Joe Hockey - Australia's Lord of Misrule

This is what Federal Treasurer-elect Joe Hockey stated in The Australian on 12 September 2013:You can go forward and spend your hearts out because we're going to have a good Christmas.

This from a millionaire right-wing politician who intends to reduce the household income for literally millions of ordinary Australians after the New Year, including an est 40,000 individuals and est. 38,000 families (with school aged children) living in the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales

* Cartoon from neatorama.com

How many of Abbott's troops are experiencing front bench blues?

Australian Financial Review 1 February 2013:

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has said ambitious MPs will have to satisfy themselves with committee chairmanships if the coalition wins the next election, confirming that he expects to keep his front bench in place.

Australian Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott's shadow ministers went to the 7 September federal election on an 'expectation' that he is now busily trashing and there is unrest in the ranks.

News.com.au 10 September 2013:

QUEENSLAND MPs are demanding greater representation on Tony Abbott's new front bench to reflect their large share of seats....some MPs believe the state has been under-represented since it delivers a swathe of seats to Mr Abbott in 2010.

Facebook 15 February 2013:

UPDATE

Australian Financial Review 16 September 2013:

NSW senator Arthur Sinodinos, who ran John Howard’s office when he was prime minister, will not be appointed to cabinet but will be given a portfolio in the outer ministry.....

Senior Coalition sources said there had been “question marks” raised internally over the last week about whether Senator Sinodinos may have to appear before a corruption inquiry related to a directorship he once held. Senator Sinodinos, a renowned figure inside the Coalition and former National Australia Bank executive, maintains he has done nothing wrong and his colleagues support him.

The Sydney Morning Herald 16 September 2013:

Queensland Senator Sue Boyce has attacked the Liberal Party's inability to recruit and promote women.

Her criticism comes just as incoming prime minister Tony Abbott announces his new cabinet, which is predicted to have only one woman, Julie Bishop.

Senator Boyce, who will retire from the Senate next July, said the Liberal Party did not support women through the parliamentary process...

“It's a systemic problem in the party – how embarrassing to be a government with only one woman at a senior level,” Senator Boyce said.

ABC News 17 September 2013:

                 

Tony Abbott is facing more dissent from within Coalition ranks, with Liberal MP Dennis Jensen criticising not only his leader's decisions regarding the placement of portfolios but also the incoming government's signature policy on paid parental leave.

Dr Jensen, the Member for the West Australian seat of Tangney, has told ABC News 24 he is "confused" about which minister will handle the science portfolio.

Yesterday, Mr Abbott said science would "largely" be in the industry portfolio, under incoming minister Ian Macfarlane.

But Dr Jensen, who had expressed interest in taking on the responsibility, believes some of it will be within education.

"I'm somewhat confused about what's happened with the science portfolio. It's not just completely with the industry portfolio, there's parts of it within education which will make it a somewhat schizophrenic policy area," he said.

"This is something that to me is strange.

"I mean we've got a Minister for Sport for God's sake, but we don't have a Minister for Science.".....

It was easy to see this one coming at Abbott a long way off

If the swing against the Coalition in Aboriginal communities was replicated across Australia, Tony Abbott would be leading a minor party, writes Chris Graham.

One of the features of a modern democracy is that apart from getting the government we deserve, we're also supposed to get the government that the majority of us want.

Like Communism, it's great in theory. But also like Communism, it's often not so good in practice. At least, it's not if you happen to be a minority group who has long been denied the right to elect your own leaders.

And that explains how Aboriginal Australians awoke on Sunday morning to find they had a new "Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs", a pledge Tony Abbott delivered during the 2013 election campaign.

One problem: no-one, including within the media, ever stopped to ask Aboriginal people if they actually wanted a "Prime Minister for Indigenous Affairs", and in particular whether or not they wanted Abbott.

As it turns out, they apparently don't.....

Read the rest of the 13 September 2013 ABC News/The Drum article here.

One petition signature every 3.5 seconds. Are you listening Malcolm Turnbull? We want Labor's NBN!

Computerworld 11 September 2013:

An internet petition set up by a Liberal-voting student to save Labor's national broadband network (NBN) has become Australia's largest ever online petition.

The internet appeal is roaring along, but still has some way to go before becoming Australia's largest ever petition, which was submitted to federal parliament with 792,985 signatures in 2000 calling for an end to rising beer prices.

The NBN petition calls on the incoming coalition government to scrap its plans to create a fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) network in place of Labor's existing fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) approach.

Created by Queenslander Nick Paine on Change.org less than five days ago, the petition overtook Australia's previous biggest online petition just after 11am (AEST) on Wednesday with 116,281 signatures. The prior one had 116,280 names.

That's one signature every 3.5 seconds.

The former frontrunner was a campaign to pressure advertisers to boycott radio shock jock Alan Jones in 2012 after he said former PM Julia Gillard's father "died of shame".

Mr Paine, 20, is a supporter of the coalition, but says no party is perfect.

"I personally just don't believe their policy reflects the best option for Australia and I don't think it reflects in general the majority of Australians' views," he said.

"There's no reason to just sit back and see what happens, you've got to try it out and stand up for what you believe in."

Mr Paine said it was the first online petition he's started.

The petition can be signed at change.org/nbn -- or share it on Facebook by clicking here.

The High Court of Australia will make available the audio-visual recordings of its hearings from 1 October 2013

HIGH COURT OF AUSTRALIA - MEDIA RELEASE

The High Court of Australia will commence making available to the public audio-visual recordings of its hearings from the 1st of October, 2013.

The High Court has been considering how to improve public access to its hearings.  All hearings of the Court are open to the public. The Court also provides online access to a wide range of case-specific information. The Court has now decided to take the further step of publishing on its website audio-visual recordings of Full Court hearings heard in Canberra. 

Recordings will be made available from an archive on the Court's website, initially likely to be a few business days after hearings. This will allow for vetting of recordings to avoid the possibility of information which should not be published being published – such as a name which is the subject of a publication constraint. This delay is likely to be reduced as Court experience grows.
 
The recordings will cover all Full Court hearings heard in Canberra, other than Applications for Special Leave.

The Court's decision to take these steps was made having regard to the nature of its jurisdiction and is not intended to set any precedent for other courts. 

Background Information

The Court provides on its website very comprehensive information relating to the conduct of hearings – including case management timelines, written submissions, transcripts of oral arguments, judgments and judgment summaries (see http://www.hcourt.gov.au/cases/current-cases-submissions and  http://www.hcourt.gov.au/cases/cases-heard).

The Court's 'alert' systems covering judgments, case summaries, judgment summaries and publications, now has 20,000 subscribers. 

The Court also has a well-developed school visitor program. Around 35,000 pupils visited the Court in Canberra in the past year, receiving guided tours and presentations on the Court's constitutional and appellate role, as well as attending hearings when possible. 

Contact:  Mr Ben Wickham, (02) 6270 6893, bwickham@hcourt.gov.au

Abbott's Vision For Australia by Moir

Post-election cartoon at http://www.moir.com.au/

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.