Game Day 2022 Federal Election!

[Dogs_r_barking]

Senate the have to get support from the Greens anyway. So, they still must negotiate on all legislation. There are no Teals in the Senate, so they need Green support anyway.

The preference flows from One Nation, United Australia, Animal Justice and Liberal Democrats; are not kind to Labor. Labor gets the smallest % of those and usually Greens get double the flow of Labor (Liberals get ~50%). It is highly unlikely that Labor can get back into the contest in Brisbane and will finish third.

Macnamara, Labor will finish with the most votes of Labor, Greens and Liberals, so will win that one comfortably.

Gilmore must be counted until the end…. That is super marginal.

Animal Justice put Labor second as they have agreed to stop the live sheep export if they get elected.

 

[LittleG]

Animal Justice put Labor second as they have agreed to stop the live sheep export if they get elected.

Probably delivered them 6-8 seats. Not sure I agree with the policy….

 

[Mr. Walker]

Serious question. Assuming Labor gets to 76 seats in the lower house, what role do the Teal independents play now? I get that Labor must negotiate with the Greens in the Senate but aren’t the Teals superfluous to all other parties? Can’t Albo just tell them to get stuffed? ( I know he won’t do that , burning bridges etc) but IMO it seems the power for change they expected has lessened)

 

[LittleG]

Serious question. Assuming Labor gets to 76 seats in the lower house, what role do the Teal independents play now? I get that Labor must negotiate with the Greens in the Senate but aren’t the Teals superfluous to all other parties? Can’t Albo just tell them to get stuffed? ( I know he won’t do that , burning bridges etc) but IMO it seems the power for change they expected has lessened)

Unless Labor actually delivers the policies of the majority of the Teal’s; they risk having their own Teal’s lining up to run in Labor seats.
They need to act on:
Integrity commission
Rights for women
Climate change

Once they have done that, their primary vote will go up a lot….. unless the economy crashes and we go into recession.

I suspect that in 2028, that the electorates will have shifted so much, that the Coalition will ignore Kooyong and be targeting Broadmeadows. Which I think is crazy stuff, as their taxation policies are better for the opposite electorates.

 

[The Buck]

I think this is the definitive analysis of the election.

The Age

Opinion​

Morrison government’s fall marks end of Howard-era ascendancy​

Richard Flanagan​

May 26, 2022 — 5.00am

As the results rolled in it was difficult to grasp: the Liberals of the 2020s, eerily like the Soviet communists of the 1980s, were suddenly an anachronism. Like the Politburo, they too had become entrapped within their fervent ideologies and grown so distant from reality that they lost the moral legitimacy to govern. Power was now haemorrhaging away in a death agony of lost seats.

Morrison was widely credited as the architect of this annihilation. But perhaps he was no more than the sinister final act of a larger story that began decades earlier when John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996.

John Howard celebrates his election victory on March 2, 1996.Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

Of all Australian prime ministers, it is Howard who can rightly claim to be the most transformative, reshaping the nation so completely that, other than a Labor interregnum of six years, it has been conservative governments largely in his image ever since. Every issue that defined Morrison’s downfall had deep roots in Howard’s prime ministership.

It was Howard, after all, who from 1996 on campaigned internationally against binding global carbon emission reduction targets. His reasoning for doing so, he told cabinet in 1997, was that Australia was “a major exporter of energy”. His advocacy to key world leaders, cabinet papers reveal, proved “influential”. And so, we led the world backwards.

He similarly turned back a historic tide of national progress on everything from the republic to reconciliation, refused to even use the word multiculturalism in his early years of prime ministership, and set the dogs of xenophobia onto Australian politics, transforming refugees into a threatening invasion force.

He revelled in fomenting culture wars while gutting institutions and corroding civil society, attacking it whenever it stood up for the environment, the rights of citizens, workers, or of the weakest. He purged the Liberal Party of what were then called wets, the moderates of the day, paving the way for the far-right fundamentalist clique it has now become.

His success lay in speaking to what was smallest and worst in Australia’s breast: fear, greed, apathy and racism. It was a template for all that followed.

Howardism was to be taken up with a new aggression and misogyny by his self-declared love child, Tony Abbott; continued, despite his postpartum revisions, by Malcolm Turnbull; until there came its final decadent phase: the Morrison government, a rabble characterised by sleaze, scandal and self-interest.

