well there are some things we don't know and others we don't need to know......and for good reason......i don't see you getting hi and mighty about what what's going on in afghanistan???? shouldn't the nation know what's going on?? and reveal all our defence forces information.....#-o #-o

Indonesia have a lot to answer for and it's only being revealed now due to a change of government.....

also in the past the ex government were stopping journalists from entering refugee camps and suppressing information, you are just green enough to trust the media.......](*,) ](*,)

You may argue that delaying information about boats arriving is a good idea, however that's not the same as running like a shonky car salesman on Today Tonight when a journalist asks you a question.

"We are ready to govern"

just another media and lefties beat up....he didn't run from any journo..... he is being wisked off by his minders,nothing wrong here....NEXT please....

[youtube]JhQYehcGweg[/youtube]

"Do I think that the boats will stop dead on day one of an incoming government? I wish. But it may not happen," Abbott said.

0:21 is the start of him running. When he realised he couldn't escape he started walking.

Being whisked off is the same fricken thing. He's avoiding comment, all he's missing is striking at the camera man and he'd be classic TT.

[size=8]NEXT[/size]

:lol:

A series of fatalities has occurred due to the policies of Tony Abbott's party being enacted, partly due to the policy, partly due to not establishing a covenant with Indonesia for said policy.

However, Mr Abbott is the Australian Prime Minister, he represents his party and their policies. He is unequivocally accountable for this outcome and these fatalities. And here he is on national media running away from questioning.

It's been 2 weeks since they were sworn in...

Tony Abbott's rising tide of inconvenient truths

Date
September 30, 2013

Kenneth Davidson
Senior columnist at The Age

Our new Prime Minister has quickly demonstrated his contempt for climate science.

As Tony Abbott said ad nauseam during the campaign, the 2013 federal election was about three things: the onerous level of public debt, stopping the boats and abolition of the carbon tax.

Compared to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government.

Ignored until after the election was the question of whether the moderate level of debt was a major factor in Australia avoiding the recessionary consequences of the global financial crisis. Then the new government (and its media apologists) segued effortlessly and without explanation into arguing that the deficit wasn't a life-and-death issue after all. In fact, the budget couldn't be brought back quickly into balance without risking undermining the still soft recovery.

All the information needed to make that judgment was publicly available by the beginning of 2013. But to recognise the economic reality would have involved a different election narrative: that there was room for expansionary budgetary policies. There was no debt crisis. But the truth didn't fit the narrative that Abbott constructed to win the election: that the Labor government was incompetent and illegitimate.

On the matter of stop the boats, it is important to remember that one area where political leadership counts in Australia is how issues involving race are framed. This was shown by the leadership shown by Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in response to the first wave of boat people after the Allied defeat in the Vietnam war. Their leadership has proved to be of long-term advantage to Australia.

By contrast, the latent xenophobic fear and resentment of the latest wave of boat people - fanned by both major parties during the 2013 election - will have long-term costs in terms of social solidarity, national self-respect and economic opportunities forgone, as well as damaging relations with Indonesia.

But this election campaign entered darker territory. On my reading of history, this was the first post-enlightenment election in which a core policy was based on denial of fundamental laws of science.

Edward Davey, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is quoted in Pushing our Luck - Ideas for Australian Progress, published by the Centre for Policy Development, as saying: ''Two hundred years of good science - teasing out uncertainties, considering risk - has laid the foundation for what we now understand. It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable [and] human activity is significantly contributing to the warming of our planet.''

The Centre for Policy Development notes there is bipartisan agreement between Britain's Conservative-led coalition government and the Labour opposition that global warming is both a serious challenge (Britain is committed to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 1990 levels, of 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050) and a major economic opportunity. (Prime Minister David Cameron said this year that: ''It is the countries that prioritise green energy that will secure the biggest share of the jobs and growth in a low carbon sector set to be worth $4 trillion by 2015.'')

In contrast, Abbott went into the 2013 Australian election falsely implying that living standards were falling and that a major component in rising electricity prices was the carbon tax. He said the effect of policy action on climate change was ''to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of families around Australia''.

By comparison to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government. Abbott is on the record as saying ''the science isn't settled'', the world is ''cooling'', and ''whether the carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven''.

