Therein lies the problem. People not policies. Regardless its Turnbull, by contrast to Shorten, who has been doing all the dithering, but his persona acts as the smokescreen. I can't recall an opposition releasing so many policies, outside of an election campaign.
Don't forget what an unmitigated long term financial disaster 'Mr Innovation' Turnbull has foisted on us with the second rate NBN - its utterly disgusting that simply to be 'not Labor's (far superior) NBN' we have copped years worth of delays for infrastructure that will need replacing as soon as its completed.
It is incredibly sad that so many people are comfortable that a party can so callously waste tens of billions of dollars purely for a marketing 'point of difference' & still be consider 'the better economic managers'.
IIRC Labor are going to the election with the intent to go back to full fibre to the premises NBN. This will be ballsy, as the Libs will label it as waste saying 'see, Labor hasn't changed they are economic incompetents', when it is the Libs that are the economic incompetents. The problem is people's inability to grasp things beyond an electoral cycle, that they will probably accept the slogans, even though in the long term the Libs are costing us alot more (a bit like global warming - people don't care because the effects are too distant & not acute enough, so they can't grasp it).
Like the second rate NBN, Turnbull for the Libs is still lipstick on a pig

Therein lies the problem. People not policies. Regardless its Turnbull, by contrast to Shorten, who has been doing all the dithering, but his persona acts as the smokescreen. I can't recall an opposition releasing so many policies, outside of an election campaign.
Don't forget what an unmitigated long term financial disaster 'Mr Innovation' Turnbull has foisted on us with the second rate NBN - its utterly disgusting that simply to be 'not Labor's (far superior) NBN' we have copped years worth of delays for infrastructure that will need replacing as soon as its completed.
It is incredibly sad that so many people are comfortable that a party can so callously waste tens of billions of dollars purely for a marketing 'point of difference' & still be consider 'the better economic managers'.
IIRC Labor are going to the election with the intent to go back to full fibre to the premises NBN. This will be ballsy, as the Libs will label it as waste saying 'see, Labor hasn't changed they are economic incompetents', when it is the Libs that are the economic incompetents. The problem is people's inability to grasp things beyond an electoral cycle, that they will probably accept the slogans, even though in the long term the Libs are costing us alot more (a bit like global warming - people don't care because the effects are too distant & not acute enough, so they can't grasp it).
Like the second rate NBN, Turnbull for the Libs is still lipstick on a pig

Or maybe they just don't want 5 new taxes under Labor

That only really happened with Abbott.

The ALP under Shorten have released heaps of policies. More than Rudd did in the lead up to the 2007 election.

But, as you pointed out, even with Rudd it was more about the "it's time" factor working against Howard than anything else.

What Rudd did do was ensure the ALP was seen as a viable alternative. Shorten has been doing this as well by being serious about policy.

Edited by AzzaMarch: 22/3/2016 03:12:18 PM

He's such an unlikeable face. It may be just media presentation, but I'm sick of seeing him attacking the government at every opportunity.

Let's not forget the 'lettuce tax' :lol:

Labor has called on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to stand down Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos after the New South Wales Liberal Party was found to have breached electoral laws in its 2011 victory.

The NSW Electoral Commission ruled it will not hand over $4.4 million in funding because the Liberal Party's NSW division refused to disclose donors who helped bankroll its 2011 campaign via donations to the Free Enterprise Foundation.

In its ruling, the commission concluded the Free Enterprise Foundation was used by senior Liberal officials as a means of offering anonymity to donors including property developers, who are banned from making political donations to NSW campaigns.

Senator Sinodinos was the state division's finance director and treasurer at the time, though a spokesman for Senator Sinodinos said the issue was a matter for the NSW Liberal Party....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-24/labor-calls-on-malcolm-turnbull-to-stand-down-arthur-sinodinos/7273930

Crikey! Does the corruption in the Liberal Party ever end?
This is the fourth federal member of parliament in about 5 months!!

