The Prospect of Tony Abbot As Prime Minister

[tcpip]

Recent opinion polls show Tony Abbot has a better-than-even chance of becoming Prime Minister. This possible requires some serious thought. If you are gay, you can absolutely forget about same-sex marriage rights. At least with Labor, all that's required is to get the matter tabled at cabinet and the vote will be won. His absolutely archiac and offensive attitudes towards women, climate change and indigenous people is infuriating.

He carries a dangerous attitude towards to industrial relations and his deep indifference and ignorance of economic matters. Abbot loved 'Workchoices', and will bring it back; especially targetting unfair dismissal laws, pay and conditions, and penalty rates. Opposing the economic stimulus package, which is considered among the best designed in the world, with excellent results, Abbott not only expressed opposition to it, but slept through the vote after a night on the sauce.

Absolutely reckless cuts are planned against nation-building IT and environmental infrastructure, in favour of handing back $10.5 billion of resource rents from our commonwealth, to mining companies; because Tony understands that billionaires are having tough times. Abbott's accounting has been slippery or stupid. [T]he Coalition asked the department the cost of giving the Productivity Commission an extra $4 million a year. Yesterday the department replied poker-faced that it would cost $4 million a year.. One can only echo the words of Craig Emerson; Australia has never had in the post-war era a more economically incompetent candidate for the prime ministership than Tony Abbott.

Update: Former Reserve Bank chief, Bernie Fraser, (hardly a radical) blasts the Coalition over their economic policies.

Comments

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

How can you define scrapping the ridiculous excess of the NBN as a reckless cut? $2000 per person for fast broadband, when what we have at present is quite adequate for most purposes, is inane waste.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

You haven't mentioned asylum seekers. That's just as abhorrent a policy.

[horngirl.livejournal.com]

So you'd rather our internet infrastructure lagged even further behind the rest of the developed world than it already is?

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

"What we have at present" is insufficient for necessary infrastructure for the future, especially for connecting population nodes. Whilst I would prefer other infrastructure expenditure to have priority it is still a very good project.

Also this is a essentially a transfer payment; billions of dollars out of IT infrastructure, billions of dollars handed back to the mining companies.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

True that. Abbott's trite "Stop The Boats" claim is certainly deserving of criticism. He doesn't actually have a policy of "stopping" boats at their source, but he certainly agrees on punishing those who arrive here, by assigning them to detention in a country that is not a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees and re-introducing the highly damaging policy of Temporary Protection Visas.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh good article from The Punch ... quite a worthwhile online 'zine

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/abbotts-asylum-seeker-policy-is-out-of-its-mind/

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Capital that would be recouped after... 2 years at present rates.

[zey.livejournal.com]

I suspect he actually secretly wants boats to come partway, but, to be given the opportunity to "stop" them in a way that's visible to the xenophobe demographic.

[zhenzhi.livejournal.com]

i don't even want to imagine what it would be like with him running the show. :-(

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

But it is quite possible at this stage.

I can certainly understand people wanting to give Labor a bit of a kick, but you know, after getting rid of workchoices, ratifying Kyoto, making a formal apology to indigenous people and getting us through the GFC unscathed, it hasn't been a bad three years.

(Heck, even the insulation programme wasn't as bad a people make out...)

The possibility of a Howard Mark II looms on the horizon. And it's not a pretty sight..

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a very accurate assessment. Help encourage wars overseas (plus points from the chest-beating nationalists) and then kick the refugees when they arrive (plus points from the chest-beating xenophobes).

In business that's called 'vertical market integration'.

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

I am so angry that I can't vote any more. The thought of that man being PM makes me sick to my stomach.

[jennifergearing.livejournal.com]

That so many people seem to think he's a viable option terrifies me. I'd put it down to shit polling but I've spent too much time with some of my business clients of late, and too many of them feel comfortable enough to talk about how they think he's "a great bloke" with "a better plan" (what fucking plan? IDEK). Every time it happens my stomach drops and I feel a little less safe in this country I've lived in my whole life; and I never felt very safe to begin with.

Perhaps it was naive of me to think 2007 was a few steps forward, but I gotta say; if this election swings LibNats back into power, I don't know how we come back from that.

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

I really don't understand people complaining about how bad the last 3 years were. Considering the Global Financial Crisis and so forth they could have been much much much worse. OK, apparently there are some states with really bad unemployment, but is this a federal or a state issue given that it is localised.

My main disappointments with the government currently (apart from the stupid filter) are less about what they have done, and more about what they couldn't do because they got blocked by Tony & his ilk and the more raving looney minorities.