By then, Howardism resembled a degenerative disease. What once had been merely cynical gestures to win votes or wedge opponents had transformed into a terminal cancer of mystical doctrine. They had come to believe their own baseless babble, and they did not get that harassment in the workplace was not part of the culture wars but lived experience. So too human-induced fires, floods and cyclones. They never realised that their ideology did not stand the test of reality: whether it be rain or flame or allegedly being raped metres away from the prime minister’s office.

It was widely noted that they didn’t get women, though, as Samantha Maiden noted, it was women who finally got them. At root, the problem was that they didn’t get people: not the old, who were left to die unnecessary, wretched deaths while they went to the cricket. Not anyone under 40 who would never own a home, nor the trans kids they damaged or the poor they may have driven to suicide with the illegal and evil “robodebt”, wasting nearly $2 billion of our money in the service of persecution.

They didn’t get kindness or decency, that the suffering in the theatres of cruelty they called border defence not only distressed but shamed many Australians. They didn’t get that their ceaseless rorting and corruption offended people who built lives around trust and honesty.

While our artists were loathed, our scientists belittled, and our journalists pursued by a politicised federal police for exposing alleged war crimes, party hacks and corporate drones were routinely rewarded with sinecures and board seats and the bling of yet another Order of Australia, a currency now more debased than the Iranian rial.

And as though it were the play within the play, Andrew Hastie, rising star of the Liberal Party, described a recognisable moral hell in recent testimony to the Ben Roberts-Smith trial.



Confirming comments he had made to journalists about being a SAS soldier in Afghanistan, Hastie said: “There were days where I felt it was a closed universe, where you can make up your own morality on the grounds you wanted to and it was a dark and haunting and incredibly unnatural feeling”.

Invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famously about a man’s descent into murderous tyranny, he said, “some guys went up the Congo.” Hastie spoke of dreams he’d since had where “we have killed one of our own guys and covered it up”. He said it spoke to “moral trauma”.

Hastie’s dream strangely resonates with a larger, national moral trauma that has played out over decades, reaching in Morrison its feverish apotheosis. Australia was an increasingly illiberal democracy in which we were ever more unsafe and more unequal. We were both inured to and haunted by the idea that politics without a moral basis was the only politics possible.

On Saturday, that nightmare abruptly ended. It turned out politicians couldn’t make up their own morality to explain away their crimes without consequence. The historic significance of the election is that it was the people who put an end to not only the Morrison government but also the Howard ascendancy and with it, the two-party system.

Many weren’t voting for a party or a program. Many had lived the Armageddon of climate change as flood and fire and drought. They were not afraid of change for the better. Trusting in each other, in the idea that politicians should answer to them, they held to the principle that they no longer would be told who their member would be and what that member would stand for. They were standing up for a future they were brave enough to believe we should, and we can, address. They dared to hope.

That night, a post popped up on my phone showing a photo of two small girls, each with an arm around the other, smiling at a TV screen depicting the election result. It was the Murugappan children, Australians both, imprisoned with their asylum seeker parents for years at a cost of millions of our dollars.
A caption said it all: “Thank you, Australia. It is finally time to bring Priya, Nades, Kopi and Tharni home to Bilo.”

The Murugappans were finally going home to Biloela and it felt that we were going home with them, that Australia was returning to its best instincts and away from its worst.

But those who had chosen to go up the Congo were not returning, not now, not for a very long time, and perhaps never.


Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep

 

[D Mitchell]

Serious question. Assuming Labor gets to 76 seats in the lower house, what role do the Teal independents play now? I get that Labor must negotiate with the Greens in the Senate but aren’t the Teals superfluous to all other parties? Can’t Albo just tell them to get stuffed? ( I know he won’t do that , burning bridges etc) but IMO it seems the power for change they expected has lessened)

The 7 "teal" seats are superfluous, their climate change and ICAC credentials aren't necessary in the Reps and the Coalition had agreed to the Paris Agreement Targets anyway. Even if the Coalition had won all those 7 seats, it's still a long way short of the Government in the Reps.

 

[dogwatch]

Serious question. Assuming Labor gets to 76 seats in the lower house, what role do the Teal independents play now? I get that Labor must negotiate with the Greens in the Senate but aren’t the Teals superfluous to all other parties? Can’t Albo just tell them to get stuffed? ( I know he won’t do that , burning bridges etc) but IMO it seems the power for change they expected has lessened)

To a great extent that's true and it's why I wanted Labor NOT to reach a majority in its own right. However there will be parliamentary committees where they can have a voice on many matters which may include their core issues like integrity in government, climate change, electoral reform, the indigenous Voice to Parliament, etc. This gives them an opportunity to get headlines and gain traction. They will of course have the opportunity to speak in parliament where they may choose to highlight local issues and national ones. They will also be able to introduce private member's bills. They will no doubt prove adept (as Cathy McGowan did) at getting media attention for their pet issues.

