May is likely to be an interesting month in 2016

All around the world directors, shareholders, beneficial owners, mob bosses, drug lords, gun runners and owners of stolen art hiding within shell companies in low tax jurisdictions will be marking their calendars…..

AFR Weekend, 8 April 2016:

The ICIJ, which has said it will not provide data to regulators, plans to release the names of more than 200,000 Mossack Fonseca companies, trusts and foundations in May, including names of directors, shareholders and beneficial owners.

Tax authorities can use this data to seek further documents under tax treaties with many jurisdictions....

America begins to imagine Trump as US president

The Boston Globe, 9 April 2016:

The GOP must stop Trump

PDF: A front page in Trump’s America

DONALD J. TRUMP’S VISION for the future of our nation is as deeply disturbing as it is profoundly un-American.

It is easy to find historical antecedents. The rise of demagogic strongmen is an all too common phenomenon on our small planet. And what marks each of those dark episodes is a failure to fathom where a leader’s vision leads, to carry rhetoric to its logical conclusion. The satirical front page of this section attempts to do just that, to envision what America looks like with Trump in the White House.

It is an exercise in taking a man at his word. And his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page. It is a vision that demands an active and engaged opposition. It requires an opposition as focused on denying Trump the White House as the candidate is flippant and reckless about securing it…..

That’s not a pretty picture. But then nothing about the billionaire real estate developer’s quest for the nation’s highest office has been pretty. He winks and nods at political violence at his rallies. He says he wants to “open up” libel laws to punish critics in the news media and calls them “scum.” He promised to shut out an entire class of immigrants and visitors to the United States on the sole basis of their religion.

The toxic mix of violent intimidation, hostility to criticism, and explicit scapegoating of minorities shows a political movement is taking hold in America. If Trump were a politician running such a campaign in a foreign country right now, the US State Department would probably be condemning him.....

Read the rest of the article here.

Australian Federal Election 2016: why are taxpayers spending so much on political has-beens?

The Sydney Morning Herald: John Winston Howard

The Liberal Party began to roll-out the aging John Winston Howard OM AC last week as part of its fundraising efforts for the upcoming federal election campaign.

But make no mistake, it’s not just Liberal Party supporters who were paying for that 11,000 guest Docklands party in Melbourne and the exclusive dinner at the Pratt family mansion in Kew the following night – the Australian taxpayer is also likely to have been subbing the former prime minister as he sipped his wine and nibbled on canapés.

Since he lost his seat in the 2007 federal election Howard has milked the public purse for $1.82 million in additional entitlements over and above his very generous parliamentary pension.

That $1.82 million pays for a fully equiped modern office including phone & internet, office consumables, domestic air travel for himself and on occasion a family member and  travel in government cars, as well as subsidising the running costs of his own private vehicle¹.

Given his obvious sense of entitlement which saw him bill taxpayers over $67,000 in the first half of 2015 (the latest Dept. of Finance entitlement record published) it will come as no surprise to eventually discover his trip from Sydney to Melbourne and return will not be paid by either Howard or the Liberal Party.

Footnote

1.Howard is one of five former prime ministers still receiving these additional entitlements

One member of the Liberal Party and his historical myopia

Herald Sun: Oliver Walsh in 2014

This was the Herald Sun reporting on Oliver Walsh on 24 March 2016:

AN INDIGENOUS services group head says the Darebin deputy mayor should resign for questioning the genocide of Aborigines.

Deputy mayor Oliver Walsh last week said he was “not totally comfortable” with the inclusion of Aborigines in the city’s monument to Victims of Genocide and Genocidal Acts.

“I still have issues with this,” Cr Walsh said at Monday night’s council meeting. “In many ways I have issues with the Aboriginal part, because technically it is not a recognised genocide.”

Cr Walsh’s comments were labelled “disappointing” and “unbelievable” by Victorian Aboriginal Childcare Agency (VACCA) chief executive Muriel Bamblett.

“I think it’s just really disappointing, I think it’s a step backwards and I hope the people that elect people with these values and principles really think about it, and I think we should call for his resignation,” Ms Bamblett said.

“If he insists that his statement is correct and he stands by them then I think his deputy role and capacity to lead are in question……

Apparently Deputy-Mayor Walsh is of the school of thought which argues that if Australian colonial governments didn’t label their own official policies and actions as genocide at the time, then these cannot be called genocide now.

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to many that this insensitive man is a member of the Liberal Party, was previously electorate officer for Victorian Liberal MP Graham Watt and also employed as campaign manager for Liberal candidate Kyle Dadleh during the 2010 Victorian state election.

It seems those ‘bright young things’ in the Liberal Party just can’t help themselves when it comes to cultivating a social tin ear and historical myopia.

On the Turnbull-Joyce ticket the old Age of Entitlement endures

On Thursday 24 March 2016, in a week in which the House of Representatives was not sitting and on the eve of the Easter long weekend, Nationals MP for New England and Deputy-Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce decided to go to faux election campaigning by helicopter – slugging very weary Australian taxpayers somewhere between $3,836 and $4,166 for the ride (depending on which of his staffers journalists were quoting).