As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government - closing the Climate Commission, instructing the Environment Department to prepare legislation to scrap the Climate Change Authority (which was independently responsible for allocating $2 billion a year for programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), and sacking two department heads who had been involved in development of the emissions trading scheme.

Worse, Abbott has appointed the former head of the ABC and the Australian Stock Exchange, Maurice Newman, as chairman of the government's Business Advisory Council. Newman recently complained (in The Australian Financial Review on September 17) about the former government's cavalier attitude to the carbon tax ''and related climate myths''. He went on to say: ''The money spent on agencies and subsidies pursuing these myths was wasted. Their legacy continues to undermine Australia's international competitiveness.''

Rubbish. Action by the previous government to impose a price on carbon was a small step to improve Australia's long-term viability as a wealthy country. Dismantling these measures is a futile defence of early 20th-century industrial capitalism.

Australia cannot make the transition to a low-carbon, post-industrial state when we have a governing elite that is hostile to established science and therefore prepared to back Abbott's ideological obsessions.

As David Spratt, the co-author of Climate Code Red - the case for emergency action, has pointed out, Abbott successfully used the politics of fear to win the 2013 election. ''The challenge for the opposition is to construct a narrative that recognises this apprehension and fear and provides a clear path to climate safety so that Howard's battlers become safe climate champions,'' Spratt says.

It's a difficult but essential task.

Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist for The Age.

Email: kdavidson@dissent.com.au



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbotts-rising-tide-of-inconvenient-truths-20130929-2umbc.html#ixzz2gMaE3PcN

More performances like this and Joe Hockey will send confidence backwards
Date

September 27, 2013

Budget shows $18.8b deficit
Joe Hockey looked like the dog that caught the car at his first press conference as Treasurer.

His expression oscillated between bewilderment and annoyance, as he went dangerously close to complaining about having too full a "dance card", and being forced to spend too much time in the capital.

Tell it to Wayne Swan one was tempted to say - the poor sod seemed to be always in Canberra slaving thanklessly over the numbers, doing the hard grunt work of budget preparation and fiscal management.

Advertisement
Swan was roundly criticised for his less than confident start back in 2007 - in some eyes he would never recover.

One suspects now though that if Hockey, just nine days into the job, were fully candid, he'd admit to a grudging respect for his old nemesis.

Being Australia's treasurer is regarded as the hardest job in government because it is.

Friday's "presser" was ostensibly called to reveal the final numbers from Labor's penultimate budget - ie the one outlined last year for 2012-13.

But the focus was always going to broaden out from those plainly historical numbers.

Which is what happened.

Questions came from all angles, touching on Hockey's fractious relationship with Treasury - its head, Martin Parkinson, will leave after the next budget; the true state of the budget now; the current state of the economy and any threats to it; his views on the US Fed's stimulus tapering; the risks of a housing bubble as cautioned by our own RBA: his thoughts on inflation; an so on.

His answers were a study in non-answering - even on the broad macro-economic challenges.

The kind version is that Hockey's vagueness was deliberate - part of a whole of government strategy right now to say as little as possible.

But to be frank, it felt more like something else. Like perhaps a government that has not yet made the pyschological transition to office.

Even the subject of the presser revealed that. Attacking Labor's 2012 budget required little change from his past practice.

Narrow attack lines work in opposition and Hockey was as skilled a practitioner of the art as any. But in government, treasurers have to simultaneously project and defend and they have do it across the board.

Despite Dr Parkinson's looming replacement, Hockey maintains that his relationship with the Exchequer is in excellent shape.

So it was surprising that he cast a slur his own department by slamming the revenue projections from the former government's announced tightening of the Fringe Benefits Tax treatment of privately leased cars.

The numbers had come straight from Treasury - as recently as July.

Is the Treasurer really saying the people who are now his senior departmental officials bodgied up the numbers for political purposes?

Hockey will no doubt find his feet, but if business confidence really has rebounded from the change of government alone, then it wouldn't take too may directionless press conferences like Friday's to send it back the other way.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/more-performances-like-this-and-joe-hockey-will-send-confidence-backwards-20130927-2ujp6.html#ixzz2gMcNaGmb

Helen Coonan for the NBN Board. Incredible.

Julia Gillard defends legacy, criticises Kevin Rudd in first public comments since her defeat

September 30, 2013 - 8:20PM

Mark Kenn

Julia Gillard gives first public talk

While it was difficult to lose the ballot against Kevin Rudd, former Prime Minister Julia Gillard says she decided to give the party 'the gift of silence', in her first public interview at the Sydney Opera House.

