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You do realise just how muc legislation she was able to get through with a hung parliament

You need to read this article by noted lefty Peter Van Oselen.....but do go on with your delusion by all means.......ain't reality a bitch.....

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opi...k=15ee26a52dd48f38aa91063b6e0809a8-1468055327



Peter van Onselen

Contributing editor
Canberra

HOW did we get to a point in the national debate where a government judges its success or failure according to the number of pieces of legislation passed? Surely what matters is the quality, not the quantity, of the legislation - in particular the quality of the contested legislation, for that is what distinguishes the two major parties vying for control of the government benches.

Government ministers have enjoyed using the number of pieces of legislation passed to demonstrate the success of the 43rd parliament. Anthony Albanese said last year: "We've now passed 307 pieces of legislation through the House of Representatives. The opposition haven't focused on that debate." Said Jason Clare more recently: "Despite all the negativity ... this parliament has passed 482 pieces of legislation." Just last week independent Rob Oakeshott crowed during an interview about the amount of legislation passed. Independent MP Tony Windsor did the same. It now stands at more than 550 pieces of legislation passed by the minority parliament.

What they don't tell you when they use these numbers as a retort to Tony Abbott's accusation that the government has been a failure is that the Coalition has opposed only 13 per cent of the legislation.

What they also fail to tell you is that the opposition, supporting 87 per cent of legislation passed, is on par with Labor's record in opposition during the Howard years.

So what of the 13 per cent passed? A government passing legislation opposed by its opponents that goes on to benefit the nation is likely to be politically rewarded. One that passes legislation that fails to deliver on promises is likely to be punished at the ballot box.

It is a pretty simple equation. It is the quality of contested legislation, not the quantity of uncontested legislation, that matters.

Most legislation isn't controversial and receives bipartisan support. Quality policy and popular opinion on contested legislation are what's at issue. Labor has failed on both counts. While late-term legislation such as DisabilityCare may qualify as worthy policy, it wasn't contested. And its implementation will be the responsibility of whichever party wins the next poll. The disability legislation is not part of the contested policy debate, even if Bill Shorten individually and the Labor government collectively deserve credit for putting the issue on the agenda.

There are three key areas that make up a significant proportion of legislation Labor has introduced that the Coalition has opposed: the mining tax, the carbon tax and bills to scrap the Australian Building and Construction Commission. Each of these pieces of legislation fails in one or both of the tests mentioned: quality and popular support.

The mining tax was negotiated in a closed room between Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan and the nation's three big mining companies. It was hastily arranged soon after Kevin Rudd was ousted as leader, and experts immediately claimed it was unlikely to raise the revenues budgeted for.

No Treasury bureaucrats were in the room with the Prime Minister and Treasurer when they struck the deal.

In sharp contrast, the mining giants had some of the best taxation specialists in the room with them to ensure they landed a sweet deal, which they did. A mining tax projected to raise billions of dollars raised virtually nothing in its first six months. It was a failure of quality that then became a failure of popular support.

The carbon tax failed the test of popular support because it was a negotiated solution to climate-change action between Labor and the Greens that saw Gillard break an election pledge.

Subsequently, the details suffered on the quality test because the carbon price now has a per tonne price point out of step with the price in other carbon trading systems. This threatens the ability of the Australian system to integrate on the world stage. If the price collapses once it floats as part of an emissions trading scheme, the compensation package becomes costly. If the floor price is too high, Australia continues to be out of step.



The third area of contested policy - bills to abolish the ABCC - may not have garnered the headlines that the mining and carbon taxes have. But it has hardly been something the government can hang a re-election campaign on.

A further area of contested legislation is school education reform: the so-called Gonski package. There are internal divisions within the Coalition, with NSW supporting it even though the federal Coalition does not. It is unsurprising that Labor is seeking to focus on this policy script in the lead-up to the election. That's not to say that the package isn't without its problems. For a start, the serious dollars do not start flowing into schools for years to come, and there is little guarantee that when they do start flowing they will be efficiently spent. But education policy is relatively safe ground for Labor, backed up by long-term polling trends that show voters trust Labor on education more substantially than the Coalition.

