Tuesday 6 December 2011

'Steve' Gulaptis MP gets a chance to prove how effective his representation is for Clarence



The Nationals Glove Puppet for Clarence, ‘Steve’ Gulaptis has his first chance to prove his metal.
The former disgraced MP for Clarence, Steve Cansdell, promised air-conditioning for Yamba Public School on Angourie Road.
The school is approximately 5m above sea level and around 1.5 kilometres inland as the crow flies from the higher sheltering coastline.
Now the O’Farrell Coalition Government and Education Minister Andrew Piccoli has decided Summer cooling of class rooms (which can experience up to 30 degree plus indoor temperatures) is unnecessary because the Yamba Pilot Station on a sea promontory at around 27m above sea level gets a regular ‘breeze’.
So far all Gulaptis has done is bleat in The Tele – time to do more ‘Steve’!

Opposition Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey exposed


Peter Martin on 1 December 2011:


The two Perth accountants who costed the Coalition’s 2010 election policies breached professional standards and will be fined, a disciplinary tribunal has ruled.

The ruling is an embarrassment to the Coalition which claimed during the campaign the costing was “as good as you could get anywhere in the country, including in Treasury." In recent months it has threatened to use private accountants once again.

Geoffrey Phillip Kid and Cyrus Patell, both of the Perth office of WHK Horwath produced a one-page report for the Coalition two days before the election which Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey tendered as an audit, saying the pair had certified “in law that our numbers are accurate".

“If the fifth-biggest accounting firm in Australia signs off on our numbers it is a brave person to start saying there are accounting tricks,” he told ABC radio. “I tell you it is audited. This is an audited statement.’’

In fact the document was the result of a carefully-worded agreement between the accountants and the Coalition to produce work primarily "not of an audit nature".

An audit would examine the assumptions used by the Coalition and whether they were reasonable.

Kidd and Patell’s unpublished agreement with the Coalition explicity required them to make no inquires about “the reasonableness of otherwise of the assumptions used"...

A professional conduct tribunal established by the Institute of Chartered Accountants ruled in July that Kidd and Patel were liable to face disciplinary action because their one-page report failed to contain “a statement that the procedures performed do not constitute either an audit or a review” and so failed to properly describe the limited nature of the agreed upon procedures…

Read the rest here.

Something to ponder about the 2011-12 Federal Budget

Monday 5 December 2011

A few barefaced political untruths in November-December 2011



He pledged to save small business $1 billion a year by cutting red tape.  Leader of the Opposition Tony Abbott in Crikey, 2 December 2011