Julia Gillard has thrown a thinly veiled barb at Kevin Rudd for disloyalty and for destabilising her prime ministership, declaring the difference between her behaviour and his was that she always worked for the re-election of the Labor government.

She said while it was difficult to accept the outcome of the ballot which returned Mr Rudd to the prime ministership, she had quickly concluded the best course was to give her party "the gift of silence" deciding not to make any public comments before the election.

In the only public comments she has made on the explosive events of June and Mr Rudd's role in eventually replacing her, she justified her original move on Mr Rudd in June 2010 as "legitimate".

"To ask your leader to have a leadership ballot, that's legitimate, to do things continuously that undermine the Labor Party and the Labor government, then of course that shouldn't be done by anyone," she said.

"The key difference is every day I was deputy prime minister, I spent all of my time doing everything I could to have the Labor government prosper."

She also used the opportunity to hit out at media reports that she had split with her long-time partner Tim Mathieson, declaring the rumours completely untrue and claiming the original report in the Woman's Day magazine had been written without contacting her.

In her first serious interview since her removal from office on June 26, Ms Gillard told a sell-out audience at the Sydney Opera House that she was all too aware of the sexist treatment of her on the internet and elsewhere but chose not to engage despite a feeling of "murderous outrage".

However, she expressed the view that it would hopefully be easier for a woman to follow in the future, all but endorsing Tanya Plibersek as a future female prime minister describing her one of the nation's most gifted communicators.

She said there was "an underside of sexism, really ugly, violent sexism" in Australia but it was not clear that it was merely a function of the new media age.

"I would have thought we were beyond that and it's kind of depressing that it's not," she said.

Ms Gillard also spoke of the difficulties of managing the minority parliament revealing she had needed to have the Prime Minister's office rewired to have the division bells ring when a vote was on in the House of Representatives because the numbers were so finely balanced the government could have been defeated at any time.

Ms Gillard said she regarded her April trip to China culminating in a new special relationship between Beijing and Canberra to establish annual meetings at prime minister level as her biggest foreign policy achievement.

The good natured exchange also brought out an admission that her first meeting with US President Barack Obama almost went awry when she asked him if he was "mad" for expressing jealousy about the parliamentary tradition of Question Time.

While the questions were almost universally friendly, it was a question from a boy not even tall enough to reach the microphone, that stumped her.

Why, he asked, did she oppose gay marriage?

As she had done during her prime ministership, Ms Gillard fumbled her way through an answer that ultimately went nowhere, and singled itself out as the only question for the night that received a qualified applause.



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/julia-gillard-defends-legacy-criticises-kevin-rudd-in-first-public-comments-since-her-defeat-20130930-2uosq.html#ixzz2gNPjF1gx

Tony Abbott's rising tide of inconvenient truths

September 30, 2013

Kenneth Davidson
Senior columnist at The Age

Our new Prime Minister has quickly demonstrated his contempt for climate science.


As Tony Abbott said ad nauseam during the campaign, the 2013 federal election was about three things: the onerous level of public debt, stopping the boats and abolition of the carbon tax.

Compared to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government.

Ignored until after the election was the question of whether the moderate level of debt was a major factor in Australia avoiding the recessionary consequences of the global financial crisis. Then the new government (and its media apologists) segued effortlessly and without explanation into arguing that the deficit wasn't a life-and-death issue after all. In fact, the budget couldn't be brought back quickly into balance without risking undermining the still soft recovery.

All the information needed to make that judgment was publicly available by the beginning of 2013. But to recognise the economic reality would have involved a different election narrative: that there was room for expansionary budgetary policies. There was no debt crisis. But the truth didn't fit the narrative that Abbott constructed to win the election: that the Labor government was incompetent and illegitimate.

Advertisement
On the matter of stop the boats, it is important to remember that one area where political leadership counts in Australia is how issues involving race are framed. This was shown by the leadership shown by Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam in response to the first wave of boat people after the Allied defeat in the Vietnam war. Their leadership has proved to be of long-term advantage to Australia.

By contrast, the latent xenophobic fear and resentment of the latest wave of boat people - fanned by both major parties during the 2013 election - will have long-term costs in terms of social solidarity, national self-respect and economic opportunities forgone, as well as damaging relations with Indonesia.