[kremmen.livejournal.com]

What amazing hype. The availability of DSL2+ is way higher here than in, say, the USA.

Some countries with super-high population concentrations have better speeds than us, but that's inevitable.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

If we were in the US, the UK, or even Germany (let along Greece) we would really know what the GFC would have been like. As an export-orientated economy we would have been looking at 15%+ unemployment if it wasn't for the stimulus package.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

The availability of DSL2+ is way higher here than in, say, the USA.

[[Citation Needed]]

Because some other people from U.S. disagree.

http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/treating-aussie-internet-users-like-a-bunch-of-dodos/

[omnot.livejournal.com]

I'm an ABBA fan: Anyone But Bloody Abbott!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I can hear the guns, Fernando. He's sure not a dancing queen, down the aisle or anywhere else (there won't be any ring, ring). But he does want to cut my super, and call another war, trooper and give the mining companies all our money, money, money.

After going on and on and on, I'd still like to see him bang a boomerang.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I agree with your sentiments; there is no greatness from this backward Howard-clone and there is certainly nothing of a plan that's beneficial to the majority of people.

The polling has been pretty crazy the past couple of weeks, but I get the feeling that things are changing. People are beginning to focus on the extremely poor economic competence of the opposition leader and his ultra-conservative views.

Being politically partisan I was worried that Nelson or Turnbull might steal the middle ground in an election. In this case I am worried about the thuggish legislation this crusader will impose on others.

NBN (nature of), cost & benefit

[arjen-lentz.livejournal.com]

This is about a road, an electronic one.
NBN costs about $10bln/year over 4 years investment to build. Considering it's nation wide, that'll be about the cheapest piece of infrastructure that's ever been built. It's an absolute bargain.
There are a few new tunnels and bridges in Brisbane that cost multiple billions each!

NBN is not primarily for the "lucky" people who live in the right suburbs of the major population centres, it's for everybody. It means people can live elsewhere and do high tech jobs, but it also means farmers are able to upload the videos of their cattle to sell. That's a real need now, a satellite downlink to the outback can't deliver that.

This e-road delivers something very very valuable, namely ability to make a living outside the major population centres - it affects lifestyle (for all of us), education, health, use of resources, and more.
Quite possibly the people who came up with it didn't even realise that ;-), but it's huge.

Then we can also look at other countries, many "3rd world" nations have faster, more reliable and cheaper Internet connectivity than we do. And I know, because I've had people in those countries as my colleagues and the connectivity/bandwidth is what enabled the jobs.

[jennifergearing.livejournal.com]

What's also troubling me is the fact that the ALP, despite actually holding power, currently, seems to be continuing its game of "let's chase the Libs to the right whilst the media machine continues to buy into the idea of us being left" thus shifting the apparent 'centre' further and further to the right. It doesn't change my opinion of Abbott or the LibNats, but it still troubles me.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I understand the need and desire to find the political centre in terms of public opinion. Finding this, and remaining at least somewhat progressive is difficult. For example, I understand how Gillard et al have framed the asylum seeker issue; no more mandatory detention for application (except when they arrive 'unauthorised'); no more temporary protection visas, any processing centre to be located in a country that's a signatory to the UN convention. OK, I can swallow that - with a grimace - because I understand in deepest darkest suburbia there is more than a few people who are apparently scared stiff at the prospect of Tamils and Afghanis risking their life to get here.

In other instances I think greater clarity should have been expressed. For example the offer of a "market based solution" to carbon pricing leaves the door open to both the ETS (some of the Libs) or a carbon tax (Greens). I think by this stage it should be obvious that the Libs aren't going to play ball.

In other areas I think they have seriously misjudged where the political centre actually is; on same-sex marriage, the Internet filter, and the NSCP, the majority of the population is far to the left than what's being offered.

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I think Howard Mark II is an understatement. I found Howard morally repugnant and actively dislikable. I find the thought of PM Abbott positively terrifying.

[jennifergearing.livejournal.com]

I can see your point, to a degree; I think perhaps it's more that I'm saddened by the conflation of the centre vis a vis public opinion with some kind of 'actual centre' (for want of a better term - brain slightly fried at the moment).

I suppose there's an argument to be made that it makes more sense to define the 'actual centre' in terms of the number of people on either side, and I can see that being perhaps a more democratic notion of the centre, but it saddens me.

The Right seems to be very good at moving the Overton window in their favour, whereas the Left often seems to spend more time buying into these moves than countering them.