Brilliant! Quote of the day.

A bloke worth $100 million plus is "in it for himself".

So Australia's debt is 17% of our GDP. Our GDP is $1.5T, a debt of around $255bn. So if you're genuinely claiming we're paying $365+ billion in interest, more than we actually owe countries I'm calling bullshit.

If I had to choose between trusting your version of events or the Treasury's, sorry, you can wallow in your own bullshit.

This.
As far back as 5 years ago I saw Turnbull for what he is - a smarmy, arrogant grub. Never been a fan of his, even when he was opposition leader. Not the man Australia needs. We've had enough people the last seven years in it purely for themselves.

Pfft.

Turnbull is the only true liberal in that party. It is otherwise dominated by rich, white, religious 1% ers.

The public undermining of Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull and questions over his loyalty to Tony Abbott have been linked to expectations inside the Coalition that the Prime Minister is heading towards a ''mini-reshuffle'' of the ministry.

Mr Turnbull was forced for a fourth straight day on Thursday to affirm his loyalty to the Prime Minister and support for the budget during a combative interview with Sydney radio host Alan Jones.

Mr Turnbull accused Mr Jones and conservative newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt of ''doing the Labor Party's work'' in destabilising the government.

The stoush prompted government discussion about what had fuelled the attack on Mr Turnbull, with suspicion that Jones and fellow right-wing commentator Bolt were being egged on by the hard right of the party.

Fairfax Media can also reveal that Bolt and Jones have asked Labor for ammunition to use against Mr Turnbull, particularly in relation to his stewardship of the national broadband network.

At the same time, some of Mr Turnbull's allies are privately blaming the Prime Minister's office for intervening to stop a succession of high-profile appearances on the ABC since the budget.

Bolt and Jones have both taken aim at Mr Turnbull for allegedly not selling the budget to the public, an accusation Mr Turnbull has rejected.
In a fiery morning exchange, Mr Turnbull accused Jones and Bolt of creating the furore around his alleged leadership aspirations.

Jones responded: ''There is no challenge to his leadership. They are suggesting Malcolm precisely because you have no hope ever of being the leader. You've got to get that into your head.''

Mr Turnbull replied: ''This is the most united, cohesive government we've had in this country for a long time and I think it is just very sad that you and Bolt are doing the work of the Labor Party in undermining the Abbott government.''

But questions linger over the strength of the relationship between Mr Turnbull and the Prime Minister after Fairfax Media revealed Mr Turnbull had not gone ahead with four slated appearances on the ABC.

In an interview on the ABC's 7.30 on Thursday night, Mr Turnbull said he didn't have "any plans, any desires, any expectations to be the leader" of his party again.

"Politics is an unpredictable business so people say to me often, 'Do you think you'll be leader again?' and I say my prospects are somewhere between nil and very negligible and I think that is probably about right,'' he said.

However when asked directly about his leadership ambitions, Mr Turnbull said he "didn't think there is any member of the House of Representatives who, if in the right circumstances, would not take on that responsibility".

He also said Bolt and Jones had undermined the prime minister by suggesting the government was divided which was an enormous falsehood.

"I will not stand by and let that falsehood be peddled because there is a risk if you don't stand up to bullies and people who peddle these lines, that they will start to become accepted,'' he said.

Some of Mr Turnbull's allies are privately blaming the Prime Minister's office, which vets all media appearances.

A Liberal Party source said possible changes to the ministry were behind the instability.

''There might be a few people trying to remind Abbott of their usefulness to him and loyalty when it counted [when he took over the Liberal leadership from Mr Turnbull],'' said a Liberal Party source.

Arthur Sinodinos is expected to be moved on from his suspended role as assistant treasurer after his bruising appearance at the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, while speculation persists that Immigration Minister Scott Morrison will step into the job of Defence Minister at the expense of David Johnston.

Parliamentary secretaries Josh Frydenberg and Steven Ciobo are considered to be two of the front runners to take Senator Sinodinos' job.

I love what Clive has done to both major parties and the print media.

The Age has published 4 opinion pieces by 4 different authors condemning Clive, including an editor, and the last by Latham likening him to a freak show and referring to "The Elephant Man". Fucking disgusting

3 of the 4 articles allowed commenting, which numbered in the 100's, the vast majority savaging the authors for the baseless attacks on Palmer. The Latham article comments were headed the same way and they shut comments down after only a few hours.

One comment stood out: "We hate you the media for manipulating our political process, for twisting facts in favour of whoever serves your interests, we hate reading your opinions, and we hate both of the major parties for selling this country out" . If they had likes he would have got hundreds.

