Cranky Queenslander

The Culprit

I was listening to the Twister Wire podcast this morning, trying to get more information about the NBN, while I try to decide if it’s going to be a good thing or a giant waste of taxpayers money. While I thought the content of the episode I was listening to was okay, the presenter, one Phil Dobbie, decided to destroy any creditiblity he had by dropping a totally irrelevant and completely wrong statement at the end;

“For Tony Abbott, he wants to show how he can stop asylum seekers, trying to escape repressive regimes, unless those repressive regimes have been accommodating enough to give them a passport.”

What a bunch of tripe that is! Is this guy for real? Let’s stop for a minute and check the facts;

These “asylum seekers” pay people smugglers large sums of money to sneek across multiple borders, and eventually be packed onto rickety boats for a life threatening ride to Australia.

There is no reason they could not claim asylum in other countries they pass through, and our governments refugee resettlement program would then take some of them, as would many other countries.

Let’s also remember that plenty of them do have documents with them when they leave, showing who they are and where they are from, but then go on to destroy these papers once they get within range of Australia. Why do they do that, one must wonder?

Considering what they pay to the smugglers, it’s pretty clear many of them have the means to do things properly, so the motivation for sneaking into Australia must be challenged. Is it simply that we are the soft touch, that hands out the big bucks to new arrivals?

Even if none of that moves you, how about the fact that these rickety old boats are a death trap, and people do die both on the boats, and under the waves when they inevitably sink. The people arguing for a relaxing of our border protection laws are arguing for more people crammed on more boats and more suffering and more death.

This is NOT the kind of moving forward I vote for.

Clearly Australian media outlets are struggling to come up with good meaty stories this Election, so they are resorting to making up stuff to fill airtime and column inches.

Take, for example, the ABC’s ludicrous assertion today Tony Abbott has been anything but crystal clear on the Coalitions IR policy going into this election;

@abcnews 11:51am via TweetDeck
Abbott stumbles on IRAbbott stumbles on IR changes

If you go on to read the full article, it is clear the ABC is drawing a VERY long bow here; What Tony Abbott is clearly saying is that;

• The coalition will not change the IR laws during the next term of government
• That nobody, including the ABC, can forsee that the laws will never need changing

Surely it is entirely unreasonable to think that any given law will NEVER need amending? Of course the IR laws will change, the world doesn’t stop turning, so lets get over this rubbish, and move onto working out who we are going to vote for on the basis of real policy and not journalist rubbish.

Normally I wouldn’t give anyone silly enough to run for parliament under the “sex party” banner any airtime at all, but the claims made in a recent press release are worth looking at, as an example of something that is clearly a political beat up designed to get press attention.

Sandy Gutman, running for the seat of Waringah, says;

“Last Thursday I had a Godwin Gretch-type character call me from the Tax Office and tell me that over the next five weeks of the election campaign and for no particular reason, I am to be audited”

I like how he throws “for no particular reason” in there. It makes it sound very conspiratorial, doesn’t it? Well Sandy, the fact is that the ATO audits many many people every, for no particular reason, other than to ensure that people are playing by the rules. If you have your affairs in proper order, then it should be a painless process. This is not a conspiracy or even a big deal.

In fact, I’m sure there are plenty of small business owners being audited right now, who wonder why Sandy should get special treatment because he is an aspiring politician.

But there’s more to this conspiracy, apparently;

Yesterday afternoon his long-running website, www.austentayshus.com suddenly vanished off the world wide web. “Neither I, nor my service provider, have any idea what has happened here”

Firstly, if your hosting provider doesn’t know what happened, then it’s time to get a new hosting provider! Honestly, nobody else in their right might would accept “I don’t know what happened to your website” as a suitable response.

Secondly, a bit of digging around and it’s pretty clear the site has been taken down at the hosting end. So it’s clear that either Sandy or his hosting provider know what’s going on, and this is simply a publicity stunt.

Now for the final bit of irony;

[Sandy] said he was a hard-working stand-up comedian who paid his taxes and led a sober and celibate lifestyle.

So why is it that a celibate individual is running for parliament under the auspices of the Sex Party?

It’s a good thing there is no chance of this individual winning the seat.

It remains to be seen if the issue of illegal arrivals will make it to the top of the issue list this election, but it is clear that Julia Gillard’s attempt to neutralise the issue before calling the election has failed miserably.

The obvious point is that she is proposing to roll out the form governments solution; The previous coalition government managed to completely stop the flow of illegals being smuggled into Australia by transporting the arrivals to 3rd party countries and processing their claims for asylum there. This saved lives and was widely popular, but the incoming deputy PM Julia Gillard was happy to throw that solution away and simply wait for the flood to resume.

A secondary but worthy point is that Julia Gillard has acted pretty arrogantly, naming East Timor as the site for her new offshore processing facility, without even ringing the East Timorese leader beforehand to float the idea. The backpeddling after that stuff up as epic to watch, and I think we need to really put the spotlight on the new PM and make sure she explains in great detail what her plans really are.

Even then, can we be sure she’ll follow through if elected?

News reported by the ABC that a South Australian Liberal candidate has been assaulted while campaiging.

I’m really hoping to hear that Julia Gillard comes out and denounces this action today; Violence is never acceptable, and bashing a politician because you don’t agree with their views has to be one of the stupidest reasons to start a fight I’ve ever heard of.

I don’t know what these fools hoped to achieve by this; Here’s hoping this kind of thing is not widespread in Labor supporters.

It’s that time again, so I think I should get back into blogging and make a bit of noise. There’s certainly plenty to look at, and plenty the current government has done to damage our country.

Julia Gillard obviously has a serious credibility problem going into this election; After backing Kevin Rudd for so long, to just turn up one day and roll him shows that she’s only too happy to backflip if it suits her personally. It has to make you wonder what else she might backflip on if we elect her.

What do you think will be the big issues this time around?