One of this government's biggest failures has been that it has tried to do too much in a short time. This has contributed to failures of implementation, never more apparent than in the mad scramble to spend money during the global financial crisis. The Howard government passed 150 to 200 pieces of legislation annually. Labor during the past two terms has passed 200 to 250 pieces of legislation annually.

The days of small government are behind us, and there are few signs the opposition is intent on returning to them if elected.

Peter van Onselen is a professor at the University of Western Australia.
 

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Mego Red

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Holy s**t.

Did you just call TONY ABBOTT'S ADVISOR and JOHN HOWARD'S BIOGRAPHER a noted lefty?!?

You've really fallen right off the edge, Bicks.

You're quoting The f***ing Australian - you might as well be quoting Al Jazeera as an impartial source.

This is one of the more insanely partisan things I've seen parceled up as "impartial".

Honestly, you should open your mind to some other sources and opinions.

You're quoting the opinion of someone who advised the Libs on workplace relations as if they're a fair judge of Labor politics!
 

Mego Red

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There are a LOT of folks from the left side of politics who we could be cutting and pasting into this thread, but frankly I'm bored of the partisanship and hostility.
 

Mego Red

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You're poorly informed, it is planned to be a rival group for the socialist group Get Up.

Socialist. LOL.

It's only folks from the hard right that use the phrase "socialist" to describe GetUp! - because it's an easy inflammatory thing to say.

There's very little about "socialist" ideals in GetUp - they're hardly campaigning for industries to be owned by government.

They want stronger environmental policies, social accountability on human rights, marriage equality - pretty simple liberal minded views.
 

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Holy s**t.

Did you just call TONY ABBOTT'S ADVISOR and JOHN HOWARD'S BIOGRAPHER a noted lefty?!?

You've really fallen right off the edge, Bicks.

You're quoting The f***ing Australian - you might as well be quoting Al Jazeera as an impartial source.

This is one of the more insanely partisan things I've seen parceled up as "impartial".

Honestly, you should open your mind to some other sources and opinions.

You're quoting the opinion of someone who advised the Libs on workplace relations as if they're a fair judge of Labor politics!

So it goes if someone works for a Parliamentarian at some stage to further their career that must necessarily follow that's ones chosen Political bent???

I suggest you avail yourself of a regular viewing of Mr. Van Onselen's program on Sky News and get back to me...

Barry Cassidy was Bob Hawke's adviser yet he's held out to be the bastion of impartiality by the left...

Haha John Howard's Biography....you just chose to leave out the word UNAUTHORISED, just an oversight no doubt?

I suppose you've read the said book, hardly a glowing endorsement of John Howard, in fact I found it quite the opposite.

Oh and I read plenty of the papers, wouldn't miss my daily dose the Guardian for quids just for the shits and giggles....
 

Mego Red

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Sky News??

Sky News is now as hard right as Rupert's other tv propaganda outlet, Fox News.

It's hilarious seeing you backtrack on Van Onselen - do you think Tony Abbott had him as an advisor because Tony wanted a different point of view?

His "impartiality" meant a Howard bio that was soft of any negatives that surrounded the man ("concluding that although the image of the ordinary bloke has helped his enduring popularity, he—like George Bush—possesses a number of uncommon strengths that have made him one of the most formidable leaders in Australian political history.") and his other books have ALL been positive to the right ("Liberals and Power", "Battleground", about how savvy they were compared to Abbott).
 

Mego Red

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And glad to hear you're reading the Guardian.

Little by little, opening your mind to progressive opinions might pull you back towards the middle ...
 

