Things that matter when the ALP are in government.

[The Passenger]

and the other is based on anecdotes from families of a couple of suicide victims

Thanks for proving the thread title.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

I just don’t understand how you can claim someone who has backed PMs as diverse as Whitlam and Abbott has any kind of ideological consistency

Supporting Hawke and Keating is hardly the move of a neoliberal when you look at some of the Coalition leaders from the 80s

He has gone harder to the right in the last couple of decades imo

He was always a pragmatist, and willing to act in self interest. In the 90's he was backing Blair after all.

At that time Fox News wasn't a conspiracy news site either. It was conservative, but it was balanced out with a fair amount of moderate opinions. Before Hannity it was Hannity and Coombes

And this was also the guy who started Star TV in China. When other people were freaking out about working in China, he agreed to censor his own media to get the licence

Something has changed with him, not sure if it was 9/11, the loss of the centre in us politics, or just becoming old. It's to enough of a degree that his kids are not the enthusiastic supporters they were 20 years ago

 

[Caesar]

Thanks for proving the thread title.

Robodebt was a fiasco, but until you have coronial findings implicating the program in people’s deaths and people being referred for prosecution it’s not sensibly comparable to pink batts on that front

That’s not giving the government a pass, it’s just stating the obvious

 

[ralphmalph]

He also supported Hawke and Whitlam and I’d hardly describe the latter as a necon

I don’t see any ideological consistency in Murdoch’s history beyond what is good for his own business at any particular point in time

Support for Whitlam is nearly 50 years ago and Hawke nearly 40 years. Your argument might be more convincing if you could find some more recent examples.

 

[Pessimistic]

I'd be interested to know how we can know that as fact, Caesar.

I agree that Murdoch is - largely - mercenary in terms of where his support goes, but to say he has no principles is a little disingenuous.

When he supports Labor/the Tories, it's because it's New Labour and Tony Blair's neoconservatism and outright Murdoch cronyism; when he supports Kevin Rudd it's because he was actively courted by Rudd until he won office and refused to kowtow anymore.

Its one reason we like Dan Andrews which a lot don't get. He has no time for Murdoch and vice versa. Murdochs tried his best and come up blank. Its borderline criminal the ant dam media stuff. And this was right from the point he put up for election not just covid recency.

 

[Caesar]

Support for Whitlam is nearly 50 years ago and Hawke nearly 40 years. Your argument might be more convincing if you could find some more recent examples.

Well Rudd over Howard is hardly the move of a neoliberal

I don't think anybody would deny that Murdoch is massively biased towards the Coalition, I just don't see much evidence that it's anything more than mercenary - Coalition governments have had more favourable policies towards things like cross-media ownership and corporate taxation for the last 30-odd years

I can't think of a time when the ALP has made it worth Murdoch's while to support them and they've failed to get that support. Keating and Hawke's backing of his acquisition of HWT in the 1980s was shameless, but it paid off handsomely.

 

[Pessimistic]

I just don’t understand how you can claim someone who has backed PMs as diverse as Whitlam and Abbott has any kind of ideological consistency

Supporting Hawke and Keating is hardly the move of a neoliberal when you look at some of the Coalition leaders from the 80s

Hawke and keating were right into the outsourcing fads of the day, they just did it with less ideology than some 'actors'

on that though, I read Thatcher spent like a drunken sailor compared to the tories 'austerity' of the last decade. its all relative

 

[Pessimistic]

Do we remember in the assange revelations that the US govt weren't that happy with Rudd.... nek minute.

And Blairs famous discussion of how his policies 'happily' coincided with murdochs is top viewing
Funny how M's papers pursued Blair after WMD, but not Bush or Howard.

 

[ralphmalph]

I can't think of a time when the ALP has made it worth Murdoch's while to support them and they've failed to get that support. Keating and Hawke's backing of his acquisition of HWT in the 1980s was shameless, but it paid off handsomely.

What do you think are some reasonable or internally acceptable examples of how a party might do this?

 

[Gough]

I think lying would be a good one to add, we had years of people losing their s**t over Gillard's carbon tax lie, yet mouthing untruths is pretty much the default position of this government going back to Abbott's infamous "No cuts" promise on election eve.

 

[Taylor]

Oh, and those texts telling people Medicare was at risk

 

[Gough]

Oh, and those texts telling people Medicare was at risk

Medicare is at risk from this government, you talk to doctors about what freezing the rebate is doing to healthcare in this country.

 

[Caesar]

What do you think are some reasonable or internally acceptable examples of how a party might do this?

I don't think it's reasonable to pander to private corporations for favourable media coverage, my point is simply that the ALP is at no inherent disadvantage compared to the Coalition when it comes to bribery

The media content payment laws currently making their way through parliament is one example of a policy designed to shamelessly appeal to the likes of Murdoch, and personally I'm surprised that the government caught the ALP on the hop with it. It's the sort of policy I'd see as far more natural coming from Labor's side of politics.

 

[Taylor]

Medicare is at risk from this government, you talk to doctors about what freezing the rebate is doing to healthcare in this country.

