More reports showing that 'trickle up' economics is at work in Australia

Here is just a little of what Liberal & National party members - and their governments - refuse to understand as they support a far-right economic platform which is built on a reduction in corporate tax rates, high business profits and large management salaries in conjunction with employee wage supression, erosion of workers' rights, an increase in employment insecurity based on casual, part-time and/or employees as sham contractors and, further restrictions on eligibility for a number of basic welfare payments.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 10 April 2018:

Last year, as the government prepared another round of welfare crackdowns, Minister Michaelia Cash said she expects “that those who can work should work and our welfare system should be there as a genuine safety net, not as something that people can choose to fund their lifestyle.”

The subtext was clear – those who need help are a drain on the rest of us.

This rhetoric is familiar, but it is wrong. It is the wealthiest Australians who enjoy the most support.

Research commissioned by Anglicare Australia shows that each year, a staggering $68 billion is spent keeping the wealthiest households wealthy. That is greater than the cost of Newstart, disability support, the age pension, or any other single welfare group.

The Cost of Privilege report, prepared by Per Capita, models four household types to show how these concessions and tax breaks work. One of the couples we modelled, Tim and Michelle, own their own home. They have two children in private schools, top health insurance, and two investment properties. Michelle doesn’t work, and Tim runs a small business. Each year, Tim and Michelle get $99,708 in concessions from the taxpayer, or $1917 per week. That is well over twice as much as a couple with two children on Newstart, and nearly three times as much as a family with one parent on the Disability Support Pension. Tim and Michelle do this by getting concessions on their superannuation, negatively gearing their investment properties to minimise their taxable income, and getting tax breaks for private schools and private health insurance. They also get generous Capital Gains Tax exemptions.

Each year, thousands of Australia's wealthiest households profit from these loopholes and subsidies. Our report finds that tax exemptions on private healthcare and education for the wealthiest 20 per cent cost more than $3 billion a year. 

Superannuation concessions to them cost over $20 billion a year, and their Capital Gains Tax exemptions cost an astonishing $40 billion a year. Compare that to the annual cost of Newstart, which comes in at just under $11 billion a year.

Importantly, nothing that Tim and Michelle are doing is wrong or illegal. This is not a broken system. It is a system working exactly the way it was designed to work, supporting the wealthiest at the expense of the rest of us.

These numbers tell us that something has gone badly wrong. The eighties were the decade of trickle-down economics, where taxes were cut for the richest with the promise that everyone else would soon feel the benefits. But now it’s worse – we’re in an era of trickle-up economics where subsidies, tax breaks and concessions for the richest are paid for by everyone else.....

Anglicare Australia, 26 March 2018:

Cost of Privilege Report (.pdf)

Cost of Privilege - overview (.pdf)

Cost of Privilege - households (.pdf)

ABC News, 15 April 2018:

One in every five Australian children has gone hungry in the past 12 months according to a new report, with some even resorting to chewing paper to try to feel full.

The survey of 1,000 parents commissioned by Foodbank shows 22 per cent of Australian children under the age of 15 live in a household that has ran out of food at some stage over the past year.

One in five kids affected go to school without eating breakfast at least once a week, while one in 10 go a whole day at least once a week without eating anything at all.

"I think that's a very sad indictment on us as a society," said Foodbank Victoria chief executive Dave McNamara…..

"Some kids were eating paper. Their parents had told them 'There's not enough food, if you get hungry you'll need to chew paper.'"

"This isn't made up. This is a story we heard setting up one of our school breakfast programs down in Lakes Entrance, which is a beautiful part of the country."

"No-one's spared. It's not people on the street; it's people in your street. It's in every community across Australia."

