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paladisious
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notorganic
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notorganic
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A bit cringeworthy, ALP... 
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notorganic
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Aaaaaaaaaaaand, The Libs win the cringeworthy title for the day.
[youtube]nxsLgKnim3A[/youtube]
HAY THAR ROCKSTAH
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433
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:lol:
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paulbagzFC
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thupercoach
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batfink
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obviously both.......;) ;)
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paulbagzFC
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Fucking News Corp rofl. They have no journalistic credibility. -PB
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notorganic
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paulbagzFC
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ozboy
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Supposedly a biased front page in The Australian today, another Murdoch paper.
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notorganic
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http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/08/sophie-mirabella-thoroughly-outgunned-election?CMP=soc_567Quote:Sophie Mirabella being 'thoroughly outgunned' in election, her aide warns
Leaked email warns of challenge from independent candidate and urges party members to write to papers praising Mirabella
Sophie Mirabella is being “thoroughly outgunned” in her bid to retain her seat of Indi, according to a leaked email from a member of her staff, with her main challenger claiming the support of several former Coalition MPs.
Mirabella, the shadow science and innovation minister and a leading figure on the right of the Coalition, holds Indi with a notionally safe margin of 9%.
But the incumbent is facing increasingly stiff competition from popular local independent Cathy McGowan, who could topple Mirabella if she is preferenced strongly by Labor, the Greens and minor parties.
A leaked email from Mirabella staffer Adam Wyldeck, published by Crikey, admits that the Liberal candidate is being “thoroughly outgunned by the McGowan camp” and urges party members to write letters to local newspapers praising Mirabella.
Wyldeck said McGowan supporters were “flooding every single one of the local papers with vitriolic letters of hatred towards Sophie”.
McGowan told Guardian Australia that there was strong support for her campaign from outgoing independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor and even from former Coalition MPs.
Windsor – who has labelled Mirabella “nasty” – publicly offered help to McGowan and may even make a campaign appearance, despite recent poor health.
“Lots of independents have been very helpful and offered personal support, including Tony Windsor,” she said. “But it’s much wider than Tony. Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum, including former Coalition MPs, have said, ‘Well done Cathy, we hope you get there.’
“This is a traditional conservative seat where rural people want something better from their politicians. They want good government but also good communication, where their MP engages properly with them.”
McGowan, an agricultural consultant, said the National Broadband Network was a key election issue in Indi, claiming that constituents were unhappy with the Coalition’s alternative.
The independent candidate said she had 360 volunteers working on her campaign, although she had not discussed preferences with Labor or the Greens and would not be distributing her own preferences.
The division of Indi is a sprawling rural electorate in Victoria that includes the towns of Wodonga and Wangaratta, as well as the mountainous Falls Creek and Bright.
Conservative politicians have held the seat since 1931, with Mirabella the incumbent since 2001. Her primary vote has fallen from 62.6% in 2004 to 52.6% in 2010.
A spokesman for Mirabella said she was unavailable to comment on her campaign.
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notorganic
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http://workinglife.org.au/2013/08/09/lets-stop-corporate-tax-dodging-before-we-cut-company-tax/Quote:LET’S STOP CORPORATE TAX DODGING BEFORE WE CUT COMPANY TAX
Written byMark Zirnsak Justice Director at Uniting Church
August 09, 2013
IN the first week of the federal election, one of the clear political flashpoints has been over the Coalition’s policy to reduce the company tax rate from 30% to 28.5%.
Perhaps before our political parties begin cutting business taxes, they should first look at closing loopholes that allow big corporations to avoid paying their fair share of tax.
Corporate tax dodging costs the rest of the community.
We all expect the Government to fund our hospitals, roads and schools, but not everyone is willing to pay their fair share.
In the May Budget, the Federal Government made a number of announcements to crack down on tax dodging by multinational corporations operating in in Australia.
One of those was the practice of loading up their Australian subsidiaries with debt through loans from overseas. In this way multinational corporations can claim interest repayments as a tax deduction. This also means they reduce their profits here in Australia and house part of their profit in countries with low tax rates or in tax havens.
The rich-countries club, the OECD, has noted that the tax treatment of debt means that “leveraging high-tax group companies with intra-group debt is a very simple and straightforward way to achieve tax savings at group level.”
In other words if you’re a multinational company you can use your global structure to manipulate where you put your debt in order to minimise your tax.
