane – nobody takes charge. Health and education services? Don’t even ask about it – nobody knows who the hell is running things.
The federation is stuffed. Nobody’s in charge. Nobody cares. The politicians warm their seats just long enough to fatten their wallets and their arses, then go off into retirement to write a lying book or two about how great they were and take up sinecure jobs on company boards and university campuses.
Total crap BOW I expected better from you. Lets us look at a few facts. Hundreds of workplace deaths occurred during 1996-2007 under Howard’s PM ship. No $23million Royal Commissions into any of them. Wonder why? No blame poured on Howard. The deaths re batts had more to do with greedy batt installers (businessmen who were Liberal voters anyway) who did not train their staff and ignored their state Health and Safety Laws…state laws, not Federal laws I might add.
It should be remembered that not one person who died during the home insulation program was directly employed by the Rudd government and that employers are responsible for workplace safety. I also didn’t notice anybody returning their batts or school halls for that matter? Did Liberal whingers expect Garret and Rudd to be in every roof supervising every installation? That is like saying Abbott was responsible for everybody who died during his term as health Minister because he cut $1billion from hospitals.
Official records show that there were no fires in 99.98% of the million ceilings insulated and 10,000 jobs were created. Just 2 in 10,000 installations had fires and just 30 had structural damage mostly caused by greedy installers. A 2012 report on the “pink batts fiasco”said that by 2020, the insulation scheme would save at least 38 petajoules of energy (equivalent to lighting all Australian households for one and a half years) and avoid 14 Mt of CO2-e greenhouse gas emissions. Sadly but predictably, Abbott used dead men to win votes over this issue.
There was a net total of over 463 deceased people in the workplace 2009-13, yet Abbott’s outrage was contained to just these four who got used as election fodder by the Looters. One can draw a parallel with Dutton’s demonisation of refugees. How do the families of those 463 disregarded dead feel knowing that since 2009 and before even then their loved ones didn’t warrant a single high profile Abbott or Liberal to speak up for them. To have the Liberals show no desire to defend the memories of these deceased people, to express no concern for their families loss, to fail to call for an enquiry into the fatalities of their loved ones? Such hypocrisy by the Looters.
The Liberals and especially Abbott didn’t give a tinkers damn about dead workers, but they clearly did care about the dog-whistle, votes, winning and power. Prior to the pink batts insulation scheme being introduced, there was one house fire for every 765 insulation instalments under the Liberals. Under Labor’s pink batts scheme, there was one fire for every 6,158 installations. That said I will say this. Rudd was remiss in not enforcing workplace safety regulations.
Onya BASSMAN. That’s exactly how it works in this country , the born to rule can do no wrong and the left can do no right.
You are a champion. Give it to ’em.
The doctrine of ministerial responsibility is officially dead BLS.
“The federation is stuffed”.
Of course it’s stuffed. What do you expect? Chaff is fine for horses but if the citizens are fed shit then you get a nation of idiots.
http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/reality-tv/james-weir-recaps-seven-year-switch-series-2-episode-10/news-story/2a416ca6a2755d49da0b271861a4b9c2
Turn on a TV, one loop around the channels any time, night or day and figure out why we are a nation of placid gawking gullible zombies.
Get right up ’em.
Good gods! I couldn’t even get past the first sentence of that piece.
Quelle horreur!
Mack – from previous blog.
Chris Cornell (with Soundgarden) IS the original.
I hadn’t heard the Peter Frampton version before, but I listened to it and liked it, but not as much as the Soundgarden version. What’s that tube he’s singing into about?
Could never stand Kevin, thought him to be a self obsessed little man living in a thought bubble of his own magnificence…….still is.
Kevin or Dismayed Tracy?
Still projecting your inferiority complex. what a weak silly old bugger you are. If you weren’t so vile you would be sad.
Again…..we are paying the win only. No place dividend sorry.
Continuing with the Trump theme from the last blog, Chris Kenny made interesting reading this morning. But there is something that genuinely puzzles me. Being human, all politicians lie at least sometimes and, being politicians, some of them lie rather a lot. When this happens, their supporters generally attempt to rationalise this in some way, or try a counter argument that it is not really a lie anyway. All the objective analysis shows that Trump lies far more than most politicians, although I grant that some of this may be a casual indifference to the truth rather than more deliberate lying. And, by and large, his supporters simply don’t care. These are the same supporters who are convinced that he is going to ‘drain the swamp’. Now, I may be missing something, but I would have thought that the person to drain the swamp will be someone who lies a lot less than the average politician, not one who lies a lot more.
The other point JTI is that the whole process of removing a leader takes 3 months.
That is 10% of a Parliamentary term.
If it were towards the end of the term, the Libs would call a snap election while Labor was leaderless.
So you are very correct in saying Labor can only replace a leader immediately after an election.
That gives an incoming Government a holiday for 3 months.
UK labor changed its policy and got Corbyn – given that anybody can join the party for a trivial sum, it is a disaster ready to happen or already had happened.
I imagine a lot of Tories joined. Four pounds a month is a small price to pay to undermine the opposition: https://join.labour.org.uk
He is a piece of work, our man Kevin.
Still carrying empty suitcases.
Hard to say who was the worst Milton, Rudd or Abbott?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfJXKG4IB20
Gillard…….
Who can forget the brilliance, Mr Insider, of the very talented Anthony Ackroyd and his clever impersonation of Kevin Rudd, or as we knew him, Kevin 747.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wksMvWCsh4
Very hard to to the difference between Ackroyd and the original Henry.
It still amazes me that this this geeky, bespectacled career public servant – who couldn’t even remember which union he belonged to when asked about it during the 2007 election campaign – was able to walk all over the ALP. Here’s this party allegedly full of hard-nuts and industrial head-kickers and they just couldn’t stand up to him.
His electoral appeal is similarly mysterious. I found him about as dynamic and exciting as a plank of wood but if the opinion polls were to be believed he was up there with Bob Hawke at his best.
Maybe he has some sort of weird super-power. Is Nerd-Strength a thing?
I read your interesting new blog when it came out yesterday in the Australian, Mr Insider, and its sad isn’t it for Labor that they have got Turnbull on the ropes, he’s down 11 or more negative Newspolls, and here’s a possible Labor Leader stoush looming! FGS haven’t they learnt anything from the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years! Having said that I do like Anthony Albanese but you can be sure if they go to a Leader change that Turnbull will most likely risk springing an early election using the element of “surprise”. As for Rudd he can bugger off forever imho.