Category Archives: Abbott

The Politician’s Guide to Democracy: Part One – Five things Democracy is NOT (#ItsTime)

Are you a Politician who can’t get his own way? Have you put forward perfectly reasonable policies to the people of your country – only to hear the whiny cries of your ungrateful constituents? Are you trying to get some legislation through parliament, but find that those unreasonable Politicians in opposition won’t play ball? Are you sick of people ignoring your

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You can’t fight an ideological war by shutting physical borders

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

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Abbott: Master of lies, damned lies and statistics

“There were three gradations of inveracity – there were lies, there were damned lies, and there were statistics” (Arthur Balfour, 1892) You may have noticed that Abbott and other members of the front bench regularly throw around numbers and statistics to back up what they’re saying. Numbers and statistics are quantifiable, so when they are used, they make the speaker sound like

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The Snouties: Awarding the most ‘On the Snout’ pollies

As we all know, good government started six months ago – following Abbott’s near demise as our Prime Minister. And this last parliamentary sitting fortnight in Canberra has been another stellar example of this. There’s been press conferences galore, leaky cabinets and question-time performances worthy of entry into the Tonies (pun intended). We also learned this week that one of the government’s key

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A ‘People’s vote’ on Marriage Equality: A repeat of the Republic debate?

Following last week’s cabinet discussion on marriage equality, Tony Abbott announced that: “going into the next election, you’ll have the Labor Party which wants [marriage equality] to go to a Parliamentary vote and you’ve got the Coalition that wants it to go to a people’s vote” (12 August 2015) According to our Prime Minister, he is champion of the people’s

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Ok. I’m convinced. Terrorism is THE BIGGEST threat to Australia right now. 

I believe that terrorism is THE biggest threat to us right now – not because I believe Abbott’s rhetoric suggesting that terrorists are about to invade our shores, but because terrorism is successfully being used to distract us from what we should really be panicking about – the very real threat to our ability to live on this planet.

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Abbott the Dragon Slayer: The art of making scary mountains out of tiny molehills

Unless you’ve been on a desert island or in a coma, you’ve heard Tony Abbott boast over and over and over again that: “We’ve had a lot of really significant achievements over the last year: We stopped the boats. We scrapped the carbon tax. We scrapped the mining tax“ These three issues were a key part of Abbott’s 2013 election

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Understanding ‘Abbott-Speak’ – Truthiness to English Dictionary

Listening to Tony Abbott speak can be confusing. One day he’s saying something like “Let me be as categoric as I can, the GST won’t change, full stop, end of story“. Then, in the very first budget brought down by his government, the GST is immediately put under the spotlight – leading up to last week, where he praised the States for

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Tony Abbott: it’s called the House of Representatives, not the House of Rulers.

“Heads should roll“ declared Abbott a few weeks back, after the ABC dared to do what every other TV channel was doing by replaying Zaky Mallah’s appearance on Q and A. A few days later, Abbott told us that his government will be putting forward a Bill to facilitate “the modern form of banishment“, allowing the Government to strip away citizenship from

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