For domestic businesses this presents unfair competition as it is hard to compete without such tax dodging opportunities!
Tax dodging means multinational corporations unfairly raid the public purse while still expecting the things it pays for, such as roads, communication networks, courts to protect their intellectual property and an educated workforce.
Reductions in tax revenue either mean services need to be cut, or others pay more tax to make up the shortfall.
Work by academics Taylor and Richardson found publicly listed Australian companies used thin capitalisation (artificially loading up debt) and transfer mispricing (using artificial internal transactions to shift profits to low tax countries) as their primary methods of tax avoidance in the period 2006 to 2009.
However, their work had to be based on best guesses, as the secrecy enjoyed by multinational corporations under Australian tax law, prevents any scrutiny of the real tax affairs of these companies outside of the efforts of the Australian Taxation Office.
The current rules are ineffective in stopping multinational enterprises from artificially loading debt in their Australian operations.
Analysis by the Australian Treasury found the current debt levels of some multinational corporations in Australia are now much higher compared with corporates with truly independent arrangements.
The Government plans to limit the amount of interest payments that can be claimed as a tax deduction from 75% of their value to 66.67% of the company’s value. It is estimated this change will claim back at least $500 million from tax dodging activities.
The Government has also proposed to implement a number of other technical fixes to reduce loopholes which currently allow interest repayments and debt for corporations to be used as a tax dodge.
The proposed changes have been supported by the Tax Justice Network Australia, of which the ACTU and a number of unions are members. The Tax Justice Network is a global movement which aims to clamp down on tax dodging by multinational enterprises and wealthy individuals.
Tackling tax dodging is an ongoing game of cat and mouse. It is not clear if there is a change in Federal Government that these measures will be implemented. Even if the measures are implemented the tax minimisation industry – of hundreds of lawyers and accountants – will no doubt be employed to try and find new loopholes.
If we want our whole community to benefit, rather than just a wealthy few, and not lose that which we take for granted, we need to protect our tax revenue. Edited by notorganic: 9/8/2013 10:29:17 AM
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Mr
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notorganic wrote:http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/08/sophie-mirabella-thoroughly-outgunned-election?CMP=soc_567 Quote:Sophie Mirabella being 'thoroughly outgunned' in election, her aide warns
Leaked email warns of challenge from independent candidate and urges party members to write to papers praising Mirabella
Sophie Mirabella is being “thoroughly outgunned” in her bid to retain her seat of Indi, according to a leaked email from a member of her staff, with her main challenger claiming the support of several former Coalition MPs.
Mirabella, the shadow science and innovation minister and a leading figure on the right of the Coalition, holds Indi with a notionally safe margin of 9%.
But the incumbent is facing increasingly stiff competition from popular local independent Cathy McGowan, who could topple Mirabella if she is preferenced strongly by Labor, the Greens and minor parties.
A leaked email from Mirabella staffer Adam Wyldeck, published by Crikey, admits that the Liberal candidate is being “thoroughly outgunned by the McGowan camp” and urges party members to write letters to local newspapers praising Mirabella.
Wyldeck said McGowan supporters were “flooding every single one of the local papers with vitriolic letters of hatred towards Sophie”.
McGowan told Guardian Australia that there was strong support for her campaign from outgoing independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor and even from former Coalition MPs.
Windsor – who has labelled Mirabella “nasty” – publicly offered help to McGowan and may even make a campaign appearance, despite recent poor health.
“Lots of independents have been very helpful and offered personal support, including Tony Windsor,” she said. “But it’s much wider than Tony. Politicians from all sides of the political spectrum, including former Coalition MPs, have said, ‘Well done Cathy, we hope you get there.’
“This is a traditional conservative seat where rural people want something better from their politicians. They want good government but also good communication, where their MP engages properly with them.”
McGowan, an agricultural consultant, said the National Broadband Network was a key election issue in Indi, claiming that constituents were unhappy with the Coalition’s alternative.
The independent candidate said she had 360 volunteers working on her campaign, although she had not discussed preferences with Labor or the Greens and would not be distributing her own preferences.
The division of Indi is a sprawling rural electorate in Victoria that includes the towns of Wodonga and Wangaratta, as well as the mountainous Falls Creek and Bright.
