Australian Federal Election 2016: and the slurs quickly become childish

This time it is independent candidate in the NSW New England electorate, Tony Windsor, on the receiving line for daring to stand in a seat held by Nationals Deputy-Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and it’s the Murdoch media which is behaving like toddler in full tantrum mode: 

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PLUNGE 2016 - Clarence Valley Arts & Culture Festival 26 March to 23 April

What's on and when here. 

Just because it is beautiful......(6)

IMAGE: MONARCH BUTTERFLIES AGGREGATED IN THE PAPERBARK GROVE AT THE AUSTRALIAN BOTANIC GARDEN AT MOUNT ANNAN ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF SYDNEY. (ANN JONES) 2015

Australian Federal Election 2016: and the slurs begin.....

The federal election writs haven’t been issued yet and there was Robert Bou-Hamdan aka Big Rob on his "Lismore Radio" Facebook page scattering aspersions:

It seems unusual that the former MP, who states her strong opposition to coal seam gas locally and who should understand the need for Australia to secure its oil and gas needs into the future, would be working so hard for another country against us while also running as the Labor candidate for the seat of Page - a role designed to represent and protect our interests both locally, nationally and Internationally.

What information is the former MP providing to Timor-Leste as their Senior Legal Adviser?

Oh dear, it’s apparently ‘treason’ time at Big Rob’s place where he seems to be offended by the notion that a lawyer before entering politics should return to that same profession after losing at the 2013 federal election.

As for being "their Senior Legal Adviser" - it is my understanding that Ms. Saffin resigned as legal adviser to Jose Ramos-Horta before the start of the official 2007 federal election campaign which saw her successfully win the seat of Page and, I expect that she will have followed the same course of action in 2016 as she re-contests the same seat

I wonder if Big Rob can spell d-e-f-a-m-a-t-i-o-n?

One would have thought he would be busy enough with ongoing court proceedings since January this year as it is:

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This was Malcolm Bligh Turnbull's NBN promise to the Australian people during the 2013 federal election campaign

This was then Australian Communications Minister Malcom Bligh Turnbull’s promise to voters during the 2013 federal election campaign:

https://youtu.be/MzSDAGDIn44

On 12 December 2013, less than three months after the Liberal-Nationals Coalition won government, ITnews reported:

The Coalition is already predicting an $11.5 billion blowout to the cost of building its version of the national broadband network, but says it will still cost less than Labor's scheme….

the Coalition's own pre-election pledges proved overly optimistic, with costs expected to come in at "around" $41 billion rather than the promised $29.5 billion.

The 2016 forecast to bring 25 Mbps to all Australians has also been canned. Instead, the Coalition predicts it will be able to bring download speeds of up to 25 Mbps to 43 percent of premises in Australia's fixed-line footprint by that time.

The Coalition's approach "should also be able to deliver access to wholesale speeds of up to 50 Mbps to 90 percent of Australia's fixed-line footprint and wholesale speeds of up to 100 Mbps to 65-75 percent by 2019".

The Coalition will only guarantee these speeds to NBN Co's wholesale customers — internet service providers. There will no longer be a guarantee of what each end user will see in terms of speeds delivered to the home.

On 25 August 2015, almost two years after Abbott & Co formed government, itWire reported the deteriorating NBN situation thus:

It’s official. The Coalition version of the NBN, with its inferior copper technology, will cost as much as Labor’s all-fibre version – on the Government’s own figures.

In February last year – 18 months ago – I sat in a room full of IT journalists and heard Malcolm Turnbull’s deputy, Paul Fletcher, admit that the Coalition’s costings of Labor’s planned NBN had been exaggerated.

Before the September 2013 election Turnbull and Fletcher and Abbott and the rest of the Coalition, when they weren’t chanting ‘Stop the Boats!’ and ‘Axe the Tax’, were endlessly repeating the unsubstantiated talking point that Labor’s NBN would cost $90 billion, more than twice ALP Communications Minister Stephen Conroy’s estimate of $39 billion.

