I think we might have very different ideas on the definition of positive

like kevein told you once....try and be less of a dick matt....removing the carbon tax is a positive result....

That's your opinion, but it's not actually demonstrably true.

It also doesn't do much for the case that the LNP is nothing other than "the other guys" that add nothing other than "we're not Labor", does it?

What did LNP put forward in regards to IR legislation?

I agree that there needs to be a better balance between Fairwork & Workchoices as both were skewed too far in the way of Unions & Employers respectively.

COALITION frontbencher Christopher Pyne spent almost two hours drinking and chatting with James Ashby a month before the political staffer lodged court documents accusing Speaker Peter Slipper of sexual harassment and misusing Cabcharge dockets.

The National Times has learnt that on the night of March 19, about 9.30pm, Mr Pyne - the manager of opposition business in the House of Representatives - met Mr Ashby and another Slipper staffer in the Speaker's office.

Two separate sources have confirmed details of the meeting to the National Times. Both insist Mr Pyne rang back later the same evening to request Mr Ashby's mobile phone number.

Mr Pyne confirms the meeting took place but says he can "not remember" ever having requested Mr Ashby's mobile number.

"I don't remember ever having asked for Mr Ashby's number," he said. "I have met Mr Ashby on three occasions, and I have never had any need to phone him."

The Liberal Party powerbroker continues to deny he had any prior knowledge of the claims Mr Ashby made in the Federal Court documents or that he had ever had a discussion with the staffer over his concerns about Mr Slipper.

A source close to Mr Slipper's office told the National Times that, during the evening of March 19, Mr Ashby revealed personal details to Mr Pyne, a claim Mr Pyne strenuously denies.

"I have nothing to hide," Mr Pyne said. "I was simply passing the time of day. We had a beer and a political discussion."
Asked if Mr Ashby raised with him any concerns regarding Mr Slipper, Mr Pyne replied, "No. Not at all."

The revelation of the March 19 meeting between Mr Pyne and Mr Ashby and the request for a phone number add to previous statements by Mr Pyne in which he described his contact with Mr Ashby as brief.

Mr Slipper was not in his office on the night of the 19th, as he was presiding over an adjournment debate in the House of Representatives.

After being invited in for a drink, Mr Pyne stayed drinking with Mr Ashby - then a junior media officer in the Speaker's office - and the other unnamed staffer until after 11pm.

When Mr Slipper returned to the office, Mr Pyne left.

Mr Pyne said that it was not unusual for him to socialise with Mr Slipper's staff in the Speaker's absence, saying: "I am the manager of opposition business and part of my responsibilities is that I have a greater level of contact with the Speaker's office than the average member of Parliament."

On Sunday, Mr Pyne told Sky News that the first knowledge he had of Mr Ashby's Federal Court action was when he read about it in the News Ltd press the previous Saturday.

"I had no specific knowledge of these claims before that, of course I've had contact with the Speaker's office, as manager of opposition business over the last six months, but I had no knowledge of these extraordinary serious allegations until I read about them in the newspaper in the News Ltd press," he said.

Asked if he had ever had contact with Mr Ashby during the course of his employment in the Speaker's office, Mr Pyne replied: "How could I not when I walk into the reception in the Speaker's office with Speaker's staffer there; I've said 'hello' to all of them, so I passed the time of day with all of them."

Mr Pyne repeated he had never discussed with the staffer the allegations of the misuse of Cabcharge dockets, nor the sexual harassment claims made in the Federal Court civil case.

Asked on the ABC's 7.30 last week if there was evidence to suggest Mr Ashby had received help from the Coalition in preparing his Federal Court claim, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott replied: "Not that I'm aware of."
Mr Ashby claims in documents lodged with the Federal Court that Mr Slipper walked into his office and said: "Can I kiss you both?" There was no one else present. This is alleged by Mr Ashby to have happened the day after Mr Pyne had a drink with him.

In addition, Mr Ashby claims that Mr Slipper called into question via text message on February 26 "whether your loyalty [sic] was to thugs in LNP or to me!"

In a subsequent text message sent to Mr Ashby, Mr Slipper said: ";;) ok I do like you but must understand I get upset when you play with my enemies and keep me in the dark. It is not what I expect of someone I considered I am close to. If you find this intolerable please discuss".

Mr Ashby resigned as a member of the Liberal National Party and accepted the job as an adviser to Mr Slipper on December 22 last year.

Mr Slipper, who has denied criminal accusations he misused taxpayer-funded taxi vouchers, also denies the civil claim that he sexually harassed Mr Ashby.

Mr Slipper, a Sunshine Coast MP, has stood aside as Speaker indefinitely while the allegations are investigated.