Conservative politicians have held the seat since 1931, with Mirabella the incumbent since 2001. Her primary vote has fallen from 62.6% in 2004 to 52.6% in 2010.
A spokesman for Mirabella said she was unavailable to comment on her campaign. National politics would certainly be a better place without Mirabella. Go McGowan!
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paulbagzFC
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lol at the Reddit comments on that cafe sign picture :lol: -PB
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paulbagzFC
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Also interesting that Kim Williams (CEO of News Corp) is stepping down. Wonder what will change come next Monday (if anything). -PB
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notorganic
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paulbagzFC wrote:lol at the Reddit comments on that cafe sign picture :lol:
-PB You've found my super secret public source of auspol news.
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paulbagzFC
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notorganic wrote:paulbagzFC wrote:lol at the Reddit comments on that cafe sign picture :lol:
-PB You've found my super secret public source of auspol news. I laugh how some of them are all "they entitled to their opinion and you are trying to stop their freedom of speech". Srsly? -PB
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Joffa
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Can Murdoch truly influence the upcoming election? Not quite As long as readers are critical and, for the most part, our journalists hold the frontline, then we're doing all right – editorials don't really influence votes Bronwen Clune theguardian.com, Friday 9 August 2013 11.20 AEST Amongst all the outraged responses to The Daily Telegraph cover featuring Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd and the call to “kick this mob out”, not to be outdone its latest frontpage, the most interesting point was lost. Can Murdoch’s editorialising impact an election? Evidence suggests there is no correlation between reader’s media consumption and how they vote. At least that’s been the consistent finding of the Australian Election Study, the most exhaustive set of data ever collected in Australia on the dynamics of political behaviour, conducted on large samples for every election since 1987 and 2010. Data and political blogger Scott Steel, better known to many as his alter ego Possum Comitatus, agrees, saying that media consumption has never shown up as a voting influence in any study he’s done with work groups or in-depth interviews. That’s not to discount the extraordinariness of the move by the Tele, the country’s biggest selling daily, in identifying whose back it had on its front page, given it was only day one of the official election – but editorial support for one party or another in the lead up to an election is older than Gutenberg’s press itself. Murdoch is simply doing what moguls do, something he seems quite committed to, in sending Col Allan to Australia with the apparent directive to “bring down Rudd on the NBN.” And, setting modern media ethics aside, News Corporation was not wrong, legally or historically, in its own defence that it was exercising its right to editorialise as it chose. It was only earlier this year that the Independent Media Inquiry and its recommendations, set up after upheld allegations of media bias “died a horrible death"– in the words of one of its architects Matthew Ricketson. Sure, the issues around editorial support are heightened by the fact that Australia has one of the highest concentrations of newspaper ownership in the world with Murdoch’s News Limited owning two thirds of metropolitan daily circulation. That’s a fair political punch, but as to its impact on an election result, that’s another matter entirely. It seems that Murdoch has mistaken influence for credibility, a rookie mogul mistake made by mining tycoon Gina Rinehart in her bid to control Fairfax. Splashing his personal agenda all over the front page of his mastheads, does nothing but diminish his own questionable (hello, News of the World!) personal standing. That’s not to say we shouldn’t care. We should. And we do. Readers hold journalists accountable, journalists hold news editors accountable, news editors hold moguls … never mind, the point is that audiences have always held the power, and are not easily swayed by the delusional egotism of media owners. Yes, even those who still read physical newspapers (which, if you’ve read a lot on “Telegate” now seems to imply an openness to being brain-washed as opposed to those of us who get our news online - there’s some powers in that ink!) Journalists, on the other hand, have a much harder time keeping the media owners at bay by the sheer fact that many a mogul writes their pay cheques, but by and large they value what they do (in fact it’s what gives what they do value) enough to put up with some fairly heavy pressure. As long as there is a distinction between a paper’s “editorialising” and journalists doing their job – asking the hard questions, checking the facts and saying no to standover influences – then journalists’ credibility stands. Former Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes calls News Ltd journos “a legion of eager minions” willing to help Murdoch try and influence the upcoming election, but I don’t think that’s quite right. Paul "Boris" Whittaker, maybe, but to suggest that all News Ltd reporters are willingly taking direct orders from Murdoch is a bit of a stretch. Fairfax has been pretty solid holding this line in its wrangle with shareholder Rinehart. And only this week did The West Australian journalist Steve Pennells claim victory over Rinehart’s attempt to get him to reveal his sources. News is in the business of credibility. It always has been. Without it there’s no influence – something Rinehart, Murdoch et al have failed to fundamentally understand. And it’s only readers that can empower them with that one. Let them wage their futile editorial (and now twitter) wars. It looks like an embarrassing attempt at relevance, which Murdoch lost some time ago. As long as readers are critical and, for the most part, our journalists hold the frontline, then we’re doing alright. Yes, there’s the occasional rogue reporter, but we’re pretty adept at spotting them in the wild and calling them out on it. Money or masthead bylines don’t win squat in the new media paradigm. Credibility wins our attention. It’s time moguls stopped taking their audiences for granted. Granted, audiences stopped listening to them some time ago. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/09/australian-election-editorials-rupert-murdoch?