I spoke to some quite high up doctors very recently and they are far more concerned about the impact of shutting down elective surgery and not allowing people to see a GP if they have any flu like symptoms. As far as quality of life goes, it's not emergencies that suffer, those get taken care of no matter what.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

I spoke to some quite high up doctors very recently and they are far more concerned about the impact of shutting down elective surgery and not allowing people to see a GP if they have any flu like symptoms. As far as quality of life goes, it's not emergencies that suffer, those get taken care of no matter what.

who is not being allowed to see a GP? we went to several GP's last year without knockback, and my parents and I all had several procedures (again without knockback or even delay)

the ONLY thing the GP's said they wouldnt do is COVID-19 testing, and they directed my wife to the nearby testing clinic

 

[Caesar]

Medicare is at risk from this government, you talk to doctors about what freezing the rebate is doing to healthcare in this country.

lol, if you talk to doctors about why they should get more money they will always have a good answer

If you want to make your own judgement on how reasonable their complaints are, go back over the last 30 years and compare rebate indexation to wages growth and CPI. There is some validity there, but a lot less than they would have you believe. Doctors don't like having to operate in the real economy, they just expect the government to provide a magic pudding.

Problems with the decline in bulk billing are almost entirely down to a lack of supply and doctors gouging the system. That said, I agree the freeze was a simplistic attempt at a solution that went on far too long

Until a government has the cajones to take on the medical colleges regarding their cartel behaviour, nothing will change

 

[The Passenger]

Robodebt was a fiasco, but until you have coronial findings implicating the program in people’s deaths and people being referred for prosecution it’s not sensibly comparable to pink batts on that front

That’s not giving the government a pass, it’s just stating the obvious

Suicide is such a complex situation.

Outside of the most obvious of scenarios, any party who may have contributed to the death always has the out - "there was a lot of contributing factors".

Dismissing it as "a couple of families with anecdotal evidence" is all levels of uncool. Yes it's disingenuous some of the reports at the time of 2000+ who got a robodebt and killed themselves within a year to suggest that was the sole reason. But the reasons behind suicide are rarely singular. Most often it's impossible to know if a single issue was the tipping factor or just a contributing factor? But does that really matter. A lot of people were distressed as hell from those robodebt letters. My uncle - who doesn't have mental health issues - out himself into hospital with a panic attack over the whole thing.

And you can damn we'll be sure if Labour put out this system, the media response would have been far more brutal.

 

[Caesar]

Dismissing it as "a couple of families with anecdotal evidence" is all levels of uncool. Yes it's disingenuous some of the reports at the time of 2000+ who got a robodebt and killed themselves within a year to suggest that was the sole reason.

It wasn’t even 2000 suicides within a year - it was 2000 deaths. The causes weren’t documented. Given most of the people who died were on the old age pension or disability support, I’d like to see how many die in a normal year before using them to draw any conclusions about robodebt.

I am sure that the debt notices had an adverse impact on a lot of people’s mental health, but by the same token I can count on one hand the number of actual suicides where families have come out and said ‘robodebt was a factor’.

 

[Gough]

It wasn’t 2000 suicides within a year - it was 2000 deaths. The causes weren’t documented. Given most of the people who died were on the old age pension or disability support, I’d like to see how many die in a normal year before using them to draw any conclusions about robodebt.

I am sure that the debt notices had an adverse impact on a lot of people’s mental health, but by the same token I can count on one hand the number of actual suicides where families have come out and said ‘robodebt was a factor’.

I can count on one hand the people who died installing pink batts and we had a whole RC over that.

 

[Pessimistic]

If I murder someone old on life support, do I get a more lenient sentence? seems to be where public discourse is heading, and its a 'slippery slope'.

 

[Caesar]

I can count on one hand the people who died installing pink batts and we had a whole RC over that.

Yeah, but that was on the back of coronial findings which don’t exist here

I’m not trying to defend robodebt (which was a tremendously shitty program) but the whole suicide angle has been a huge beat up

 

[Taylor]

who is not being allowed to see a GP? we went to several GP's last year without knockback, and my parents and I all had several procedures (again without knockback or even delay)

the ONLY thing the GP's said they wouldnt do is COVID-19 testing, and they directed my wife to the nearby testing clinic

The last four people who have tried to see a GP with a runny nose or headache have been denied service until they have a clear covid test. They get told to go to emergency instead.

 

[Ned_Flanders]

The last four people who have tried to see a GP with a runny nose or headache have been denied service until they have a clear covid test. They get told to go to emergency instead.

the last four? thousands of people go to the doctors every day, and you know "the last four"????

 

[Father Jack]

Yeah, but that was on the back of coronial findings which don’t exist here

I’m not trying to defend robodebt (which was a tremendously shitty program) but the whole suicide angle has been a huge beat up

To be honest, the LNP have got off easy on this, it was an entirely foreseeable outcome that handing out debt notices basically at random to people under existing severe financial stress would have, for want of a better term, negative consequences.

 

[Gough]

To be honest, the LNP have got off easy on this, it was an entirely foreseeable outcome that handing out debt notices basically at random to people under existing severe financial stress would have, for want of a better term, negative consequences.

What they did was actually against the law, it's a detail people forget. This Government seems to view the rule of law as something to legislate around rather than actually observe.