Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Treasurer Scott Morrison were out in force today, continuing to ridicule Labor’s plan for a Royal Commission into the Banking and Financial Services Sector and announcing further details of their own plan – to restore the funding previously cut from ASIC by the LNP through a ‘user-pays’ model. More significantly, Turnbull and Morrison are proposing that the
Read more
As the campaign for a Australia’s Federal election on July 2nd kicked off in earnest this week, we’ve been hearing two key messages from the LNP: Message one: We need to save the Construction sector Message two: Leave the Banking and Financial Services sector alone Both these messages are unpopular with around two thirds of Australians – making them strange choices to open a
Read more
While the government scrambles to look for ways to increase revenue and cut spending, one group of sacred cows who seem largely unperturbed by these ongoing discussions are Australia’s largest companies. That might be because around one in three of them pays no tax at all. And for those that do pay tax, there is talk of cutting the corporate tax rate in the future. It
Read more
I hate Huntsman Spiders. Correction – I am terrified of them. It doesn’t matter that I know they can’t kill me. They are a HYUGE, brown, hairy spider – and when I see one, my heart starts to race, the Adrenalin starts pumping and all I can think of is that it must die. IMMEDIATELY. OK, maybe they aren’t hairy
Read more
There’s been a lot of noise over the past few weeks about how changes to negative gearing could lower housing prices. According to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull: “[Labor] is putting at risk Australia’s most important asset; they’re putting at risk the fundamental asset base of our economy.” (Malcolm Turnbull, 29 February 2016) But in the words of Daryl Kerrigan from the movie The
Read more
They said it would never happen. From comedians to serious commentators, Donald Trump may have been leading in the polls – but when it came down to it, they said that the American people wouldn’t actually vote for him. But that was 2015, and following some actual real voting over the last month, the narrative has now shifted from ‘they aren’t going to elect him‘
Read more
“The operation of any electoral system, any voting system, should be to clearly and transparently translate the wish of the voter into a parliamentary result.” .. .so said Malcolm Turnbull yesterday as he introduced legislation into parliament aimed at curtailing the potential of independent or micro-party senators to achieve election by stealth – solely through the distribution of preferences. Nick Xenophon – one
Read more
It’s a federal election year – and although a date hasn’t yet been set, all the political ducks are starting to line up in rows as the triennial wooing of the Australian voter begins. They aren’t really wooing ‘us’ of course – what they actually want is our votes. And with the focus put on polls by both politicians and the media, you’d be
Read more
(An update to this article was added on 18 November.) Following the attacks in Paris on the weekend, there is little doubt that we – along with most of the rest of the Western world – are at war with ISIL. And at the risk of stating the obvious, the key to winning any war is knowing who the enemy is and
Read more
As news came out yesterday evening that a Syrian refugee passport was found next to one of the terrorists in the Paris attacks on Friday, predictably the media pounced, and all the right wing refugee-demonisers came out in force. Our very own stop-the-boats-fetishest, Tony Abbott, spoke with his media team – the Daily Terrorgraph, sorry Daily Telegraph – who today published
Read more
Progressive Conversation 