Disgust Sensitivity, Political Conservatism, and Voting

In two large samples (combined N = 31,045), we found a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and political conservatism. This relationship held when controlling for a number of demographic variables as well as the “Big Five” personality traits. Disgust sensitivity was also associated with more conservative voting in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. In Study 2, we replicated the disgust sensitivity–conservatism relationship in an international sample of respondents from 121 different countries. Across both samples, contamination disgust, which reflects a heightened concern with interpersonally transmitted disease and pathogens, was most strongly associated with conservatism.
http://spp.sagepub.com/content/3/5/537.abstract

Crikey! Does the corruption in the Liberal Party ever end?
This is the fourth federal member of parliament in about 5 months!!

EXCLUSIVE
One of Bill Shorten's closest political allies has inflated his union's membership levels in an apparent bid to boost the union's clout in the ALP and prop up the opposition leader's dominant right faction.
A Fairfax investigation has found that the Plumbers Union, led by Shorten ally Earl Setches, has for each of the past eight years claimed many more members to Labor than its official figures show, in one year nearly double.
Mr Setches blamed the difference on a "clerical f--k-up" and denied his union had inflated its membership numbers to ALP for factional advantage. "No reason whatsoever, I would not give a f--k (about ALP numbers)," he said.

The revelation comes at a difficult time for the opposition leader, with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull using union corruption as an election issue and threatening a double dissolution if the Senate fails to pass union-reforming laws.
Late last year Fairfax separately revealed that the Plumbers Union and Mr Setches were central to a Labor branch-stacking scam involving the use of anonymous gift cards to buy nearly 1000 ALP memberships.
The union membership and branch-stacking scams highlight Mr Shorten's failure to act on the party reform he promised in 2014, with his own faction in his home state riddled with fraudulent conduct.
The inflated membership numbers has allowed the Plumbers Union to claim more delegates at ALP state conferences than they were entitled to, and has allowed the Shorten/Conroy bloc within the right to retain its dominant position.
This gives the beneficiaries of the inflated numbers more say in policy decisions and pre-selection of Labor parliamentary candidates.
Mr Setches said the union had different types of memberships, including for retirees and those out of work. But ALP rules state that only members who have paid dues between April and June can be counted.

Fairfax Media can reveal that this year the Plumbers Union claims 11,207 members to the ALP when they only have 6169, according to the union's audited Fair Work Commission filings.
Mr Setches admitted the numbers should be the same and claimed the Fair Work figures could be too low.
Where membership figures lodged with the ALP indicate the union has grown nearly 30 per cent since 2006, the Fair Work figures show the reverse - a decline of almost 30 per cent in plumbers' members.
The discrepancies started in 2009 - around the time that Mr Setches switched his allegiance from the Labor left to join Mr Shorten's faction after the two apparently bonded while walking the Kokoda Track together.
The union appears to have accelerated the discrepancy in recent years.
A spokesman for Mr Shorten declined to comment directly but said. "This is a matter for the Victorian branch and it should be fully investigated."
Comment has been sought from ALP state secretary Noah Carroll.
Under Labor rules affiliated unions must have an independent audit of its paying members. The party then determines how many delegates each union is entitled to.
With the Labor right splintered into a string of sub-factions, every number counts among the 300 union delegates to state conference.
The plumbers currently have 13 delegates but their actual entitlement should be about six delegates. The separate branch-stacking scam allows them up to 11 delegates from Labor's wider branch membership.
One rival right faction source said if the Plumbers Union was an individual party member it would be expelled for "rorting the system to gain power".
The decline of union numbers in many blue collar industries has had a flow on effect in the ALP, challenging control by the party's right faction and affecting decades-long power balances.
In 2013, Fairfax Media revealed extensive rorting by the Transport Workers Union in NSW of its membership numbers. It had claimed more than 40,000 members when the real number was 17,800.
In 2011, Fairfax revealed large discrepancies at the Australian Workers Union which at the time had boasted rapid membership growth but most of the rise was in unpaid or "phantom" members.
Under scrutiny from the royal commission into union corruption, the Victorian AWU has since dramatically slashed the numbers it now claims on its books.
After the Fairfax branch-stacking revelations last year, Victorian Labor launched a review that was overseen by factional figures and which led to the expulsion of hundred of members.
But the findings deflected attention from the scam as they did not focus on the pervasive use of pre-paid cards.The difficulty in tracing who paid for them makes the cards ideal for branch stacking.
The issue was highly sensitive as the gift cards were largely used by allies of Mr Shorten and Mr Conroy. Mr Setches' own ALP membership was even bought using an Australia Post gift card.
A key figure in the scam, Lebanese numbers man David Asmar, fled to Lebanon when the royal commission wanted to question him late last year.
He recently returned to Australia and has re-emerged as a candidate for Labor internal elections.