Foodbank Victoria graphic below based on its Rumbling Tummies Report, April 2018:

The only Australians who do not recognise the cruel farce that is 'robo-debt' are right-wing politicians, ideologues and the just plain ignorant

“It is trite maths that statistical averages (whether means or medians) tell nothing about the variability or otherwise of the underlying numbers from which averages are calculated. Only if those underlying numbers do not vary at all is it possible to extrapolate from the average a figure for any one of the component periods to which the average relates. Otherwise the true underlying pattern may be as diverse as the experience of Australia’s highly variable drought/flood pattern in the face of knowledge of ‘average’ yearly rainfall figures. Yet precisely such a mathematical fault lies at the heart of the introduction from July 2016 of the OCI machine-learning method for raising and recovering social security overpayment debts. This extrapolates Australian Taxation Office (‘ATO’) data matching information about the total amount and period over which employment income was earned, and applies that average to each and every separate fortnightly rate calculation period for working-age payments.”  [Terry Carney AO, UNSW Law Journal, Vol 42 No 2, THE NEW DIGITAL FUTURE FOR WELFARE: DEBTS WITHOUT LEGAL PROOFS OR MORAL AUTHORITY?, p2]

The Canberra Times, 5 April 2018:

The Coalition government's "robo-debt" program has been unlawfully raising debts with welfare recipients, wreaking "legal and moral injustice", a former administrative appeals tribunal member has said.

Emeritus professor of law at the University of Sydney Terry Carney, who was on the Administrative Appeals Tribunal for 40 years and was its longest serving member until finishing in September, has weighed into the debate over the controversial debt collection method saying the Department of Human Services has no legal basis to raise debts when a client fails to ‘disprove’ they owe money.

While Professor Carney urged it be made to comply with the law, the DHS rejected his comments, saying its Online Compliance Intervention program was consistent with legislation.

"Robo-debt" - the subject of a Commonwealth Ombudsman report and a Senate inquiry recommending sweeping reforms to the program - was at the centre of a maelstrom of controversy last year and remains loathed by critics calling for change….

Writing in the UNSW Law Journal last month, he said that despite the DHS' stance it remained responsible for calculating debts based on actual earnings, not assumed averages.

“Centrelink’s OCI radically changed the way overpayment debts are raised  by purporting to absolve Centrelink from its legal obligation to obtain sufficient information to found a debt in the event that its ‘first instance’ contact with the recipient is unable to unearth information about actual fortnightly earnings. As noted by the Ombudsman, the major change was that Centrelink would ‘no longer’ exercise its statutory powers to obtain wage records and that the ‘responsibility’ to obtain such information now lies with applicants seeking to challenge a debt. Writing a little later, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee challenged this, contending that

6.13 It is a basic legal principle that in order to claim a debt, a debt must be proven to be owed. The onus of proving a debt must remain with the department. This would include verifying income data in order to calculate a debt. Where appropriate, verification can be done with the assistance of income support payment recipients, but the final responsibility must lie with the department. This would also preclude the practice of averaging income data to manufacture a fortnightly income for the purposes of retrospectively calculating a debt. …”  [Terry Carney AO, UNSW Law Journal, Vol 42 No 2, THE NEW DIGITAL FUTURE FOR WELFARE: DEBTS WITHOUT LEGAL PROOFS OR MORAL AUTHORITY?, pp3-4]

Monash Family versus Monash Forum

Members of the Monash Forum include Craig Kelly, Eric Abetz, Tony Abbott, Barnaby Joyce and Kevin Andrews. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen  [The Sydney Morning Herald, 5 April 2018]

The allegedly more than 20 member strong Monash Forum circulated a letter in late March 2018 emphasising the importance of coal-fired power to the Australian economy and setting out principles such as the withdrawal of subsidies for renewable energy and the advantage of new generation of “low-emission” coal-fired power stations.

It is hard to see this group as anything but a collection of far-right politically notorious, climate change denying, xenophobic, chauvinistic, historical revisionist ‘warriors’ on a mission to bring down Malcolm Bligh Turnbull and hasten Australia's decline into the worst aspects of its old 20th Century self.

Apparently a group of descendants of former army general Sir John Monash, GCMG, KCB, VD (1865-1931), as well as the Australian Returned Services League, thought along much those same lines.

Here is what these family members said:

via ABC Defence Reporter @AndrewBGreene

Are Facebook and those unethical data miners already manipulating voters in Australian elections?

