Australian Federal Election 2016: spot Amanda Vanstone's attempts at political deception in The Age newspaper

This was former Liberal Senator for South Australia and former minister in the Howard Government, Amanda Vanstone writing in The Age on 9 May 2016 in an article titled Turnbull or Shorten? The choice seems clear:

Let’s break that down a little.

Schooling

Yes, Malcolm Turnbull went to a public primary school at Vaucluse in Sydney’s affluent Eastern Suburbs for about three years and, yes he went to Sydney Grammar School from the age of eight with the assistance of a scholarship for at least part of that period. He graduated from university during the years when undergraduate and post-graduate tertiary education was free of course fees in Australia. He was the child of divorced parents. All this is on the public record.

Bill Shorten went to a local Catholic primary school before attending Xavier College’s junior & senior schools in the Eastern Suburbs of Melbourne – his mother taught at Xavier and presumably there was some degree of discount on his school fees. So yes, he also had a private education in affluent suburbs. He graduated from university during the years when tertiary education was free of course fees and undertook a post-graduate degree during a period when course fees were re-instituted. His parents divorced when he was about 20 years of age. All of which is also on the public record.

Wealth

Malcolm Turnbull inherited assets worth an est. $2 million from his hotel-broker father before he turned 29 years of age according to one of his biographers Paddy Manning and, he and his wife independently and jointly went on to garner considerably greater wealth which was last estimated to be in the vicinity of $200 million. His last Statement of Registrable Interests lists a veritable slew of financial investments and an expensive property portfolio shared between he and his wife. It is not known if he inherited any money from his mother.

It is not known to the writer if Bill Shorten inherited any money to speak of from his dry-dock manager father or his mother, however his last Statement of Registrable Interests lists very little in assets held by either he or his wife beyond their mortgaged family home.

What essentially separates these two men are the differences in their personal and political philosophies and the wide gap between their different levels of personal wealth.

Although this is something Amanda Vanstone is trying hard to distort in this federal election campaign and something The Age appears to be so indifferent to that its editor is not reigning in her excesses.  

Just because it is beautiful......(9)

Speaking In Colours

Quote of the Week

There’s nothing the matter with being vicious, In fact there is not nearly enough venom and malice in this pussy-footing society of ours.

[Malcolm Bligh Turnbull quoted in Quadrant, 16 December 2015]

Federal Election 2016: feeling entitled to the last

Have you been a sitting member in the federal parliament since 2004?

Recently lost party pre-selection?

What do you do to retain all the salary, lurks and perks of an MP between 9 May when parliament dissolved and polling day on 2 July 2016?

Why you announce that you will nominate as an Independent candidate.

Problem solved!

Not only are you still on the parliamentary gravy train – even if you happen to lose your seat you will be further compensated by the long-suffering taxpayer when the Australian Electoral Commission pays out if you have received 4% or over of all formal first preference votes recorded in your electorate.

That’s $2.62259 per eligible vote in this double-dissolution election.

At least one disendorsed Liberal Party MP, who thinks he was the most popular MP in his seat there’s ever been, has obviously done the maths and decided to add to the $104,496 plus annual pension he would receive if he simply resigned now.

One would think even a 34 year-old Liberal Party candidate in this year's federal election would realise that the Internet means you cannot blatantly copy without attribution

BuzzFeed politically impaled a very foolish federal election candidate on 5 May 2016:

Meet the Liberal National party’s candidate for the federal seat of Brisbane, 34-year-old Trevor Evans.

Evans, who is the current CEO of the National Retail Association, was pre-selected last month to run for the Liberal National party in the hope he’ll replace retiring LNP MP, Teresa Gambaro.....

If people want to find out more about Trevor Evans they could go to his website and learn all about his history working with the Salvation Army and time as chief of staff to now immigration minister Peter Dutton.

Except one passage really jumps out. It’s about his early years “growing up without much” and family who “instilled the values that helped him become the person his is today [sic].”

The passage stands out mostly because Trevor suddenly becomes “Tim”.

BuzzFeed News googled the passage and found the website of fake US congressman, Tim Hawthorne, which has been set up by a digital design agency to advertise its products.

BuzzFeed News contacted Evans about the copy-and-paste situation with his biographical information.

“We are using a template - It’s not front facing and full website will be live in a few days,” Evans said over Twitter direct message.

Minutes later the website’s “About Trevor Evans” section was taken down.

Well spotted, Buzzfeed!

UPDATE

A vastly different "About Trevor Evans" has reappeared and it now opens thus:

[Accessed 7.25am 13 May 2016 at https://lnp.org.au/trevor-evans/]

Federal Election 2016: looking at the ICIJ Panama Papers searchable database

Some observations after an initial look at the ICIJ Panama Papers searchable database* (which includes Offshore Leaks data), with regard to listings of companies and individuals associated with Australia……

For some who are listed it appears to be a bit of a family affair, for others a lone foray into off-shore company registration.

Some associated with registered companies are investors, while others are active players in the mining, smelting, construction, manufacturing, banking, finance, risk management, insurance and marketing sectors.

There’s the odd investment manager or two, at least one specialist in fine art, some professional property directors and company secretaries, self-employed consultants and a media type.

One of Australia’s rich listers and a National Party politician (appointed not elected) also make appearances on this database.

As does a company which had as directors one multimillionaire former Labor premier of NSW and another multimillionaire who who went on to be a Liberal prime minister – for reasons unknown full details of this company have not been included in the searchable section of the ICIJ database to date.

What there doesn’t appear to be any indication of is that ordinary workers on the average wage went to Mossack Fonceca or other financial advisors to set up a companies in a low taxing jurisdiction such as Panama, the British Virgin Islands, Singapore or Hong Kong.

Off-shore registration appears to be something indulged in primarily by business and industry in this country as well as those with above average to high levels of personal wealth.

The very groups that Turnbull & Co have given company and income tax cuts in the 2016-17 Budget.

Inevitably there are 2014-15 political donors among those listed on the databases and, just as inevitably, there are some who give more to the Liberals and their Coalition partner than they do to Labor.

Before voting on 2 July 2016 readers might consider clicking on the search link at the beginning of this post and typing in a few individual and company names, to see how these might compare with the known interests of election candidates and those political donors included in documents held at the Australian Electoral Commission Annual Returns Locator Service.  

Where people spend, invest or gift their money says something about their personal and professional ethics.  

* It is not asserted by the creators of these databases that every individual or corporation identified has been involved in unlawful tax evasion or any other form of wrongdoing.