The long term plan of a future fund is feasible yes, but for the short / medium term what this means is that people will not go to the doctor as often (even when they need to) and then when they become even more sick because they bypassed the doctor due to the increase, they will have no choice but to go to hospital.
People go to GPs so they don't have to go to the hospital as well as getting cured for what they have and if you have less people in hospital then patients get a more quality experience during their stay. Im not a health professional but I believe people can probably catch a lot of the early symptoms of a killer disease and if theres a way in which it can be treated early then it prevent one from being admitted to hospital because they were proactive about it by seeing a doctor.
Hospitals are bursting at the seams already and the last thing we need is people being admitted for something that could have been treated by a doctor at a stage when the illness could have been detected early.

Edited by SocaWho: 22/5/2014 01:35:24 PM

Edited by SocaWho: 22/5/2014 01:36:03 PM

I think this is more speculation than empirical fact. I don't think there is going to be overflow of sick people clogging up hospitals based on refusing to pay $7 to see a Doc. There might be a little bit of that but I don't think it would be particularly insidious. You could argue the same for pharmaceuticals, the cost of prescription medicines might deter a few from buying them but then citing that as a reason to provide free medicine to avoid people clogging up hospitals I don't think would hold water. Try looking at the co-payment as an extension of PBS. you get a really expensive service (or medicine) which is heavily subsidised by the taxpayer. Of course the best cure is prevention, people need to take responsibility for their health and lifestyles. Hopefully a price signal will encourage people do more exercise and eat healthier foods, which would save the healthcare system billions.

You championed Rudd and Gillard. You voted in people that saddled us with the debt we now have to pay off. You did that due to your ideological leanings, despite every bit of common sense, together with your fellow left-leaners.

Don't tell me you're not rusted on.

Edited by thupercoach: 22/5/2014 04:24:38 PM

I think the great thing is that even in a left-leaning forum such as this, the message is sinking in that we can't continue the way we have done and change is vital. Looks like the Libs have done a great job of positioning that in the community's mind already.

How we get there is another matter. Heck, Shorten hasn't got any answers. He was part of the problem, not the solution.

Clarke and Dawes not quite as subtle as usual.

[youtube]aq_7lNALyGw[/youtube]

Shorten never has any answers. If he ever goes for any other job his achievement on his CV will be overthrowing 2 prime ministers.

Maybe he should go get a job in Italian politics.:lol:

:lol: :lol:
Bill "Machiavelli" Shorten.

Where have I championed Ruddies and Gillies? :lol:

My ideological leanings are central-right at best rofl.

I voted for Katter ffs :lol:

-PB

Edited by paulbagzFC: 23/5/2014 07:19:55 AM

Yes. He should write a book instead. :d . Like Machiavelli hehehe

BS.
This isn't your first day on this forum. Centre- right my hairy Semitic arse.

Edited by Joffa: 22/5/2014 10:27:42 PM

Are we not allowed to say 'jew' now?
FFS that's more pathetic than the c*nt filter.

i dont blame the mods, i have little doubt they'd get threatening mail if they allowed it

Bob Carr was right afterall.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/05/22/how-australias-winking-tony-abbott-became-one-of-the-worlds-most-unpopular-prime-ministers/

If by sinking in you mean that most people have given up replying to the right wing on the forum who essentially have a one way conversation parroting liberal party nonsense line for line :roll: If we wanted to do hear that we would just go to youtube and watch old lnp campaign adds

With this budget there has been a lot of garbage being sold. Not only that the only way to fix the budget is to savage the poor, but that savaging the poor will make us all more prosperous.

This is very disturbing to me having lived a lot of my life in the USA and this is the same story told in the USA all the time despite taxes, welfare payments, union density, progressivity of tax rates having no correlation with gdp per capita growth either in data I have worked out for myself or analysis other people have done that I have seen. It worries me to hear people parrot this stuff in Australia because they have probably have no idea what its like being in an unequal country like the usa. Its easy for inequality to sound abstract and less important than the economy. So I thought I would share a few stories out of my own personal experience

