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Prime Minister Kevin Rudd set to call September 7 federal election
By chief political correspondent Emma Griffiths
Updated 7 minutes ago


The ABC expects Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to visit the Governor-General shortly after 3:00pm AEST today to call a federal election for September 7.

Mr Rudd has arrived in Canberra after flying out of Brisbane earlier this afternoon.

It is widely believed he will set the country on course for a five week campaign, culminating in a polling day a week earlier than had been set by predecessor Julia Gillard.

Labor staffers have been told to make their way to Melbourne where the party's campaign headquarters will be based.

A September 7 election means the planned referendum on the constitutional status of local governments will not go ahead, as voters would not have been given enough notice.

Clearing the decks

Earlier today, the Prime Minister announced he had brokered deals on two key programs.

Victoria has signed up to the Commonwealth's school funding overhaul in an agreement worth more than $12 billion over six years.

Mr Rudd also announced that Western Australia has joined Disability Care, the national disability insurance scheme.

Yesterday, the Government struck another offshore settlement deal for asylum seekers with Nauru.

Asylum seekers who arrive in Australia by boat can now be processed on the Pacific Island and if they're found to be genuine refugee they can be resettled there.

The agreement is similar to the deal struck with Papua New Guinea a fortnight ago.

Careers over

This election will spell the end of the careers of several prominent politicians.

After holding the balance of power during the 43rd Parliament, independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor are not standing again.

There is also an exodus of experienced Labor MPs, including Ms Gillard, former leader Simon Crean and ministers Nicola Roxon, Martin Ferguson and Stephen Smith.

On the Coalition side, long-serving MPs Alex Somlyay, Paul Neville and West Australian moderate Judi Moylan are also retiring.

Topics: federal-elections, elections, government-and-politics, political-parties, australia

First posted 56 minutes ago


http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-08-04/rudd-set-to-call-federal-election/4863864

Edited by Joffa: 4/8/2013 02:59:42 PM

Joffa just leave this to the politics thread. We don't need multiple threads on the same topic.

How so?

Meh, Australia is in a fine state.

"Since 2007 the Federal Public Service has grown by 20,000, we have not seen a commensurate growth in output."

Tony Abbott

Does this mean we are going to see 20,000 jobs lost. He also stated that the Public service payroll needs to be slimmed down.

The Federal Campbell Newman.

This FFS.

He is quite clearly telling us what he is going to do, vote for him or don't vote for him, but don't claim you weren't warned,,,,

The fuckwit is including 7,000 members of the military in that list.

http://www.politifact.com.au/truth-o-meter/statements/2013/may/20/tony-abbott/tony-abbott-says-we-now-have-20000-more-bureaucrat/

Dem statistics.

-PB

Subtle.

Tell us you really think Rupert

:lol:

Oh dear. I'll be so happy when Labor win.

Stop. The. Boats. = 3 words

Kick. This. Mob. Out. - Sorry Rupert, but this is too many slogan words to compute with your average right winger.

Hilariously vested interests.

-PB

The more I see this the more I hope it's someone's idea of a joke. Surely there's some kind of watchdog who's all over this garbage.

Ofc it's an editorial and an opinion piece but putting it on the front page news trying to tell the public what to think it just laughable.

Wonder how many people understand Ruperts vested interests against things like the NBN lol.

-PB

If you're going to call yourself a "news" publication and then put an editorial piece on the front page with a headline like that you may as well cut to the chase, gloss your covers and get stocked next to Women's Weekly.

:lol: =d>

-PB

Conroy tried to bring one in... and got smashed in the media because of it. :lol:

Oh right...I forgot about that :lol: Doesn't seem like such a stupid idea now huh? :lol:

Not much left for Abbott to privatise.

who was it the privatised QANTAS & the commonwealth bank....among others???

Who sold off Telstra among others?

-PB

Qantas has always been privately owned :-"

Qantas has always been privately owned :-"[/quo


keating privatised a public owned company "QANTAS"......

8 NOVEMBER 2010


Bob Ellis
It is hard to see how Paul Keating’s five great achievements – the floating of the dollar, the letting in of foreign banks, the privatisation of Qantas, the winding down of tariffs and the sale of the Commonwealth Bank – look any good any more.

After Qantas’s two ‘incidents’ this past week it has no future as an airline and it is clear that sending maintenance off-shore and the $1,600 Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce earns every hour has a lot to do with it.

When sold it was the world’s safest airline (praised by Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man: ‘Qantas never crashed’); now it’s a dodgy dysfunctional scramble for post-meltdown survival and obscene levels of executive payout (what to Qantas executives do?) with half the ground-crew-per-plane it had in 1994, all of them daily exhausted, guilty, overworked and numb with frustration.

Why privatise anything where lives are at risk? The executives will always want for themselves the money that should be spent on safety and the sackings that follow this will always endanger lives (consider England’s train crashes after Blair’s privatisations), and I don’t see the point.