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Mego Red

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(From today's The Age)

Whatever the ultimate result of this election, this is not 2010. It is not the story of a governing party, riven with toxic personality wars, tearing itself apart for no good reason. And it is unlikely to be the story of a coherent minority government, carefully negotiating its way through two divided houses of parliament. It is instead the story of a party tearing itself apart for very good reasons.

And that means it is hugely compromised even in majority government, and uniquely ill-equipped to handle the task of minority government if it comes to that. That's because the Coalition is now deeply, irreconcilably divided on ideology. It is not merely the Liberal Party that is in crisis, but its very politics. Rudd despised Gillard out of a mortal wound to the ego. Malcolm Turnbull's reactionary flank despise him for what he believes. Turnbull's position is impossible because he now presides over a civil war that cannot be resolved; it can only be won.

For decades now we've witnessed the disintegration of the political left, which became incoherent as an idea once it wholeheartedly embraced Hawke and Keating's liberalism. Thereabouts it could no longer figure out if it was about class, or cultural ideas like freedom of choice and non-discrimination. Hence the cleavage whereby the "liberal left" now holds working-class people in disdain for their occasionally racist or sexist views. That's partly how we ended up with the Greens threatening to take seats from Labor, and a Labor Party plausibly claiming success even as its primary vote plumbs new depths. Now, though, we're seeing a similar disintegration on the right. The combined result is the complete fracture of what we once understood politics to be.

"We are the trustees of two great political traditions," John Howard said as Prime Minister, referring to both his party's classical liberal and conservative strands of thought. "And if you look at the history of the Liberal Party, it is at its best when it balances and blends those two traditions." That can work for a time, but eventually it cannot hold. These are not simply counterbalancing flavours to be blended in some magical ratio.

We're dealing with a fundamental contradiction here between a liberal tradition that values freedom over consensus, cultural experimentation over tradition, and individualism over group solidarity; and a conservative one that is much the reverse. Even a master like Howard couldn't hold it together in the end, his premiership crashing on the radically liberal shores of WorkChoices that simply did away with conservative family-values ideas like, say, predictable working hours.

It's also not like Turnbull didn't try. He gave in to his culture warriors on the Safe Schools program. He so clearly forwent his own judgment on climate change and same-sex marriage, committing himself to a plebiscite with little to commend it and that he clearly doesn't believe in. The trouble is that in the decade since Howard, this political fault line has become a chasm. That's why the most reactionary elements of the right are not merely culturally nationalist; they are economically protectionist as well. Here we find Pauline Hanson just as surely as we find Donald Trump and a certain strand of Brexiteer.

And truth be told, members of this wing of the Liberal Party have more in common with Hanson than their partisan commitments will allow them to admit. They pursue a version of what we might once have called left-wing economics – hence George Christensen's self-declared war on globalisation. They aren't a million miles away from the pre-Whitlam Labor party that, partly for protectionist reasons, were such devoted fans of the White Australia policy. And arguably, they're appealing to very much that kind of constituency. White, working class, predominantly male.

I suppose, then, it's true to say the next phase is an enormous test of Turnbull's leadership skills. But that's not particularly illuminating because it might just be that no one has the leadership skills to circle this particular square. These contradictory forces aren't being reconciled anywhere at the moment. The Tories who were once the most staunch champions of a Britain inside Europe have lost control of their party's heart. The Republicans have completely lost their party to Trump's anti-free trade tirades.

Turnbull hasn't yet lost his party, but perhaps that's because he never really had it. The Coalition struggled in this election because it never really offered a clear agenda. Its centrepiece was an expensive business tax cut of tiny economic benefit and even less political appeal.

But really, what other option was open to him? The ideological rift in the Coalition means your choices are either paralysis of the kind we saw this year, or some crazy-brave agenda of the kind Abbott delivered in the 2014 budget that made his government unelectable quicker than just about any other government in our history.

The major parties are now in structural decline – as Turnbull himself acknowledged this week – because they now are now symbols for a politics that no longer exists. Left and right have almost never been meaningful terms, but today whatever residual meaning they might have had has fragmented into nothing coherent.

