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Tony Abbott has to be well placed for Pollie of the Year

by Whaleoil on April 29, 2010

Tony Abbot has forced Kevin Rudd to take a position on something. Rudd is of course mortified and has blamed the opposition for having to ditch Australia’s efforts at an ETS.

In hindsight, it is even more extraordinary Turnbull was so obstinate. From the moment he rolled his hapless predecessor Brendan Nelson for articulating the exact wait-and-see position Rudd has now adopted, Turnbull and his supporters claimed the Coalition had no choice but to back Rudd.

They were supposedly terrified of handing Rudd a trigger for a double dissolution election on climate change. But even before Climategate, before the flop at Copenhagen, it was obvious that wasn’t the case. As I wrote last August, Turnbull should have called Rudd’s bluff, and embraced an election on a new energy tax.

Well, sure enough, Rudd blinked. He never wanted to go to voters with a new tax. He wanted to walk to the polls hand in hand with Turnbull, as a great statesman with his patsy, having pulled a fast one on an electorate soon to be burdened with the costs.

Ironically, this description of Rudd and his mad dash for an ETS is not only accurate for Rudd but also for John Key.

Rudd’s mission to rush out in front of the rest of the world with an ETS because climate change was ”the greatest moral challenge of our time” has finally been exposed as flimflam.

John Key might want to spend a bit of time on the phone with Tony Abbott and get a few pointers on this Climate Change thingy he seems hell bent on believing. meanwhile Tony Abbott gets a nomination for the Whaleoil Politician of the Year Award.

He has stopped Rudd’s great big new tax.

He has put the Liberals into play this cycle.

He has scared the crap out of Rudd by calling him what he is, Prime Minister Blah Blah, and all talk and no action. The only thing better he could have done was describe Kevin Rudd as “Smile and Wave”.

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  • excuseme

    It’s called holding your nerve. Abbott has the kind of self-belief that Turnbull never had, and that Key is also finding elusive.

    It’s time to stop this ETS nonsense in NZ, starting with demotion of the dangerous ideologue Nick Smith. Are we as a country just going to accept Smith’s formula, choosing to tax ourselves while the rest of the world watches in bemused astonishment? Or are we going to act pragmatically, legislating now to defer NZ’s ETS and fuel tax regime until a majority of other western countries entrench similar “climate change” structures?

    If Nick Smith (or even John Key) suffers a loss of face in this change of course, so be it. Otherwise we are about to take on unquantified risks to our economy and standard of living through blind adherence to Smith’s dogma. His cabinet colleagues need to have the courage to take control of the situation (over Key’s objections, if necessary) before it is too late.

  • marybelle

    It would be a good idea for some in the National Party to have a listen to talkback radio – not only during the day but in middle of the night. On talkback radio you hear the ordinary folk – the ones who never get heard by politicians. Like the lady who voted National instead of Labour because she thought John Key was going to drop the ETS. Now that he is not the lady won’t be voting National again. John Key needs to drop Nick Smith and drop the ETS before it is too late or he will find that National will be a one term government. It is not too late. So what if the “Foresters” don’t get their payout. It is based on a lie in any case. There are a lot of investors who don’t end up getting the payout that they thought they would. Ask those at Blue Chip and Five Star investors. Why should the consumers of electricity and petrol pay a carbon tax to the “Foresters” just to keep them happy? Take Tony Abbot’s advice and drop the ETS. It is just a United Nations money-making venture and has no credibility.

  • chiefsfan73

    As a resident in Australia, I am glad we have Tony Abbott. He rolled Turnbal-less the wanna be Labour candidate by 1 vote, because Joe Soft Cockey couldn’t make up his mind. Thank god. However I digress. Tony has quickly over come the typical play the man not the ball mudslinging, one associates with the spineless left, to quickly sit Rudd on his arse, and expose him for the hollow man of spin he is. The public of Australia are quickly realising what those of us who left Helengrad have long known. Labour = tax and spend it like it’s your own. We all know they might be a bit slow, but with a plethora of examples to choose from even an aussie could work out Rudd is a dud.

    He came to power with no policy, simply telling the gullible that they needed a change. In recent times it has become abundantly clear that he is a shameless good news junkie. He turns up to announce a big spend policy, and when it predictably falls over, he avoids blame, hides and sends a junior minister to front the announcement that the whatever hairbrained policy it was is now being canned.

    The expression Mad Monk has not been used to describe Abbott for some time, because Federal Labour have been too busy hiding from their mistakes or trying to dream up smoke screens to divert attention from them.

  • megashitstirrer

    Fuck the dirty filthy foresters lobby trying to suck scum off the kiwi taxpayer, they do not deserve 1.2 billion of taxpayers money just because they planted trees in the hope they would get a subsidy, fuck them I say.

    The NZ taxpayer deserves much better. To hell with Nuck Smuth.