Comments on: Jess Rudd writes: ‘This spill is ours. Own it’.

By: Article Submission

Article Submission — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 11:04:48 +0000

bmLObu Great, thanks for sharing this article.

By: M Geeky

M Geeky — Tue, 15 May 2012 09:07:53 +0000

Take a look at this, Jessica:
http://www.expendable.rv

Watch the film… all of it.

Then tell me what you think of Australian politicians.

By: Acacia

Acacia — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 02:12:09 +0000

I cannot believe how mean some of these comments are. Regardless of my political beliefs or leanings, I think this is a well written and engaging piece. Jess, I think you’re great and an excellent role model for young women.

By: Anon

Anon — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 12:40:19 +0000

I’m loath to add another click but I have to say that re-reading it 6 weeks after the event makes it even more obvious that this was propaganda designed to catch the not-too-clever plebs that the Labor Elite like to manipulate and look down their noses at. Nauseating? Sure. Unbearable? Not since the Queenslanders showed us how it’s done.

By: Satyam

Satyam — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:04:16 +0000

The Howard/Costello government gave us the lonsegt period of prosperity since Federation. All economic indicators improved significantly between 96 and 07. It lowered income tax by a massive amount and introduced the GST which as underpnned the revenue the States lost because of the Ha Case. It kept our borders secure and steered us through the economic fallout from the Asian collapse and 9/11. Best of all it won the culture wars.It’s clear that none of the posters here work in the private sector which was devastated by the GFC. There has been a massive downturn in M&A activity and capital expansion whilst the government frittered away billions on school halls that nobody wants.The Rudd government has failed at every point. Most importantly they effed up dealing with the GFC by spending all of the surplus and running up a huge debt, whilst ensuring that lots of people in middle Australia lost their savings as a result of the bank guarantee.Fuel watch, grocery watch, $900 cheques to dead people, BER, pink batts, blowing the surplus, running up huge borrowings, the health fiasco, the mining tax, the Henry damp squib, the 170+ deaths of boat people. And all this in one term!Are you people blind or just so sheltered in your little public service bubble that you just can’t see that this generation of the ALP is unfit to do anything but stay in permanent opposition whilst the grown ups on the right lead us to prosperity and real freedom from the lefty puritans and fools.

By: Markynhos

Markynhos — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 01:09:12 +0000

interesting, Shaun.I’ve worked in the virpate sector for 15 years, public for 3. I encountered a very few fine individuals in virpate employment, and many, many more shysters and spivs. Your tale about business owners over-extending their credit rings very true, it’s happened to 3 of my employers.Interesting that the wingnuts are absolutely savage against virpate homeowners who take on a too-big mortgage, but they’re willing to give a free pass to business owners who get themselves into too much debt (and usually try and get out of it by screwing their employees out of superannuation payments).I then worked in tax for a couple of years, dealing with companies who were behind on their income tax withholdaing payments. That’s right, they were paying their workers the after-tax income, but failing to remit the income tax portion to the public purse. Basically it meant they were trading while insolvent, unable to pay their obligations as and when they fell due. Absolute leeches on society as far as they were concerned, it was one rule for them, one rule for everybody else. I heard all the special pleading and dog-ate-my-homework excuses under the sun. And believe me, they were companies and names you have heard of.I find it peculiar that some people are so ready to throw an aura of secular sainthood around folks who are just out to make a buck. About 80% of the ones I dealt with were spivs, nothing more, nothing less.

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 11:55:23 +0000

It will be a crisis when there’s a rsgeoeivn default, and one or more countries exit the Euro. What’s happened so far is just a bout of anxiety.The bullhawks have been wrong all year about the strength of domestic economy, and imminent, real-soon-now, once-in-a-hundred years mining boom. If and when it eventuates I don’t see how its going to reverse the factors that are depressing consumer confidence, the housing market, retail and manufacturing. If the boom means even more tightening, all those sectors will become even more depressed.We’ve been lectured all year by the likes of Battellino about how rich we are, but outside of mining, construction and engineering, no-one is seeing much benefit, and I don’t think we will.If there wasn’t the carbon tax to blame for, well, everything, I reckon the RBA’s interest rate settings would already be a huge political issue. Fortunately for Tony Abbott and the RBA, Gillard is copping the blame for everything because of a modest, over-compensated tax that’s almost 12 months into the future!