There might develop a loose form of collaboration among these different or expanded forces entering the new parliament. For example, the fact that Labor won't have a majority in the Senate means they will need cross-bench support to get legislation approved. Now they could just get this from the Greens which should be enough (or close to it) but the Greens might also push back and, for example, say "no we don't want the ALP version of ICAC, we want the Helen Haines version" - i.e. the one she introduced in the last parliament as a private members bill in the House of Reps.

Further, if there is a referendum (most likely the one on the Indigenous Voice within the next 12 months, but potentially there could be something else) it will require fairly broad support across the political spectrum to be carried. The voices of the independents will be particularly important in that situation as they come with a reputation for fairness, moderation and intelligent reflection. People from all over the country who are not sure how to vote in such a referendum will be paying attention to those independent voices.

Perhaps another way to look at it is to consider that independents like Wilkie, McGowan, Haines, Katter, Steggall and Sharkey have cut through sufficiently to get re-elected in recent times. Their constituents must think they are getting value for their vote if they re-elect them.

And even if Labor gets to 76 seats what if for some reason there is a by-election in the next 12-18 months? An intransigent or arrogant Labor government might lose that by-election and suddenly find it only has 75 seats out of 151. Then it becomes a whole lot trickier.

So it would be a brave or stupid government that thumbed its nose at the wave of new independents. They don't just represent a handful of city electorates. They represent a new order of politics, and a hefty cohort of voters who have become unhitched from the two-party system. Both major parties should be trying very publicly to co-operate with them (or steal their thunder) in the hope of winning back those voters. They should not be turning their back.

 

[jaxie1]

I think this is the definitive analysis of the election.

The Age

Opinion​

Morrison government’s fall marks end of Howard-era ascendancy​

Richard Flanagan​

May 26, 2022 — 5.00am

As the results rolled in it was difficult to grasp: the Liberals of the 2020s, eerily like the Soviet communists of the 1980s, were suddenly an anachronism. Like the Politburo, they too had become entrapped within their fervent ideologies and grown so distant from reality that they lost the moral legitimacy to govern. Power was now haemorrhaging away in a death agony of lost seats.

Morrison was widely credited as the architect of this annihilation. But perhaps he was no more than the sinister final act of a larger story that began decades earlier when John Howard was elected prime minister in 1996.

John Howard celebrates his election victory on March 2, 1996.Credit:Simon O'Dwyer

Of all Australian prime ministers, it is Howard who can rightly claim to be the most transformative, reshaping the nation so completely that, other than a Labor interregnum of six years, it has been conservative governments largely in his image ever since. Every issue that defined Morrison’s downfall had deep roots in Howard’s prime ministership.

It was Howard, after all, who from 1996 on campaigned internationally against binding global carbon emission reduction targets. His reasoning for doing so, he told cabinet in 1997, was that Australia was “a major exporter of energy”. His advocacy to key world leaders, cabinet papers reveal, proved “influential”. And so, we led the world backwards.

He similarly turned back a historic tide of national progress on everything from the republic to reconciliation, refused to even use the word multiculturalism in his early years of prime ministership, and set the dogs of xenophobia onto Australian politics, transforming refugees into a threatening invasion force.

He revelled in fomenting culture wars while gutting institutions and corroding civil society, attacking it whenever it stood up for the environment, the rights of citizens, workers, or of the weakest. He purged the Liberal Party of what were then called wets, the moderates of the day, paving the way for the far-right fundamentalist clique it has now become.

His success lay in speaking to what was smallest and worst in Australia’s breast: fear, greed, apathy and racism. It was a template for all that followed.

Howardism was to be taken up with a new aggression and misogyny by his self-declared love child, Tony Abbott; continued, despite his postpartum revisions, by Malcolm Turnbull; until there came its final decadent phase: the Morrison government, a rabble characterised by sleaze, scandal and self-interest.