Then Fletcher, in February 2014 said in a public forum, in a direct response to my question, and in front of dozens of witnesses, that NBN Co’s internal review of Labor’s NBN had costed it at $56 billion, much closer to Labor’s figure than the inflated estimate the Coalition took to the election.

When I quizzed him on the disparity between the Coalition’s $90 billion estimate of a FTTP network and the much lower NBN Co estimate (made by the management team the Coalition had put into place) of $56 billion, the best Fletcher could say was that the Coalition estimate “may have been a little high”.

Now it seems its estimate of its cut-down version of the NBN ‘may have been a little low’. The big advantage of the Coalition’s ‘multi technology mix’ model, in which millions of households will receive fibre-to-the-node rather than fibre-to-the-home, was supposed to be that it would be a lot cheaper.

Now the CEO of NBN Co, at the briefing accompanying the release of the company’s annual financial figures, has said that the Coalition’s ‘multi technology mix’ NBN will cost at least $46 billion and may cost as much as $56 billion – EXACTLY the same figure that Malcolm Turnbull’s handpicked experts had estimated the Labor FTTH NBN would cost…

That same day The Sydney Morning Herald ran with this:

A $15 billion blowout in the cost of building the national broadband network, partly caused by the slow rollout of key broadband services, could make the internet more expensive for Australians, M2 Group chief executive Geoff Horth said.

NBN on Monday revealed that the cost of building the project would increase by as much as 36.6 per cent to $56 billion up from the $41 billion previously forecast.

By 14 September 2015 The Sydney Morning Herald was reporting:

It is taking Telstra longer overall to repair phone lines damaged during extreme weather than previous years, leaving some consumers and businesses without service and ineligible for compensation.

However, the cost of fixing copper network outages in the street will soon transfer to the government-owned NBN Co, under a rewritten multibillion-dollar deal with Telstra…..

What many people do not realise is that if NBN Co were to announce this week it was rolling out fibre-to-the-node [FTTN] internet in Punchbowl, it would become responsible for making sure Mr Patane's mud-soaked copper wires were good enough for a 50 megabit per second service.

"If it's an area designated to receive FTTN, and the copper in the street needs to be remediated and can be remediated, then we will remediate it," an NBN Co spokesman said.

"If the copper cannot be remediated, then we will use one of the other technologies we have at our disposal to provide them with a service."

NBN Co becomes responsible for maintaining the copper lines between nodes and premises. Its latest corporate plan was full of warnings that degraded copper connections could delay the roll out and increase overall costs.

"The quality of this [copper] network is not fully known as there has been limited opportunity to evaluate the physical infrastructure at significant scale," it states.

NBN chief executive Bill Morrow also revealed Telstra did not release any information about the copper network until after the $11 billion deal was renegotiated.

"If there is a case to where the copper is just in such poor condition that we can't offer the speeds that the government has made us commit to, then we won't use copper in that area. If it means pulling in fibre or fixed wireless towers, that's what we'll do," he said on August 24.

Unlike the NBN started under Labor, which planned to replace the copper connections with end-to-end fibre at 93 per cent of premises, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has asked NBN Co to redesign the network to include the copper connection at millions of premises. About 4 million households and businesses would now get a boosted copper connection, while the remainder getting fibre, cable, satellite or fixed wireless.

As at 3 March 2016, almost two and a half years after the Liberals and Nationals introduced their supposedly ‘new, improved and cheaper’ National Broadband Network (NBN) the three-year construction plan for Angourie, Freeburn Island, Iluka, Wooloweyah and Yamba is seemingly no longer relevant and there appears to be no plan to connect most of the Northern Rivers to NBN via Fibre To The Node in the foreseeable future.

Given the aging population on the NSW Far North Coast, many of us may die still waiting for Malcolm Turnbull’s 'innovative' version of the NBN.

A look back at Deputy-Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce

Now that Tony Windsor has announced he will stand at the 2016 federal election as an independent candidate in the New England electorate, it is perhaps time to briefly recap Nationals MP for New England and Deputy-Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce’s position on some of the issues which may be at play for voters in that seat or go to perceptions of his gravitas or otherwise.