Is the 'American disease' already making Australian democracy ill?

On 27 March 2018 the blog Queen Victoria observed:

During the recent South Australian election, take a guess how many Labor policy announcements made the front page of The Advertiser, the State’s only major newspaper? If you guessed zero, you would almost be right. In fact, there were only two – a promise by Labor to invest in TAFE, and even then it was half a tiny corner article, worth 36 words, with the other half given to a Liberal election pledge, and Labor’s loans for solar panels and batteries, again a handful of words, and sitting beside a Liberal promise. You’ll need a magnifying glass to spot the articles on the front pages below..

Looking at those front pages it was easy to see what Victoria Rollison meant.

But was it more than just News Corp playing Murdoch's favourite game of Labor bashing?

Earlier, on 17 March 2018 the day of the South Australian state election (which the Liberals subsequently won) journalist Mark Kenny wrote in the Weekend Australian that:

Like Turnbull in 2016, Marshall and his team have been criticised for not being sufficiently aggressive about Labor’s failings. But they have run short, sharp and effective negative TV commercials (the sort that bewilderingly never came in the federal campaign) around the theme of “I’ve had enough, Jay” which neatly captures the mood for a corrective change. This is a good example of how paid advertising can deliver tough messages if politicians are reluctant.

Yet a sense of coasting has worried many Liberal supporters and observers. When I told a group of Adelaide Liberals last month that Marshall and his team seemed insufficiently combative towards Labor and Xenophon, a front­bencher pulled me aside afterwards and showed me his phone. He argued I misunderstood their methods, that public assertions and media debates were not the main game. He showed me his i360 app, a new campaigning tool that has revolutionised the Liberals’ marginal seats campaigning.

Through i360 the SA Liberals believe they have progressed to a new level of targeted campaigning, leaping far ahead of what has been used before by either major party in Australia. If they perform well, we can expect a technological and tactical quantum leap forward at the next federal campaign.

In his quick demonstration, the MP called up a marginal seat, much like finding a suburb on Google Maps, then zoomed in to a street where pins identified addresses deemed to house swinging voters. Deeper dives on households contained genders, ages, voting intentions or lack thereof as well as policy interests. The information is collated from the party’s existing Feedback system, updates from doorknocking and calls, responses to surveys conducted via email, online or phone calls plus census data and the harvesting of social media data. This is Big Brother meets grassroots campaigning. Neither the data nor the technology is much use without quality information fed in and strong analysis leading to the right strategies, along with diligent personalised attention in follow-up visits and communications.

This is leading-edge campaigning, as i360’s website explains. “Data is the difference,” it proclaims, describing its “extensive political identification” through information collected from “in-person, phone and online surveys, as well as through partner relationships in addition to lifestyle and consumer data” purchased from “top-tier” providers. “Our data is further enhanced by our suite of predictive models, filling in gaps and helping us build the most complete profile for every individual possible,” it says.

Billionaire US Republican sponsors Charles and David Koch are major investors in the firm, which openly canvasses only for “free-market” candidates. The SA Liberals purchased a product licence and have worked with i360 to modify systems for compulsory and preferential voting. Motivated by the frustration of 2014 where, despite a huge popular vote win, just a few hundred votes in the right seats would have made all the difference, Marshall has driven this innovative approach. He and novice Liberal state director Sascha Meldrum visited the US in Aug­ust 2016 to assess the system before other campaign strategists joined the training and implementation.

If the Liberals surprise on the upside today, SA’s expertise will be immediately sought after for the looming Victoria, NSW and federal campaigns.

Long lead times help and the SA Liberals have had more than a year to build up data and, crucially, follow up on targeted voters more than once. This is where grassroots organisation, numbers on the ground and diligence are essential, lest intelligence is wasted for lack of personal politicking, but the potential for efficiency, personalised material and two-way feedback to shape policies and messages is huge. Even in an age when you can get an app for everything, no app can win you an election. And I still think public policy differentiation and aggression are crucial.But if the Liberals form a major­ity even after the unprecedented Xenophon disruption, expect to hear a lot more about i360 and data-driven campaigning.