The mood of the electorate is sending a big Fuck You to both Labor and Liberal, and Clive is laughing all the way. He is an idiot, but at the moment everyone loves that he is able to stick it to Abbot and Labor. Delicious!

Clive's being the same obstructionist self he was with football. How conveniently people forget.

Clive makes me laugh. Him and Katter are a joke.

Now Piers Akerman with a big attack on Turnbull. Amazing how the far right is doing more to undermine Abbott than anything Labor has done. Has anyone actually thought less of Turnbull after all of this?

Now Piers Akerman with a big attack on Turnbull. Amazing how the far right is doing more to undermine Abbott than anything Labor has done. Has anyone actually thought less of Turnbull after all of this?

Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has cancelled four scheduled appearances on various ABC television and radio shows over the past month, it emerged yesterday, as last night yet another ABC flagship cut short a discussion of Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project, the NBN, with the portfolio minister responsible for it.

Over the past month, Delimiter has published a number of articles providing evidence that the ABC is avoiding coverage of the National Broadband Network issue; and especially the Coalition’s highly controversial and unpopular modification of the project.

For example, Malcolm Turnbull has appeared on the ABC’s flagship discussion show Q&A 12 times since he was appointed Shadow Communications Minister in late 2010, but has faced extended questions on the NBN (his main policy area) just once. On all other occasions, the host has actively shut down the topic after only brief discussion or avoided it completely. Other ABC flagships such as 7:30 have covered the NBN topic only sporadically and not in depth (for example, up until yesterday 7:30 had not covered the NBN at all in 2014).

Where the NBN has been covered in detail by the ABC, it appears mainly to have been the efforts of individual passionate journalists which has spurred such coverage. However, those reporters have been sequentially deterred from pursuing that coverage. Lateline co-host Emma Alberici had her pro-NBN article delayed until after the Federal Election, when its impact would be severely diminished. ABC Technology + Games editor Nick Ross has largely ceased writing on the topic after his NBN coverage was featured on Media Watch. And another reporter who had been covering the NBN, Jake Sturmer was reassigned.

Yesterday it was revealed that it was not only the ABC itself, but also Turnbull that had contributed to the broadcaster’s dearth of high-level coverage on the issue.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that the Communications Minister had pulled out of four previously scheduled appearances on the ABC’s flagship shows since the Federal Budget in early May, including two appearances on 7:30, one on the ABC’s AM program, and one on Insiders. The newspaper appended part of the blame to a restrictive media policy set by the office of Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Turnbull did finally appear on 7:30 last night for a prolonged interview (we recommend you click here for the full broadcast and transcript). The interview had been scheduled earlier this week to be mainly on the topic of the National Broadband Network. However, as with previous appearances on shows such as Q&A, Turnbull’s discussion of the NBN was cut short by the show’s host.

“As we agreed earlier in the week, I’m coming on to talk to you about the very considerable progress of the NBN under the new Government, and that’s what I’d like to talk about,” Turnbull told host Sarah Ferguson. “We have made great progress of pulling this failed Labor project into line.”

However, despite the interview having been arranged largely for the NBN topic, Ferguson quickly segued off the topic, shifting the topic immediately to discussion of Turnbull’s fractious relationships with conservative commentators Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, which has flared up as a topic this week following a dinner Turnbull held with Palmer United Party leader Clive Palmer and several others.

“Can we move back onto the NBN?” asked Turnbull after a prolonged discussion. However, Ferguson insisted on further discussion of the Palmer dinner, leaving only several minutes for discussion of the NBN at the end of the program.

In addition, Ferguson also failed to ask Turnbull about one of the most controversial issues to have recently affected the project.

On Wednesday this week, NBN Co took the extraordinary step of hiring one of the most senior executives of media organisation News Corp Australia to be its new chief financial officer, in a move which caused an instant uproar in Australia’s technology sector, as it bolstered theories about the Coalition having a close connections with the Murdoch publishing empire. The executive, long-time News Corp CFO Stephen Rue, has strong credentials as a chief financial officer but does not appear to have experience in the telecommunications sector.

The news of Rue’s appointment was interpreted by much of Australia’s telecommunications sector as confirming what had previously been seen as speculation or even conspiracy theory that the current Coalition Federal Government was seeking to water down Labor’s ambitious FTTP NBN project to protect the existing interests of industry giants such as News Corp, especially the company’s Foxtel cable television joint venture with Telstra.

In his biography published last week, former independent MP Rob Oakeshott explicitly claimed there was a connection between the Coalition’s broadband policies and News Corp.

The Coalition’s policy has the “potential to return millions and millions of dollars in future profits” to News Limited and Telstra through Foxtel, Oakeshott reportedly wrote in the book. “As much as I have personal regard for Malcolm Turnbull, I think his telecommunications policy is wholly owned by Telstra and News Limited. It does nothing for consumers, and is a massive win for a couple of corporate boards.”