Barnaby Thomas Gerard Joyce entered the Australian Parliament in 2005 as a senator for Queensland and resigned to contest the NSW seat of New England in 2013, a seat which was vacant due to retirement of its member Tony Windsor.

Until September 2013 he was a member of the Opposition.

A  former accountant, he is a man of property with a residence and commercial property in St. George, Queensland and two rural properties in Barradine on the Liverpool Plains, NSW.

In the first half of last year taxpayers spent $912,269.95 meeting his parliamentary entitlements claims, including family members travel totaling $12,818.80 over those six months.

SELECTED JOYCE:

MICHAEL BOWERS: It is fair to say that you need to be in politics for a fairly long time, generally speaking, before we have enough cartoons to do a Talking Pictures. You've been here less than a year, I think, and we've got a wealth of material. Did it stun you how much interest there was in you when you came to Parliament?

SENATOR BARNABY JOYCE: Probably disturbed me a little bit. It disturbed me that I was so ugly…..

SENATOR BARNABY JOYCE: In a funny way you are sort of happy with that. When you do cross the floor it is amazing the abuse you get from your own side and the things they scream at you. When I went to the hospital for that check-up and there was someone from my own side who screamed out, "I hope you do die, you so-and-so!"

MICHAEL BOWERS: Who did you sit next to when you crossed the floor.

SENATOR BARNABY JOYCE: You don't really look. The person I sat next to I remember they said, "This is so cool," and I went, "This is so dangerous!"

[ABC TV Insiders, “Talking Pictures” segment,19 February 2006]

The major reserves of coal in the world are located in the United States, China and India, and those countries are where the jobs will go when this Labor government’s ETS is introduced. The government will be exporting the jobs of Australian working families to the United States of America and to China. Mongolia will not have an ETS, and it will be a big exporter of coal. We will have direct attacks from Indonesia on Australian exports. Indonesia has become very capable in taking over Australia’s share of coal exports. South Africa has the ability to deliver metallurgical, coking and thermal coal. [Senate Hansard, 12 March 2009, 3.32pm]

BARNABY JOYCE, NATIONALS' SENATE LEADER: The Australian Government would never be allowed to buy a mine in China. So why would we allow the Chinese Government to buy and control a key strategic asset in our country? Stop the Rudd Labor Government from selling Australia. [ABC TV 7.30 Report, 17 March 2009]

The outspoken Queensland Senator Barnaby Joyce is now the oppositions finance spokesman and he's told AM he favours banning Chinese state-owned companies from investing in Australia's resources sector. And he likes the idea of breaking up the power of the big four banks in Australia by toughening divestiture laws in the banking sector. He has also raised the spectre of the United States not paying it's debts and causing a global economic meltdown. [ABC Radio AM, 11 December 2009]

The Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has bowed to pressure and booted the Senator from the critical role after months of gaffes by Barnaby Joyce.

But the Senator insists he did a good job and today he's condemning anonymous sources on his own side of politics for white-anting. [ABC The World Today, 26 March 2010]

This is part of where we are off to in this insane world. What will this world look like if they stay there? What on earth will Australia look like if this crowd stays there? Their own people cannot believe them. They have walked all over the left; to the right they look absolutely absurd. The NBN is another complete absurdity. The only thing we can do to fix it is get rid of them. [Senate Hansard, 11 September 2012, 4.29pm]

Hansard records show that Joyce mentioned the National Broadband Network approximately 69 times as an Opposition senator but never once on the floor of the House of Representatives to date.