OH MY GOSH! THE CORRUPTION! THE NEVER ENDING LABOR CORRUPTION! THEY'RE SO CORRUPT, THEY ARE BASICALLY RIGHT WINGERS. AMIRITE MURDOCH RAGS???



http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/key-union-rorts-labor-numbers-20160328-gnsakp.html

OH MY GOSH! THE CORRUPTION! THE NEVER ENDING LABOR CORRUPTION! THEY'RE SO CORRUPT, THEY ARE BASICALLY RIGHT WINGERS. AMIRITE MURDOCH RAGS???

We need a Federal ICAC.

I'm a douche

While watching Secrets Of The Brain on SBS this evening it reminded me of the research that found a correlation between conservative voting and disgust response
Here is the abstract of the peer reviewed publication:

TL;DR
- For equivalency sake, how many Labor politicians are being stood down/resigning as a result?

For someone who likes to criticise people as being "wilfully ignorant", you seem to ignore a lot of facts which do not fit your ideal view of the world.

You have tried to create the appearance of an equivalence, where there is none - a false equivalence between what I referred to and the article you quoted
There are no Labor Party members of Parliament being stood or about to be stood down.

The article in which Murdoch Rags wilfully ignored was highlighting the many levels of corruption within the Unions and the Labor party. That is all. Put next to the article Murdoch Rags posted, it shows that corruption happens regardless of political alliance.

The Federal Government is floating a radical idea to let the states and territories levy income taxes.
Prime Minister and Cabinet Department head Martin Parkinson has briefed state and territory officials about the proposal and premiers and chief ministers will get the full details ahead of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting, on Friday.
Treasurer Scott Morrison was this morning questioned about the proposal and said it was under consideration....
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-03-30/coag-states-territories-could-levy-income-taxes/7283232

Dear, oh, dear. More massive costs to the economy thanks to more layers of monetary management structure

more layers of monetary management structure?????

The states already exist. This suggestion (separate from an assessment of its merits) adds no increased structure. It just shifts it from one level of govt to another.

Dear, oh, dear. More massive costs to the economy thanks to more layers of monetary management structure

Yep and instead of one group there will be 7 - basic logic

I wish politicians would come out and just say 'we need more money'.

Is it that hard to call a spade a spade in politics? We have reduced income from mining and the shortfall has to come from somewhere.

I think they really should be making a bigger deal about collaboration with other countries regarding the taxation of multi-nationals like apple and google.

I wish politicians would come out and just say 'we need more money'.

Is it that hard to call a spade a spade in politics? We have reduced income from mining and the shortfall has to come from somewhere.

I think they really should be making a bigger deal about collaboration with other countries regarding the taxation of multi-nationals like apple and google.

I am very disappointed in Turnbull .

Look it is ideological to think states would ever be abolished - people (simplistically) have a psychological need for 'identity' - its an ego thing
Turnbull is right (admittedly with his rhetoric) that we have to become a smart nation - what we learn from history is we don't learn from history; we are intellectually lazy - growing wheat & shearing sheep in the 20th century, digging up shit in the 21st century....