No ordinary citizen has ever said, ‘Thank God we privatised Telstra!’ after the many thousands of lost jobs and soaring phone bills. And I don’t see the point.

Why privatise anything? What service improvements do we get from the lotteries, tramways, nursing homes and prisons privatised against the people’s wishes? The money that goes to the shareholders comes out of safety and frequency of service (your call is important to us) and ordinary people die of the difference.

It is possible that privatisation kills people; but, hey, the upside is Alan Joyce gets $1,600 an hour, $13,000 a day, $90,000 a week, $4.7 million a year for saying things are going swimmingly while engines catch on fire.

Ralph Norris at the Commonwealth Bank, by contrast, gets only $5,563 an hour (multiple times what his government-bureaucrat predecessor got in 1991), but it’s hard to see what he does to earn it.

He puts stress on millions of lives, sure, every time he puts interest rates up but the time he spends deciding this can be measured in minutes per year. And I don’t see the point in paying him this much; one year of his wage, as I keep tiresomely pointing out in my books, could subsidise three small theatre companies for 1,000 years on the interest alone. And I don’t see the point.

Keating’s floating of the dollar has been a whangdoodle of a success too. It means, this week, that hundreds of export businesses, farms in particular, will go broke, and China, which doesn’t float its money, will soon rule the world.

We can’t, like China, say our dollar is worth a useful 78 US cents; no, it’s a disastrous 101 cents, driving our 2013 budget back into deficit, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Except unfloat the dollar, of course, and admit Paul was wrong. And that would never do. Better the people perish than this eloquent drongo confess he made a mistake.

He took off the tariffs too, which meant that instead of us taxpayers getting back 10 cents for every Hong Kong t-shirt we bought, and instead of having a clothing industry that kept employment in country towns and kept those country towns going, we made nothing out of the t-shirts we bought and devastated hundreds of thousands of lives. What a great idea that was.

Can’t have protection, he said. Everyone else does but we won’t. Protectionism was an idea that worked for 5,000 years, but it’s lately failed. Let’s do away with it. Just us, on our own.

Funny how he didn’t see that protection means what it says. We protect ourselves from AIDS with condoms. We protect our shores with navies, armies and air forces.

We protect our children from roving perverts with police and Hinch’s broadcast hate-lists. We protect ourselves from boat people by locking them up in the Adelaide Hills. But protect our jobs and way of life by tariffs? Nah, that’s over.

Losers like Japan, the EU, the US and China do that. We’re over it. Paul Keating says we’re long over it. Who needs jobs in country towns?

...And, oh yes, Keating let in the foreign banks, which meant Australian money didn’t stay here, it went to other countries to pay their executives thousands an hour and put out of work, in tens of thousands, our suburban bank tellers and wreck their families’ lives.

That was a good idea wasn’t it? He was praised for it effusively at the time; world’s greatest treasurer and so on. How wrong they were.

The worst thing he did, though, was sell the Commonwealth Bank. Had it still been a government instrumentality Wayne Swan could have ordered it, this week, to keep its interest rates at 6 per cent.

This would have saved the average family $40 a week. In what way was it helpful that Swanny could not?

The past 10 years has seen the unravelling – as I predicted in my book on economics First Abolish the Customer in 1998 – of the Friedmanite Consensus as more and more businesses go to the wall and mortgages go up and wages down and jobs are lost in tens of thousands and country towns cark it, and Keynesian Common Sense is returning.

If we keep people working, Keynes says, the nation prospers. An idea thought outdated at the time.

But Keating, who doesn’t read books much, won’t admit this. Planes will fall out of the sky because of his innumerate folly but he won’t admit it. He’s as rich as Croesus now, and we can all get stuffed.

And economics for people like him is no longer a mechanical system of pushed levers and cascades of money, it’s a religion: though he slay me yet will I trust him. It’s a kind of willed madness that China, the victor, has opted out of.

And we’re still in it, imagining competition with slaves and selling our farms and our jams and our Berlei Bras to foreigners makes national sense.

And our present Prime Minister, who likes what she’s heard of Paul Keating’s ideas and thinks Bob Katter a fool, doesn’t get it either.

She’s in the religion that’s killing us all.

And it’s a pity.

Edited by batfink: 5/8/2013 03:09:15 PM

No he didn't. Keating sold the publicly owned Australian Airlines TO Qantas.

http://www.qantas.com.au/travel/airlines/history-through-the-years/global/en

The Australian government instigated the sale of a portion of the company to British Airways but the only way any portion of Qantas was government owned was after the amalgamation with Australian Airlines, which they owned. And you can rip on Keating for that, but he also ensured that Qantas would be permanently majority Australian owned.

You seem to be strugling with the difference between being publicly owned (ie listed on the stock exchange) and government owned (ie not listed on the stock exchange).

More fundamental flaws in batfink's comprehension of english.