By then, Howardism resembled a degenerative disease. What once had been merely cynical gestures to win votes or wedge opponents had transformed into a terminal cancer of mystical doctrine. They had come to believe their own baseless babble, and they did not get that harassment in the workplace was not part of the culture wars but lived experience. So too human-induced fires, floods and cyclones. They never realised that their ideology did not stand the test of reality: whether it be rain or flame or allegedly being raped metres away from the prime minister’s office.

It was widely noted that they didn’t get women, though, as Samantha Maiden noted, it was women who finally got them. At root, the problem was that they didn’t get people: not the old, who were left to die unnecessary, wretched deaths while they went to the cricket. Not anyone under 40 who would never own a home, nor the trans kids they damaged or the poor they may have driven to suicide with the illegal and evil “robodebt”, wasting nearly $2 billion of our money in the service of persecution.

They didn’t get kindness or decency, that the suffering in the theatres of cruelty they called border defence not only distressed but shamed many Australians. They didn’t get that their ceaseless rorting and corruption offended people who built lives around trust and honesty.

While our artists were loathed, our scientists belittled, and our journalists pursued by a politicised federal police for exposing alleged war crimes, party hacks and corporate drones were routinely rewarded with sinecures and board seats and the bling of yet another Order of Australia, a currency now more debased than the Iranian rial.

And as though it were the play within the play, Andrew Hastie, rising star of the Liberal Party, described a recognisable moral hell in recent testimony to the Ben Roberts-Smith trial.



Confirming comments he had made to journalists about being a SAS soldier in Afghanistan, Hastie said: “There were days where I felt it was a closed universe, where you can make up your own morality on the grounds you wanted to and it was a dark and haunting and incredibly unnatural feeling”.

Invoking Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, famously about a man’s descent into murderous tyranny, he said, “some guys went up the Congo.” Hastie spoke of dreams he’d since had where “we have killed one of our own guys and covered it up”. He said it spoke to “moral trauma”.

Hastie’s dream strangely resonates with a larger, national moral trauma that has played out over decades, reaching in Morrison its feverish apotheosis. Australia was an increasingly illiberal democracy in which we were ever more unsafe and more unequal. We were both inured to and haunted by the idea that politics without a moral basis was the only politics possible.

On Saturday, that nightmare abruptly ended. It turned out politicians couldn’t make up their own morality to explain away their crimes without consequence. The historic significance of the election is that it was the people who put an end to not only the Morrison government but also the Howard ascendancy and with it, the two-party system.

Many weren’t voting for a party or a program. Many had lived the Armageddon of climate change as flood and fire and drought. They were not afraid of change for the better. Trusting in each other, in the idea that politicians should answer to them, they held to the principle that they no longer would be told who their member would be and what that member would stand for. They were standing up for a future they were brave enough to believe we should, and we can, address. They dared to hope.

That night, a post popped up on my phone showing a photo of two small girls, each with an arm around the other, smiling at a TV screen depicting the election result. It was the Murugappan children, Australians both, imprisoned with their asylum seeker parents for years at a cost of millions of our dollars.
A caption said it all: “Thank you, Australia. It is finally time to bring Priya, Nades, Kopi and Tharni home to Bilo.”

The Murugappans were finally going home to Biloela and it felt that we were going home with them, that Australia was returning to its best instincts and away from its worst.

But those who had chosen to go up the Congo were not returning, not now, not for a very long time, and perhaps never.


Richard Flanagan is an Australian writer. He won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his novel The Narrow Road to the Deep

I have long considered Howard to be one of the worst Prime Ministers Australia has ever had - getting Australia into illegal wars, adding taxes eg GST, affecting poor people mainly and numerous other things

 

[King Harold]

I have long considered Howard to be one of the worst Prime Ministers Australia has ever had - getting Australia into illegal wars, adding taxes eg GST, affecting poor people mainly and numerous other things

But , give him credit , he led the gun reforms with courage and great common sense.
Shame other‘s in other parts of the world lack the same ticker.

 

[LittleG]

The 7 "teal" seats are superfluous, their climate change and ICAC credentials aren't necessary in the Reps and the Coalition had agreed to the Paris Agreement Targets anyway. Even if the Coalition had won all those 7 seats, it's still a long way short of the Government in the Reps.

The Teals, Labor and The Greens want legislated targets. They may also push for much higher targets, which is what we need to do to stop major changes to our climate.