By: MaryAlice

MaryAlice — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 05:17:56 +0000

Grubsheet’s source – there’s a risk that yet tenahor leadership change will hurt the party by reinforcing the notion that the Labor leadership is a revolving door, totally hostage to the opinion polls. Within Labor, this is called “the New South Wales disease”, after a succession of leadership changes there saw a tired and corrupt government reduced to a rump in the parliament in the last state election. Yet such is the disillusionment with Gillard that MPs are coming to realise that switching jockeys is their only hope, and the sooner the better.This school of thought has it that felling Gillard now will give her successor a clear run of two years to establish himself and have at least some hope of reversing the tsunami of community support for the Liberal-National Party Coalition. Labor foolishly believed that Coalition leader Tony Abbott was unelectable. But Abbott – a fiercely effective opponent of the carbon tax – has streaked eleven points ahead of Gillard as preferred prime minister in the latest poll.Labor now faces a nightmare scenario – that Abbott will not just win the next election, whenever it’s held, but Labor will be so badly beaten that it will be out of office for a generation and may, indeed, cease to be any significant force in Australian politics at all. What to do? Well, here’s the startling scenario outlined to Grubsheet by our source – a Labor “grandee” with close links to all of the main players.Gillard is a dead woman walking and according to this source, most credible figures in the party are now openly conceding the fact. This includes traditional power brokers and number crunchers like former national secretary, Karl Bitar, and former Keating minister, Graham Richardson, who is openly telling people that “the government is f***ed”. Labor is now privately canvassing alternatives. And while there’s some support for former ACTU secretary Greg Combet – Gillard’s Minister for Climate Change – the smart money is on the other former senior union boss in Gillard’s cabinet – Bill Shorten, the Assistant Treasurer.Shorten shot to national fame and popularity five years ago when he became the spokesman for the families of Tasmanian miners trapped in the Beaconsfield mine disaster. He’s credible, articulate and has some powerful connections beyond Labor and the union movement. Shorten is married to Chloe Bryce, the daughter of Governor-General Quentin Bryce. And it’s not lost on Labor that the couple and their 18-month old daughter, Clementine, would present a sharply more voter-friendly image as the nation’s first family compared to Julia Gillard and “First Bloke” Tim Mathieson – her live-in lover at The Lodge.But being Labor, of course, it’s the politics that really count. And what’s decisively in Shorten’s favour is his membership – and leadership, as former national secretary – of the Australian Worker’s Union, the dominant faction in modern Labor. The AWU makes and breaks ministerial careers at will – its Queensland boss Bill Ludwig arguably Labor’s most powerful figure, to whom senior figures like Treasurer Wayne Swan owe their entire careers.So Bill Shorten is both “connected” – in Mafia parlance – and user friendly. The bookies in Queensland already have him as odds-on favourite to replace Gillard and Labor’s elder statesmen like Bob Hawke and Kim Beazley long ago identified him as a potential future prime minister. And he has the all important killer instinct to both succeed in politics and survive in Labor ranks, a key figure in the political assassination of former prime minister, Kevin Rudd, and the installation of Gillard as his successor.Will Shorten actively move against Gillard? Only the coming days and weeks will tell. But one thing is certain. The draft is well and truly on, with senior Labor figures – including some of Gillard’s own ministers – convinced that the electorate has stopped listening to her and her chances of a political resurrection are now zero.The one wild card is Kevin Rudd, who makes no secret of wanting to make a comeback. The chances of that are also said to be zero, such is the personal animosity towards him in Labor’s ranks. But if the party calls the bluff of the independents and removes Gillard and installs Shorten, what then? Would Rudd seek to bring the whole house of cards down by resigning his Queensland seat and prompting a bye-election that the polls show Labor would