But this election campaign entered darker territory. On my reading of history, this was the first post-enlightenment election in which a core policy was based on denial of fundamental laws of science.

Edward Davey, the British Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, is quoted in Pushing our Luck - Ideas for Australian Progress, published by the Centre for Policy Development, as saying: ''Two hundred years of good science - teasing out uncertainties, considering risk - has laid the foundation for what we now understand. It screams out from decade upon decade of research. The basic physics of climate change is irrefutable [and] human activity is significantly contributing to the warming of our planet.''

The Centre for Policy Development notes there is bipartisan agreement between Britain's Conservative-led coalition government and the Labour opposition that global warming is both a serious challenge (Britain is committed to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, from 1990 levels, of 34 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2050) and a major economic opportunity. (Prime Minister David Cameron said this year that: ''It is the countries that prioritise green energy that will secure the biggest share of the jobs and growth in a low carbon sector set to be worth $4 trillion by 2015.'')

In contrast, Abbott went into the 2013 Australian election falsely implying that living standards were falling and that a major component in rising electricity prices was the carbon tax. He said the effect of policy action on climate change was ''to put at risk our manufacturing industry, to penalise struggling families, to make a tough situation worse for millions of families around Australia''.

By comparison to Britain, and indeed most European countries, Australia has a climate denial government. Abbott is on the record as saying ''the science isn't settled'', the world is ''cooling'', and ''whether the carbon dioxide is quite the environmental villain that some people make it out to be is not yet proven''.

As Prime Minister, Abbott has demonstrated his contempt for climate science by an immediate wholesale assault on the climate change infrastructure left by the previous government - closing the Climate Commission, instructing the Environment Department to prepare legislation to scrap the Climate Change Authority (which was independently responsible for allocating $2 billion a year for programs designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions), and sacking two department heads who had been involved in development of the emissions trading scheme.

Worse, Abbott has appointed the former head of the ABC and the Australian Stock Exchange, Maurice Newman, as chairman of the government's Business Advisory Council. Newman recently complained (in The Australian Financial Review on September 17) about the former government's cavalier attitude to the carbon tax ''and related climate myths''. He went on to say: ''The money spent on agencies and subsidies pursuing these myths was wasted. Their legacy continues to undermine Australia's international competitiveness.''

Rubbish. Action by the previous government to impose a price on carbon was a small step to improve Australia's long-term viability as a wealthy country. Dismantling these measures is a futile defence of early 20th-century industrial capitalism.

Australia cannot make the transition to a low-carbon, post-industrial state when we have a governing elite that is hostile to established science and therefore prepared to back Abbott's ideological obsessions.

As David Spratt, the co-author of Climate Code Red - the case for emergency action, has pointed out, Abbott successfully used the politics of fear to win the 2013 election. ''The challenge for the opposition is to construct a narrative that recognises this apprehension and fear and provides a clear path to climate safety so that Howard's battlers become safe climate champions,'' Spratt says.

It's a difficult but essential task.

Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist for The Age.

Email: kdavidson@dissent.com.au



Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/tony-abbotts-rising-tide-of-inconvenient-truths-20130929-2umbc.html#ixzz2gNRNsPfb

what bullshit jules.....when the journo does ask the queestion he doesnt run.....

keep clutching at those straws.....;) ;) ;)

Wonder how long confidence will last with Turnbull when his over inflated ego starts affecting the outcomes of our national infrastructure (and people start to realise).

10 years time we will have massive financial black hole on our hands in order to fix FTTN.

-PB

Are you trying to sound like a lawyer or something? Where was all your moral posturing on deaths at sea when Labor was in charge? You are being tongue in cheek aren't you, it's absurd to suggest the PM is accountable for an incident which occurred on foreign soil when he hasn't had a chance to influence his policies regionally yet. The fault here lies entirely with the former Labor party, who dismantled the pacific solution and facilitated the path for people smugglers to reinvigorate their people smuggling operations. Just because they aren't in government anymore and their policies aren't "official" anymore doesn't mean the damage and destruction wielded by Labors policies have gone away, nor that the current PM is responsible for them, nor that there is a quick fix solution. The current PM is however responsible for ultimately stopping the boats and consequentially the deaths at sea, but like Gonski, NDIS and every other policies enacted in the history of politics it will take time to achieve the desired result.