So what exactly is i360?

This is what it said of itself at www.i-360.com on 31 March 2018:

At i360® we believe THE DATA IS THE DIFFERENCE. But what does that mean? Simply put, it means integrating data in everything we do to produce the most effective outcomes for every one of our clients.

At the core of the i360 operation is a comprehensive database of all 18+ American consumers and voters containing thousands of pieces of individual and aggregated information that give us the full picture of who they are, where they live, what they do and what is happening around them. Leveraging this and our capabilities in data science, analytics, technology development and advertising, we help clients take their efforts to the next level by embracing the concept of truly borderless data.

i360 boast of these statistics:

Snapshot of section of i360 home page, 31 March 2018

i360 has a multiple presences on Facebook eg. i360online and i360Gov.com. [IP addresses are deliberately not supplied in this post and caution is urged if readers decide to vist these pages]

i360 aslo boasts of playing a "crucial" part in the South Australian election on its 
"Newsroom" page.

This is what is said of this company elsewhere………

The Real News, 29 March 2018:

Kochs have a far more sophisticated operation called i360. And they track, as you heard in the little clip from my film, 1800 pieces of data on you dynamically and on a continuous basis. They basically know your credit card purchases, they know your cable viewing habits. This is a lot deeper into your guts and soul and privacy than even your Facebook profile from Cambridge Analytica. And also you have a very similar operation used by Karl Rove. That's the guy that was known as Bush's brain, though Bush calls him Turd Blossom. This is the, Karl Rove was the engineer of some of the creepiest and possibly illegal activities behind the Bush campaigns. He's still out there with his own database operation called Data Trust, whose main client is the Republican National Committee.

These operations do more than grab some of your private information or just your Facebook profiles. Some of their activities have actually unquestionably bent elections not just by convincing you do things, you know, their idea is to try to zombify, you know, know everything about you and manipulate you. But sometimes they go way, way beyond that in their operations to win elections….

They're targeting you because they know very personal things about you. They literally know, as Mark Sweetland says, we're not making that up as an example, it's really true. For example, i360 knows if you downloaded porn and then order Chinese food before you voted. They can use that information to manipulate how you vote. And by the way, deviously, whether you vote at all. They can convince you not to vote. That's a real powerful tool that they have. That's part of the game, is convincing you not to vote. So that's one of things that they do…..

…they can convince you. For example, a lot of the, lot of the targeting about Hillary Clinton was not to get you to vote for Trump but to get voters who, for example, voted for Bernie Sanders or others, to convince them not to vote at all. And that was very, very effective, for example, in Wisconsin, where according to a University of Wisconsin study, about 50000 people, mostly students in Madison County and Milwaukee, didn't vote because they were convinced that, that Hillary was evil enough that it just didn't matter. They may be crying now, but the but the-…..

Encourage apathy and saying that your vote doesn't matter. And that's one of the things that they're very good at. But the other is very, some of it's not too subtle, OK. For example, in Wisconsin the Koch brothers, a spinoff from i360, one of the operators there working with Kochs sent out e-mails, and sent out social , sent out e-mails to people on their databases who own guns, who live in rural areas and normally vote by mail-in ballot. And they sent them messages saying, protect your guns. And these are also all Democrats. Protect your guns and vote. Make sure you send your absentee ballot to this address on this date. The address was wrong, and the date was too late to get your vote counted. So that was one way that Scott Walker, for example, won his against his recall in the recall referendum. Then they rolled it out. The same trick. Wrong date, wrong address for your absentee ballots to minority and Democratic voters in North Carolina. And then throughout the South.