Speaking in Senate Estimates last week, ABC managing director Mark Scott insisted there was no “conspiracy” to censor coverage of the NBN topic on the broadcaster’s shows, stating that the ABC had published some 150 articles on the topic since September last year.

“There’s no overarching policy or direction around coverage of NBN issues. Our editors, our executive producers, our journalists exercise their editorial judgement under the window of our editorial policies on which they operate on stories … I am aware that there are people in the technology press who would like us to cover NBN issues all day every day. Our editors and producers make their editorial judgement, and they have no overarching instructions in doing so.”

opinion/analysis
If I was writing a murder mystery, this would be the point where I would suck on my pipe and utter darkly … “and the plot thickens further”.

Last night we saw, yet again, one of the ABC’s flagship shows fail to substantially discuss the NBN topic with the portfolio Minister responsible for it. For God’s sake, 7:30 actually scheduled an interview with Turnbull specifically on the topic of the NBN earlier this week, as the Minister himself said on air — and then spent the vast majority of the interview time pressuring Turnbull about his spat with Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones. When host Sarah Ferguson did get around to talking to Turnbull about the NBN — for the first time in 2014 — the host allocated just several minutes to discuss the topic.

In addition, Ferguson failed to ask Turnbull about the most controversial issue in the NBN area this week — the hotly debated appointment of a long-time senior News Corp lieutenant to the post of NBN Co CFO. I can tell you that that news of that appointment has been a huge traffic generator for Delimiter this week. The Australian public is deeply interested in it. And yet it was ignored last night — just like Lateline host Tony Jones ignored the issue of NBN Co turfing three of its most senior executives, when he interviewed Turnbull on April 10 this year, the day that move was announced.

At the same time, we have Turnbull actively cancelling no less than four scheduled interviews with the ABC over the past month since the Federal Budget, leading to those shows also lacking coverage of the NBN topic.

To be honest, I don’t quite know what to think of all this.

Clearly, as I’ve pointed out previously, the ABC is lacking in-depth NBN coverage right now. When it does cover the topic, as we saw last night, that coverage is often tokenistic and and overshadowed by other political matters. I don’t blame the broadcaster for covering a cat fight between conservative politicians and the commentators who normally support them (who isn’t interested in that?!) … but I wouldn’t like coverage of Australia’s largest ever infrastructure project to suffer as a result, as it clearly did last night on 7:30. And clearly Turnbull has also tried to rein in some of his media appearances, perhaps spurred by commandments being issued by Tony Abbott’s office.

However, the reasons why all this is occurring continue to be wreathed in mist. I’d love to have been privy to 7:30′s editorial discussion before the Turnbull interview last night. One does wonder why, after not having covered the NBN at all this year, the show finally asked the Communications Minister on to discuss the topic, and then ended up discussing the NBN for a mere couple of minutes. The mind boggles. I mean, it’s not as if the Member for Wentworth is in charge of a $30 billion, highly controversial, national infrastructure project, or anything. Oh, that’s right …

the NBN is a waste of money
all you kiddies want it for is to download more movies porn faster

Please! =;

netflix is bigger than porn in the USA
its taking up the most bandwidth

will be the same here

Are you a baby boomer by any chance? You just reek of stubbornness to everything changing around you.

netflix is bigger than porn in the USA
its taking up the most bandwidth

will be the same here

Tony Abbott 'embarrassing' Australia, says Tanya Plibersek


The prime minister has reportedly cancelled meetings with the world's top finance officials during his visit to the United States

theguardian.com, Saturday 7 June 2014 15.55 AEST   

Labor has slammed Tony Abbott, declaring him embarrassing for cancelling meetings with the world's top finance officials during his visit to the United States.


Deputy opposition leader Tanya Plibersek said the prime minister had made a succession of missteps during his travels overseas, the latest in the US.


"Australians have to worry that he'll be embarrassing us on the world stage," she told reporters in Sydney.


It follows a report from political columnist Laurie Oakes, who said Abbott had cancelled long-planned meetings with US treasury secretary Jack Lew, International Monetary Fund head Christine Lagarde and World Bank president Jim Yong Kim despite Australia hosting the G20 summit in November.


“The G20 is the most important meeting ever on Australian soil. The head of the IMF, World Bank and US treasury chief will be critically involved with preparations for the G20,” Plibersek said.


“This shows the prime minister doesn’t understand how important the G20 is. He’s not as engaged as he should be.”


Plibersek said that followed the embarrassing spectacle of Abbott "washing Australia's dirty laundry" by talking about domestic issues at the Davos conference.


Six months down the track, the relationship with Indonesia was still not back to normal, she said.