surely lose? Here again, the growing mood is to call Rudd’s bluff, to dare him to enter history as a Labor “Rat”, who brought down a government and made Tony Abbott prime minister in an act of petulant personal revenge.Some Labor figures now perceive the entire future of the party to be at risk, as its traditional “aspirational working class” constituency turns to Abbott and “left leaning progressives” in the cities turn to the “save-the-planet-at-all costs” Greens. Certainly, there’s a growing sense that the Greens – with whom Labor entered into an uneasy coalition to govern – are the real enemy, more dangerous even than Abbott as they steadily erode Labor’s primary vote.So here’s tenahor scenario. That if the independents make good on their promise of “Julia or dust” and sacrifice themselves by returning the country to the polls, Labor will turn on the Greens. They’ll do a preference deal with the Liberal-National Coalition to put the Greens last on ballot papers across the country and try to destroy them as a mainstream party altogether. Sound extreme? Well, some senior Labor figures now see this as the party’s only hope of keeping it alive in any form at all to continue its proud record of governing Australia stretching back more than a century. “May you live in interesting times”, goes Chinese saying.Comment:This will happen and the sooner the better, for Labor likes nothing more than a good knifing of a failed leader at five minutes to midnight. Gillard is just waiting for a tap on the shoulder. Those currently plotting to knife her are the same conspirators that installed her after stabbing Rudd in the back last year, sooner or later they might get it right. If they do go with Shorten, it would be something of a fleeting surge for him, not unlike the act Hawke pulled on Hayden, of which I was reminded as to just how repulsive he was then (and still is) in a film on Foxtel on Sunday night. To think that Australia had that egocentric bodgie as our PM for nine years, it doesn’t say much for the quality of the electorate, does it?Admittedly, Shorten has a bit more style than Hawke, but he’s still only a lacklustre pick from a party devoid of any real talent. The reason I think this change will happen, is because Labor knows that the loathsome rural independents only have one self-serving objective in mind, and that is to qualify for huge retirement payments that are triggered around the end of 2011 and early in 2012. They couldn’t care less what happens to Gillard, so long as they get their ‘super qualification dates’ attained. Charming – isn’t it? Mind you, if any ‘one’ of them had a grain of decency and a genuine concern for Australia, they would pull the pin on Labor and force an election but pigs can’t fly as far as I’m aware. I don’t believe Rudd would cause a problem, but then wouldn’t it be lovely if he did, since we know he’s nether forgiven nor forgotten their act of treachery.The political landscape would alter slightly with Shorten as the ALP leader, for the reasons mentioned above – he being a far more acceptable type than the hapless one who currently, unfittingly, occupies The Lodge. But Shorten is someone that can only be called extemporaneous prime minister material as he’s only been in parliament for 5 minutes. However, this Labor government, as Graham Richardson so eloquently put it – “ .is f***ed”. The electorate are definitely not buying this ridiculous carbon tax sham for starters, plus they’re fed up with the never-ending wholesale mismanagement of everything this bunch of morons try to implement, so irrespective of whatever leadership stunt they try-on, nobody is listening and they want them out urgently. The sooner Labor acknowledges that they’ve totally stuffed up the whole shooting match and call an election, the better. I tend to think the point above about the Greens being their biggest worry for the future, is spot on, as let’s face it – these feckless ex-union types are all about self preservation, what the hell else are they going to do – go back to the union?

By: Taqi

Taqi — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 01:38:37 +0000

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By: dean

dean — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 05:49:53 +0000

There are many libs in sheeps clothing in the labour party and they dont care about the polity…

Jessica hun,,, darling you haven’t got all the public fooled.

f…off as you would say also were not all plebs dear!!