So some of this is really fraudulently stealing your vote away. And that's just, that was the i360 spinoff. Then you have Data Trust, which is Karl Rove's operation. they used an operation which I uncovered working with the Guardian and BBC called caging. And what caging is is you send letters, Karl Rove used his databases to target, for example, students, black students in black colleges who were away from their school on summer vacation. They are registered, these were students registered, for example, in the swing state of Florida. And they knew that they weren't at their at their voting addresses even though they are legal voters because they were home for the vacations. They sent letters. When the letters marked Do Not Forward came back to the Republican National Committee, those voters were challenge as not existing, and they lost their vote. They sent these letters as well to black soldiers and airmen at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station. They sent letters to men at homeless shelters you don't always get their mail. And as a result they used, they used this information to challenge the right of those voters' ballots to be counted. If they mailed them in their ballots would be junked. If they try to show up to vote they were blocked from voting. That's the ugly, ugly and truly actually illegal use of these databases, and that's just some examples we've uncovered.

Well, I think that Cambridge Analytica, which is like I say, the least sophisticated, and they try to use brain massaging. By the way, they also use other tactics. One of the services that they offer, I just you know, is to is to say that they'll set up your opponent, political opponent, with hookers and tape them. So it's not just, they've got that database and then they would, of course, use their social networking thing to blow it all up. But it will have a huge impact on the 2018 election. A bigger impact on 2020.

And this includes other operations that these database guys are working on. One of them you mentioned, a guy Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas. He is Trump's what I call Vote Thief in Chief. He was officially appointed to run Trump's so-called vote fraud commission. One of the databases he uses is a roll crosscheck, where he gives lists of voters he says are registered or actually vote in two states in a single election, which is illegal. He has claimed with Donald Trump that three million people voted twice, mostly voters of color. And I'm the only journalist to actually have, I have a copy of the of of his list of double voters. The three million double voters. And it's people with names like Jose Garcia, and David Lee, and John Black. These are just common names of voters of color, but not, you know, obviously not common for Republicans.

But you'll see names in this, for example, Maria Cristina Hernandez is supposed to be the same voter as Maria Inez Hernandez. That person is supposed to be the same voter who voted one in Virginia and one in Georgia. That's their claim. And those voters named Garcia and Hernandez lose their vote. On that list, two million of those accused voters, people accused of voting twice, don't have the same middle name. Two million people accused don't have the same middle name, and they are removing, this is important, they're actually removing hundreds of thousands of people from the voter rolls as we speak. In fact without, without this game, this database game called Crosscheck, which is Trump and Kobach's database, Trump would not have won in 2016…..

It's serious stuff. Because if it were simply a matter of targeted advertising, convince you to vote for their candidate, that's all right.

But Cambridge Analytica has been, their, their chiefs were caught on tape by Channel 4, one of the outlets I work with, by Channel 4 investigators in Britain, saying that they will create fake news about your opponent and use their social networking abilities and use their particular targeting of individuals, their social networking habits, to spread fake news about your opponent. And they said we can do it in a way that no one will know that we've been involved. They said they successfully did this already in other countries. We don't even know how many countries because they make a point of keeping their involvement hidden. This is very, very scary stuff. They are deliberately creating, Donald Trump's screaming about fake news, but he employed the fake news generator. That's the big problem. That's one of the very big problems of Cambridge Analytica, and I know that we have that same problem with Data Trust, i360, and some of the others.

Liberals continue to behave badly in 2018 - Part Three

This time it was not Liberal politicians in federal government but Victorian Liberals on the state opposition benches who were behaving badly.......

The Age, 30 March 2018:

The Victorian opposition has broken a promise and reneged on long-standing parliamentary custom by breaking its ‘‘pairing’’ to vote down the Andrews government's controversial fire service reorganisation bill.

Government and crossbenchers in Parliament’s Upper House were in uproar after two Liberal members who had told Labor they could not vote or be present because of their religious beliefs suddenly arrived to vote on Good Friday morning.

‘This is ball tampering of the highest order,’’ said crossbencher Fiona Patten from the Reason Party.

She said the Coalition’s conduct would make it very difficult for her and others in minority parties to have a working relationship with the Opposition.

The controversy erupted after a marathon sitting over the government’s bid to restructure the fire services.

This is the first time the upper house has ever sat on Good Friday.

Around midnight, Ms Patten said that Liberal MP Bernie Finn had told the house he could not work on Good Friday. At the same time, Craig Ondarchie also indicated he was not going to be in Parliament House for similar reasons. One Labor MP said Mr Ondarchie had been acting like he was ‘‘holding a prayer vigil’’.