Plibersek said it was extraordinary that Abbott was not meeting the top economic officials at a time when Australia was preparing to host world leaders for the November G20 summit.


"The G20 is the most important international meeting that has ever been held on Australian soil," she said.


Plibersek said the rest of the world was moving forward on climate change action but Abbott was a "Nigel no-friends" on the world stage.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/07/tony-abbott-embarrassing-australia-says-tanya-plibersek

Are you a baby boomer by any chance? You just reek of stubbornness to everything changing around you.

Dear Tony, from someone you may once have called a 'job snob'
June 6, 2014
Simon Castles

In May 1999, Tony Abbott responded to me directly in this newspaper. "Simon Castles should feel very angry indeed about being unemployed and idle for 18 months," he wrote, "and not having the opportunities that work for the dole provides."
At the time, Abbott was minister for employment services, and was responding to a piece I'd written a few days earlier in which I reflected on my own experience of unemployment and generally got stuck into him for his comments about the unemployed being "job snobs".
(By the way, Mr Abbott, if by chance you're reading this, I never said I was "idle", I said I was unemployed; these are not the same thing. They tend to be equated only in the minds of those who know nothing about unemployment beyond that story they saw on A Current Affair that time.)
Anyway, 15 years later and the employment services minister is now Prime Minister. And props where they're due, Mr Abbott, your career trajectory has certainly been more stellar than mine. But I have remained employed these 15 years, paying my taxes and, in so doing, giving something back I hope for the help I received when I was young and unemployed and needed it most.
The safety net, in other words, worked for me, just as it has worked for countless thousands of Australians for generations (including, interestingly, Clive Palmer, who last week defended the dole, saying it had helped him when he was an out-of-work teenager).
But what of the young unemployed today? Well, if the government gets its way – the battle in the Senate is set to begin in earnest – the young unemployed will get no help at all. Or so little help that the word "help" begins to look perilously like its opposite.
Under the government's plan, from next year, unemployed people under 30 will have to wait six months before receiving benefits. They will then be put on work-for-the-dole for six months, before the money is again taken away for half a year. And so on it will go. This policy manages a rare feat in being both astoundingly cruel and incredibly dumb.
Work for the dole is the least-worst part of the plan, but that is no endorsement. Introduced by John Howard in the late-'90s, work for the dole has always been a piece of populism masked as policy. Its aim has never really been to help the jobless, but rather to win the support of those who believe the unemployed have it easy. ("Easy" on the dole, by the way, is $255 a week, or about half what a single person needs to reach the poverty line.)
A study of work for the dole, by Jeff Borland and Yi-Ping Tseng of the University of Melbourne, found that participation in the program is "associated with a large and significant adverse effect on the likelihood of exiting unemployment payments". In other words, those in work for the dole end up stuck on welfare longer than those not in the program. It is believed this is because those in the program have less time to look and prepare for real work.
Then there is the other part of the government's policy for the young unemployed – the six months without any payment at all. Here is how they sell this in the budget spin document: "Because we want new jobseekers, especially those leaving school and university, to actually look for work, income support will only be provided once a six-month period of job hunting has been completed."
It's worth reading that sentence again. First, nice use of the word "actually", guys. Way to patronise everyone who's struggled to find work ever. But secondly and more importantly, just how is the average jobseeker supposed to hunt for jobs for six months without any money? Are they meant to draw on their trust fund during this time? Or perhaps sell off shares in the portfolio they built up while completing year 12?
Sorry for the snark. But Abbott and Joe Hockey really need to answer this question of how. They can't be let off the hook on this. Even if we leave aside for a moment the need a person has for food and shelter – a rather big thing to put aside – looking for a job itself costs money. Anyone who has ever chased work knows this and yet somehow it has escaped the notice or understanding of our Prime Minister and Treasurer.
More than 100,000 people a year are expected to be hit by these changes. A packed MCG of the young and desperate. Even government officials told a Senate hearing this week that they expect half a million people to be pushed into crisis and seek emergency relief over the coming years as a result of the welfare changes.
And to reiterate: the young jobless will get no money for six months, and then be moved for six months into a program that doesn't work. So for half the year they will have time but no money, and for the other half they will have money but no time. The policy actually appears designed to hinder efforts to escape unemployment.
I look back on my period of unemployment in the mid-'90s as an awful time. As a spirit-crushing fog in which day-to-day life was shadowed constantly by feelings of frustration, worthlessness and worry. But if the government gets these changes through, I'll know I was truly one of the lucky ones. I'll know I was part of one of the last generations of young unemployed to be given a chance before the dismantling of the safety net began.

Simon Castles is an Age producer and a former editor of The Big Issue.