Senator Faulkner says that I deny climate change. I do not deny climate change at all. I just deny that they have the capacity to change it back. I was watching the weather intently over the Christmas break and since the carbon tax it seems to be around about where we left it last time. I thought that it was all going to be better now that the carbon tax is in. I thought that we had climate nirvana, but it is about where we left it. I want my money back. What happened to the weather? It was supposed to be fixed up by now after the carbon tax! [Senate Hansard, 11 February 2013, 4.23pm]

Hansard records Joyce mentioning climate change approximately 56 times as an Opposition senator but only once in passing as a government MP and Minister for Agriculture in the House of Representatives. He has never mentioned the Coalition Government’s “Direct Action” policy which replaced Labor’s carbon reduction scheme

Yes. If there is nothing that needs to be answered, that is fair enough. We just need to clear the air; that is all. We just need to clear the air and get it off the cards. It is now very important that this piece of legislation goes through and that the people around Kiruna, the people around Breeza, the people around Nea, the people around Werris Creek and the people around Quirindi clearly understand that we support this legislation—because they will be reading this; you can bet your life on it—and that Xavier Martin, John Lyall and even Tim Duddy understand that we are in support of this legislation. They can communicate to the people of the area that we support this legislation and, in supporting this legislation, that we clearly show that the coalition in New England are trying to work to resolve issues. Hopefully, they will have a strong hand in a future coalition government to continue the work that needs to be done to make sure that we get the proper balance right. [Senate Hansard, 16 May 2013, 3.50pm]

BARNABY JOYCE: The other one is about apparently the sexiest man alive, and that's not me. Not that I needed to tell you that.

WILL OCKENDEN: A quick look through some old sexiest politician polls does confirm the Minister's comments.

So when Barnaby Joyce was talking sexy, he had someone else in mind.

BARNABY JOYCE: Which is a gentleman by the name of John Christopher Depp, 51 years old otherwise aka Jack Sparrow and he has decided to bring into our nation two dogs without actually getting the proper certification and the proper permits required. Basically it looks like he snuck them in.

WILL OCKENDEN: The two Yorkshire terriers Boo and Pistol are believed to have arrived in Australia last month, and weren't declared to customs and didn't pass quarantine.

BARNABY JOYCE: We found out he snuck them in because we saw them taking it to a poodle groomer.

WILL OCKENDEN: Now the dogs have discovered, Barnaby Joyce has given Johnny Depp 50 hours to remove them from the country, or else.

BARNABY JOYCE: Mr Depp has to either take his dogs back to California or we're going to have to euthanise them. [ABC Radio The World Today, 14 May 2015]

MARK COLVIN: The Federal Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce's decision to oppose a Chinese backed coal mine has reignited debate about the leadership of the National Party.

Mr Joyce has been widely assumed to be a likely successor should Warren Truss retire.

Mr Joyce has argued strongly against the Environment Minister Greg Hunt's conditional approval the Shenhua Watermark project.

He's specified that his concerns stem from his position as Agriculture Minister, not because the project's in his electorate.

PM has spoken to a number of Nationals MPs who believe the question has damaged his standing internally, and to Liberals who say it's further evidence he shouldn't succeed as the Nationals' leader. [ABC Radio PM, 14 July 2015]

Hansard records Joyce only mentioned the Shenhua mining site once in the Senate Chamber and never to date on his feet in the House of Representatives.

NEW England MP Barnaby Joyce says the Coalition's "not ruling anything in or out" when it comes to matching Labor's promise on the multibillion-dollar Gonski funding agreements, but maintains money isn't the only factor in a successful education system.

Labor has put education on the front lines of the upcoming federal election battle by promising to honour the final two and most lucrative years of the six-year Gonski funding arrangements with the states, something the Coalition has declined to do.

But Mr Joyce denies the pressure's back on his government, arguing Labor hasn't said precisely how they'll pay for the full six years of Gonski.

And to those principals and teachers who say they're already seeing improved results just two years into the funding reforms, the MP says increased funding alone doesn't guarantee better student results. [The Northern Daily Leader, 6 February 2016, p.3]

Hansard records show Joyce has never mentioned “Gonski” funding on the floor of the Senate or during his time as either an MP, minister and Deputy-Prime Minister in the House of Representatives.

Australian Federal Election 2016: we'll all be rooned!

Ever since Labor released the outline of its negative gearing and capital gains tax reform policy, both the Prime Minister and the Treasurer have been thundering on about the catastrophic consequences which would result.

Apparently if implemented this policy will be like one of the seven plagues of Egypt sent to decimate the wealth of the chosen ones.