Well that's exactly it. He and by the extension the LNP are using FTTP solely as an opposition policy. Aka Labour did FTTH therefor it was too expensive, too slow, bla bla bla election discourse bla bla bla.

Rather than listening to financial reason and that of industry analysts that are saying that FTTP is going to be more expensive in the long run.

I really can't wait for the day that the government has to go to Telstra begging and crawling on their knees like a whore for that shitty, under maintained, expensive, 60+ year old copper network.

Telstra are going to laugh all the way to the bank and average joe citizen will never know the true cost of what the Coalition Government had paid.

-PB

We will have a massive black hole anyway when people realise the socio-economic benefits of the NBN were drastically overstated.

Spending $90 billion of taxpayer funds on an internet upgrade so people can stream porn more quickly and experience less jitter playing COD and a few other shitty, overstated, imagined benefits I don't regard that as "financial reason".

It would be more politically expedient for Turnbull to argue for FTTP as this is the popular public position and already cost Coalition an election. There is a obviously genuine concern about the true state of the roll out and ultimate cost and whether this project in its current format and progress represents value for money to the taxpayer, which the review is intended to uncover. FTTP die hards should be welcoming of the review to solidify the business case for FTTP rather than fretting about what "truths" it might unearth, which indicates they are not so confident in its commercial basis.

I didn't see any Labor MP's or any of our PM's running away from questions regarding fatalities at sea. Abbott should be ashamed of himself. And so should you for defending his act of cowardice.

Which by then will be 20 years out of date, 25-30 years by the time we stump up the money to rebuild the infrastructure AGAIN.

I haven't seen the footage, I really don't care, I'm betting it's a MASSIVE beat up. What concerns me is you treat Abbott allegedly running away from a media scrum as a greater moral dilemma than boats sinking and people dying, so the shame is squarely on your own shoulders.

What a shocker to discover that you're a complete hypocrite.

So just so that we're clear; you're commenting on something you haven't seen and therefore have no understanding of.

OK, I'll be sure to disregard everything you say from now on.

No, never said that at all. I'm arguing the fact that this is what the Coalition is doing with their NBN policy, clear as day.

This isn't about Labour and it's policies, let's not get sidetracked there.



Overstated how?



But FTTH is a system that would start turning a profit after a period of time, something FTTn will never do.

As for games, porn etc that is an incredibly short sighted view of what the NBN was trying to achieve and is clearly stated by somebody who literally has no idea.

Yes at absolute present day standards, 100mbps at a home connection level might seem overboard, but in 2-3 years time it may not.

For education purposes alone, 100mbps is not enough, even for one school. Decent FTTP is essential for these applications, especially other businesses that use such large volumes of internet traffic.

Not to mention the psuedo-divide between those with FTTH and those without, something that will become more apparent in the coming years.

Games and porn; incredibly short sighted.

-PB

The people dying and boats sinking; the exact same information that Abbott is trying to blackout in the media?

-PB

Get fucked. Why should the PM, whose been in power for less than three weeks, be scrutinised over something that happened Indonesia and a direct consequence of the previous governments policies? The blood is on Labors hands, even in opposition their policies are still reaping destruction. Clearly this is just a red herring to transfer Labors failings onto the the new PM.

He's talking about reporting boat arrivals not people dying and boats sinking. Inevitably those are the kinds of incidents which are always going to leak to the media.

Well I understand boats sinking and little babies drowning is a greater moral dilemma than the PM ignoring some rabid journalists. I don't need to watch a youtube clip to understand that.

How your NATIONAL LEADER responds to questions about this crisis sets a precedent for how he is going to continue to handle any further trials and tribulations.

Labor's policies have little to do with the fact that it was implementation of Liberal ordinance that saw this event unfold and Abbott's inability to deal with questioning sets a poor standard for someone who is meant to be LEADING the country. Is he going to continue to run away any time he gets a tough question? That doesn't say a lot for his ability to deal with a crisis.

As you so keenly point out, people died and he's unable to face up to that fact and respond to a few simple questions? It's certainly not the kind of man I want running the country.

To quote the man himself, it's time for Tony Abbott to "man up".

Edited by afromanGT: 1/10/2013 03:59:01 PM