I know one woman who got raped as a teenager and had a baby - she is a close friend. She had a dream to be a librarian and was quite academically gifted but she decided to keep the child because, despite not being religious, her conscience forbid her from having an abortion. Later on she got married and she works 3 jobs and her husband one - both are full time in one of their jobs and are above minimum wage. Yet despite working 60 hours a week and her husband working a comparable amount they can't afford to feed to feed their family. They buy all their groceries at walmart where the food is so cheep, fake and inedible that their whole house smells sickly when they cook.
One Lady I know well just collapsed while I was talking to her and I took her to hospital. She was in the emergency room for 12 hours with me and got barely any treatment despite being fully insured. She only got visited just before dawn and then all they did was put a saline drip in her, check on her a few hours later and then send her home. Her deductible was $1500. Later her car was towed at her expense by a gas company who were making repairs despite her being legally parked. We wanted to know if that was legal for the gas company to do this but it would have cost more than the towing to get such advice.
Another friend got an operation which was botched and their deductible was $6000 and they later found out it was botched. Everyone insists here it is the best health care system in the world. It isn't even the best if you are rich
Regularly I talk to homeless people and I am shocked at how they differ from Australian homeless people. The homeless seem much more rare in Australia and they are usually so mentally unwell they are difficult to talk to. Here you meet normal people that are homeless.
One of my most striking experiences was a friend of mine who had to move to Australia with their husband for their high paying job. After some years here the husband had to move back to America for their job and she started freaking out because she had grown accustomed to the superior lifestyle we have here. Even though she was paid highly in both oz and the usa the lifestyle was so much better here she actually divorced her husband rather than go back. So I suppose socialism does break up marriages....as tragic as any story of divorce is, it drove home the difference between a radically unequal society and an egalitarian society like ours. Amazingly even the reasonably wealthy are better off. The difference cannot be understated

It is nonsense we have a debt crisis. It is nonsense that the deficit can only be reduced by spending cuts. It is nonsense that we have to target the poor for heavy lifting. It is nonsense that we have a better society if we neglect the poor. I hope many of the undecided read this and consider what society we want to become

First he brought back knights and dames, now he's bringing back knaves and paupers.

Try and find a time where I have "championed" Labor :lol:

I'll give you a hint; bagging LNP =/= championing Labour.

And that's even with the fact that Labor are Centre-Right now :lol:

-PB

Pretty sure he edited out my "ffs'.

Wtf?

Get a life.

-PB

No way Tony Abbott can now budget for a second term

DateMay 22, 2014
Waleed Aly

The government has snookered itself with austerity measures that leave very little political capital to win the next election.

Dammit Abbott, it's a rocky horror show

Our wedding to Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Treasurer Joe Hockey turns rocky horror show in the Budget 2014. With Rocco Fazzari and Denis Carnahan.

Tony Abbott was clearly deflecting this week when he declared his job “is not to win a popularity contest”. It’s the kind of thing no democratic politician really believes, but which you must say in the face of catastrophic polling of the order presently dogging his government. For now the popular focus is on whether or not Abbott can recover; whether this will be the fortnight that ultimately relegates him to a single term. But in truth there are bigger questions here, and the Coalition faces a conundrum far tougher than merely figuring out how to win the next election. And it’s a conundrum created well before last Tuesday.

The reason the government broke so many promises in this budget is simple: the promises they made from Opposition were wildly contradictory. You cannot rein in deficits and abolish two major taxes, and replace one of them with a climate change policy that costs billions and promise no tax hikes and quarantine education, health, defence, public broadcasting and pensions from cuts. That’s like a weight-loss diet that does away with protein but promises no cuts to cake and lard! A platform like that was always going to have its day of reckoning.

The tragedy is that Abbott didn’t need to do it. He is the Prime Minister today because Labor had descended into an unelectable mess. Even Labor’s popular initiatives such as their Gonski education reforms and the National Disability Insurance Scheme never truly threatened his dominance. Abbott had the freedom not to promise a set of contradictions. He had the freedom to keep his options open and perhaps even to tell us some budgetary truth. But he didn’t. He told us budgetary fantasy as though he hadn’t given a moment’s thought to what would happen after the election.

The result is that he brought the Coalition to government with a mandate for almost nothing. Repealing the carbon and mining taxes, sure. Stopping the boats by whatever militant means he could conceive, yes. Paid parental leave, arguably. But what else? Nothing on education, nothing on middle class welfare and especially nothing on industrial relations. In short, nothing that might help repair a budget in “crisis”, real or imagined.

But with this budget, the government was behaving as though it had the most monstrous of mandates. It was positively radical in its ambition to break the social democratic model of our welfare state. Encouraging poor people not to go to the doctor by making them pay more for it or leaving young unemployed people without any support for up to six months at a time are things you can only credibly do once you’ve sold a vision to the public. Otherwise they look like randomised cruelty. The reason the government’s reckoning has been so brutal is not merely that the public clearly thinks the budget zeroes in mercilessly on the most vulnerable. It is that it seemed to come from nowhere, without the government even bothering to convince us of the virtues of this approach first.

The political calculation here is obvious. This was the tough, axe-wielding budget you get out of the way early in your first term, banking you will have plenty of time to win people back. But it’s not that simple anymore; not when the rejection is this emphatic. So fierce is the reaction that this budget can now only be an ambit claim. Any move Abbott makes from here must be some form of retreat.