Malcolm Turnbull telling voters that “every homeowner in Australia has a lot to fear from Bill Shorten” and that removing negative gearing will “smash the residential housing market”. While Scott Morrison informed us that "It's bad news if you own a home, it's bad news if you're an investor in a home, and bad news if you're renting a home…That's three strikes and you're out."

Then the authors of the report Turnbull and Morrison relied on, BIS Shrapnel, came clean……

Financial Review, 3 March 2016:

The government's assault on Labor's negative gearing tax has suffered an embarrassing setback with the authors of a damning report saying it was written late last year and had nothing to do with Labor's policy released just a month ago.

Just hours after Treasurer Scott Morrison used the findings to slam Labor's policy for driving up rents and dragging the economy backwards, BIS Shrapnel associate director Kim Hawtrey made an urgent clarification.

"The assumptions were set several months ago, and the analysis done late last year, well before Labor announced its policy. Therefore the assumptions do not align with Labor's policy," he told The Australian Financial Review.

"The report makes no recommendations and does not purport to be an assessment of any particular policy."…..

This was followed a few days later by further embarrassment for Turnbull & Co…...

Peter Martin: Economics Editor, The Age, 7 March 2016:

Negative gearing encourages excessive use of debt, lifts overseas borrowings and raises real interest rates, according to the economist whose work on the subject has been lauded by the Treasurer Scott Morrison.

Kim Hawtrey, now with consultancy firm BIS Shrapnel, wrote the words more than 20 years ago when he was an academic at Macquarie University in an article in the journal Australian Tax Forum.

"Deductibility of interest payments on debt creates a tax advantage for debt over equity," he wrote. "Negative gearing ensues by way of combining debt interest deductibility with concessional tax treatment of capital gains, encouraging over-investment in property and related asset inflation sectors."

More than two decades on, Dr Hawtrey says he won't divulge his personal position on negative gearing, saying the work his firm released last week was "technical" and "dispassionate".

"I have not commented on my views and I am not going to comment on my personal views, from a policy point of view, or as a voter or whatever," he told Fairfax Media.

"We were simply given a task and we carried out that task, and no attribution or nothing should be read into that as to any policy preference."….

Then matters became a little worse for Liberal and Nationals MPs who were hoping to use the BIS Shrapnel report as strong talking points in their respective electorates – another report surfaced…..

ABC News, 7 March 2016:

A new report on the housing affordability crisis in Sydney and Melbourne calls for the Federal Government to urgently rethink its support of negative gearing.

The report, Sydney and Melbourne's Housing Affordability Crisis – No End in Sight, was written by Dr Bob Birrell and David McCloskey from Monash University's Centre for Population and Urban Research.

Dr Birrell said the report highlighted the seriousness of the problem.

"These governments have abandoned the current generation to a lifetime of rental properties," Dr Birrelll said.

"The situation is much worse than it was a couple of years ago. It is a social catastrophe."

He said governments have created the conditions for major concessions for investors.

"The result has been an enormous increase in investment but it has been primarily in established houses and that has caused these prices to reach levels in Sydney that are among the highest in the western world," Dr Birrell said.

The report revealed the record-high housing prices in Sydney and Melbourne would lead to social problems.

"The PM's stance reveals a monumental insensitivity to the social catastrophe flowing from record-high housing prices for the next generation of home seekers in Sydney and Melbourne," the report stated……

It comes as no surprise that the latest Newspoll reveals that the Coalition and Labor are still neck and neck on a two-party preferred basis, with Turnbull’s net satisfaction rating shrinking to three points. The Australian pointing out on 8 March 2016 that “It was 10 points a fortnight ago and 22 points in January. If it continues to slide on this trajectory, he will sink below zero.”

Nor is it any surprise that the Essential Research opinion poll released that same day also has Labor and the Coalition tied on a two-party preferred basis, with primary votes for Turnbull & Co down 2.6% since the September 2013 federal election and primary votes for Labor up 3.6% in the corresponding period and approval of Malcolm Turnbull's performance as prime minister standing at 45% - down 6% since its February 2016 poll.