However, despite his protestations otherwise, this was not the first time Joyce had hopped into a helicopter rather than a car since 2013.

Ah, yes….on the Turnbull-Joyce ticket the old Age of Entitlement endures.

The Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 2016:

It was the day before Easter in Drake, a sleepy village in northern NSW, when the peace was interrupted by a helicopter depositing Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce on a sporting field behind the popular local pub, the Lunatic Hotel.

Drake is just a 40-minute drive from Mr Joyce's second electorate office in Tenterfield but his office insists a helicopter was the best option to avoid a four-hour drive from his home base in Tamworth. It was his second chopper ride to the village in less than a year.

After I'm finished I'll have a beer and jump in the chopper and head off to fly over the blueberry farm 

The latest Drake visit, which will cost the public almost $4000, happened two days after the Turnbull government released a long-awaited review into parliamentary entitlements sparked by the "choppergate" scandal that engulfed former speaker Bronwyn Bishop and sent Tony Abbott's prime ministership into a final nosedive.

The review called for clear guidelines so the "use of charter transport must constitute value for money, and in particular that, in the absence of compelling reasons, helicopters cannot be chartered to cover short distances".

Mr Joyce, who has been in unofficial election campaign mode since Tony Windsor recently declared his challenge in New England, arrived in Drake on March 24.

During the three-hour visit he launched a Telstra mobile tower - first announced in June 2015 - and visited the school, a local blueberry farm and inspected a bridge in need of an upgrade.

The Age, 8 April 2016:

Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce chartered a helicopter to visit an area less than an hour and a half by road from his ministerial office in Armidale.

The flight to Copeton Dam places a question mark over a key plank of the National leader's defence of his helicopter usage, supported on Friday by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, that choppers were used as an alternative to unreasonably long drives.

The 120 kilometre flight from Armidale to Copeton Dam cost $2211 return.

The most controversial helicopter flight in Australian political history, Bronwyn Bishop's $5000 hop from Melbourne to a Liberal Party fundraiser in Geelong, was just 40 kilometres shorter…..

He took a fourth helicopter trip from Armidale to Legume near the Queensland border in February last year, according to parliamentary records for electorate-related travel.

That flight, to announce a $350,000 road upgrade, cost the public $4737.

Confirmation of four helicopter flights forced Mr Joyce's office on Friday to withdraw its statement to Fairfax Media on Thursday that the two flights to Drake were his only helicopter usage since becoming the MP for New England in 2013.

Australian Federal Election 2016: higher education

The Turnbull Government is expected to use this Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) report, Higher Education Loan Program: Impact On Budget, to justify major changes to higher education funding and student loans in its 3 May 2016 budget papers.

The report points to a projected increase in the cost to government of supplying HELP student loan programs (HECS, FEE, VET FEE, SA, OS).

It also notes the contribution vocational education loans (VET) make to the size of the HELP portfolio.

Federal Government VET student loans accounted for 20.1% of new HELP loans from 2010-11 to 2016-16 and The Australian reported on 23 February 2015 that; About 40 per cent of all money lent to students in vocational courses will never to be recovered, according to Grattan Institute modelling submitted to the Senate inquiry into the private vocational training sector. This compared to with 21 per cent lent to university students.

Given the blatant rorting of the VET program by dubious private ‘colleges’ it would be wise of the Turnbull Government to make fulfilling its promise to overhaul vocational student loans a priority – along with restoring funding to the states’ technical and further education sector.

Of course that is not what is likely to happen, as the PBO report will probably be used as an excuse to push ahead with the Abbott-IPA plan to turn higher education and universities into a privileged playground for the sons and daughters of Australian and international elites.

Dear Mr. Morrison........

North Coast Voices was sent a copy of the following letter sent to Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison, with permission to publish:

EMAIL TO TREASURER MORRISON SENT ON GOVERNMENT  EMAIL FORM 8^th April 2016

Dear Mr Morrison

I was interested to hear your interview on Radio National "Breakfast" this morning. 

It was quite astonishing that you rejected the notion of a Royal Commission into the banks given all the shonky behaviour we have seen from all of the "Big 4" in recent years. It's quite obvious that these all-powerful institutions have no respect for the regulators (your cop on the block or whatever you called it) or for the Australian community.  Whenever a new outrage is revealed, we hear sounds of contrition from the offending bank and then some time later there's another outrage revealed.

In your comments criticising the Leader of the Opposition for his suggestion that a Royal Commission be considered, you ignored the fact that there are backbenchers in your Government calling quite strongly for a Royal Commission.  Don't you hear your backbenchers, Mr Morrison?

Don't you understand that there is considerable community concern about the continuing outrageous behaviour of the major banks?

We need a royal commission into the big 4 banks.  Maybe that will result in some improvement in their behaviour.

Yours sincerely

Leonie Blain

8^th April 2016