Post-election cartoon at http://www.moir.com.au/
Saturday 14 September 2013
Friday 13 September 2013
Five days after the federal election and Prime Minister-elect Abbott was seen to have lost control of the backroom boys in Queensland
First we find that Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott couldn’t keep his party members on message three days after the 7 September 2013 federal election and now we see that he perhaps never had any strong influence on the party machine in Queensland, which extraordinarily appears to have knowingly endorsed a man for a vacant Senate position who is in the midst of a very serious Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) inquiry into an allegation/s concerning electoral bribery.
The Australian 12 September 2013:
Campbell Newman has suspended the appointment of Barry O'Sullivan to fill the senate vacancy of Barnaby Joyce in the face of a Crime and Misconduct Commission investigation involving the former Liberal National Party official.
In an extraordinary move, the Queensland premier today refused to allow parliament to formally endorse Mr O'Sullivan's party pre-selection in May to fill the senate vacancy, created by Mr Joyce's move to the lower house.
Mr O'Sullivan is facing a long-running CMC probe over his involvement in an alleged attempt to induce former Liberal leader Bruce Flegg to resign from parliament, ahead of last year's state election, to make way for Mr Newman to stand in his seat.
While an initial CMC probe cleared Mr O'Sullivan, the emergence of recordings - made by Dr Flegg on his mobile phone - sparked a new investigation with evidence....
Tensions have long existed between the LNP parliamentary team and Mr O'Sullivan, the long serving treasurer and chair of the candidate vetting community.
UPDATE
Australian
Financial Review
13 September 2013:
Abbott has been ambushed
by a civil war that has simmered behind the scenes in Queensland’s
Liberal National Party (LNP) since early 2011. He is now forced
to contemplate whether he and Queensland Premier Campbell Newman chose to
back the wrong side.
The internal hostilities
came to a climax in November last year, when The Australian Financial
Review’s Pamela Williams revealed that LNP party executives had forwarded to
Queensland police a dossier about fund-raising activity by Liberal Party
federal vice-president Santo Santoro.
The dossier was the
product of a wider conflict between the Nationals and Liberals after they
merged to form a single party, the LNP, in 2008. But what followed next
was swift and brutal.
Santoro was not only
exonerated, but by the end of the month the greatest critics of Santoro
and Newman – backbenchers Ray Hopper, Alex Douglas and Carl Judge, together
with the LNP’s largest individual backer, Clive Palmer, for various reasons
were all out of the party.
Ten months later the
protest movement that this triggered, which has embraced wider issues as it
expands beyond Queensland, threatens to cripple Abbott’s government. Abbott
must now negotiate with the man he spurned in an angry confrontation in a room
at the Hyatt Hotel in Melbourne before the Liberals’ federal conference in June
last year.
Murdoch media's welfare recipient bashing comes undone
Document Type: Complaints
Outcome: Adjudications
Date: 5 Sep 2013
The Press Council has considered a complaint about an article “Welfare fraud costs us $78m” in The Advertiser and the adelaidenow website on 18 January 2013. The words “Single-parent women most likely to cheat” appeared above the headline. The first sentence said “South Australian welfare recipients have ripped off nearly $80 million from Centrelink in the past financial year and most of the fraudsters are women”.
After the article appeared, the Federal Department of Human Services (which had supplied some data for it) told the publication that fraud-related debt in South Australia in the past year had been about $2.5 million, not $78 million. The article was then removed from the website and a “clarification” was published in the newspaper on the following day.
Margaret Moir complained that the $78 million figure in the original article was “grossly inaccurate”. She said the subsequent clarification lacked prominence, especially given the prominence of the original article, the seriousness of the inaccuracy, and the linkage made with sole-parent women.
The publication acknowledged the mistakes but pointed to its action to correct them. It said page 2, where the clarification appeared, is one of the most read pages and is more prominent than page 5, where the original article appeared.
The Council’s Principles require publications to take reasonable steps to ensure that reports are accurate, fair and balanced. The Council has concluded that the inaccuracies arose from a failure to distinguish between the amount of overall debt and the small proportion of that amount which is due to fraud. They were aggravated by the inaccurate estimate of the share of the national debt total which was owed by South Australians. In addition, when stating how much the debt “costs us”, no account was taken of the fact that the department says most of it is being recovered.
The Council acknowledges there was some ambiguity in the way in which the department responded to the newspaper’s original request for information. In addition, two subsequent sentences in the article avoided to some extent the errors described above by saying that “welfare recipients in this state owe $78 million in fraudulently claimed and incorrectly overpaid benefits” and “only $43 million of this money is being recovered” by Centrelink from recipients. But they were not sufficiently clear and prominent to compensate for the serious errors in the headlines and first sentence.
Accordingly, the complaint on the ground of inaccuracy is upheld.
The Council’s Principles also require serious inaccuracies to be corrected promptly and with due prominence in order to neutralise, as far as possible, any damage caused by the original article. The Council concluded the “clarification”, while it may have addressed the Department’s concerns, did not effectively explain the errors for other readers. In addition, it should have been frankly headed as a “correction” and with words such as “welfare fraud” to help attract the attention of people who might have read the original article. It should have been positioned more prominently – for example, in the top half of page 2 (or any other page up to page 5, at the top of which the article itself had appeared). These aspects were especially important because of the link in the headlines between the alleged amount of fraud and the involvement of sole parent women.
Accordingly, the complaint about the “clarification” is upheld. The Council acknowledges, however, that the publication responded promptly when it became aware of the error, both by removing the article from its website and by publishing the “clarification” the following day in a genuine attempt to address the concerns which had been brought to its attention at that time.
