So dingos and koalas vote. Alrighty then.

Yep, about as sensible a proposition as your signature..

You saying that trying to keep Holden alive in this country with its plants is not a good idea?

Can see what you're saying about the mining industry having more jobs, might be true, but motor industry is a good exportation market as well.

Mining is also too hot and cold with opening/closing mines depending on what China needs. Plus as mack said, mining companies send our profits off overseas.

-PB

No one really cares what an inbred from Brisbane thinks. The people who pat each other on their backs for being from a certain place.

:-$

"Liberal party gags candidates from community forums"

Rofl.

-PB

The whole point of the speech was that Australia doesn't proverbially have all its eggs in the one basket that is the mining industry.

Clearly he believes it doesn't really matter what industry the money is invested into, as long as it generates jobs and creates economic stimulus in an area that isn't the mining.

But just 19% of Australia's $1.5tn GDP is generated by mining, compared to 53% in the service industry (financial, commercial, education, etc.), 2.5% in tourism and 12% Agriculture.

While I agree that Australia needs to get over its obsession with mining, it doesn't rely on the industry anywhere nearly as heavily as people believe.

Your talking about someone who just last year bought a brand new SS Commodore, clearly I'm a fan! But at the same time I do believe a company has to be able to stand on it's own two feet. If there are legislative things that could be done to help Holden and Toyota then I'm all for it, I recongnise the jobs that depend on them, but I don't believe a blank cheque is the answer either.

But my point is less about whether or not the government supporting or not supporting the motor or mining industry, and more that Rudd can't have it both ways, he can't criticise Abbott on the one hand, for example on his plans for a special economic zone in the north just last year, them on the other offer up an extremely similar policy himself during an election campaign in which he needs to win some marginal seats in the Northern Territory...

He is just all over the place, lurching from the extreme left to the extreme right depending on the marginal seat he's visiting that day!

Rightio...

Only if they're over 18.

If you're going to fund the automobile industry then it comes with certain precursors. The money is staggered rather than in one lump sum and the investment ensures X number of jobs guaranteed over Y number of years. Similarly they government do their bit to support this investment by promising that all government fleet vehicle models are those built in Australia.

Does this mean that batfink and thupercoavh will no longer be posting in this thread? [-o<

we should be so lucky. They can take Rusty with them.

It's your loss, Rudd tells Abbott voters in bleak ad campaign

August 19, 2013

Labor has launched a large-scale negative advertising assault aimed at undermining voters' trust in Tony Abbott.

We're chancing our arm with [Rudd], he's out there in the public, Abbott has been put in cotton wool.

Aired from Sunday night, the high-rotation TV ad has the slogan "If he wins, you lose" set against a close-up picture of the Opposition Leader in suit and blue tie.

The ads, which claim that an Abbott government would cut 12,000 jobs, feature the lights going out on families and builds on the theme of "cuts, cuts, cuts" being pushed by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in his campaigning across the country last week.

Speaking at Westmead Hospital on Sunday, Mr Rudd said a Liberal government would cut 3000 health workers and $1.8 billion from Medicare Locals.

On Monday he will warn that cuts are coming in the seat of Bennelong, home to 10,000 teachers, nurses, doctors, firefighters and other public servants.

Mr Rudd, who returned as leader promising to end the "wall to wall negativity" in politics, plans to defend the ads as being about "accountability not negativity".

The latest round of negative advertising comes as the latest Newspoll survey shows Mr Abbott's Coalition has increased its commanding lead over Labor, 54 per cent to 46 per cent after preferences.

Mr Rudd's narrow lead as preferred prime minister has also sunk. The poll published in The Australian newspaper shows Mr Rudd is favoured by 43 per cent of voters, down three points since the last survey, while those preferring Mr Abbott rose four points to 41 per cent.

However, a senior Labor source said the message from the party's first round of ads about cuts had started to gain traction.

Internal party polling in marginal seats indicates a turnaround from the first week of the campaign despite newspaper polls at the weekend spelling dire news for the Rudd re-election effort.

"We've been picking up a point a night. By the middle of the week we think the complexion of this election will be different, much closer," an ALP source said.

Labor believes the longer the campaign goes on, voters will realise how stage-managed the Abbott campaign is. "We're chancing our arm with him [Rudd], he's out there in the public, Abbott has been put in cotton wool," a strategist said.



Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/federal-politics/federal-election-2013/its-your-loss-rudd-tells-abbott-voters-in-bleak-ad-campaign-20130818-2s55l.html#ixzz2cMJhttco

I'll stop. Let's keep this thread left wing.

that's right...only leftie socialist's with massive chips on their shoulders are welcome....

no chips, just dip.

common sense only thanks.

That precludes most of you right there.

Maybe you should just start a thread called The Left Wing Thread. You can discuss how horrible Abbott is, make all sorts of unsubstantiated accusations of the Liberals and sing the praises of Kevin the Saviour and Julia the put-upon-first female PM who suffered from so much misogyny and not at all her incompetence and corruption. You can thank the unions for doing their utmost for keeping the class war alive and end each day with a rendition of L'Internationale.

And who needs opposing views...they just get in the way.

Heck, you lot were going to vote Mark Latham in. So much for common sense.

Edited by thupercoach: 19/8/2013 09:25:28 AM

Rofl.

-PB

that rules 50% of you guys out

you can add to that KRUDD'S Negative smear campaign after stating how he was going to bring back decent and moral debate...PMSL



Edited by batfink: 19/8/2013 11:05:03 AM

If you really want to support the Automotive industry in this country then you need to look at why it began failing in the first place. The removal of the import taxes allowed car manufacturers to bring in cheaper made cares from Asia which meant these companies no longer needed to manufacture the cars in Australia as they can make a Camry cheaper in Korea or china and import it than to just make it here.

return the taxes and you'll see many more cars being made in Australia and more Jobs being created through need. you can even slowly roll back government support so that these companies do not feel the full brunt of the Tax for up to 10 years.

Kevin Rudd is ending negativity in the same way a father stops his kid from smoking by making him smoke the whole pack.

:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Something along the lines of "we need to diversify our economy because the mining boom is dead." Bullshit Kevvy, take a flight from Toowoomba to Charleville and then tell me that!

Can't remember the actual words, i'm sure it will be repeated 58635417862354812 times on sky news today though.

Exactly and it never did, but to neglect the industry through these hard times would be foolish.

20% of 1.5tn is still 300 billion (I think, but regardless a lot of money). My issue isn't with mining neglect per se but ignoring the fact that these private firms often contribute significantly to infrastructure with ports, rail and road networks. They also provide a lot of work for other industries and specialist consultants (like where I work).

It pisses me off even more when these dickheads say they're going to spend the countries money building cars people obviously don't want for a price that internationally isn't competitive. Its stupid. The public attachment to Holden is what's kept them afloat.

Mining companies extract what is in Australian land and sell it. A small amount of tax goes to the government, a small amount of money is spent on employing Australians and the vast amount of profit goes overseas without being re-circulated within the Australian economy.


They invest in infrastructure that general has very little purpose other than to support the mining industry.

They drive up costs of all other industries in Australia by offering massively over-inflated wages for workers, which other industries then need to at least partially match to find employees.

They divert knowledge away from future industries as students and skilled workers develop mine-specific aptitude.



It's great now, while the mining is going on, because it keeps people employed and helps the economy tick over.

But what's it going to be worth when the ore runs out, or the demand runs dry?


Your business supporting the mining industry (similar to where I work) will be closed down. A generation of people will be unemployed and with very few skills to contribute to an industry other than mining. All the other manufacturing will be gone, and all the infrastructure of the last 20 years will be in remote areas completely useless to non-mining industries.



The alternative would be to get as much tax out of mining companies as we can... and spend that money on building new and diverse industries and infrastucture in Australia. If mining slows down, it'll just be a temporary speed bump as employees start taking lower salaries to work in other industries (making Australian manufacturing more affordable on a world scale). If the mining companies stop operating in Australia, well that's not so bad since the ore will stay in the ground anyway for Australia to profit from in the future.

This is not specific to mining at all what's your point? Foreign investment in this country is significant.



I'm guessing you do not frequent mines?



It's the nature of the work. It's remote. If you don't offer more money then why go out to the middle of nowehere to live in a camp?



Mine specific aptitude can be applied throughout many industries. The fundamentals are the same.



Exactly.




When the ore runs out? :lol: You'll be quite old when that happens my friend.

Demand will not drop below pre-mining boom levels. We have the deposits and we have the infrastructure to extract it.



It won't. Our base is diverse and mining is not a significant necessity for our survival. What mining does do is provide a cash-cow for us to piggy-back when larger projects come along.

We're generally in construction and commercial development.