So it’s not that the Coalition cannot be re-elected in 2016. It’s that now it can only be re-elected via a parade of sweeteners. Precisely what these could be is unclear. For John Howard it took the form of family benefits and tax cuts. Abbott has already trashed the former, and might find the latter difficult in the short term if he really cares at all about the budget. Whatever Abbott finds, it will go against the course he has charted so far. He can either persevere with his austerity reforms, or he can have hope for a second term. But it’s hard to see how he can do both.

Which means that Abbott might already have brought his government’s reform phase to an end. What industrial relations policy, for instance, could he possibly risk taking to the next election? How well placed is he to hold a mature debate on raising GST revenue? Indeed what Coalition-friendly reform ideas could he possibly find that will not merely reinforce the mould that has now firmly been cast in the public mind that his politics clearly favours the rich? Abbott simply has no political capital to spend on these things. And if he was unprepared to take anything approaching a contentious reform into an election he was certain to win, it is difficult to see him doing it when he is under electoral threat.

That’s a shame because there is no doubt we face serious budgetary and economic questions in the medium term. It’s a shame, too, because it gifts Labor a populist narrative in Opposition that won’t go anywhere near answering those questions. Labor need only rail against Medicare co-payments and petrol prices, now. And it knows it will be railing against a Coalition that has snookered itself. Abbott’s conduct in Opposition meant he came into government with little mandate. His conduct in government ensures next time around, he won’t be able to seek one.

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist. He hosts Drive on ABC Radio National and is a lecturer in politics at Monash University.


Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/no-way-tony-abbott-can-now-budget-for-a-second-term-20140521-zrjie.html#ixzz32TyfjmK5

The word that was edited out was mong, it is offensive to some people and there is no need for it, if you could please refrain from using it that would be great, thanks.

Good read this article but I particularly agree with this one.

Abbott did the same in opposition but has never including now been able to get out of this mind set. Sorry to steal one of yours notor but


Is still all we hear from them.

Why would Shorten and Labor propose any policies (or answers in LNP speak) now when all it would do is give the fear mongers in the LNP 2 and a half years to try and deflect it?

Saying that, I think the type of rubbish campaign that Abbot and the LNP ran last election won't hold for a party that should be progressive so the "answers" will come.

I have an office at the University of Adelaide so I'm on their mailing lists. The Vice Chancellor's response had some interesting insights in particular:

Being a Go8 university, they're supposed to be one of the uni's that should be supporting these measures so that gives you an idea of bad things are getting.

It's the same as them asserting that because the ABC does not have a right-wing agenda, it must automatically be left.

I feel sorry for people like rusty and thuper that are incapable of seeing the world in anything other than black & white.

Your excessive pointless censorship is offensive to some people and there is no need for it, if you could please refrain from doing it that would be great, thanks.

I don't think there is a debt crisis. I agree. The debt is low. But you don't want to have the debt so large that the interest becomes unpayable.

I didn't think "mong" was a good word to use but didn't make a big deal of it. Still, I agree we can do better than "mong".

And the left can do better than spout offensive terminology like "creep" and "who put the "C" into "cuts".

In fact, as the Aussie public are starting to wake up to what's going on and realising that the budget isn't remotely as draconian as it's been painted by the lefties, the fact that these jobless, socialist losers with rings through their noses have been marching and protesting has only strengthened the government's position.

Let's face it, if the Arts Faculty rentacrowd thinks it's bad, the rest of the country will think it's good.

As for the wink thing, seriously, this is the most hilarious of all. First of all, there's no way that woman's figures were correct.

Secondly, so Abbott winked when she said she worked ona sex line.
Rudd was dragged out of a strip joint. Not a creep I guess?

Is that all the left has got? Calling Abbott a creep and a cnut?

I'm telling you now, we're at least 2 and a half years out from the next election. This government will get re-elected, if for no other reason that the opposition is a frightening mess that the rest of the country doesn't trust.

What's Shorten going to do? Up the borrowings again to make himself look good? Or, like the previous government, promise uncosted things that they have no hope of delivering?





Edited by thupercoach: 23/5/2014 09:21:00 AM

They're both twats. One a former and one a current.

Can't Turnbull make a run at the leadership.

Fucking Abbott.

The only bit I agree with you about is the hullabaloo about Abbott being creepy. We all knew he was a misogynist before the election and he was still voted in, it's hardly a game changer in an electoral sense.

I am getting tired about the media calling the protests violent though. All I've seen are people trying to hold their ground while security/police try and make some room for the politician to get through. If there have been multiple people being charged for assaulting police then I'll retract that statement.