Mr Finn on Thursday night had told Parliament, in a debate about Labor pressing on with its legislation despite it being Easter: ‘‘I have long believed in: you do not work on Good Friday — any other day of the year. That is the rule. Even when my birthday falls on Good Friday, I do not celebrate it on Good Friday.’’

In a similar vein, and at about the same time, Mr Ondarchie said: "Today is the day that Jesus died. It is a very important day. Today I want to be with my church family. I want to take up your offer, as do some of my colleagues, about accepting the pair that you have offered."

A ‘‘pairing’’ is an unofficial agreement from both sides of politics that, when an MP is unable to attend a vote, allows an MP from the opposing side to also miss the vote, so numbers remain matched.

The government granted the pairs requested by the opposition and Labor ministers Philip Dalidakis and Jaala Pulford, the deputy leader in the upper house, excused themselves from the vote and went home.

Mr Dalidakis, assuming he had a pair, travelled to Sydney on Friday morning.

But when the vote occurred just after 11am, Mr Ondarchie and Mr Finn returned to the chamber.

After Mr Finn and Mr Ondarchie’s return to Parliament, Labor’s bill was defeated 19-18.

Labor Upper House MP Cesar Melham said the pair were dishonourable and ‘‘should hang their head in shame’’.

Ms Patten said that when the Mr Ondarchie and Mr Finn came back into the chamber they could not look anyone in the eye.

Labor's upper house leader, Gavin Jennings, said the government ‘‘had generously offered those pairs because we had members praying in the parliament last night to be with their families and be with their church communities on the most holy day on the Christian calendar’’.

‘‘And those people who prayed in front of us and begged us to let them go, returned after we had given them a pair – right at the death knell, was when they returned, to betray parliamentary convention.’’……

The hypocritical antics of Messrs. Craig Philip Ondarchie and Bernard Thomas C. Finn as set out in the Parliament of Victoria Legislative Council Daily Hansard:

09:55am Thursday 29 April 2018

Mr ONDARCHIE (Northern Metropolitan) (09:55) — As John 3:16 teaches us:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

Today is Maundy Thursday, tomorrow is Good Friday and it is the most solemn day of the Christian year. It is the day our saviour died for us. It is the day we were redeemed from our sins by the voluntary death of God himself at the hands of man. On Good Friday, according to the gospels, Jesus was taken before Pilate in the morning, sent to Herod, returned to Pilate, was mocked and beaten, saw Barabbas released in his stead, was crowned with thorns, was condemned to death, carried the crushing burden of the cross, told the weeping women what would happen in his future, was crucified between two thieves and forgave those who crucified him. As Luke 23:34 tells us, ‘Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do’, and he cried out and died. It is the most solemn day of the Christian calendar.

I close my contribution in prayer:

Jesus, Today we pause to remember your sacrificial love

That shone light into the darkness

That bore life from such emptiness

That revealed hope out of devastation

That spoke truth through incrimination

That released freedom in spite of imprisonment

And brought us forgiveness instead of punishment.

Thank you that we can now walk in the light of your life, Hope, truth, freedom and forgiveness, This day and everyday. Amen.

Approx. 23:12pm Thursday 29 April 2018

Mr ONDARCHIE — Members, the blackness that hangs over my head tonight is associated with the passing of my Lord and Saviour on this evening. At this very time on the first Good Friday Jesus had been arrested and taken before the high priests Annas and Caiaphas and it was during this time that Peter denied him. I think this place is not about being tactical for me, Mr Jennings; it is about respect. It is about respect for —

00:15am Friday 30 March 2018

Mr ONDARCHIE — I move: That the committee now report progress. In doing so I alert the house to the fact that we are now officially in Good Friday. I have made my point very clear. I do look to get some confirmation from the minister at the table, Minister Jennings, and the other minister who made an offer to members of the house that anybody who wants a pair can have a pair. This is a very religious day for me. You heard me talk about that –