I will put it this way:
Not even The Greens policies (implemented in ALL countries worldwide) are enough to prevent our Climate Crisis. As even IF all countries get to ‘Net Zero’ emissions tomorrow….. it won’t stop the planet from warming. We are tackling the symptoms and not the disease. Having as many independents in parliament may allow us to change tack and lead the world towards what we need to do. Growing trees on its own is not going to solve anything.

At some stage I will finish writing up what is required and will share then.

 

[Norm De Guerre]

But , give him credit , he led the gun reforms with courage and great common sense.
Shame other‘s in other parts of the world lack the same ticker.

I think the amount of credit that he gets for that decision is way overstated. However given the rest of his legacy, I understand why people always bring this up as the crowning achievement of what was otherwise an incredibly divisive political career.

Literally any reasonable human being in a position of power would've made the same decision given the amount of trauma involved.

This image is a better representation of Howards lasting and actual legacy.

It still bemuses me that the LNP wheel him out every election cycle like he's some kind off beloved elder statesman.

 

[King Harold]

I think the amount of credit that he gets for that decision is way overstated. However given the rest of his legacy, I understand why people always bring this up as the crowning achievement of what was otherwise an incredibly divisive political career.

Literally any reasonable human being in a position of power would've made the same decision given the amount of trauma involved.

This is Howards lasting and actual legacy.

It still bemuses me that the LNP wheel him out every election cycle like he's some kind off beloved elder statesman.

Yes the Tampa scandal was a disgrace ,
and yes the gun issue was his responsibility to lead , but he did and was unwavering . So good on him for that !
Personally I was never a great fan either.

 

[dogwatch]

Yes the Tampa scandal was a disgrace ,
and yes the gun issue was his responsibility to lead , but he did and was unwavering . So good on him for that !
Personally I was never a great fan either.

Howard came along 940 years too late. If only he had turned back the boats in 1066.

But then I guess you wouldn't have become such a one-eyed Doggies fan, KH ...

 

[King Harold]

Howard came along 940 years too late. If only he had turned back the boats in 1066.

But then I guess you wouldn't have become such a one-eyed Doggies fan, KH ...

 

[footscray1973]

Howard and Costello had an opportunity to consider, fund and initiate infrastructure projects that would help the nation move from the 20th to the 21st century. Creaking infrastructure that was long overdue for overhaul or replacement, or new infrastructure (e.g. maybe their own version of the NBN).

Hell, even if they'd only committed to upgrading the national train network, and introducing high speed services between the eastern seaboard capitals as a start, with underpasses/overpasses, etc to eliminate rail/road intersections along the routes, we would be reaping the rewards now and into the future. And the cost, while significant at the time, would have saved millions/billions compared to if/when it eventuates.

The problem is neither Howard, nor his gormless treasurer, had any VISION for the future of the nation. The best Howard could do was look in the rear vision mirror at a non-existent idyllic life he imagined from the 50s and 60s, where migrants like my European post-WW2 parents were largely invisible to Howard and his ilk, and women were also invisible other than to be housewives, and so on for most other minorities.

In the same way that Menzies wasted the mining boom and by the time he retired had no significant achievements to show for 17 years of govt, his wannabe acolyte spent 11 years achieving essentially the same thing. Nothing. But we've got the Future Fund, so Costello and David Murray can continue to play with tax-payers' money and invest in the odd o/s tobacco industry!

It is also allegedly funding the NDIS, or at least it was planned to in the 2013 ALP govt budget, yet somehow under 9 years of Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison, and with a value over 15 billion, the NDIS seems to be more focussed on funding a legal service to either prevent people accessing the scheme, or prevent people accessing more money than a bunch of people with no disabilities deem the applicants are worth.

So that's a great legacy I suppose, for not just Howard, but his LNP successors too.

What a bunch of useless ***ts.

 

[Dogs_r_barking]

I have long considered Howard to be one of the worst Prime Ministers Australia has ever had - getting Australia into illegal wars, adding taxes eg GST, affecting poor people mainly and numerous other things

I loathe him. His core and non core election promises, the interference with school curriculums to dumb down kids around their civil rights and responsibilities. Unfunding the Aboriginal legal services, his blatant racism, especially around Marbo and his fearmongering, misogyny hatred of the poor, he is a mean spirited nasty little man. (End of rant)

 

[D Mitchell]

But , give him credit , he led the gun reforms with courage and great common sense.
Shame other‘s in other parts of the world lack the same ticker.