Taxing miners excessively is stupid. Anyone who thinks these companies would absorb taxes is naive. They don't lose money, they either fire employees or cancel major projects, both of which involves the government getting less money out of them. Now I know our government is useless but I don't think they're that stupid.

You say you're in a mining related industry but I question a lot of what you say. Have you been to a mine? Have you been involved in a significant mining operation? Anyone who thinks these companies can afford to leave mines and come back later expecting to make money has rocks in their heads. If you took away mining you leave a huge black hole in our GDP and unemployment will sky-rocket.

Got a Palmer United Party info sheet in the mail yesterday. Includes a DVD of Titanic 2 :lol: am going to watch whatever it is tomorrow night :lol:

Heaps of couples with children I know have been sitting on the fence over labour vs liberal. Getting told that dads will get paid leave, and mums getting nearly a years worth of wages when having a child, under liberal will quite easily make them vote that way. When I tell the mrs about it, I can 100% guarentee any issues she had voting for liberal before will be gone.

The point regarding mining profits overseas does apply to all industries - but other industries do not sell "stuff" that comes out of Australian dirt. If a foreign company invests in Australia to create products, it's quite different to a foreign company coming here to extract product.

I regularly travel on roads crowded with commuters to go to an underdeveloped airport and get on a plane to fly to the middle of the desert. The big money spent by mining companies for infrastucture is on railway lines and conveyer belts connecting ore bodies to ports that do not service wider industry on population bases. Meanwhile nothing is spent on the infrastructure in cities being clogged with FIFO workers.

I would definitely debate that technical knowledge developed in mining can easily be transferred to manufacturing or construction industries... some skill-sets like maintenance and processing can potentially be transferred but certainly a mining engineer isn't going to have many skills to transfer. And many other technical disciplines (ranging from design and operation to sourcing and quality control) are applied completely differently in the different industries.


The "ore" generically might not run out... but certainly if demand drops then the mining industry will slow down massively - Australia will be his massively by unemployment and economic decline unless other industries have been adequately supported during the mining boom era.

What happens if the world eventually acknowledges the threat of climate change and slashes the coal industry? What happens if gold loses its status as a base currency as was occurring prior to the GFC? What happens if (when) China through investment stabilises Africa to the extent that it can extract ore cheaply and reliably from their vast resources? Even if there was NO tax on mining in Australia, we couldn't compete on costs with a stable Africa.




I don't for a second doubt that if we increased taxation on mines, mining companies would slow operations leading to unemployment and lowering the GDP - but that's because we've already been letting mining get too much for too little in return, creating the 2-speed economy.

I consider myself lucky to be associated with the mining industry - I don't know how anyone manages to live comfortably in Perth in a technical or manufacturing job without being associated with it. I've also seen first-hand that the mining industry in Australia is probably one of the worst-managed industries in Australia and one of the worst-managed mining industries in the world.

Mining companies do so little to manage their own efficiency it's unbelievable... the "get it out of the ground at any price" attitude is so prevalent it's scary. Many mines in third world countries are ahead of us, let alone mining in the developed world.

If we started getting a higher revenue from mining, sure there would be an immediate downturn - however the mining industry wouldn't cease. It would find ways to be more efficient and maximise profitability per tonne of any given ore extracted. The mining companies will still make profit, and Australia will actually get something back for the minerals it possesses.



As always there's no right or wrong but a balance to be struck... for me the balance at present is just weighted far too much towards letting mining companies pay as little as possible in taxes for fear that they're all we have propping up our economy.

The reason that the car industry in Australia is failing is because of production costs. Materials, wages, etc. are significantly higher here and at the end of the day those costs are passed on to consumers. Returning the Import Tax isn't going to make producing cars in Australia any cheaper, it just makes the alternative more expensive. All you'd do then is make owning a car more difficult for Average Joe.

First of all, I'd never have voted for Mark Latham.

As for "unsubstantiated accusations". Nobody, not one of you right-wing oriented windbags, has been able to rebut the questions I've raised regarding Abbott's policies and promises. There was absolutely nothing unsubstantiated about pointing out that he's on record stating Tax Revenue needs to be increased, but that he's cutting company and income tax, won't change GST, won't back new cigarette taxes and doesn't believe that Austerity measures are the answer to Australia's budget deficit. So where's he pulling this money from?

There's nothing wrong with opposing views. It's the incoherent, irrational drivel that I tire of.