A request for comment from Mr Ashby has been sought through public relations representative Anthony McLellan.

i would say that a very small section of emploee's were disadvantaged under workchoices and a tweak here or there would have sufficed, but the raft of changes implemented under fairwork are disadvantaging against ALL employers......such as the redundancy packages...

it's also worth noting that the last Labor government and this Labor government are guilty of stealing large sections of coalition policy and taking them on as there own,at the same time they have narrowed the gap between the two parties and we see to parties that are very similar, sort of like falcons and commodores

lets face it they were buying their votes

if you google "copying your competitor" there are many articles on the benefits and drawbacks of this strategy.....the difference here is that the current Federal Labor government are incapable of managing ,monitoring or implementing anything without it running of the rails and causing a massive shit fight, one failed policy or strategy after another.....

as voters and responsible people we tend to try and be objective and look at what someone is trying to achieve and if it fails, we are generally supportive of them government, because they meant well and we could see the benefits and virtues of their intention.....so what would you accept as a failure rate 5% or 10%...most farmers or manufacturers would strive to achive less than a 5% failure rate......but this government has better than a 80% failure rate......

The large numbers of employees that were actually disadvantaged during the times of Workchoices disagree.how so???




I agree. Both parties are so far removed from their traditional roots because they are both trying to out-center each other.

Do you think that the LNP would put forward a maternity leave scheme (that's skewed towards rewarding the rich and keeping the poor poor) if the ALP didn't do it first in the most egalitarian fashion they could think of?dont know, dont think we should have one


Do we need to have the whole extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence chat again? better if you dont sound contrite or condescending


It's not just the ALP that do this, as highlighted above. Both parties are trying to out-populist each other and have no values left. My point remains that the LNP have done nothing to convince that they are any better than the ALP under Abbott's leadership.
your choice



You will have to believe me when I say that I have an incredulous look on my face when you claim to be objective when talking about Julia Gillard as there doesn't appear to be an appropriate emoticon.

I'm interested in your maths of how you came to the conlcusion that this government has "better than" (assuming that you meant greater than) an 80% failure rate, and by your own arguments the vision and meaning behind any failed legislation would also need to be accounted for.

Hey Matt,

some time ago you suggested that the welfare payments formed an insignification proportion of the finances of Austrlia that it wasnt worth worrying about.......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Australian_federal_budget

here's more proof the government has lost it's mind..............



http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/homestay-for-asylum-seekers-sought-20120503-1xzzt.html

How does this indicate that the government has lost its mind?

You know what's really crazy? The LNP are trying to convince Australia that Asylum Seekers are dangerous, and will end up murdered or raped by bringing them into their homes.

How's that for being a humane, welcoming, multicultural nation.

Mr Abbott's immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, called it a desperate and reckless policy.

"To place asylum seekers in suburban homes and communities, where there is no consultation with neighbours or the police and just a hotline to call if something goes wrong, has all the ingredients of another Labor asylum disaster in the making," he said.

To read the mainstream media at the moment, you would think Australia was being ruled by Visigoths or that we had somehow returned to subsistence survival.

Things have gotten so bad in our poor country, apparently, the nation is in such a dire predicament, that a leading journalist has seen fit to say that the prime minister should "fall on her sword".

A former Liberal staffer, a mainstay of media talkfests and panel shows, declared on national television that Julia Gillard should be "kicked to death", a comment that drew virtually zero condemnation in the mainstream media.

Violent metaphors dominate the discussion of the Gillard Government.

A recent article in (appropriately enough) The Punch managed to use all of these expressions in the course of its ranting: "assassination", "bloody execution", "swung a sledgehammer into its own political heartland", "knifed".

The same article put the PM's problems down, in part, to her not having had a baby, and offered this brilliant piece of analysis:

Meanwhile ... middle-of-the-road voters have written her off as bulls**t artist and are declaring themselves for a Liberal leader they largely hate because anything is better than a leader you simply cannot believe.

Yes, that's right. People are longing for the honesty of Tony Abbott.

Lying is, of course, at the heart of the attacks on the Prime Minister herself, which personally, I think is fair enough. Politicians should be called out if they lie.

The hilarious thing about such attacks is that their intensity and the level of sheer repetition they garner would make an outsider think that this was the first time in the history of Australian politics that a government had reneged on a commitment or said one thing and done another.

As anyone who dared criticise John Howard's tangential relationship with the truth will know, many of those now getting the vapours about Julia Gillard's dishonesty were more than willing to excuse such behaviour from him.

In fact, a standard theme of commentary throughout the Howard years, recycled as holy writ by journalists and other sage readers of the political entrails, was that 'the punters' didn't care about Howard's lying.

Anyone who brought up his "non-core promises", his selling of the Iraq War on the basis of Saddam Hussein's non-existent weapons of mass destruction, his and his ministers' knowledge of matters to do with the AWB's dealings with the same Hussein, or his appalling behaviour regarding the children overboard affair, was liable to be treated to chapter and verse about about how such complaints were the sort of thing that only concerned 'Howard haters'.