3 years later, East Timor. 5 more years, the Indian Tsunami, newly elected SBY appreciated Howard's leadership in the immediate $60 mil aid, expanded the following year to $1bil. 'You were the first on the phone. You were the first ..." Conservatives have a capacity for compassion that virtue signalers can't comprehend, let alone match.

 

[D Mitchell]

The Teals, Labor and The Greens want legislated targets. They may also push for much higher targets, which is what we need to do to stop major changes to our climate.


I will put it this way:
Not even The Greens policies (implemented in ALL countries worldwide) are enough to prevent our Climate Crisis. As even IF all countries get to ‘Net Zero’ emissions tomorrow….. it won’t stop the planet from warming. We are tackling the symptoms and not the disease. Having as many independents in parliament may allow us to change tack and lead the world towards what we need to do. Growing trees on its own is not going to solve anything.

At some stage I will finish writing up what is required and will share then.

Australia is responsible for, what, 2 % of emissions ? Your homework for the weekend LittleG, you might come up with the answer to the question you've put to yourself, albeit far more elegantly, what's the point if CCP China, Russia, the US, India, Old MacDonald and his cows aren't on board ? Don't think of it as an onerous task, rather an opportunity of persuading potential voters / financial contributors.

 

[D Mitchell]

Howard came along 940 years too late. If only he had turned back the boats in 1066.

...

But for Harold, you'd be posting as hundwaecce

 

[NBates]

I never like John Howard, but I had been saying for 12 months (probably more) out loud on a regular basis (as he would get up my goat every time he opened his mouth or was on public display) that Morrison is the WORST PM this country has ever had. He never seemed to DO anything about anything and I always imagined his time was taken up in his office talking to advisors and colleagues about how he could improve his image or what crap he could spin when he was pushed by reporters. So at least I credit Howard for the gun laws when he would have had the regional reps going off their heads. I often think of myself as an outsider, but on this occasion the wave of common sentiment about the guy reflected mine - thank goodness for that!

 

[D Mitchell]

I never like John Howard, but I had been saying for 12 months (probably more) out loud on a regular basis (as he would get up my goat every time he opened his mouth or was on public display) that Morrison is the WORST PM this country has ever had. He never seemed to DO anything about anything and I always imagined his time was taken up in his office talking to advisors and colleagues about how he could improve his image or what crap he could spin when he was pushed by reporters. So at least I credit Howard for the gun laws when he would have had the regional reps going off their heads. I often think of myself as an outsider, but on this occasion the wave of common sentiment about the guy reflected mine - thank goodness for that!

Not all, NBates. It's one thing to go personal, ask Plibersek, PM's aren't dictators, they lead their parties. PM ? There's only one job more daunting and that's a judicial appointment.

 

[The Buck]

Conservatives have a capacity for compassion that virtue signalers can't comprehend, let alone match.

 

[LittleG]

Australia is responsible for, what, 2 % of emissions ? Your homework for the weekend LittleG, you might come up with the answer to the question you've put to yourself, albeit far more elegantly, what's the point if CCP China, Russia, the US, India, Old MacDonald and his cows aren't on board ? Don't think of it as an onerous task, rather an opportunity of persuading potential voters / financial contributors.

The cost is the only issue. You don’t need those countries involved at all….

Knowing that the Oil companies knew about climate change in the 1970’s and did nothing about it, I am pretty sure I can sue them for the cost to fix that mess…. I just need a very good legal team to get the cash.

 

[Dogs_r_barking]

I never like John Howard, but I had been saying for 12 months (probably more) out loud on a regular basis (as he would get up my goat every time he opened his mouth or was on public display) that Morrison is the WORST PM this country has ever had. He never seemed to DO anything about anything and I always imagined his time was taken up in his office talking to advisors and colleagues about how he could improve his image or what crap he could spin when he was pushed by reporters. So at least I credit Howard for the gun laws when he would have had the regional reps going off their heads. I often think of myself as an outsider, but on this occasion the wave of common sentiment about the guy reflected mine - thank goodness for that!

Agree, I have immense respect for Howard‘s response to gun laws.

 

[D Mitchell]

The cost is the only issue. You don’t need those countries involved at all….

Knowing that the Oil companies knew about climate change in the 1970’s and did nothing about it, I am pretty sure I can sue them for the cost to fix that mess…. I just need a very good legal team to get the cash.

I know a lawyer who might be interested but what instructions are you going to give him/her when he/she asks Waddayumeenby "You don’t need those countries involved at all….? Please explain ? You wouldn't be trying to get out of weekend homework, would you now ?