Note (not required for publication by the newspaper):
The Council considered the publication’s online response. By swiftly removing the article from its website, it had ensured that the error did not continue. But readers who saw the original article online and did not see the clarification in print would not have been aware of the correction. The Council will consider specific standards for online corrections in order to address this type of problem.
This adjudication applies part of
General Principle 1: “Publications should take reasonable steps to ensure
reports are accurate, fair and balanced.”; General Principle 2: “Where it is
established that a serious inaccuracy has been published, a publication should
promptly correct the error, giving the correction due prominence”; and Note 2:
“The Council interprets ‘due prominence’ as requiring the publication to ensure
the retraction, clarification, correction, explanation or apology has the
effect, as far as possible, of neutralising any damage arising from the
original publication.”
What a difference that day made to Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott's opinion of the entitlements of an elected Opposition
When the shoe is on the other foot it apparently pinches.......
According to Tony Abbott Member of Parliament in 2007:
According to Tony Abbott Prime Minister-elect in 2013:
Thursday 12 September 2013
Blicks River Guardians' Monster Fete & Family Fun Day, 9am to 3pm Saturday 14 September 2013
WATER MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD
Blicks River Guardians will be holding a Monster Fete and Family Fun Day at Dundurrabin Community Centre on Saturday 14th September from 9am to 3pm. We invite everyone to come out and visit our beautiful area and enjoy a great day. There will be stalls selling home made goods, a variety of food and plenty of activities for all ages.
Come and find out more about the gold exploration by Anchor Resources - Blicks Project EL 8100 and EL 6465 – check out the maps and collect some handouts, talk to us about your thoughts on the expanded Anchor EL 8100 lease area approved in July 2013. As landowners and guardians of the Plateau we encourage locals to become informed about their legal and social rights in relation to mining interests.
The Blicks River Guardians is a sub-group of Dorrigo Environment Watch (DEW) and our focus is to raise awareness about the current gold and antimony exploration on the Blicks and Nymboida River catchments, both major tributaries of the Clarence River......
Visit our new Facebook page "Blicks River Guardians" where you can keep up to date with our activities. Coming soon ... more details on our webpage at http://www.blicksriverguardians.org. Please sign our petition to the NSW Legislative Council. The petition is also available on the BRG website - you can help by printing a copy, getting family and friends to sign and posting it back to us at the post office box on the form.
Three days after the federal election Prime Minister-elect Abbott began to lose control of the message
The Daily Telegraph 10 September 2013:
An all-out brawl has broken out within the Liberal Party over its performance in Western Sydney.
Federal Director of the Party, Brian Loughnane, has accused incoming senior minister Scott Morrison of backgrounding against the party's state director Mark Neeham.
Mr Loughnane questioned The Daily Telegraph yesterday on whether it was the immigration spokesman, Mr Morrison, who was backgrounding against Mr Neeham over the party's performance in Western Sydney.
He said whoever in the Liberal Party was backgrounding against Mr Neeham was "wide of the mark" and "If it's Scott Morrison? ..." he asked.
When asked why he believed Mr Morrison would background against Mr Neeham, Mr Loughnane said it was because Mr Morrison did not like Mr Neeham.
The Daily Telegraph then suggested it might call Mr Morrison, who is a former state party director, to which Mr Loughnane, who is married to Tony Abbott's chief of staff Peta Credlin, said that he was sure we already knew what Mr Morrison's views were.
His comments came after The Daily Telegraph reported Liberal Party disquiet about Mr Neeham's performance and the fact Liberal Party failed to win the seats of Greenway and Parramatta in the area where they did so well at the state election......
One aspect criticised has been the failure of the party to attempt to rescue the campaign of Greenway candidate Jaymes Diaz after he was caught on camera on the first day of the campaign as being unable to tell Tony Abbott's six-point plan on asylum seekers.
Respected party elder Senator Arthur Sinodinos has said the party should have got Mr Diaz "straight back on the horse", rather than hiding him.
The Daily Telegraph discovered yesterday that it was in fact the national office of the party, not Mr Neeham, who made the disastrous decision to hide Greenway candidate Jaymes Diaz away from the cameras......
There have been other accusations that the NSW head office was asleep in devising a strategy to do enough to warn voters about not confusing a vote for the Liberal Democrats in the Senate with a vote for the Liberal Party.
The factional blame game also continues within the party, with several MPs blaming Right factional powerbroker David Clarke for his decision to back and defend Jaymes Diaz as the candidate for Greenway.
One Clarke supporter questioned what option Mr Clarke had when Mr Diaz and his father controlled 80 per cent of branch members in the area....
The
Sydney Morning Herald
11 September 2013:
Andrew Nguyen has
claimed in an interview with Fairfax Media that Tony Abbott's campaign staff
physically escorted him away from an appearance by the then opposition leader
in Liverpool during the third week of the campaign.
"They told me
Andrew please go home, you can't be here," Mr Nguyen said.
"I was given no
reason, I was escorted to my car and they made sure I turned right towards my
[Cabramatta] office and didn't turn to come back to Westfield shopping
centre."
"We were treated
like second-class citizens. Me, [Jaymes Diaz in] Greenway and [Martin Zaiter
in] Paramatta.....
Mr Nguyen told Fairfax
the man who escorted him was called "Justin".
"I would say Justin
removed me. I looked like a criminal and he was a policeman removing me from
there."
A local Liberal Party
member active in the campaign confirmed to Fairfax it was Justin De Domenico,
who had been assigned by Liberal head office to supervise in Fowler.
"I saw Justin take
him away. It was all part of keeping candidates away from the media who they
thought might embarrass them like Diaz," the source said....
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