00:20am Friday 30 March 2018

Mr FINN — I very strongly support the motion moved by Mr Ondarchie, and I have to say to you I have been sitting here since midnight and I feel quite ill, physically ill, to be sitting here on Good Friday when I know that I should not work on Good Friday, that this is a day of extreme solemnity; it is a very sacred day. I know there are some members on the government side who do not understand those of us of faith, but the fact of the matter is that it is beyond the realms of decency to force people to work, to breach their religious rights, as we have seen. I know there are members of the government who do not actually believe in freedom of religion — and they are showing that just at the minute. I heard Mr Jennings say that every one of us who asked for a pair would get one. Now, I want a pair because merely being here, as I say, is making me feel ill when I know I should be elsewhere. I want a pair; Mr Ondarchie has said he wants a pair. I would be very, very keen for Mr Jennings to get to his feet and clarify if the offer still stands for each and every member, as he said, who wants a pair to be given a pair. That is something that I think he has got to do, because he said it. I mean, we didn’t ask for it; he offered it, and it is only reasonable that he now clarify the situation, given that there is some significant confusion as to whether that offer was genuine. He is either fair dinkum or he is not fair dinkum. If he is fair dinkum, then we can get on with it. If he is not fair dinkum, we know that he can’t be trusted and we move on from that in my members statement today. You heard me talk about it when we broached this subject an hour or a bit more ago. This is the day that my Lord was crucified. I do not want to be here. I want to be with my family and I want to be with my church family. I find it highly disrespectful that on this very important day in my faith’s calendar we are still here. I think it appropriate, Minister, that with respect, selfishly, to me and to others who understand the importance of this day today we stop this now. We can come back to this. It is not time critical. I note that in your motion this morning on the rising of the house that we are going to reconvene early in May. We can come back and do this then. Today is the day that Jesus died. It is a very important day. Today I want to be with my church family. I want to take up your offer, as do some of my colleagues, about accepting the pair that you have offered. This is not acceptable.

Those with long memories will recall that Coalition MPs and senators have a history of attempting to distort parliamentary processes. The Night of the Long Prawns during a federal parliamentary sitting in 1974, the refusal of NSW Premier Tom Lewis in 1975 and Qld Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen also in 1975 to follow parliamentary convention and accept a nominee put forward by a political party to fill a casual vacancy in a seat which to that point in time had been held by that same party, are just three examples. 

Corporate tax cuts lead to 'jobs and growth' in Australia? Pull the other one!

This Business Council of Australia survey was apparently mothballed when initial results indicated that it would reveal the truth about outcomes flowing from the Turnbull Government’s planned corporate tax cuts - a distinct lack of jobs and wages growth.

Financial Review, 27 March 2018:

Fewer than one in five of Australia's leading chief executives say they will use the Turnbull government's proposed company tax cut to directly increase wages or employ more staff, according to a secret survey conducted by the Business Council of Australia.

More than 80 per cent said they would either use the proceeds to boost returns to shareholders or invest in the company.

The explosive revelation comes as the government is still struggling to secure the final two Senate votes needed to pass the remainder of the $65 billion package.

The survey follows a letter to all Senators last week by the BCA and 10 of the nation's top chief executive officers in which they pledged to reinvest the proceeds of the tax cuts with the ultimate aim of increasing wages.

"If the Senate passes this important legislation we, as some of the nation's largest employers, commit to invest more in Australia which will lead to employing more Australians and therefore stronger wage growth as the tax cut takes effect," the letter said.

But The Australian Financial Review has learned that the BCA directly surveyed the chief executives of its 130-plus members about a company tax cut this year, in the wake of the company tax rate cut in the United States.

The chief executives were asked which of four options they would nominate as their preferred response to the company tax cut in Australia.

These were: returning funds to shareholders; more investment; increasing the wages of their existing workforce; or increasing employment.

More than 80 per cent nominated one of the first two options while only 16 per cent to 17 per cent nominated higher wages or employment.

The survey results are understood to have been tightly held but were reported on internally in a memo entitled "the good news and the bad news".

A spokesman for the BCA confirmed the survey to the Financial Review on Monday but downplayed its significance…….