If we were starting our political parties today, from scratch, we simply wouldn't have Labor and the Coalition. We'd have a reactionary neo-nationalist party straddling One Nation and the outer reaches of the Coalition. There would be a Greens-like party, suspicious of the free market, and built on concepts like equality and sustainability. And there would be a more centrist one, spanning parts of Labor and the Coalition: generally liberal, inclined towards free trade, and mostly culturally open.

This would be the natural party of government, but it would struggle to form a reliable majority. Most likely it would end up in a series of power-sharing arrangements with the party either side of it. It would be volatile, occasionally rancorous, but perhaps over time might find an uneasy equilibrium as we matured and got used to the fact that majorities don't really exist anymore. And really, that's what we have now, only without the labels that make the divisions in our politics intelligible. We proceed under the fiction that ideological divisions are failures of leadership. And so, we're left only with this spectacle of perpetual, exhausting crisis

Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist, the winner of the 2015 Quill award for best columnist, and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
 
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Waleed Aly is a Fairfax columnist, the winner of the 2015 Quill award for best columnist, and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
Geez, he's managed to pot every single politician and every party from the last 35 years in one article! Has anyone ever done anything right Waleed?
 

Mego Red

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Geez, he's managed to pot every single politician and every party from the last 35 years in one article! Has anyone ever done anything right Waleed?

He's actually not potting anyone. You should give it another read - it's an inciteful look at the fracturing of traditional versions of left/right politics that's happening internationally.

But you're right that Waleed is one of the few members of our media that isn't a party hack. He has a belief system that he holds with integrity, and I admire that.
 

Mego Red

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Interesting article (though a few years old).

Seems sensible that most journalists would have centrist left views - though I have a lot of sympathy for the fact that they have to then present right wing views in their writing. Seems inauthentic.

You'd rather the editors held the same views as those writing for them, but I guess the wealthier they become and the further they rise into media elite, the more conservative they become.
 
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He's actually not potting anyone. You should give it another read - it's an inciteful look at the fracturing of traditional versions of left/right politics that's happening internationally.

But you're right that Waleed is one of the few members of our media that isn't a party hack. He has a belief system that he holds with integrity, and I admire that.
Inciteful? Some members of political parties hold differing views on some things. Woah.

The idea of absolute left and right in politics is old school. Both parties are central now and only oppose the other's ideas because it's not their own, even though they may have once held that same view - see Turnbull on climate change and Shorten on the plebiscite.

There are investment bankers who care about climate change just as there are nurses who think the gays are a bit off putting.

Bill has had his fair share of juggling to do. I'm sure many of the rank & file of the CFMEU weren't impressed on the gay marriage stance. I'm sure they secretly liked the Libs performance and position on boat people too.

Turnbull is just another leader doing what any other leader has to do.
 
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He's actually not potting anyone. You should give it another read - it's an inciteful look at the fracturing of traditional versions of left/right politics that's happening internationally.

But you're right that Waleed is one of the few members of our media that isn't a party hack. He has a belief system that he holds with integrity, and I admire that.
Using inciteful instead of insightful means you agree he is potting ;)

I'll just take my dictionary and go :D
 

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Socialist. LOL.

It's only folks from the hard right that use the phrase "socialist" to describe GetUp! - because it's an easy inflammatory thing to say.

There's very little about "socialist" ideals in GetUp - they're hardly campaigning for industries to be owned by government.

They want stronger environmental policies, social accountability on human rights, marriage equality - pretty simple liberal minded views.

I suppose you'd consider the thousands of robocalls Get Up made to householders in marginal seats around midnight in the final week of the election campaign asking for time to carry out a series of polling questions purporting to be on behalf of the Liberal Party fits in well with Get Up's "social accountability" and "simple liberal minded views"???....me, I'd just call it devious misrepresentation by people with questionable morals.
 
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