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Roar_Brisbane
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paulbagzFC wrote:Good on them.
-PB =d> =d> =d> =d>
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batfink
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strange how no mention of murdoch's bias when he supported KRUDD in 2007???????
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ozboy
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batfink
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Murdoch backs Rudd as PM April 21, 2007 - 8:13PM Media Mogul Rupert Murdoch has endorsed Labor leader Kevin Rudd, saying he would make a good Australian prime minister. Mr Rudd met for a one-hour private meeting with Mr Murdoch at the News Corporation's New York headquarters today but the meeting was extended when the pair decided to have dinner together at a local restaurant. Channel Seven reported that when asked if Mr Rudd would make a good prime minister, Mr Murdoch replied "Oh, I'm sure." Mr Murdoch has previously given his public support of world leaders who went on to win their elections, including Britain's Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush. He also has been a supporter of Prime Minister John Howard but would not say if Mr Howard should step aside. "We'll have to see and make a judgment at the end of the year," he said. Mr Rudd will return to Australia on Monday from his first overseas visit as opposition leader. Mr Rudd has met with US government officials and business leaders and yesterday addressed the prestigious left-wing thinktank The Brookings Institution. In his wide-ranging speech on the Australia-US alliance, Mr Rudd urged the United States to ratify the Kyoto protocol and said the economic potential of the relationship with China for both Australia and the US was great. "Australia's challenge, therefore, as with the United States, is to maximise our common economic interest with China while robustly asserting, both publicly and privately, our continuing points of difference and disagreement," he said. There are no more official meetings on Mr Rudd's agenda, but he is expected to meet with a New York football team, the Magpies, in a social event tomorrow. A spokesman for Mr Rudd confirmed that he would not meet with US Democrat candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama as suggested. http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/murdoch-backs-rudd-as-pm/2007/04/21/1176697152165.htmlShort memories ......... http://www.abc.net.au/news/2007-04-21/murdoch-endorses-rudd-as-pm/2528658Edited by batfink: 9/8/2013 02:09:58 PM
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paulbagzFC
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Saying he backs him and publishing opinionated dribble as front pages news are hardly comparable acts. Nice try batty. -PB
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afromanGT
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Probably because in 2007 Murdoch thought he had Rudd in his pocket. Now in 2013 he finds out that it's quite the contrary.
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batfink
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paulbagzFC wrote:Saying he backs him and publishing opinionated dribble as front pages news are hardly comparable acts.
Nice try batty.
-PB so are you saying in 2007 Murdoch did not endorse KRUDD?????
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batfink
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afromanGT wrote:Probably because in 2007 Murdoch thought he had Rudd in his pocket. Now in 2013 he finds out that it's quite the contrary. your comment would imply that only Murdoch had something to gain from the endorsement of KRUDD??????
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afromanGT
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batfink wrote:afromanGT wrote:Probably because in 2007 Murdoch thought he had Rudd in his pocket. Now in 2013 he finds out that it's quite the contrary. your comment would imply that only Murdoch had something to gain from the endorsement of KRUDD?????? Of course. He endorses the potential PM whom he thinks is going to be easier to persuade to benefit his endeavours.
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batfink
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afromanGT wrote:batfink wrote:afromanGT wrote:Probably because in 2007 Murdoch thought he had Rudd in his pocket. Now in 2013 he finds out that it's quite the contrary. your comment would imply that only Murdoch had something to gain from the endorsement of KRUDD?????? Of course. He endorses the potential PM whom he thinks is going to be easier to persuade to benefit his endeavours. ????
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