This lobby group has now decided that 'spin' is more important than fact and senators have all received a BCA video appeal promising well-paid and meaningful jobs and wages growth that only growing investment can deliver if the comapny tax cits are passed.

A neat trick given that its members are also arguing before the Fair Work Commission Annual Wage Review 2017-18 that the minimum wage should remain as is or only be increased by 34-35 cents an hour which represents no growth in real wages.

The vague, slyly worded non-promise to lift workers wages received by Senators

via @Tony_Burke

Google some of the businesses on this short list and one finds an unflattering employer history with regard to employee wages and job terms & conditions.

Federal Liberals continue to behave badly in 2018 - Part Two

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Bligh Turnbull still continues (as late as Wednesday 28 March 2018) to deny any part in the Barnaby Joyce scandal…..

The Sydney Morning Herald, 28 March 2018:

A key adviser to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull helped to formalise a job transfer for the partner of Barnaby Joyce, according to new details about the controversial decision to secure the new position in a ministerial office.

The letter from Mr Turnbull’s senior governance adviser was signed on May 9 last year and gave official clearance to the new role for Vikki Campion, who was in a relationship with Mr Joyce at the time and is due to give birth to their baby next month.

The role played by the Prime Minister’s office triggered detailed questioning in Parliament last month amid an uproar over the relationship and the way the government moved Ms Campion from one office to another to manage the matter….

A spokesman for the Prime Minister said on Wednesday, "The email simply confirms what we have always said: as is usual practice, the PMO performed a purely administrative role passing on the documents to the relevant department."

The extent of Mr Turnbull’s knowledge of the affair and the job transfer has been the subject of furious debate for weeks, given reports that Mr Joyce’s former chief of staff, Di Hallam, took steps in late 2016 to inform the Prime Minister’s office of the romance and arrange a job transfer for Ms Campion.

Sacked former Australian Prime Minister and Liberal MP for Warringah,Tony Abbott, doing his best to ensure Malcolm Turnbull leads the Coalition to defeat at the forthcoming federal election. Rumour has it that he sees himself as Leader of the Opposition for a second time around.......

The Conversation, 27 March 2018:

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has said that if people had been more willing to heed the message of those like Pauline Hanson over the last two decades, “we would be a better country today”.

In a speech loaded with praise for the controversial One Nation leader, Abbott described her as “a remarkable and a resilient presence in our public life for more than two decades”.

He also said the only way the Coalition could win the next election was to harvest Hanson preferences. “If I can make that more likely, that is a very positive contribution that I can make to the prospects of the Turnbull government.” He said the Coalition should preference One Nation above Labor and the Greens, because the government had been able to work constructively with it in the Senate.

Launching a book of her speeches, Pauline: In Her Own Words, Abbott referenced a “lot of dirty water under the bridge” between them in the past. When he was a member of the Howard government, Abbott was involved in moves that ended in Hanson being jailed for electoral fraud. She said after she was released: “Heaven help this country if Tony Abbott is ever in control of it. I detest the man.”

At the launch Abbott praised Hanson’s “willingness to let the past be the past”.

While over in Western Australia a nasty Liberal mano a mano war has erupted.....

The West, 28 March 2018:

A factional war inside the WA Liberals has boiled over with Federal MP Ian Goodenough suggesting a rival should face criminal charges for misleading the Australian Electoral Commission.

The AEC confirmed it had removed long-time Liberal player Simon Ehrenfeld from the electoral roll after complaints from Mr Goodenough and his allies about Mr Ehrenfeld not actually living at the address he had registered.

Mr Ehrenfeld is the vice-president of the party’s Moore division and president of the Liberals’ Hillarys branch.

Mr Goodenough claimed Mr Ehrenfeld could face investigation for misleading the AEC.

He said other senior Liberal Party members could also face action for giving statements to the commission asserting Mr Ehrenfeld lived at the Kallaroo address.

“The AEC should take steps to prosecute him if they deem it necessary,” Mr Goodenough said.

“Obviously it is more serious if two or three people have conspired.”