Decent, ordinary people were too busy getting on with their lives to concern themselves with hairsplitting about what Howard did or didn't say.

Part of the logic governing rationalisations of Coalition dishonesty was that people didn't worry about it because the economy was going so well. Low interest rates, low unemployment, and a booming mining sector stopped any temptation to hand-wring about ethics.

Oh, how times have changed!

Now, we are regularly told, it is the decent ordinary people who are mortally offended by any and all political dishonesty. We are told that they are shocked - shocked! - that a politician might not be as pure as an angel riding a unicorn in the land of clouds and sugar. We are told that having the most successful economy in the world is irrelevant.

The change of narrative is simply extraordinary.

Of course, none of this is to excuse the various problems of the Gillard Government. But there is a point to make about the level of aggressive hysteria that currently infects mainstream commentary about this government.

It cannot simply be explained by the performance of the government or the behaviour of the current prime minister. If economic issues are what matter, then this government is performing as well, arguably better, than the Howard Government, and in much more difficult circumstances.

It cannot simply be explained by the 'scandals' each government brought upon itself.

Maybe you can argue that Gillard's problems with Slipper and Thompson are more serious than Howard's with, say, Mal Colson and the plethora of ministers he had to sack for breaching the code of conduct.

But the differential doesn't explain why so many commentators were willing to excuse Howard's problems but portray Gillard's as some sort of existential crisis for Australian democracy itself.

And honestly, what is more serious than a government committing the nation to war on the basis of demonstrably false intelligence? Compared to that, shifting positions on a price on carbon is small potatoes.

So what's going on?

Stripped of all the self-justifying nonsense used to maintain the rage that currently fills our newspapers and airwaves, there are three pertinent distinctions between this government and the Howard Government: it is a Labor Government, it is a minority government, and the current prime minister is a woman.

Being a Labor government not only alienates the dominant right-wing media, it brings business into public discussion in a way that simply never happens with a Coalition government.

Bad behaviour by Howard was excused by a phalanx of media apologists. Policy disagreements that would have been discussed in backrooms with a Coalition government are now made the subject of multimillion dollar advertising campaigns.

The hung parliament forces the government into deal making that is nearly always interpreted as weakness by the media, and they also tend to preference stability (interpreted as 'strength') over achievement. The buzzword is 'authority'.

Gillard being a woman means she is judged by a different standard, and let's not pretend otherwise. It may not be a decisive matter, but it is one that shifts the balance of interpretation.

When she is tough, she is seen as treacherous and unbecoming. When she prefers compromise and negotiation, she is seen as weak. Oh yeah, and she doesn't have kids: how can she relate to 'normal' people?

The Gillard Government is far from perfect, and ultimately has no-one to blame for its poor standing but itself. All I'm trying to put my finger on is why their bad behaviour is deemed so much more unacceptable than the bad behaviour of the previous Coalition government. Those three reasons are key.

Tim Dunlop was the author of two of Australia's most successful political blogs, The Road To Surfdom and Blogocracy.

How does this indicate that the government has lost its mind?

You know what's really crazy? The LNP are trying to convince Australia that Asylum Seekers are dangerous, and will end up murdered or raped by bringing them into their homes.

How's that for being a humane, welcoming, multicultural nation.

I dont see the issue with the homestay policy, its just reducing the overcrowding in detention centres, saving taxpayers money and allowing asylum seekers to connect with the community rather than being stuck in a jail like environment. Any notion that this is somehow "dangerous" is just prejudice rubbish

That's a long bow to draw, I don't see murder and rape mentioned there.
Umm, why do we detain illegal immigrants? Oh, that's right, because we don't know who they are or where they''ve come from. I'm sure you'd open the doors to your family home to anyone who came knockin' Matt?

They are not illegal immigrants, under any official &/or legal definition in this country. They are asylum seekers until they are found to have legitimate or illegitimate claims for refugee status.

For years, Canada has been housing asylum seekers in the community and by the community, administered by charity and religious organisations, following a period in detention averaging several weeks permitting identity, security and health checks to be expedited. They are then granted bridging visas for the period of their status assessment.

The suggested Australian policy is to do the same after similar checks have been completed in as short a time frame as possible.

Asylum Seekers are not illegal. That's a fallacy.

What do you think Morrison is referring to by 'trouble'? Batfink has certainly drawn the conclusion that all refugees are violent criminals and will set women on fire.

The home-stays save money because it's cheaper than detention. They are for short-term stays while their applications are being processed, with reporting requirements on their character. Doesn't make much sense for them to at up, even if they did want to.

I'd be more than happy to house a family of asylum seekers, and yes, I've already applied for the program. Not only is it a great initiative, it's also good money that goes into my pocket.

Ever consider that the "riots" are direct reactions to being locked up for years and being treated like criminals when they're actually nothing of the sort?

When you treat people like animals, perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when they reply in kind.

so you condone that sort of behaviour?????